The Climate of Man

P.S. Hard to believe I could possibly have anything to left to say but here it is: all this stuff about the earth has been warmer or what have you does not move me. It hasn't been warmer while we've been on it, and I like the climate the way it is -- I don't want it a bunch hotter and drier with higher sea levels.

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monica38 wrote:

Hey everyone -- I found this site by searching for Elizabeth Kolbert's name. I'm glad I found it. I'm too clueless about the site to tell views vs. posts but I'm glad people are reading it, because the more people think about climate change, the better, as far as I'm concerned.

I'm glad you've found it too, because you're an interesting opponent to debate with. Please stick around for as long as you like!

monica38 wrote:

I don't think the closest analog is Malthus, I think it's the ozone hole, albeit much more complex and difficult to deal with.

Personally, I guess the closest analogue is Condoleeza Rice's "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud", together with her allegations that WMD skeptics were irresponsible for opposing her idea that "we must act decisively and quickly" in Iraq. Of course, we are both begging the question through our choice of analogy.

About those points you made in between, and which I didn't respond to for now: Did you make them because you wish to discuss them, or just to let us know how you ended up thinking about the issue? They're interesting points to discuss, but I would like to avoid writing kilowords of rebuttal unless somebody wants to read them.

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Absolutely I would like to hear what anyone has to say about them, and particularly you, Thomas, since much of it was written in response to you, after all! I still would like to believe I don't have to worry about this as much as I do, plus if I do get active in this issue I'd like to know what people are going to say in response in advance. Frankly some of what you have said is far more convincing than the complete balderdash that comes out of the Bush administration; then again they have certain political constraints that prevent them from, say, writing off the agricultural sector of the economy. I must say the little of the economic stuff I read clearly conveyed to me why those who want us to do nothing about climate change stick to "we don't know for sure it's happening or that we're causing it" rather than "we can live happily behind sea walls drinking desalinated water and eating food grown in Canada." Not that you're saying the latter.

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For a pithy summary of the case against global warming, you might want to see the Wall Street Journal editorial of today, 6/21. The paper appears to be in a panic that something might actually be done in the US about climate change.

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Yup, here it is. (Sorry for not responding yet, Monica. I'm a bit busy at the moment. I can write lots of post that fit between two chunks of work, but nothing that required serious thinking.)

Quote:

Kyoto by Degrees
June 21, 2005; Page A16

Something strange is happening in the U.S. Senate -- or at least stranger than usual. The world's greatest deliberative body is hurtling toward passage of limits on greenhouse gases, even as the scientific case for such a mini-Kyoto Protocol looks weaker all the time.

Recall that as recently as 1997 the Senate voted 95-0 for the Byrd-Hagel Resolution assailing Kyoto's provisions. Bill Clinton never even brought the Protocol up for a vote. But all of a sudden such limits are said to be a political "inevitability" in a Republican Senate. Energy Chairman Pete Domenici says he's open to the John McCain-Joe Lieberman mini-Kyoto, and New Mexico Democrat Jeff Bingaman is proposing an amendment that would impose even stricter limits on fossil fuel use.

Politics is often illogical, but this momentum seems entirely untethered to real science. Since that Byrd-Hagel vote eight years ago, the case for linking fossil fuels to global warming has, if anything, become even more doubtful. The Earth currently does seem to be in a warming period, though how warm and for how long no one knows. In particular, no one knows whether this is unusual or merely something that happens periodically for natural reasons. Most global warming alarms are based on computer simulations that are largely speculative and depend on a multitude of debatable assumptions.

Then there's the famous "hockey stick" data from American geoscientist Michael Mann. Prior to publication of Mr. Mann's data in 1998, all climate scientists accepted that the Earth had undergone large temperature variations within recorded human history. This included a Medieval warm period when the Vikings farmed Greenland and a "little ice age" more recently when the Thames River often froze solid. Seen in that perspective, the slight warming believed to have occurred in the past century could well be no more than a natural rebound, especially since most of that warming occurred before 1940.

