Coyote Blog

Via Volokh:

Richard Branson is offering a $25 million prize for the development of a technology capable of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

I Win!

OK, I get that he is actually looking for some solar-powered device that plates out carbon from the air on a cathode, or whatever.  Or maybe a big nuclear-powered Air Products plant pumping liquid CO2 down an old oil well. 

By the way, I wonder if it will occur to anyone that if you really want to offset carbon, you probably need to clear cut old growth forests, bury the logs, and plant new trees.  I would guess that a newly growing forest absorbs a lot more CO2 than old-growth redwoods (anyone know?)  And no, I am not really suggesting it.  I got in enough email hot water a year ago when I suggested that if global warming was really to become a problem, we could reverse it pretty quickly with about 30 man-made Krakatoa's, made from the creative use of some of those H-bombs still lying around.  Maybe we could even use them to dig a new canal across Nicaragua, killing two birds with one stone.

Anyway, I like Branson's idea.  This kind of price approach has yielded some interesting results in other fields.

The Jawa Report links a pretty fun episode of Bullshit! that takes a poke at the environmental movement.  Don't expect to get a lot of new facts, but it is funny, particularly the classic "Ban di-hydrogen monoxide" petition.  But the real thing I took away from the video was just how anti-capitalistic the environmental movement is.  Listen to the slogans -- its much more about "anti-corporate greed" than anything about the, you know, environment.  Listen carefully for the part where environmentalists take personal responsibility for using computers and cars that the evil corporations produce.  That admission comes right after Teller's dialog.

Q&O has a nice roundup on the science around the Sun and the Sun's well documented increase in intensity and its potential affect on global warming.  As I have mentioned before, there is a growing body of evidence that some warming has to be laid at the Sun's doorstep.

The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American
weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since
1999.

That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief
rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more
emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active
during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level
state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling,
should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little
Ice Age 300 years ago.

Climate history and related archeology
give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode,
or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar
events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the
Medieval Warming.

There is a lot more.  I am not ready to say, though, that the substantial increases we have seen in atmospheric CO2 levels are not also having an impact.  That impact is just a lot less than warming-panic-spreaders like Al Gore would like to acknowledge  After all, it is much easier to demagogue your way through an election beating up Exxon and GM than by beating up the Sun.  And, after failing to take over the economy under the banner of socialism, statists want to use global warming to take a second shot at world domination. 

Why the CO2 contribution to warming exists but is greatly overstated is explained here.

While we all argue about man's impact on the climate (my most recent take here), why isn't anyone checking the thermostat?

The New
Scientist report, along with other scientific assessments warning of
global cooling, also come as a blow to the campaign -- led by David
Suzuki and one of the directors of his foundation -- to portray all who
raise doubts about climate change theory -- so-called skeptics -- as
pawns of corporate PR thugs manipulating opinion. If the Suzuki claim
is true, then the tentacles of Exxon-Mobil reach deeper into science
than anyone has so far imagined.

Dramatic global temperature fluctuations, as New Scientist
reports, are the norm. A Little Ice Age struck Europe in the 17th
century. New Yorkers once walked from Manhattan to Staten Island across
a frozen harbour. About 200 years earlier, New Scientist reminds us, a
sharp downturn in temperatures turned fertile Greenland into Arctic
wasteland.

These and other temperature swings corresponded with changing
solar activity. "It's a boom-bust system, and I expect a crash soon,"
says Nigel Weiss, a solar physicist at the University of Cambridge.
Scientists cannot say precisely how big the coming cooling will be, but
it could at minimum be enough to offset the current theoretical impact
of man-made global warming. Sam Solanki, of the Max Planck Institute
for Solar System Research in Germany, says declining solar activity
could drop global temperatures by 0.2 degrees Celsius. "It might not
sound like much," says New Scientist writer Stuart Clark, "but this
temperature reversal would be as big as the most optimistic estimate of
the results of restricting greenhouse-gas emissions until 2050 in line
with the Kyoto protocol."

It turns out that while we may be encountering some of the highest temperatures in a couple of centuries, the sun's output is also at its highest point in centuries:

I am skeptical of some but not all global warming claims, but must admit that even as a skeptic, I find this argument by James Lewis uncompelling:

Now imagine that all
the variables about global climate are known with less than 100 percent
certainty. Let's be wildly and unrealistically optimistic and say that
climate scientists know each variable to 99 percent certainty! (No such
thing, of course). And let's optimistically suppose there are only one-hundred x's, y's, and z's
--- all the variables that can change the climate: like the amount of
cloud cover over Antarctica, the changing ocean currents in the South
Pacific, Mount Helena venting, sun spots, Chinese factories burning
more coal every year, evaporation of ocean water (the biggest
"greenhouse" gas), the wobbles of earth orbit around the sun, and yes,
the multifarious fartings of billions of living creatures on the face of the earth, minus,
of course, all the trillions of plants and algae that gobble up all the
CO2, nitrogen-containing molecules, and sulfur-smelling exhalations
spewed out by all of us animals. Got that? It all goes into our best
math model.

So
in the best case, the smartest climatologist in the world will know 100
variables, each one to an accuracy of 99 percent. Want to know what the
probability of our spiffiest math model would be, if that perfect world existed?  Have you ever multiplied (99/100) by itself 100 times? According to the Google calculator, it equals a little more than 36.6 percent.

The Bottom line: our best imaginable model has a total probability of one out of three. How many billions of dollars in Kyoto money are we going to spend on that chance?

Yes, there is a point to be made that climate is really complicated.  However, I can still make correct and valid directional predictions without knowing the exact state of every variable.  For example, I can say with some certainty that, at least here in Arizona, that the temperature at 4PM is going to be higher than the temperature at 4AM, and probably by many degrees.  I can make this statement despite having no idea what the temperature at either time actually is.

I think one can say that the hypothesis is pretty strong that man-made CO2 is increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations which in turn is causing some warming.  Where Mr. Lewis probably has a point is on the issue of positive and negative feedbacks.  Most of the warming in the estimates in productions like "An Inconvenient Truth"  relies not on just CO2-driven warming, but warming from a variety of feedback processes.  These feedbacks are really really complicated and not well understood.  I discuss this issue of feedbacks both here and here and here.

(HT Maggies Farm)

Though Cathy Young's article has the opposite title, I actually think that the global warming debate is cooling off a bit, with a bit more reason creeping into a debate so far dominated by ideologies as much as science.  More and more voices like this one are starting to be heard:

Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy studies at UCLA and a
self-identified liberal, noted this recently on his blog. Writes
Kleiman, "To those who dislike a social system based on high and
growing consumption and the economic activity that supports high and
growing consumption and maintains high and growing demand (a dislike
with which I have considerable sympathy), to those who think that the
market needs more regulation by the state, to those who think that
international institutions ought to be strengthened . . . global
warming is a Gaia-send" -- since it justifies drastic worldwide public
action to curb production and consumption. (Gaia, the ancient Greek
goddess of the earth, is a term used by many ecologists to refer to the
earth as a living entity.) While Kleiman sympathizes with
environmentalists, he notes that "their eagerness to believe the worst"
-- for instance, in Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth" --
"is just as evident as the right wing's denialism."

As an
analogy, Kleiman cites many social conservatives' attitude toward the
AIDS epidemic, which has been used to portray sex outside monogamous
heterosexual marriage as fraught with deadly peril and to preach the
message of premarital abstinence. (Kleiman doesn't explicitly say this,
but his comments hint at another abuse of science: Many conservatives
and gay rights activists, for different motives, have exaggerated the
fairly tiny risk of HIV infection from heterosexual sex.)

The
analogy between AIDS and global warming also extends to attitudes
toward ways to remedy the problem. The religious right, Kleiman points
out, pooh-poohs condoms as a way to reduce the spread of sexually
transmitted diseases because the effectiveness of such a remedy would
undermine the abstinence message. Similarly, those on the left who
embrace environmentalism as their substitute religion don't want to
hear about scientific and technological solutions to climate change --
from nuclear power to geoengineering, the artificial manipulation of
the global environment -- that do not include stepping up regulation
and curbing consumption.

There is a growing number of voices in
the scientific community that reject both denialism and alarmism on
global warming. Roger Pielke, an environmental science professor at the
University of Colorado, calls such people "nonskeptical heretics" --
those who believe that human-caused global warming is a real problem,
but one that can be met in part with technological management and
adaptation. Mooney has come to embrace such a viewpoint as well.

The NY Times actually chimed in on this same topic.  And I for a while have been promoting a skeptical middle ground in the global warming debate.

Update: Increasingly, folks seem to want to equate "skeptic"
with "denier."  If so, I will have to change my terminology.  However,
that would be sad, as "skeptic" is a pretty good word**.  I accept there
is some CO2 caused warming, but I am skeptical that the warming and its
effects are as bad as folks like Al Gore make it out to be (explanation here), and I am
skeptical that the costs of an immediate lock-down on CO2 production
will outweigh the benefits.  That is why I call myself a skeptic.  If
that is now a bad term, someone needs to suggest a new one.

**Though I can't help but be reminded of the great Tonya Harding interview on the Dan Patrick Show, where the famous hubcap-wielder and kneecap-breaker said  "I'm not going to make a skeptical of my boxing career."

Headline from the Canadian, via Hit and Run:

"Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming-related causes by 2012"

In case you are struggling with the math, that means that they believe Global Warming could kill three quarters of the world's population in the next five years.  And the media treats these people with total respect, and we skeptics are considered loony?  It appears that the editors of the Canadian have taken NOAA climate research Steven Schneider at his word:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements,
and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us has to decide what
the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

However, this example is a very good one to again raise the issue of the skeptical middle ground on climate. 

The methane hydrate disaster case in this article may be extreme, but it is consistent in certain ways with the current climate theories of those who advocate various extreme warming scenarios that require massive government intervention (i.e. every climate study that the media chooses to report on).  To oversimplify a bit, their warming models work in two parts:

1. Man-made CO2 builds up in the atmosphere and acts to absorb more solar energy in the atmosphere than a similar atmospheric gas mix with less CO2 would.  Most climate scientists agree that since CO2 only absorbs selected wavelengths, this a diminishing-return type effect.  In other words, the second 10% increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere has a smaller impact on global temperatures than the first 10%, and so on.  Eventually, this effect becomes "saturated" such that all the wavelengths of sunlight that are going to be absorbed are absorbed, and further increases in CO2 concentration will have no further effect on world temperatures.  No one knows where this saturation point is, but it might be as low as plus 2 degrees C, meaning the most we could raise global temperatures (without effects in part 2 below) is less than 2 degrees (assuming we have already seen some of this rise).  By the way, though I think what I have just said fits the climate scientists' current "consensus,"  nothing in the italics part ever seems to get printed in the media.
2. As temperatures rise worldwide due to warming from man-made CO2, other things in the climate will change.  Hotter weather may cause more humidity from vaporized water, or more cloud cover, from the same effect.  As posited in the article linked above, some methane hydrates in ice or in the ocean might vaporize due to higher temperatures.  More plants or algae might grow in certain areas, less in others.  All of these secondary effects might in turn further effect the global temperature.  For example, more cloud cover might act to counter-act warming and cool things off.  In turn, vaporizing methane hydrates would put more greenhouse gasses in the air that could accelerate warming.

   Scientists typically call these secondary reactions feedback loops.  Feedbacks that tend to counteract the initial direction of the process (e.g. warming creates clouds which then reduce warming) are called negative feedbacks.  Feedbacks that tend to accelerate the process (warming vaporizes methane which causes more warming) are positive feedbacks.  Negative feedback is a ball at the bottom of a valley that rolls back to its starting point when you nudge it; positive feedback is a ball perched on top of a mountain, where one slight nudge causes it to roll downhill faster and faster.   Most natural processes are negative feedbacks -- otherwise nothing would be stable.  In fact, while positive feedback processes are not unknown in nature, they are rare enough that most non-scientists would be hard-pressed to name one.  The best one I can think of is nuclear fission and fusion, which should give you an idea of what happens when nature gets rolling on a positive feedback loop and why we wouldn't be around if there were many such processes.

   So it is interesting that nearly every climate model that you hear of in the press assumes that the secondary effects from CO2-based warming are almost all positive, rather than negative feedbacks.  Scientists, in a competition to see who can come up with the most dire model, have dreamed up numerous positive feedback effects and have mostly ignored any possible negative feedbacks.  In other words, most climate scientists are currently hypothesizing that the world's climate is different from nearly every other natural process we know of and is one of the very very few runaway positive feedback processes in nature.

I want to offer up a couple of observations based on this state of affairs:

• Climate science is very hard and very chaotic, so there is nothing we really know with certainty.  However, we have a far, far, far better understanding of #1 above than #2.  In fact, models based just on effect #1 (without any feedbacks) do a decent job of explaining history (though they still overestimate actual warming some).  However, models based on adding the positive feedback processes in #2 fail miserably at modeling history.  (Several scientists have claimed to have "fixed" this by incorporating fudge factors, a practice many model-based financial market speculators have been bankrupted by).  We have no real evidence yet to support any of the positive feedbacks, or even to support the hypothesis that the feedback is in fact positive rather than negative.  I had a professor once who liked to make the lame joke that it was a bad "sign" if you did not even know if an effect was positive or negative.
• Because global warming advocates are much more comfortable arguing #1 than #2, they like to paint skeptics as all denying #1.  This makes for a great straw man that is easy to beat, and is aided by the fact that there is a true minority who doesn't believe #1  (and who, despite everything that is written, have every right to continue to express that opinion without fear of reprisal).  Actually, even better, they like to avoid defending their position at all and just argue that all skeptics are funded by Exxon.
• However, it is step #2 that is the key, and that we should be arguing about.  Though the most extreme enviro-socialists just want to shut down growth and take over the world economy at any cost, most folks recognize that slowing warming with current technology represents a real trade-off between economic growth and CO2 output.  And, most people recognize that reducing economic growth might be survivable in the rich countries like the US, but for countries like India and China, which are just starting to develop, slowing growth means locking hundreds of millions into poverty they finally have a chance to escape.

  I am going to simplify this, but I think the following statement is pretty close:  The warming from #1 alone (CO2 without positive feedbacks) will not be enough to justify the really harsh actions that would slow CO2 output enough to have any effect at all;  only with substantial positive feedbacks from #2, such that the warming from CO2 alone is tripled, quadrupled or more (e.g. 8 degrees rather than 2) are warming forecasts dire enough to warrant substantial activity today.

So that is why I am a skeptic.  I believe #1, though I know there are also things other than manmade CO2 causing some of the current warming (e.g. the sun's output is higher today than it has been in centuries).  I do not think anyone has completed any really convincing work on #2, and Occam's razor tends to make me suspicious of hypothesizing positive feedback loops without evidence (since they are so much more rare than negative ones).

More on the skeptical middle ground here.  Discussion of things like the "hockey stick" is here.  For a small insight into how global warming advocates are knowingly exaggerating their case, see the footnote to this post.

Update:  Increasingly, folks seem to want to equate "skeptic" with "denier."  If so, I will have to change my terminology.  However, that would be sad, as "skeptic" is a pretty good word.  I accept there is some CO2 caused warming, but I am skeptical that the warming and its effects are as bad as folks like Al Gore make it out to be, and I am skeptical that the costs of an immediate lock-down on CO2 production will outweigh the benefits.  That is why I call myself a skeptic.  If that is now a bad term, someone needs to suggest a new one.

I swear I have had this identical conversation with my relatives that TJIC has with his.  In particular, he gets at the issue of the hidden labor tax:

TJIC: OK, what's the cost of trash separation?

X: Trash separation?

TJIC: Yes, trash separation. You don't "recycle", per
se, your step is just putting in extra labor to separate your garbage
into two piles -

X: It's free.

TJIC: It's free?  Would you say that it takes 30 seconds a day extra to separate trash?

X: No.

Y: More like 60 seconds.

TJIC: OK, 60 seconds per day is 6 hours per year.  At $50 / hour, that's $300 of labor -

X: But that's nonsense, because we weren't going to get paid for that labor anyway.

TJIC: Yes, but you could have done something enjoyable with that time.

I wrote more about this here, where I also linked to a great Bullshit! episode on recycling.

New numbers for US vs. European CO2 growth have been making the rounds, based on a Wall Street Journal article today.  Jonathon Adler at Volokh has the key numbers for CO2 growth rates:

	U.S.	E.U.
1990-1995	6.4%	-2.2%
1995-2000	10.1%	2.2%
2000-2004	2.1%	4.5%

The Wall Street Journal tries to make the point that maybe the US somehow has a better approach to CO2 reduction.  Here is the reality:  Neither the US or the EU has done anything of substance to really reduce CO2 production, because at the end of the day no one can tolerate the political and economic costs associated with severe reduction using current technology.

But there is a story in these numbers.  That story goes back to the crafting of the Kyoto treaty, and  sheds an interesting light on what EU negotiators were really trying to achieve.

The Kyoto Treaty called for signatories to roll back CO2 emissions to 1990 levels.  Since Kyoto was signed in the late nineties, one was immediately led to wonder, why 1990?  Why not just freeze levels in place as they were currently?

The reason for the 1990 date was all about counting coup on the United States.  The date was selected by the European negotiators who dominated the treaty process specifically to minimize the burden on Europe and maximize the burden on the US.  Look at the numbers above.  The negotiators had the 1990-1995 numbers in hand when they crafted the treaty and had a good sense of what the 1995-2000 numbers would look like.  They knew that at that point in time, getting to 1990 levels for the EU was no work -- they were already there -- and that it would be a tremendous burden for the US.  Many holier-than-thou folks in this country have criticized the US for not signing Kyoto.  But look at what we were handed to sign - a document that at the point of signing put no burden on the EU, little burden on Japan, no burden on the developing world, and tremendous burden on the US.  We were handed a loaded gun and asked to shoot ourselves with it.  Long before Bush drew jeers for walking away from the treaty, the Senate voted 99-0 not to touch the thing until it was changed.

But shouldn't the European's get some credit for the 1990-1995 reduction?  Not really.  The reduction came from several fronts unrelated to actions to reduce CO2:

• The European and Japanese economies were absolutely on their backs, reducing economic growth which drives CO2 growth.  I have not looked up the numbers, but the 1990s are probably the time of the biggest negative differential for the European vs. US economy in my lifetime.
• The British were phasing out the use of carbon-heavy domestic coals for a variety of reasons unrelated to carbon dioxide production.
• German reunification had just occurred, so tons of outdated Soviet inefficient and polluting industrial plant had just entered the EU, and was expected to be shut down and modernized for economic reasons over the 1990's.  The negotiators went out of their way to make sure they picked a date when all this mess was in their base number, making it easier to hit their target.
• The 1990 also puts Russia in the base.  Since 1990, as the negotiators knew, the Russian economy had contracted significantly.
• At the same time the American economy was going gangbusters, causing great envy among Europeans.

Kyoto was carefully crafted to make America look like the bad guy.  The European's goal was to craft treaty responsibilities that would require no real effort in Europe, with most of the burden carried by the US.  But times change, and the game is catching up with them.

I have long suspected, but can't prove, that most of the recycling we do is worthless.  I look in my recycling bin and think -- it's got to be cheaper to start with the raw material than what's in this bin.  The problem is hidden system costs.  For example, everyone thinks they are saving energy by recycling.  But in my town, as in most towns, recycling basically doubles the vehicle miles driven by the sanitation trucks to get all the waste out, because we get a visit from the "trash" truck and later in the week get a visit from the "recycling" truck.  Plus there is all that extra labor in the pickup and the sorting.  And that is all before the processing costs.  And all this is without even considering the staggering amount of "free" labor the recycling system gets from you and I as individuals.**

The Mises Blog has a link to the online video of a Penn & Teller Bullshit! show that takes on this very issue.  Since its Penn & Teller, its both funny and smart, and comes to the conclusion that only aluminum can recycling really makes sense.  All the rest is a big feel-good circle jerk that really saves no money or energy.  Its particularly funny when they put about 15 different colored cans in front of one guys home and tells him each is for a different type of material.  The one addition I would make is that reusing an object for its original use almost always saves money -- for example, we save Amazon boxes to use when we ship things out.