Enter Mr. Mann, who suggested that both the history books and other historical temperature data were wrong. His temperature graph for the past millennium was essentially flat until the 20th century, when a sharp upward spike occurs -- i.e., it looks like a hockey stick. The graph was embraced by the global warming lobby as proof that we are in a crisis, and that radical solutions are called for.

But then, in 2003, Canadian mathematician Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick published a critique calling Mr. Mann's work riddled with "collation errors, unjustifiable truncations or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculations of principal components, and other quality control defects." Correct for those errors, they showed, and the Medieval warm period returns.

Mr. Mann has never offered a serious rebuttal to the McIntyre-McKitrick critique. He has refused to fully explain his methodology, claiming he's the victim of "intimidation." That's odd when you consider that the sine qua non of real science is independently verifiable and reproducible results.

Meanwhile, a review of about 200 different temperature studies was published in 2003 by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the journal Climate Research. It likewise reaffirmed the longstanding consensus that there have been large temperature variations over the past millennium.

So what would be a fair representation of how most scientists view the climate of the past 1,000 years? We'd suggest the graph nearby, which we reprint exactly as it appeared in the first report of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (hardly a group of oil-funded hacks) in 1990. It shows that our own warming period is neither unique nor all that hot.

There are other reasons to doubt the global warming alarums. For example, the computer models that predict it suggest the upper atmosphere should have warmed substantially in recent decades. But data from weather balloons and satellites don't match the projections.

There's also the matter of the alleged melting of the Antarctic ice cover, threatening a catastrophic sea level rise. In fact, recent data suggest the ice is thickening and temperatures are dropping in most of the continent. Finally, an increasing number of scientists are concluding that variations in solar radiation associated with sun spots -- that's right, the heat of the sun -- play a major role in Earth's climate.

To add it all up, the Earth is slightly warmer than it used to be a century ago, but no one knows why. Even if fossil fuels were the cause, Kyoto would make little difference, especially with China and India understandably bent on oil-fueled growth to lift their citizens out of poverty. And a warmer Earth may not be any worse than a colder one, certainly not for the longer growing seasons it would allow in the world's temperate zones. None of this justifies passing, for the first time, limits on greenhouse gases that would impose hundreds of billions of dollars in compliance costs on American energy production.

President Bush can in good conscience offer a polite rebuff to his friend Tony Blair when the British Prime Minister presses for American action on climate change at the upcoming G-8 summit in Scotland. Likewise, if Senators are going to insist on passing a pork-laden energy bill, the least they could do is avoid senseless limits on future economic growth such as the Kyoto-lites on offer from Messrs. McCain, Lieberman and Bingaman.

Source (subscribers only) here

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Just a few thoughts -- Interesting that they use a graph that is 15 years old to buttress their argument that new science supports them. Curious that they do not mention the recent letter from 11 national academies of science stating that we are warming the planet and that prompt action is called for. How helpful that they wrote this as an editorial rather than a news story; their journalistic (as opposed to editorial) standards are high enough that they would have had to interview enough scientists to show that the consensus is otherwise than they are portraying (as far as I understand it so far). In light of these shortcomings, I wonder at Mr. (Dr.?) Mann's lack of response to these guys, but I doubt very much the WSJ is doing him justice.

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monica38 wrote:

-- the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are very high relative to where they were prior to industrialization and relative to the temperate climate we've been enjoying for the last few thousand years or so.

-- this carbon dioxide will increase the earth's average temperature. If we get to 500 ppm (or whatever that magic number is), projections are we will increase our temps by 4-9 degrees

No argument from me.

monica38 wrote:

-- during the whole of our existence as a species, it has never been more than 2 degrees on average warmer than this, so if we get even 4 degrees higher, we are into uncharted territory