Along the same lines of hidden costs, this study sent to me by a reader looks at the total lifetime energy costs of automobiles, including their manufacturing and transportation as well as their fuel use.  I can't vouch for it's accuracy, but the results are somewhat surprising -- for example, most hybrids have lifetime energy costs higher than average for vehicles.

** But recycling is easy!  It hardly takes any time!  Well, let's say it takes only an incremental 1 minute a week from each individual in the country to recycle (a number that is lower than the actual, I think).  That translates to 260 million man-hours a year or the equivalent of 130,000 full time jobs.

Ronald Bailey makes a plea for free scientific inquiry in response to Dave Roberts proposal vis a vis climate skeptics.  Mr. Roberts said, in part:

When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the
impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to
minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these
bastards"”some sort of climate Nuremberg

Oh goody, yet another reason I will be put up against the wall come the progressive revolution.  I would give Mr. Roberts a helpful suggestion:  A better analog for prosecuting people over their scientific beliefs would be the Catholic Church's various attempts to stamp out heresy, including their prosecution of Galileo for his views that the earth orbits around the sun, rather than vice-versa.

My views on the reasonable skeptical middle ground on climate change here. (and more here)

Besides, I would argue that progressives like Mr. Roberts willful ignorance of the science of economics has been far more destructive than potential scientific misreadings of global warming.

For most city dwellers, the temperature increase in the summer time from the urban heat island effect (UHIE) dwarfs any temperature increase from global warming.  UHIE is the result of high population density, with lots of cars and equipment that generate heat and buildings and roads that seem to hold it in.  Many cities are several degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside.  The effect is so dramatic that correcting for this effect is a big part of the uncertainty in answering seemingly simple questions like "how much has the earth warmed in the last 100 years?"

Apparently, UHIE is a big problem in one of the world's densest cities, Tokyo.

The gleaming high rise buildings that crowd the
cityscape may symbolize Japan's economic recovery but they have also
converted this priciest of human habitats into vast heat-trapping
canyons in what is known as the urban heat island (UHI) effect.

Heat churned out by air-conditioners, automobiles and human activity
finds no escape, causing ambient temperatures, especially in the summer
months, to rise by several degrees and forcing authorities to
constantly look for newer ways to cool down a city on the boil....

A report released by the Tokyo Metropolitan government this
year shows that average temperature rise in the capital over the course
of the 20th century has been 3 degrees C....

Yamaguchi also told IPS that the number of days recording temperatures
of over 35 degrees C has gone up to more than 35 days a year,
concentrated around the three summer months between July and September.
That contrasts with the 14 days recorded in 1975....

Tellingly, most of the deaths from the European heat wave several years
ago where in cities, which tells me that UHIE had a contributing role
more than global warming.  This is actually something we argue about
from time to time in Phoenix.  Ocasionally the city considers
steps to lower our albedo, such as requiring white (rather than black)
roofs and looking at alternatives to dark asphalt for roads.

This has never been a big environmentalist issue.  My guess is that
this is because environmentalists, at least in the US, have adopted a
goal of increasing urban concentration and population densities.  I
suppose it might be embarassing for them to admit the warming they are
trying to get city dwellers to blame on CO2 may in fact be largely due
to the environmentalists own urban planning approaches.

I did not see the ABC special the other night on climate, but I am told that as a skeptic of the extreme global warming scenarios, I was compared to both a holocaust denier and a tobacco executive.  Boy, you gotta love free scientific inquiry!

One of the tricks of all debaters, not just climate folks, is to create a straw man opponent who is easy to knock down.  Now apparently this show did not even bother to interview a skeptic at all, but they chose as their straw man "people paid off by the oil companies who believe man has no effect on climate."

Well, gee, I certainly can see how with current state of knowledge it is getting tougher to credibly sell the "no impact at all" argument, but I would say that with climate and all its vagaries its still a position that a person can stake out and not be a wacko. 

There is, though, a middle ground of skepticism that falls somewhere between "man has no effect" and "temperatures will rise ten degrees and the world will end unless we make Al Gore our economic dictator."

One of the things they never explain on shows like ABC's is that most
climate scientists agree that when other variables are held constant
(more in a minute), increases in CO2 will only increase global
temperatures by 1-2 degrees, some of which we have already seen.  It is
seldom mentioned in the press that there is a strong diminishing return
relationship between CO2 levels in the atmosphere and warming (leaving
everything else equal for a moment).  So, the next doubling in CO2
concentrations will have substantially less impact on global
temperatures than the last doubling.  This is something that most
reputable climate scientists will agree with.

So, how do climate researchers get 6-8 degress of additional warming or
more in their models?  They get it from positive feedbacks.  Most of
Nature's processes are negative feedbacks -- push a pendulum one way,
nature tries to bring it back to the center.  Positive feedback is like
a rock balanced on the top of a mountain -- one little push and it
starts rolling faster and faster.

Climate scientists posit (but as yet have not observed and can't prove)
a number of feedback processes that might tend to amplify or dampen the
effect of increase atmospheric CO2 on global temperatures.  The easiest
to understand is the effect of water.  As temperatures rise due to CO2
concentrations, one might expect clear air humidity to go up worldwide
(as higher temperatures vaporize more water) and you might expect cloud
cover to increase (for the same reason).  If water vapor goes mostly to
humidity, then global warming is accelerated as water vapor in clear
air is a strong greenhouse gas.  One to Two degrees of warming from
increased CO2 might then become four or six or eight.  If instead vaporized water mostly
goes to cloudcover, the effect of CO2 is instead dampened since more
clouds will reflect more sunlight back into space.

Generally, one can make two observations about how most of the climate models
that make the news treat these positive and negative feedback loops:

• Climate scientists tend to include a lot of positive feedback
  loops and downplay the negative feedback loops in their models.  Some
  skeptics argue that the funding process for climate studies tends to
  reward researchers who are most agressive in including these
  acclerating effects.
• The science of these accelerating and decelerating effects is
  still equivocal, and their is not much good evidence either way between
  positive and negative feedback.  We do know that current models with
  heavy positive feedback loops grossly overestimate historic warming.
  In other words, when applied to the past, these positive-feedback-heavy
  models say we should be hotter today than we actually are.

My much longer article on the same topic is here, where I also address other things that may be happening in the climate and reasons why a poorer but colder world may be worse than a warmer and richer world.  I recommend to your attention this article, which is the best statement I can find of the skeptical middle ground. 

A reader emailed me this article about the Endangered Species Act at work:

The sharp chirps of the endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers and the
whine of chain saws sound discordantly in this coastal community of old
pine forests....

The woodpecker's status as an endangered species requires special
measures to try to prevent its extinction and restore its population,
wildlife officials say. That's the law. Wildlife officials gave the
town maps pinpointing woodpecker nests. No building or tree cutting is
allowed within 200 feet of a nest tree without a federal permit. Some
restrictions on development also apply to 75-acre circles around each
nest site to provide foraging area for the birds....

Since word got around this spring that owners could
face problems selling land or building houses where the birds lived,
people have been rushing to clear undeveloped lots of pine trees and
yanking the woodpecker welcome mat.

More than anywhere else in
North Carolina, Boiling Spring Lakes is a place where the coastal
development boom and the federal Endangered Species Act have collided.

"People
are just afraid a bird might fly in and make a nest and their property
is worth nothing," said Joan Kinney, mayor of Boiling Spring Lakes in
Brunswick County. "It is causing a tremendous amount of clear-cutting."...

Bonner Stiller, a state lawmaker from Brunswick County, has owned a
pair of lots as an investment here for more than 20 years. He cleared
them recently. Stiller said he was sorry to lose the trees but wanted
to protect his investment.

"You had to get in line to get
somebody with a chain saw," Stiller said. "I have not a single pine
tree left. Folks around here are terrified of the prospect of losing
their property. That causes people to get out there and find out what
they can do to protect themselves."

In the past, I have divided environmental law into two categories:  emissions law, which is not only consistent with but a must for the maintenance of a strong property rights regime; and land use law, which tends to be an affront to property rights.  You can read more on this distinction here.  This situation is a great example of why land use environmental law is such a problem.

Take a step back.  Consider that some (but by no means all) people in this country value the continued existence of the red-cockaded woodpecker.  There are several ways they might pursue this goal, which I will put in order of decreasing attractiveness:

• They can get together, voluntarily pool their money, and seek to purchase land that might be habitat for the woodpecker and voluntarily set aside what is now their land from development.  This is the best solution, and the only one that operates without resorting to the use of force against individuals.  Oranizations like the Nature Conservancy and other land trusts work this way.
• They can get the government to tax everybody in the country a few extra cents, flow these cents together into big dollars, and have the government buy the land (or seize it via eminent domain) and set it aside as open space or parkland.  This takes money by government force from people who don't value the woodpecker's survival, but at least it spreads the cost wide and thin.
• They can get the government to declare that the twenty-five or thirty people who have these birds on their land can no longer do anything, from development to tree-cutting, on their land.  This option is the worst, because it lands the entire cost of the woodpecker's survival on just a few individuals, and it costs these individuals inordinately high amounts of money in the form of reduced property values  (if you can't do anything to a piece of raw land, the resale value effectively drops to zero).  I personally hold a piece of raw land for future development of a vacation or retirement home.  A substantial portion of my net worth is in this land.  If it were to be suddenly made worthless, much of my life's savings would be gone.

As an interesting note, I have ranked these options in descending order with an eye to fairness and individual rights.  However, if we instead rank these options from the perspective of the average Congressman and his/her political calculations, we actually get the reverse order!  The first option of private action is the worst from your average Congressman's point of view, because then there is nothing they can take credit for in their next election campaign.  The second option is better, but would involve a tax or deficit increase he might conceivably be dinged for.  The third is the best for our average politically-calculating Congress critter, since it results in an outcome he can take credit for with important interest groups, and the costs are almost totally hidden, and born by just a few people who don't have many votes and may not even be in his district.  Not surprisingly, this is the approach Congress has taken, via the Endangered Species Act.

There is some hope that this problem may eventually get worked out the right way, at least in Boiling Springs Lake:

The Nature Conservancy hopes to help. Since 1999, it has acquired about
6,500 acres that form a horseshoe around the center of town. The land,
much of which is wetlands, has two groups of woodpeckers. Woodpeckers
typically nest in clusters of 3 or more birds with one breeding pair
and helpers. In time, the land could support six or eight clusters as
the conservancy adds more land for a nature preserve.

The one the government did not support, plan for, or subsidize.

It increasingly looks like hybrids, particularly newer plug-in hybrids, will be the high MPG, low-emission technology winner in the foreseeable future.  The US and California governments, among others, have subsidized (and at times mandated) pure electric vehicles, hydrogen vehicles, natural gas powered vehicles, and fuel cell powered vehicles.  While some governments have come along with ex-post-facto promotions of hybrids (e.g. ability to use the carpool lane), hybrids have been developed and won in the market entirely without government help and in places like California, effectively in the face of government opposition (because they were stuck on zero emission vehicles, low-emission vehicles were opposed)

Plug in hybrids have many of the advantages of electric vehicles without the range problems.  They use standard gasoline so they avoid the new fuel distribution issues of natural gas and hydrogen.  And fuel cell technology may be great one day but is not there yet.  I was reminded of all this by this article by Stephen Bainbridge on why the EV-1 failed.

Update:  This reminds me of the 19th century transcontinental railroads - UP, SP, NP, GN etc.  Only one of these transcontinentals did not get any federal land grants or government financing -- the Great Northern of James J. Hill -- and not coincidently the GN was the only one not to go bankrupt in the close of the century.

I have been a Tiger-lover for years, going back even before my days at Princeton.  Over the years, I have given to various tiger defense funds, generally with a feeling of hopelessness.  The total dollars someone can gain from stripping a tiger of all of its lucrative parts is almost drug-money high, due to the popularity of tiger bits in various Asian "medicines."

This proposal from Barun Mitra, as quoted by Cafe Hayek, is the first one I have seen that might have a chance.  He proposes to allow ownership and commercial farming of tigers, to give incentives to breed and preserve the species.  This is a classic tragedy of the commons problem, where current lack of clear ownership of the valuable assets (here, tigers) lead to harvesting without heed to the long-term value of the asset.

At present there is no incentive for forest dwellers to protect tigers, and
so poachers, traffickers and unscrupulous traders prevail. The temptation of
high profits, in turn, attracts organized crime; this is what happens when
government regulations subvert the law of supply and demand.

But tiger-breeding facilities will ensure a supply of wildlife at an
affordable price, and so eliminate the incentive for poachers and, consequently,
the danger for those tigers left in the wild. With selective breeding and the
development of reintroduction techniques, it might be possible to return the
tiger to some of its remaining natural habitats. And by recognizing the rights
of the local villagers to earn legitimate revenue from wildlife sources, the
tiger could stage a comeback.

I've met a lot of World Wildlife Federation folks in my life, and can say that few of them trust capitalism and many hate it.  My gut feel is that these guys would rather see Tigers die off than end up as commercial herd-beasts, so I am pretty sure this proposal will never, unfortunately, get adopted.

A week or so ago, I tried my best to lay out what I thought was a reasonable position on man-made global warming, while at the same time criticizing some of the Al Gore-type over-hype that's out there as climate change evangelists, to put it charitably, get out ahead of the current science. 

In a similar manner, I thought this article by Ron Bailey does a pretty good job at trying to find some stable ground in the climate change debate.

Michael O'Hare and Matt Yglesias (via Megan McArdle subbing at Instapundit) makes this very good point about carbon taxes:

Tragically, if you tell people you're going to tax their ft ossile
fuels, they freak out and your political career dies a swift and
merciless death. But if you tell people you're going to subsidize alternative energy sources
the people will like that. Functionally, however, these are basically
the same thing, except for the fact that the tax method works much,
much better.

This is unfortunately true.  As I have posted a number of times, I am skeptical that man-made global warming and the net of the problems (and opportunities) it brings will be bad enough to justify the economic cost of slowing or reversing CO2 emissions.  However, I can imagine being convinced that efforts to limit CO2 emissions are necessary.

Regulations on emissions, whether to the air or into shared waterways, is one of the few areas of government action that actually facilitate the smooth operation of strong property rights.  As I explained before, one could easily imagine a world of strong property rights bogged down in constant suits and counter-suits, as any property owner could rightfully sue over molecules of emissions that crossed their property line from another.  Certainly I can imagine private solutions and agreements that could have developed in the absence of government to sort this out, but government emissions restrictions, when done well, are not an unreasonable approach.

Of course, there are a lot of bad ways to manage emissions, and the government has tried about all of them.  New source controls, which are still debated and, incredibly, supported, represent all the worst of government hubris in trying to micro-manage solutions and technologies rather than just defining the desired outcome.  If anything, new technology subsidies (think ethanol) have been even worse, acting more like political pork and rent-seeking than intelligent pollution policy.

However, the government, especially the environmental lobby which tends to be full of technocrats and statists, greatly prefer the government micromanagement approach.  The impossibility of the task should be clear.  Take CO2 reduction -- to micromanage the reduction, the government would have to sort through every source of CO2, every available technology, and come up with a prioritized plan for investment to get the most reduction for the least $.  And even if the tried, they would be wrong, because this is a problem with a billion variables.  And even if they happen to get it right, they would not implement it, changing their plans the minute the Archer Daniels Midland lobbyist walked in the door. 

To understand the complexity, take one example: electric cars.  Hey, everyone loves the idea of electric cars -- they are zero emissions, right?  Well, sort of.  Actually they are emissions outsourcing devices, shifting emissions from the individual car's tailpipe to the power plant where the electrical charge is coming from.  Now, that power plant is a lot more efficient at burning fossil fuels, so often the net is better, but what if the marginal electricity production is coming from coal?  Does that net reduce CO2?  And, if electric cars reduce carbon emissions, does $10,000 investing in electric cars reduce more or less carbon emissions than $10,000 in solar?

These decisions are impossible to make, but we don't have to.  Every day, markets and price signals help individuals make such tradeoffs rationally.   That's why a carbon tax, that raises the price of CO2 emissions fairly directly, would be a much more efficient approach to managing emissions.

Update: People have asked about emissions trading.  Emissions trading schemes are OK, in that they help push emissions reductions towards the people who can do it most efficiently.  What I don't like about them is they are a government form of incumbent subsidy - basically industry incumbents get a tradeable asset of value, while new and future entrants do not.

A couple of days ago I expressed frustration at finding a source for even-handed analysis of climate issues.  As someone who accepts more warming than zero but less than Al Gore espouses, I'd like to find a source of climate analysis that I could count on to look at all sides of the issue.  Recently the Prometheus web site was recommended to me.  I am still reviewing it, but you might want to check it out.

By the way, coming soon is the climate cage match to be held by the US House of Representatives.

Update:  Please enjoy this post; however, I have published a (free) more comprehensive guide to the skeptics arguments concerning man-made global warming.  You can find the HTML version here and a free pdf download here.

A few days ago, my wife announced to me that she wanted me to take her to
"An Inconvenient Truth", the recent movie vehicle for communicating
Al Gore's views on climate change.  I told my wife that I found the
climate issue incredibly interesting -- I have always had a passion for
inter-disciplinary science and climate requires integration of bits not just
from climate science but from economics, statistics, biology, and more.  I
told her I would love to see a true documentary on climate change, but I was as
interested in seeing a "science" film from the group that put this movie
together as I presume she was in seeing a "even-handed" movie on
abortion produced by the Catholic Church.

Never-the-less, she has insisted, so I put together a skeptic's primer for
her, which I will also share with you.  Note that I am not actively involved in climate research myself, so the following is my admittedly incomplete understanding of all the issues.  It is meant to raise issues that you may not find discussed in most global warming accounts.

Overview:  The earth has warmed by 2/3 of a degree to as much as a degree (all temperatures in Celsius)
over the last 100 years, of which man may be responsible for no more than half
through CO2 emissions.  The poles, which are important to all the global
deluge scare scenarios, have warmed less than the average.  Man's CO2
emissions will warm the earth another degree or so over the next 100
years.  There is a possibility the warming will be greater than this, but
scary-large warming numbers that are typical of most climate reports today
depend on positive feedback loops in the climate that are theoretical and whose
effect has not yet been observed.  The effects of warming will be a mix of
positive and negative outcomes, recognizing that the former never seem to get
discussed in various media scare stories.  If the effects of warming are a
net negative on mankind, it is not clear that this negative outweighs the costs
in terms of lost economic growth (and the poverty, disease, and misery that
comes with lower growth) of avoiding the warming.  In other words, I
suspect a warmer but richer world may be better than a cooler but poorer world.

The Hockey Stick:  The Hockey Stick graph as become the emblem,
the sort of coat-of-arms, for the climate change intelligentsia.  Until
recently, the climate consensus for the last 1000 years, taken from reams of
historical records (things like the history of X river freezing in winter or Y
region having droughts) was this:

This chart is from the 1990 IPCC climate report, and in it you can see
features that both historians and scientists have discussed for years -- the
warm period during the Middle Ages and the "little ice age" of the
late 17th century.  Of course, this chart is barely better than a guess,
as are most all historical climate surveys.  For example, 3/4 of the earth
is water (where few consistent observations were taken) and only a small percentage of the rest was "civilized" to
the extent of having any historical records.  In addition to historical
records, scientists try to use things like ice cores and tree rings to get a
sense of long-term global climate patterns.

This long-held consensus changed with Mann, et. al., a study that created a new climate
picture for the last millennia that has immediately caught the fancy of nearly
every advocate of climate Armageddon.

For obvious reasons, this graph is called "the hockey stick" and
it is beloved by the global warming crowd because it hammers home the following
message:  Climate has been incredibly steady over the past 900 years with a flat to declining temperature trend until
man came along and caused a dramatic shift.  Based on this analysis, Mann
famously declared that the 1990's were the warmest decade in a millennia and
that 1998 was the hottest year in the last 1000 years.  (For real hubris, check
out this recent USAToday
graphic, which purports to know the world's temperature within .001 degree
for every year going back two thousand years)

In fact, what Mann's chart shows for the last 100 years is about what I said in my overview - that
the world has warmed a degree and that man maybe has contributed up to half of
this.  Notice that tacked onto the end of the previous consensus view, the
last 100 years seem like it might just be the start of another natural cyclical
climate variation.    Not necesarily a reason for panic.  Ah,
but Mann's chart!  That's a chart that anyone eager to have the government
intervene massively in the economy is bound to love. It says that we are currently entering an unprecedented anomoly, and that the chief suspect for creating this change must be human civilization.