I'm not sure this is true. Our species separated from our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos, about 7 million years ago. I'm pretty sure this time contains a few periods that were warmer than that, though I would have to look it up. In any case, I don't think "during the whole of our existence as a species" and "it" (global climate) are terribly relevant variables here, for two reasons. 1) Over the last few billion years, you, personally, have had hundreds of millions, if not billions of individual ancestors, and every single one of them has survived the climate [s]he was born into. If even one of them hadn't survived the climate test, you wouldn't be here today to be anxious about climate change. Your genes were optimized in an enormously tough selection that produced you. And since the properties that made your ancestors survive are heritable, that means your ancestors, too, should prove robust to climate change. 2) It is local, not global climate, that selects you. If you like your current climate, and in 100 years the globe will be 4°F warmer, you can easily find that climate again by looking 300 miles further north.

monica38 wrote:

-- while the modelling is not precise, quite extreme drought and (perhaps not as extreme) rising sea levels are forecast. Thomas seems to reject the models almost wholesale, and it does seem hard to rely on things that are trying to model the climate (when they can barely tell me what things will be like next weekend), but they seem to be the best info we have.

As it happens, I did question the models in order to attack the argument from the scientists' authority that Kolbert has made. This argument works in many contexts because the scientific community generally does a good job at promoting into positions of authority those who have a good track record of predicting stuff. But in this case the argument does not work because the interesting predictions are inherently uncheckable.

But I don't think that this is my strongest counter-argument in this case. My strongest counterarguments are: 1) Draughts happen even when the climate isn't changing, and nobody I am aware of predicts a significantly increased amount of extra starvation as a result of climate-change-produced draughts. As I said earlier, feeding ourselves has become an easy problem, and it won't turn into a hard one again even if climate change makes it a bit harder. 2) Projected sea level rises, according to IPCC, are between one and three feet over the next century. Again, this may produce real and significant costs, but it's not the global catastrophy Kolbert and friends make it out to be.

monica38 wrote:

-- certain systems that regulate our climate will take whatever warming we cause with the CO2 and amplify it, e.g. via the albedo factor and the thawing permafrost that will release the carbon trapped there currently -- and once they get started we can't stop them

yes, but there is negative feedback as well, and Kolbert has ignored it completely. For example, CO2 is a fertilizer, so an increase in its concentration will increase the world wide stock of vegetation, including the stock of algae in the oceans. From the top of my head, I cannot say which direction of the feedback dominates. But the fact that all fossil and plant-based carbon used to be in the atmosphere before the advent of photosynthesis, and the Earth then was obviously not hostile to life, prevents me from buying the catastrophic scenarios.

monica38 wrote:

-- while the economists say reducing CO2 levels to the degree Kyoto requires is uneconomic, that seems to be because they assume we (that is the USA) will simply write off our agriculture, forestry, and ranching industries because they are only 3% of our economy, plus build sea walls to protect all the valuable oceanside real estate that would otherwise be inundated.

This is the first time I hear of this assumption. Can you give me a cite to the economists who say that?

monica38 wrote:

-- and oh but by the way, there is quite a bit of uncertainty here, which frankly cuts both ways -- in a big way. I can't remember the Yale economist's name, but he himself states that his projections assume no desertification and other assumptions that may well prove unjustified. Plus while what can be *proven* is fairly limited, the experts who work in this field are plainly more alarmed than their "official" statements say -- which Thomas feels means they are exaggerating but which I feel means they are afraid that by the time they can say things definitively it will be far too late.

Which is, as it happens, quite exactly Mrs. Rice's point about the smoking gun (in Iraq) being a mushroom cloud. And we all know how that one turned out.

monica38 wrote:

We know this is happening; we know it will make the world materially less hospitable for our children; and it could well make life very hard for them. So let's pick up the pace and take care of it.

Your assumption is true, but you are neglecting that the resources we would devote to slowing down global warming won't be available for whatever cause we would have otherwise devoted them to. To argue that we should slow down global warming, you have to show that this is a worthier project than whatever those other causes are. It isn't sufficient to show that it has any value at all.

monica38 wrote:

Again and I hate to sound so corny, but I don't feel it's the responsible thing to do as a parent to just hope the optimists are right and the pessimists are wrong.

And again, what makes you so sure you are not making the environmental analog of Condoleeza Rice's "mushroom cloud" argument here?