So is Mann right?  Well, a couple of things to note.  First, its
instructive to observe how eagerly the climate community threw out its old
consensus based on years of research in favor of Mann's study.  It's
unusual for a healthy
scientific community to throw out their old consensus on the basis of one
study, especially when no one had replicated its findings independently.
Which no one has ever been able to do, since Mann has refused to share his
models or methodology details.  In fact, it took a US Congressional subpoena
to get any of his underlying models into the public domain.  This behavior
by a scientist would normally engender ENORMOUS skepticism in the community --
normally, I mean, except for in climate science, where mountaintop revelation without 3rd party repeatability
is OK as long as it supports a dire man-made climate catastrophe model.
In short, climate change advocates wanted the study to be true, because it was such a
powerful image to show the public.

Despite Mann's reticence to allow anyone to check his work, skeptics still
began to emerge.    Take that big temperature bulge in the Middle
Ages shown in the previous concensus view.  This bulge was annoying to climate
interventionists, because it showed that large variations in temperature on a
global scale can be natural and not necessarily the fault of modern man.
But Mann made this whole medieval bulge go away.  How?  Well, one of
the early revelations about Mann's work is that all the data before 1450 or so
comes from studying the tree rings of one single tree.  Yes, that's one tree
(1).  Using the evidence of this one tree, Mann flattened the temperature
over the 500 year period from 1000-1500 and made the Medieval warm period just go poof.  Wow!

The bigger criticism of Mann has come from statisticians.  Two Canadian
statisticians began questioning Mann's methodology, arguing that his
statistical approach was incorrect.  They demonstrated that Mann's
statistical approach was biased towards creating hockey sticks, and they showed
how the Mann model could be applied to random noise and produce a hockey
stick.   The climate change establishment did not take this criticism
well, and tried their hardest to rip these two guys up.  In fact, you might have believed that the two had been molesting little boys or declaring the world is flat rather than just questioning another scientist's statistical methodology. 

Recently, a US Congressional Committee asked a group of independent statisticians led by
Dr. Edward Wegman, Chair of the National Science Foundation's Statistical
Sciences Committee, to evaluate the Mann methodology.  Wegman
et. al. savaged the Mann methodology as well as the peer review process
within the climate community:

It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even
though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be
interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the
sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly
done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review,
which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently
politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions
without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Dr. Mann's
assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the
millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be
supported by his analysis.

Further, Wegman concurred on almost every point with the Canadians, coming to the conclusion that the hockey stick was deepfly flawed.  In most other scientific communities, the Mann analysis would have been sent
to the dustbin along with cold fusion and Archbishop James Ussher's dating of
the earth to October 23, 4004 BC.
The problem is that the Mann chart has become too politically important.  Prominent men
like Al Gore have waved it around for years and put it in his books.  No
one in the core of the climate community can back away from the hockey stick
now without the rest of the world asking, rightly, what else is wrong with your
analyses?  If I seem too hard on the climate science community, then
consider this
quote from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NOAA) climate researcher and global warming action promoter,
Steven Schneider:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements,
and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us has to decide what
the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

Now you know why, for all its flaws, you will continue to see the hockey
stick in the press.  Because it is not about the facts, but about "scary scenarios" and "dramatic statements".

Has Man Been Causing the Warming?

Yes, some of it.  But its a little more complicated than the global
warming community lets on.   First, note the last 100 years of the
hockey stick.  The big upwards spike begins in 1900, long before any large
man-made concentrations of CO2 were put into the atmosphere.  In fact,
even those most fanatical about assigning maximum blame for climate change to
man don't blame man-made effects for most of the first half of the 20th century
temperature spike. 

Which begs the question, what caused the 1900-1940 spike of about 1/2 a
degree?  Answer:  Nobody really knows.  Which begs the follow-on
question:  If we don't know what caused the 1900-1940 run-up, how do we
know that this same force is not responsible for some of the run-up since
1950?  Answer:  We don't.  As I will explain below, climate
scientists trying to validate their models have reasons for wanting the
post-1950 temperature rise to be all man-made.  But just because they
assume it to be due to man-made rises in atmospheric CO2 concentrations does
not make it so -- correlation does not equal causation.

Well, what else could be causing this increase?  It could at least partially be
natural cyclical variations in climate that we don't really understand.
Or it could be something more obvious, like, say, the sun was brighter.  I
can imagine your reaction -- no way it could be just a brighter sun,
Coyote.  I mean, that's the first thing the climate scientists would check
if earth temperatures were rising, right?

This chart compiled from data by Judith Lean of the Naval Research Library
and charted from her data at NOAA by Junkscience.com
shows that interestingly, the sun's output does appear to be higher today than they have been in many, perhaps hundreds of years.  Would such increased activity be
expected to result in higher earth temperatures?  I don't know, but if you
think it odd that scientists talk about global warming without mentioning how
hot the sun is, well, welcome to the world of climate science.   Its kind of like scrambling to find out why your room is too hot without first checking to see where the thermostat on the furnace is set.  More
on the sun's variance
and climate change here.

Future Warming:  The key question, of course, is about future warming - i.e.,
based on man's economic growth and projected output of CO2, how much can the
world be expected to warm, say over the next 50-100 years.  I don't know
what the movie "An Inconvenient Truth" will claim until I see it, but
most recent studies have shown warming from 2-8 degrees (consistent with what is depicted by the
USAToday graphic linked above).

There are lots of issues with these forecasts that occasionally might even get
mentioned in the popular press.  Some issues are unavoidable, like the
inherent complexity and unpredictability of climate.  Some issues probably
could be avoided, like the egregiously bad economic forecasting that drives CO2
output forecasts in many of these models.  I won't delve into these issues
much, except to say that we are dealing with massively complex systems.
If an economist came up with a computer model that he claimed could predict the
market value of every house in the world in the year 2106 within $10,000, would
you believe him?  No, you would say he was nuts -- there is way to
much uncertainty.  Climate, of course, is not the same as housing
prices.  It is in fact, much, much more complex and more difficult to
predict. 

All these forecasts are created by a pretty insular and incestuous climate
science community that seems to compete to see who can come up with the most
dire forecast.  Certainly there are financial incentives to be as aggressive
as possible in forecasting climate change, since funding dollars tend to get
channeled to the most pessimistic.   The global warming community spends
a lot of time with ad hominem attacks on skeptics, usually accusing them of
being in the pay of oil and power companies, but they all know that their own
funding in turn would dry up rapidly if they were to show any bit of skepticism
in their own work.

Leaving aside all the other modeling problems and focus on one fact:
Most climate scientists would agree that if you focus narrowly just on the
effects of CO2 on warming, that even under the most extravagant assumptions of
CO2 production, the world will not warm more than a degree or two in total,
some of which we have already seen.  The reason is that the effect of CO2
concentration on global temperature is logarithmic.  This means that
increasing concentrations of CO2 have diminishing returns on temperature.
For example, if the first doubling of CO2 concentration raises temperatures by
a degree, then the next doubling may only raise it by a tenths of a
degree.  This is because CO2 only absorbs sunlight and energy in certain
frequency bands and this ability to absorb energy gets saturated, much like a
pot of water can only dissolve so much salt before it is saturated.

There is fair amount of argument over just how saturated the CO2 layers are
in terms of energy absorption, but most scientists will agree that at some
point, in isolation, additional CO2 added to the atmosphere by man stops having
any significant effect on global temperature.

So how do we get these dire forecasts of 6, 7, 8 degrees of warming?
Well, I was careful to say the effect of CO2 in isolation maxes
out.  To get to higher levels of warming, scientists posit "positive
feedback loops" that augment the warming effect.  Positive feedback generally means that once a process gets going in a direction, there is some force that will accelerate the process
faster or farther in the same direction.  Negative feedback means that
once a process is moving there is some force that tends to try to slow the process back down.
Positive feedback is a boulder balanced on the top of a mountain, where one
push will cause it to roll down the mountain faster and faster; Negative
feedback is a boulder in a valley, where despite lots of effort, the rock will
keep coming to rest back where it started.

In global warming models, water vapor plays a key role as both a positive and a negative feedback loop to climate change.  Water vapor
is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2.  It comes into play because CO2 driven warming will
put more water vapor in the atmosphere, because greater heat will vaporize more
water.  If this extra vapor shows up as more humid clear air, then this in
turn will cause more warming as the extra water vapor absorbs more energy and
accelerates warming.  However, if this extra water vapor shows up as
clouds, the cloud cover will tend to reflect energy back into space and retard
temperature growth. 

Which will happen?  Well, nobody knows.  And this is just one
example of the many, many feedback loops that scientists are able to posit but
not prove. And climate scientists are coming up
with numerous other positive feedback looks.  As one skeptic put it:

Regardless, climate models are made
interesting by the inclusion of "positive feedbacks" (multiplier
effects) so that a small temperature increment expected from increasing
atmospheric carbon dioxide invokes large increases in water vapor, which seem
to produce exponential rather than logarithmic temperature response in the
models. It appears to have become something of a game to see who can add in the
most creative feedback mechanisms to produce the scariest warming scenarios
from their models but there remains no evidence the planet includes any such
effects or behaves in a similar manner.

So, is it reasonable to assume these feedback loops?  First, none have
really been proven empirically, which does not of course necessarily make them
wrong.  More damning is the fact that models using mostly positive feedback
loops do a terrible job of modeling the last 100 years.  It is a perfectly
reasonable back check on any model to see if it predicts history.   Most of the aggressive climate models (ie the ones that tend to get quoted in the press) turn out to predict a warming for the
last 50 years far above what we have actually observed, which of course might make one
suspicious of their ability to predict the future.  A while back, I said
that climate scientists had a strong incentive to "claim" as much of
the 20th century warming as possible and attribute it to man.  This is
why:  The need to validate models that predict a lot of manmade warming
over the last 50 years that hasn't shown up.  Scientists will tell you
that they have fixed these problems, but we skeptics are fairly certain they have done it by adding artificial
fudge factors of dubious scientific merit  (I will confess to my embarassment that I have done exactly this when I have created industry models for a consulting client).

But one can also answer these questions about positive feedback loops from a
broader perspective.  Positive feedback loops are not unknown in nature
but are much rarer than negative feedback loops.  The reason is that
positive feedback loops lead to runaway processes that we seldom see in
nature.  Atomic fission is one of these thankfully rare process, and one can see that it is
probably lucky our universe is not populated with many such positive feedback
processes.  In our daily lives, we generally deal with negative
feedback:  inertia, wind resistance, friction are all negative feedback
processes.  If one knew nothing else, and had to guess if a natural
process was governed by negative or positive feedback, Occam's razor would say
bet on negative.  So, what about climate?  The evidence is equivocal,
but to be fair there is an example in our near universe of a runaway global
warming event - on Venus - though it occurred for reasons very different than
we are discussing with man-made climate change.

Negatives (and Positives) of Warming: While I have some trouble with
the science employed by global warming activists up to this point, it is on the
topic of the effects of global warming that the science really gets
flaky.  Now, certain effects are fairly likely.  For example,
hurricane activity will likely increase with warmer ocean temperatures.
Warmer ocean temperatures will also cause sea levels to rise, even without ice
melting, due to thermal expansion of the water.  And ice will melt, though
there is a really broad range of forecasts.

One reason that the ice
melting forecasts are hard is because while me may talk about the world
warming a degree, the world does not warm evenly.  Most climate models
show the most warming on dry winter nights  (Siberian winters, for
example, get a disproportionate share of the warming).  An extra summer
degree in Arizona would suck; an
extra winter degree in Siberia would probably be
welcomed, and would likely extend growing seasons.

And it is here that you get the greatest silence from warming
fanatics.  Because
it should be self-evident that warming can be good and bad.  Warming
can raise ocean levels and lead to droughts.  It can also extend growing
seasons and increase rain.  It all depends on where you are and what
forecast you are using.  The only common denominator is that most official
warming reports, such as those from the UN, spend an inordinate amount of time
discussing the negatives and very little time, if any, mentioning positive
offsets.  One of the reasons for this is that there is a culture in which
every environmental activist has been steeped in for years -- that man always
ruins nature.  That everything man does is bad.  Growth is bad.
Technology is bad.  To be fair, its not that many environmental scientists
are hiding the positive offsets, it's that they have been programmed for years to be
unable to recognize or acknowledge them.

Shouldn't We Fix it, Just to Be Safe:  If you get beyond the
hard core of near religious believers in the massive warming scenarios, the
average global warming supporter would answer this post by saying:
"Yes there is a lot of uncertainty, but you said it yourself: 
Though the doomsday warming scenarios via positive feedback in the climate
can't be proven, they are so bad that we need to cut back on CO2 production
just to be safe."

This would be a perfectly reasonable approach if cutting back on CO2
production was nearly cost-free.  But it is not.  The burning of
hydrocarbons that create CO2 is an entrenched part of our lives and our economies.
Forty years ago we might have had an easier time of it, as we were on a path to dramatically cut back on CO2 production
via what is still the only viable technology to massively replace fossil fuel
consumption -- nuclear power.  Ironically, it was environmentalists that
shut down this effort, and power industries around the world replaced capacity
that would have gone nuclear mostly with coal, the worst fossil fuel in terms
of CO2 production (per btu of power, Nuclear and hydrogen produce no CO2,
natural gas produces some, gasoline produces more, and coal produces the most).

Just halting CO2 production at current levels (not even rolling it back)
would knock several points off of world economic growth.  Every point of
economic growth you knock off guarantees you that you will get more poverty,
more disease, more early death.  If you could, politically, even
make such a freeze stick, you would lock China and India,
nearly 2 billion people, into continued poverty just when they were about to
escape it.  You would in the process make the world less secure, because
growing wealth is always the best way to maintain peace.  Right now, China can become wealthier from peaceful internal growth than it can from trying to loot
its neighbors.  But in a zero sum world created by a CO2 freeze, countries
like China would have much more incentive to create trouble outside its borders.  This
tradeoff is often referred to as a cooler but poorer world vs. a richer but
warmer world.  Its not at all clear which is better. 

One final  statement:  I have lost trust in the scientific
community on this.  There are just too many statements floating around like
this one that make it clear that getting people converted to the global
warming cause is more important than getting the science right.  Mann's
refusal to share his data so that his results can be validated (or invalidated,
as seems more likely now), the refusal
to consider any dissenting views in its "scientific" conferences,
the sloppy
science uncovered, the willingness to absurdly blame
every natural event on global warming  -- all these create the
impression that global warming is a religion with doctrines that can't be
questioned, rather than what it actually is -- a really, really chaotic and complex area
of science we have only just begun to understand.

For other reading, probably the first place to look is the Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn
Lomborg. Lomborg in this book has probably the best counter-case to the
enviro-disaster stories filling the media. He has become an object of absolute
hatred among the anti-growth anti globalization fanatics who have latched onto climate
change as the key to advancing their anti-technology and anti-capitalist
political agenda. The attacks on him have become nearly as edifying about what
drives the environmental movement as his book itself. The Economist has
a nice article about his book and about the wild-eyed furious reaction of
environmental activists to it. The Economist also editorializes
here, and you can follow all the criticism and response here on Lomborg's site.

The site junkscience.com is
invaluable, in fact with a better compendium of data on climate than most
climate sites.  A good
place to start is this article.

Other sources: This paper is
a good roundup of all the issues I have addressed. Cato has a lot of other
material here
as does the Heartland
Institute and at The
Commons.  A great post from Silflay Hraka that is much more eloquent
(and concise) than I am is linked here.

Update:  I have published a (free) more comprehensive guide to the skeptics
arguments concerning man-made global warming.  You can find the HTML version here and a free pdf download here.

ABCNews is asking viewers to submit stories of evidence they have found for Global Warming in their back yard.

Witnessing the impact of global warming in your life?

ABC News wants to hear from you. We're currently producing a report on the increasing changes in our physical environment, and are looking for interesting examples of people coping with the differences in their daily lives. Has your life been directly affected by global warming?

We want to hear and see your stories. Have you noticed changes in your own backyard or hometown? The differences can be large or small--altered blooming schedules, unusual animals that have arrived in your community, higher water levels encroaching on your property.

Show us what you've seen.

So I submitted my story:

I can remember that just five years ago, the summers at my house used to be relatively cool and very wet.  Our summer temperatures never got much above 80 degrees, and it would rain every few days, at least.

The last couple of summers, temperatures have soared as high as 112 degrees at my house, and we have at times gone whole months without rain.

I am terrified at these effects of global warming.  Several of my "friends" have said they think this change has more to do with my move from Seattle to Phoenix, but they are clearly in the pay of the oil companies.

I have explained to them that ABC News and their climate reporting have educated me that small anecdotal blips in the local weather are scientifically valid proof of long-term global climate changes.

For example, my Exxon-butt-kissing friends tried to claim that for over a century, hurricane activity has followed a 20-40 year cycle, and that the recent upsurge in hurricane activity is due to the return of the "busy" end of the cycle.  I know from ABC that in fact our two-hundred years of burning fossil fuels have cause CO2 to build up and lurk in the atmosphere, ready to jump out and increase hurricane activity suddenly in 2005.

Its great to see that ABC has adopted the same lofty levels of scientific proof that are used by the rest of the environmental community.

Via the Consumerist:

When Greenpeace mobilized to protest nuclear energy at a recent appearance by
President Bush to promote his nuclear energy policy, they forgot to fill in all
the boiler-plate.

From the Greenpeace anti-nuclear-armageddon flier. Capitals and brackets are
theirs:

In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear
accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID
HERE]."

LOL.  By the way, I am not sure why those paranoid about global warming would refuse to reconsider nuclear power.   In that article, i pointed out that a different regulatory regimed would greatly reduce costs and actually enhance safety:

If aircraft construction was regulated like nuclear power plants,
there would be no aviation industry.  In the aircraft industry,
aircraft makers go through an extensive approval and testing process to
get a basic design (e.g. the 737-300) approved by the government as
safe.  Then, as long as they keep producing to this design, they can
keep making copies with minimal additional design scrutiny.  Instead,
the manufacturing process is carefully checked to make sure that it is
reliably producing aircraft to the design already deemed safe.  If
aircraft makers want to make a change to the aircraft, that change must
be approved with a fairly in-depth process.

Beyond the reduction in design cost for the 2nd airplane of a series
(and 3rd, etc.), this approach also yields strong regulatory benefits.
For example, if the
in a particular aircraft, then the government can issue a bulletin to
require a new approved design be retrofitted in all other aircraft of
this series.  This happens all the time in commercial aviation.

One can see how this might make nuclear power plant construction
viable again.  Urging major construction companies to come up with a
design that could be reused would greatly reduce the cost of design and
construction of plants.  There might still be several designs, since
competing companies would likely have their own designs, but this same
is true in aerospace with Boeing, Airbus and smaller jet manufacturers
Embraer and Bombardier.

And a while back I linked to a story on how the ultimate fallout from Chernobyl was not nearly as bad as was feared.  That article said in part:

Over the next four years, a massive cleanup operation
involving 240,000 workers ensued, and there were fears that many of
these workers, called "liquidators," would suffer in subsequent years.
But most emergency workers and people living in contaminated areas
"received relatively low whole radiation doses, comparable to natural
background levels," a report summary noted. "No evidence or likelihood
of decreased fertility among the affected population has been found,
nor has there been any evidence of congenital malformations."

In
fact, the report said, apart from radiation-induced deaths, the
"largest public health problem created by the accident" was its effect
on the mental health of residents who were traumatized by their rapid
relocation and the fear, still lingering, that they would almost
certainly contract terminal cancer. The report said that lifestyle
diseases, such as alcoholism, among affected residents posed a much
greater threat than radiation exposure.