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monica38 wrote:

Just a few thoughts -- Interesting that they use a graph that is 15 years old to buttress their argument that new science supports them.

On my reading of the article, this is not what they're doing. They say there is an old consensus (pre-1998), published in the 1990 IPCC reports. Then Mr. Mann stirred things up. Then newer research, which they cite, confirms the old consensus. They show a graph of what this old consensus says. Strikes me as sensible.

monica38 wrote:

Curious that they do not mention the recent letter from 11 national academies of science stating that we are warming the planet and that prompt action is called for. How helpful that they wrote this as an editorial rather than a news story; their journalistic (as opposed to editorial) standards are high enough that they would have had to interview enough scientists to show that the consensus is otherwise than they are portraying (as far as I understand it so far).

The authors have a point of view to offer, and the place to offer a point of view in a newspaper is in the opinion columns. Again, strikes me as sensible.

monica38 wrote:

In light of these shortcomings, I wonder at Mr. (Dr.?) Mann's lack of response to these guys, but I doubt very much the WSJ is doing him justice.

Have you explored the alternative hypothesis that the "consensus" among climatologists may not be as solid as commonly portrayed in the mainstream press? If so, what did you find?

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Update: I surfed around to see what the more recent research actually says, and found a compilation of various independent records by someone at Wikipedia, going back about 2000 years. So here is the 1990 IPCC graph, as reprinted by the Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/images/ED-AD065A_1warm06202005202215.gif

... and here is Wikipedia's graph, with bluish lines reflecting older records and redish ones reflecting newer ones. (For further explanations, see here.)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c1/2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

So while the temperature records aren't exactly hockey-stick-shaped, and the medieval warming period is real, the temperature rise over the last 150 years is still conspicuous. With all that in mind, concerning the overall thrust of the Wall Street Journal article, I now agree with Monica. Its authors are not making an honest argument.

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Mann never came back to answer his critics for good reason - mathematically his model was worthless. These are the results his model got:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/crowley2000/crowley_fig1.jpg

And these are many more models, calculated by real mathematical experts who start by stating their assumptions which minor detail Mann obviously considered beneath his dignity:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/crowley.html

For non-modellers, and it's my understanding that neither the WSJ articles nor The New Yorker claim to be written by modellers, one thing only must be kept firmly in mind: the value of any model is its predictive value because the essence of science is the repeatable experiment.

One test is to feed into a model past, known, inputs and check whether we get the past, known, outputs. In that sense this simulation fits paleo-data better than Mann's:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/crowley2000/crowley_fig5.jpg

Editorials and opinion pieces are interesting but policy should be based on demonstrable fact, not flights of fancy. Mathematical modellers (including yours truly) are generally a humble lot not claiming powers of prophesy in modelling extremely complex systems Smile

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In the immortal words of my late teacher, Feynman (Nobel prize, physics) the basic rule in science is:

_____________________________________________________________

"...you should not fool
the layman when you're talking as a scientist.. [..] I'm talking about
a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending
over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to
have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as
scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen."
_____________________________________________________________
http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/cargocul.htm

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I would like to repeat something that Helen already emphasized nicely, but that cannot be emphasized often enough:

HofT wrote:

For non-modellers, and it's my understanding that neither the WSJ articles nor The New Yorker claim to be written by modellers, one thing only must be kept firmly in mind: the value of any model is its predictive value because the essence of science is the repeatable experiment.

The reason this cannot be emphasized enough is because Kolbert and likeminded people keep arguing for their claims from the authority of the scientists making those claims. But the only reasons scientists have acquired this authority are refutable theories, reproduceable experiments, and peer review. The scary parts of the global warming story rest on theories that cannot be refuted anytime soon, an experiment that will run only once, and a peer review process that works tolerably for every single piece of the puzzle, but breaks down for the puzzle as a whole. (The entire problem is highly interdisciplinary, and scientists from one field rarely accept scientists from another field as peers worthy of revieweing their papers.) Arguments from the authority of scientists don't work in the global warming controversy!