After reading this article on the earth running out of resources,  I discovered another article from the archives of the Coyote Broadsheet, a predecessor of this blog written by one of my distant relatives, dated April 17, 1870:

As the US Population reaches toward the astronomical total of 40 million persons, we are reaching the limits of the number of people this earth can support.    If one were to extrapolate current population growth rates, this country in a hundred years could have over 250 million people in it!  Now of course, that figure is impossible - the farmland of this country couldn't possibly support even half this number.  But it is interesting to consider the environmental consequences.

Take the issue of transportation.  Currently there are over 11 million horses in this country, the feeding and care of which constitute a significant part of our economy.  A population of 250 million would imply the need for nearly 70 million horses in this country, and this is even before one considers the fact that "horse intensity", or the average number of horses per family, has been increasing steadily over the last several decades.  It is not unreasonable, therefore, to assume that so many people might need 100 million horses to fulfill all their transportation needs.  There is just no way this admittedly bountiful nation could support 100 million horses.  The disposal of their manure alone would create an environmental problem of unprecedented magnitude.

Or, take the case of illuminant.  As the population grows, the demand for illuminant should grow at least as quickly.  However, whale catches and therefore whale oil supply has leveled off of late, such that many are talking about the "peak whale" phenomena, which refers to the theory that whale oil production may have already passed its peak.  250 million people would use up the entire supply of the world's whales four or five times over, leaving none for poorer nations of the world.

Too bad Julian Simon wasn't around to make a bet on whale oil prices.

You know those towns along the highway where people joke "don't blink, or you'll miss it?"  Well, apparently I blinked and missed this story.  If the ice in a climatologist's bourbon & water melts faster than she expected, it gets a three-day spread in the New York Times, but this environmental good-new story (surely an oxymoron to most editors) seems to have been pushed to the back page last September:

The long-term health and environmental impacts of the 1986
accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, while severe,
were far less catastrophic than feared, according to a major new report
by eight U.N. agencies.

The governments of Ukraine,
Belarus and Russia, the three countries most affected by radioactive
fallout from Chernobyl, should strive to end the "paralyzing fatalism"
of tens of thousands of their citizens who wrongly believe they are
still at risk of an early death, according to the study released Monday.

The 600-page report found that as of the middle of this year, the
accident had caused fewer than 50 deaths directly attributable to
radiation, most of them among emergency workers who died in the first
months after the accident.

In fact, even the "while severe" added into the first paragraph seems to be the last gasp of an editor unwilling to accept any environmental good news, since nowhere in the article is there any evidence published of any negative long-term effect at all except that caused to the mental well-being of local citizenry by the continual onslaught of media and governmental horror-predictions.

In fact, the article goes on to say:

Over the next four years, a massive cleanup operation
involving 240,000 workers ensued, and there were fears that many of
these workers, called "liquidators," would suffer in subsequent years.
But most emergency workers and people living in contaminated areas
"received relatively low whole radiation doses, comparable to natural
background levels," a report summary noted. "No evidence or likelihood
of decreased fertility among the affected population has been found,
nor has there been any evidence of congenital malformations."

In
fact, the report said, apart from radiation-induced deaths, the
"largest public health problem created by the accident" was its effect
on the mental health of residents who were traumatized by their rapid
relocation and the fear, still lingering, that they would almost
certainly contract terminal cancer. The report said that lifestyle
diseases, such as alcoholism, among affected residents posed a much
greater threat than radiation exposure.

The other major "fallout" seems to be massively wasted government spending:

Officials said that the continued intense medical monitoring of tens of
thousands of people in Ukraine, Russia and Belarus is no longer a smart
use of limited resources and is, in fact, contributing to mental health
problems among many residents nearly 20 years later. In Belarus and
Ukraine, 5 percent to 7 percent of government spending is consumed by
benefits and programs for Chernobyl victims. And in the three
countries, as many as 7 million people are receiving Chernobyl-related
social benefits.

Sounds like post-Katrina proposals.  We have already seen more level-headed analysis debunk similar horror stories (remember "toxic soup") in New Orleans.  I wonder what a sober analysis of the real long-term health effects around the PG&E site that Erin Brockovitch made her name on would reveal?  When I lived in St. Louis, we had a local meteorologist we used to joke had "accurately predicted twelve of the last three blizzards".  Environmentalists who perplexedly scratch their heads as to why everyone does not yet fully buy into global warming should move past their "everyone is in the pay of the oil companies" explanation and maybe consider for a minute that their panicked prediction of twelve of the last three environmental disasters may be part of the explanation as well.

By the way, what really killed nuclear power was the costliness of the ridiculous regulatory regime.  In a prior post, I suggested an alternative regulatory regime, copied from airlines (see, we libertarians can sometimes hold our nose and actually make a regulatory reform proposal short of "throw it all out").  Reason's Hit and Run points to an example of those on the left reconsidering nuclear power.

Its probably time for another once-every-six-months update on global warming.  In this post I will address the current leading climate intervention position, which is:  Even if we don't understand global warming fully, the time to take massive action is now, before the process builds momentum (similar to the notion that it is easier to deflect a meteor away from earth when it is millions of miles away, rather than right on top of us).  The potential downside of global warming, it is argued, is too high to justify waiting until we are sure.   

While I find arguments that attempt to challenge the current global warming orthodoxy in any way tends to get one labeled a Luddite not worth listening to, giving one the feeling of being a southern Baptist advocating creationism in a room full of Massachusetts Democrats, I will once again try to refute this need to immediate and massive intervention.

The shorthand I use for my argument against intervention is "creating a cooler but poorer world".  In a nutshell, given current technology and likely government intervention approaches, slowing global warming almost certainly entails slowing world growth.  And while the true cost of warming is poorly understood, the true cost of reduced world economic growth is very well understood and is very high.  The real question, then, is do we understand global warming and its potential downsides enough to believe that curbing them outweighs the almost certain negative impact from a poorer world.

I will begin by conceding some warming

Typically when making this argument, I will concede some man-made global warming.  It is hard to refute the fact from various CO2 concentration estimates that man has increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere over the last 50 years, and that this CO2 likely has had and will have some impact on global temperatures.  As a result, I am willing to concede a degree or two of warming from man-made effects over the next century.  This is lower than most of the warming estimates that you see in the press, but scientists will have to nail down a lot more issues before they can convince me these higher numbers are correct.  Some of these issues include:

• World temperatures rose by a half degree in the first half of the 20th century through mostly natural phenomena.  No one knows why (though solar activity may help explain it), but even global warming's strongest supporters agree that it was probably not due to man.  No one can therefore with any accuracy separate warming in the late 20th century due to this natural effect and warming due to man's impact.  Check out Mann's now-famous hockey stick below:

Global warming advocates love this chart - I mean this is their chart, not the skeptics' - and it probably plays well with non-scientific editors who are believers themselves, but I sure wouldn't want to defend this in a board room.  What if this were a sales chart, and I wanted to claim that the sales increase after I started work in 1950 was all due to my effort.  I can just see my old boss Chuck Knight at Emerson, or maybe Larry Bossidy at AlliedSignal, saying - "well Warren, it sure looks like things changed in 1900, not 1950.  And whatever was driving things up from 1900 to 1950, why do you think that that effect, which you can't explain, suddenly stopped and your influence took over.  And by the way, why did you end your chart with 1998 - I seem to remember 1998 was the peak.  Isn't it kind of disingenuous to leave off the last 6 years when the numbers came back down some?" (update:  Even in the arctic, where the media writes with so much confidence that global warming is having a measurable impact, the difference between cyclical variations and man-made effects is hard to unravel.)

• No one really understands the cyclical variations in world temperatures and climate.  I think it is large, and certainly there are historical records of the last 800 years that seem to point to climactic extremes.  Mann, et. al. claim to have shown that man's effects dwarf these natural variations with their 1000-year hockey stick, but there are a lot of problems with Mann, not the least of which is his unbelievably suspicious refusal to release his data and methodology to the scientific community, behavior that would not be tolerated of any other scientist except one who supported the global warming consensus view.
• It is still not clear that the urban heat island effect has been fixed in the ground data, so satellite data tends to show less warming (but some none-the-less).
• The climate models are absurd in ways even a non-climatologist can figure out.  For example, economies in energy inefficient undeveloped nations are assumed to grow like crazy in the IPCC scenarios, such that "then the average income of South Africans will have overtaken that of
  Americans by a very wide margin by the end of the century. Because of
  this economic error, the IPCC scenarios of the future also suggest that
  relatively poor developing countries such as Algeria, Argentina, Libya,
  Turkey, and North Korea will all surpass the United States."
• I no longer trust the scientific community on global warming.  This quote from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NOAA) researcher and global warming action promoter, Steven Schneidersays it all:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic
statements, and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us
has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and
being honest.

While many serious scientists are working on the issue, 100% of the anti-growth, anti-technology, anti-America, and anti-man folks have jumped strongly on the global warming bandwagon, and many of these folks have in fact grabbed the reins, leading major efforts and groups.  It is important to note that these folks do not care about scientific accuracy or facts.  Their agenda is completely and absolutely to use global warming as their lead issue to push their anti-growth agenda.  As such, none of these folks are going to tolerate any fact, study, or scientific voice that in any way questions the global warming orthodoxy.  And can any scientist be considered serious who uttered the following statement (from the UN's IPCC Conference Summary, page 2):

"It is
likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, ... 1998 [was] the warmest year during the past thousand years."

My physics instructors in college used to criticize us students constantly for not understanding the error range in our lab work.  I wonder what they would think of a group of scientists that stated with confidence that 1998 was the warmest year in the last one thousand, when they only have direct measurement for the last 100 years or so and even then over only a small percentage of the planet and the other 900 years are estimated from tree rings and ice cores.  I am tired of being criticized as a Luddite for challenging "scientists" who think they know with confidence the exact world temperature since Charlemagne. 

Anyway, to avoid getting bogged down in this mess, I am willing to posit some man-made warming, say 1-2 degrees over the next 100 years.  For most who argue the subject, this is the end of the discussion.  For me, it is just the beginning.

What impact, warming?

Beyond bad cinema and Sunday supplement hyperbole, its difficult to find the good science aimed at quantifying the impacts, positive and negative, from global warming.  In fact, it is impossible in any venue at any level of quality to find any mention of the positive impacts of warming, though anyone with half a brain can imagine any number of positive impacts (e.g. longer growing seasons in cold climates) that will at least partially offset warming negatives.

Now, I am sure many scientists would respond that climate is complicated, and its hard to judge what will happen.  Which I believe is true.  But surely the same scientists that can cay that the world will warm by x degrees with enough certainty to demand that billions or even trillions of dollars be spent to change energy use should be able to come to some conclusions about the net effects, both positive and negative, from warming.

Certainly sea levels will probably rise, as some ice caps melt, by maybe a foot in the consensus view.  And storms and hurricanes may get worse, though its hard to separate the warming effect from the natural cyclical variation in hurricane strength, at least in the Atlantic.  What does seem to be clear is that the warming disproportionately will occur in colder, drier climates.  For example, a large part of the world's warming will occur in Siberia. 

When I hear this, I immediately think longer growing seasons in cold climates plus less impact in already warm climates = more food worldwide.  It strikes me that since the climate models tend to spit out warming not only world wide but by area of the world, it would be fairly easy to translate this into an estimate of net impact on food production.  This seems to be such an obvious area of study that I can only assume it has been done, and, since we have not heard about it, that the answer from global warming was "increased food production".  Since this conclusion neither supports scary headlines, increased grant money, or the anti-growth agenda, no one really talks about it or studies it much.  I would bet that if I took all the studies and grants today aimed at quantifying the impact of global warming, more than 95% of the work, maybe 100% of the work, would be aimed solely at negative impacts, studiously ignoring any positive counter-veiling effects.

I often get looks from global warming advocates like I am from Mars when I suggest work needs to be done to figure out how bad warming is, or even if it is really that bad at all.  I have learned that there are typically two reasons for this reaction:

1. I am talking to one of the anti-growth types, for whom the global warming issue is but a means to the end of growth limitation.  These folks need global warming to be BAD as a fundamental premise, not as something that can be fact-checked.  They cannot have people questioning that global warming is the ultimate bad thing that trumps everything else anymore than the Catholic Church can have folks start to question the fallibility of the Pope.
2. I am talking to an environmentalists who considers man's impact impact on earth as bad, period.  It is almost an aesthetic point of view, that it is fundamentally upsetting to see man changing the earth in such a measurable way, irregardless of whether the change affects man negatively.  These are the same folks with whom you cannot argue about caribou in ANWR.  They don't oppose ANWR drilling because they honestly think the caribou will be hurt, but because they like the notion that there is a bunch of land somewhere that man is not touching

By the way, though I know this will really mark me as an environmental Luddite, does anyone really believe that in 100 years, if we've really screwed ourselves by making things too hot, that we couldn't find a drastic way to cool the place off?  Krakatoa's eruption put enough dust in the air to cool the world for a decade.  The world, unfortunately, has a lot of devices that go bang laying around that I bet we could employ to good effect if we needed to put some dust in the stratosphere to cool ourselves off.  Yeah, I am sure that there are hidden problems here but isn't it interesting that NO ONE in global warming, inc. ever discusses any option for solving warming except shutting down the world's economies?

What impact, Intervention?

While the Kyoto treaty was a massively-flawed document, with current technologies a Kyoto type cap and trade approach is about the only way we have available to slow or halt CO2 emissions.  And, unlike the impact of warming on the world, the impact of such a intervention is very well understood by the world's economists and seldom in fact disputed by global warming advocates.  Capping world CO2 production would by definition cap world economic growth at the rate of energy efficiency growth, a number at least two points below projected real economic growth.  In addition, investment would shift from microprocessors and consumer products and new drug research and even other types of pollution control to energy. The effects of two points or more lower economic growth over 50-100 years can be devastating:

• Currently, there are perhaps a billion people, mostly in Asia, poised to exit millenia of subsistence poverty and reach the middle class.  Global warming intervention will likely consign these folks to continued poverty.  Does anyone remember that old ethics problem, the one about having a button that every time you pushed it, you got a thousand dollars but someone in China died.  Global warming intervention strikes me as a similar issue - intellectuals in the west feel better about man being in harmony with the earth but a billion Asians get locked into poverty.
• Lower world economic growth will in turn considerably shorten the lives of billions of the world's poor
• A poorer world is more vulnerable to natural disasters
• The unprecedented progress the world is experiencing in slowing birth rates, due entirely to rising wealth, will likely be reversed.  A cooler world will not only be poorer, but likely more populous as well.  It will also be a hungrier world, particularly if a cooler world does indeed result in lower food production than a warmer world
• A transformation to a prosperous middle class in Asia will make the world a much safer and more stable place, particularly vs. a cooler world with a billion Asian poor people who know that their march to progress was halted by western meddling.
• A cooler world would ironically likely be an environmentally messier world.  While anti-growth folks blame all environmental messes on progress, the fact is that environmental impact is a sort of inverted parabola when plotted against growth.  Early industrial growth tends to pollute things up, but further growth and wealth provides the resources and technology to clean things up.  The US was a cleaner place in 1970 than in 1900, and a cleaner place today than in 1970.  Stopping or drastically slowing worldwide growth would lock much of the developing world, countries like Brazil and China and Indonesia, into the top end of the parabola.  Is Brazil, for example, more likely to burn up its rain forest if it is poor or rich?

The Commons Blog links to this study by Indur Goklany on just this topic:

If global warming is real and its effects will one day be as devastating as
some believe is likely, then greater economic growth would, by increasing
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, sooner or later lead to greater damages from
climate change. On the other hand, by increasing wealth, technological
development and human capital, economic growth would broadly increase human
well-being, and society's capacity to reduce climate change damages via
adaptation or mitigation. Hence, the conundrum: at what point in the future
would the benefits of a richer and more technologically advanced world be
canceled out by the costs of a warmer world?

Indur Goklany attempted to shed light on this conundrum in a recent paper
presented at the 25th Annual North American Conference of the US Association for
Energy Economics, in Denver (Sept. 21, 2005). His paper "” "Is a
richer-but-warmer world better than poorer-but-cooler worlds?" "” which can
be found here, draws
upon the results of a series of UK Government-sponsored studies which employed
the IPCC's emissions scenarios to project future climate change between 1990 and
2100 and its global impacts on various climate-sensitive determinants of human
and environmental well-being (such as malaria, hunger, water shortage, coastal
flooding, and habitat loss). The results indicate that notwithstanding climate
change, through much of this century, human well-being is likely to be highest
in the richest-but-warmest world and lower in poorer-but-cooler worlds. With
respect to environmental well-being, matters may be best under the former world
for some critical environmental indicators through 2085-2100, but not
necessarily for others.

This conclusion casts doubt on a key premise implicit in all calls to take
actions now that would go beyond "no-regret" policies in order to reduce GHG
emissions in the near term, namely, a richer-but-warmer world will, before too
long, necessarily be worse for the globe than a poorer-but-cooler world. But the
above analysis suggests this is unlikely to happen, at least until after the
2085-2100 period.

Policy Alternatives

Above, we looked at the effect of a cap and trade scheme, which would have about the same effect as some type of carbon tax.  This is the best possible approach, if an interventionist approach is taken.  Any other is worse.

The primary other alternative bandied about by scientists is some type of alternative energy Manhattan project.  This can only be a disaster.   Many scientists are technocratic fascists at heart, and are convinced that if only they could run the economy or some part of it, instead of relying on this messy bottom-up spontaneous order we call the marketplace, things, well, would be better.  The problem is that scientists, no matter how smart they are, miss with their bets because the economy, and thus the lowest cost approach to less CO2 production, is too complicated for anyone to understand or manage.  And even if the scientists stumbled on the right approaches, the political process would just screw the solution up.  Probably the number one alternative energy program in the US is ethanol subsidies, which are scientifically insane since ethanol actually increases rather than reduces fossil fuel consumption.  Political subsidies almost always lead to investments tailored just to capture the subsidy, that do little to solve the underlying problem.  In Arizona, we have thousands of cars with subsidized conversions to engines that burn multiple fuels but never burn anything but gasoline.  In California, there are hundreds of massive windmills that never turn, having already served their purpose to capture a subsidy.  In California, the state bent over backwards to encourage electric cars, but in fact a different technology, the hybrid, has taken off.

Besides, when has this government led technology revolution approach ever worked?  I would say twice - once for the Atomic bomb and the second time to get to the moon.  And what did either get us?  The first got us something I am not sure we even should want, with very little carryover into the civilian world.  The second got us a big scientific dead end, and probably set back our space efforts by getting us to the moon 30 years or so before we were really ready to do something about it or follow up the efforts.

If we must intervene to limit CO2, we should jack up the price of fossil fuels with taxes, or institute a cap and trade scheme which will result in about the same price increase, and the market through millions of individual efforts will find the lowest cost net way to reach whatever energy consumption level you want with the least possible cost.  (The only real current alternative that is rapidly deploy-able to reduce CO2 emissions anyway is nuclear power, which could be a solution but was killed by...the very people now wailing about global warming.)

Conclusion

I would like to see some real quality discussion as to the relative merits of the path the world is on today vs. an interventionist world that is cooler but poorer, more populous, hungrier, and less politically stable.  If anyone knows of some thoughtful work in this area, please leave a link in the comment area or in my email.

By the way, I got through this whole post without mentioning or quoting Bjorn Lomborg, which really is not fair since he has been very eloquent about just this cooler but poorer argument, but since he is treated like the anti-Christ by global warming believers, it generally only causes people to stop listening when you mention him.

Note finally that other past articles in this series can be found here and here and here.

Disclosure:   I am not funded in any way by the automobile or electric power industry. In fact, my personal business
actually benefits from higher oil prices, since our recreation sites
tend to be near-to-home alternatives for those who can't afford to
drive across country, so global warming intervention would probably help me in the near term.  However, I do own a fair amount of Exxon-Mobil stock, so you may assume that all my opinions are tainted, following the tried and true Global Warming formula that any money from the energy industry is automatically tainting, but incentives that tie grant money, recognition, or press exposure to the magnitude of warming a scientist predicts never carry a taint.  My opinions carry with them an honest concern for the well-being of non-Americans, like the Chinese, which I'm told used to be considered a liberal value until liberals and progressives decided more recently that they actually fear and oppose economic growth in places like China.