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Thanks, Thomas, and here's a parenthesis you, at least, will appreciate - Professor Feynman cracked up completely when I told him the story Smile

At one point early in my career I had to write computer models for "limited nuclear wars". These depend on inputs given by military people on targets, physicists on CEPs, weapons experts on actual tonnage, meteorologists on fallout patterns, economists on infrastructure effects, medical experts on population effects, oceanographers on thermoclines, geographers - and on and on.

After feeding thousands of equations into a supercomputer lots of simulations were produced, consistently showing the safest habitable spot to be located in the South Atlantic. People who took the models to heart actually went and bought farms in the Falkland Islands - where, about one month after the purchases, they suddenly......got bombed by the Argentine Navy and Air Force.

That experience taught me vast humility in presenting conclusions of mathematical model <G>

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Great story about the Falklands!

And as to the Condi Rice comparison -- hey, it worked for her. Her boss got reelected, she got promoted -- what's the problem? JUST KIDDING. More on that later.

I have to say this board has turned into my guilty pleasure. When I should be balancing my checkbook, doing laundry, sleeping, or all of the above, instead I am reading your all's posts.

I can't fully follow HoT's statements, but I did hit that link you included, and I noted the following sentence at the bottom of the abstract: "A 21st century global warming projection far exceeds the natural variability of the last 1000 years and is greater than the best estimate of global temperature change for the last interglacial. " Sounds pretty serious. Also sounds like what Kolberg said about the relative average global temperature after warming vs. past experience: "the planet is now nearly as warm as it has been at any point in the last four hundred and twenty thousand years. A possible consequence of even a four- or five- degree temperature rise . . . is that the world will enter a completely new climate regime, one with which modern humans have no prior experience" (article II page 70) -- medieval warm period (complete with farming in Greenland or whatever per the WSJ) or no. This is what I referred to in my long rant above, and while there are perhaps more weasel words in there than I remembered, I think we have more or less agreed that Kolbert did not full on misrepresent anything, and I think this is powerful evidence that we should be heading this problem off to avoid serious consequences.

Glad to see you agree with me, Thomas, on the WSJ editorial (to some extent anyway). I don't know how much you read that paper but while I love their reporting, their op-ed stuff is usually fantasy. Anytime they write about something I know about -- and climate change is not in that category -- they just make stuff up. I'm just going to leave it at that or I'll be at it all day. The cover story from last week on ExxonMobil's flat refusal to deal with global warming was more interesting. But I did love that they felt they had to write that editorial! Speaking of panic! Perhaps all is not lost.

As to your responses to my long rant of the other day -- I don't remember all of them. Suffice it to say I agree that most likely global warming is not going to be civilization-ending and I have some tough genes I am hopefully passing on that will permit my daughter and grandchildren (G-d willing) to survive on a hotter planet. But I don't take a ton of comfort from that. Call me selfish and peevish, but I don't want to have to abandon the already semi-arid areas of the US due to climate change, which would have to include central California where I grew up, or sea wall in lots of fabulous areas on the coasts such as the beaches I grew up playing volleyball on or the Outer Banks of North Carolina where we like to vacation. Or give up growing grain in the mid-west or fruit in central California. (The economic paper I read was from something like the Connecticut Academy of Science and Economics, BTW. Not the world's most authoritative source, but they purported to be applying the Yale guy's model to Conn. Much discussion of sea walls and how the agricultural and forestry sectors of the economy were only 3% of the GNP or what have you.) I wager that most Americans wouldn't want to make this trade off if you put it to them either -- thus my sense that Bush and Co. are sticking to "we don't know if it's happening" because they don't want to deal with the follow-up questions when they have to admit (as they will have to soon) that it IS happening.

As for scientific consensus, I'm just an attorney, but to me when the National Academies of Sciences of all the developed countries say the same thing, that's consensus. It's not consensus that the climate will be inherently unhospitable to human life, and that is somewhat the impression given by the Kolbert series. But it is consensus that this is a serious problem that needs prompt attention and, yes, that's partly because of the uncertainties of it all.

Which leads us to the falsifiability/predictability point you guys are making, and I hear you on that. But as Thomas said, this is an experiment that only gets run once, because we don't have another handy hospitable planet to move to if it fails miserably. We need to act on the best information we have, and the best information we have indicates this is going to make life harder for those to follow. Not impossible, but materially harder. (By the way you were a little hard on sharpsprocket there on the vast marginal cost thing, Thomas. I thought it was clear s/he was saying it would add vast additional costs to each item produced above the fixed cost -- thus marginal). The risks of overreacting to this issue -- resources devoted to reducing carbon emissions rather than education, health care, WMD, what have you -- seem to me lower than the risks of underreacting -- when we wake up in 25 years and realize it's too late to do anything about the fact that our climate is becoming materially less hospitable to human life. Yes, droughts have always happened, but not because we deliberately made them more likely and more severe. The people in the southwestern US who just went through 7 years of drought will not take comfort from your reasoning.

As to Secretary Rice -- excuse me for being a Democrat for a moment, but she was demagoging (sp?!) an issue by pushing a very hot button when she knew the facts were likely that such an outcome was unlikely. For some reason that still escapes me, she, her boss, and their cadre were just bound and determined to invade Iraq and they would say anything to get people to sort of buy into it so they could do it. Plus, there was an easy answer for her -- let the inspectors do their thing and they'll find it if it's there. I can tell you for certain I don't have some pre-conceived idea that we definitely need to stop producing carbon dioxide; there isn't an easy way to figure this out short of just waiting and seeing, which has incredible risks; and the available information actually supports rather than undercuts me. So while I see the parallel you are drawing, Thomas, with respect, I'm going to vehemently deny that I am arguing like Sec. Rice.

I appeal again for links or cites to good economic analyses and/or good summaries of the strengths and weaknesses of climate change science. Thanks.

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Monica - you (presumably with the unerring eye of a lawyer for critical portion of the wording!) picked the very sentence best indicating why none of those models should be cause for panic, so if I may quote:

""A 21st century global warming projection far exceeds the natural variability of the last 1000 years and is greater than the best estimate of global temperature change for the last interglacial. " "

Exactly. A PROJECTION. You hardly need a reminder to the effect that the planet is way older than 1000 years, or that the "21st century" isn't even 5 years old yet! Smile

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P.S. to Monica: the site you looked up is extremely reliable and includes lots of links; additional excellent links on the MIT and Caltech websites.

Final from me on that subject: firm believer in free markets here, diligently watch market prices for beachfront property in Labrador (which doesn't belong where the map appears to place it, the Canadian province of Quebec, but rather to the Maritime Provinces) and in the northernmost stretches of the Siberian tundra; on the day you see a boom in land prices in either location, believe those gloom-and-doom global warming models, but not sooner! Very nice talking to you Smile

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HoT -- Absolutely, when the prices for those areas start going up we will be almost certain that the doom-and-gloomers were right -- and we will likewise almost certainly be too late to do anything about it! Just can't wait that long.

As to the sentence I quoted, I guess I put more stress on the last phrase than the first, e.g., greater than the best data on the last interglacial. I suppose it's quite clear I'm not a paleoclimatologist (indeed I never knew there was such a thing until about 3 weeks ago Smile

), but to me that sounds like as hot as it has been in a really long *)#+! time. Maybe quite similar to Kolberg's statement, I'm not enough of an expert to know.

Believe it or not I had independently found your site and been sniffing around on it, just didn't realize I had until I reached it through your link and found some of the articles had already been highlighted. Unfortunately I can't follow much of it. I appreciate the recommendation though.

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monica38 wrote:

I have to say this board has turned into my guilty pleasure. When I should be balancing my checkbook, doing laundry, sleeping, or all of the above, instead I am reading your all's posts.

I can sympathize. When posting here, it certainly doesn't help to have a life. But it's not a showstopper either, and don't worry -- your life will fade away eventually. Nothing to worry about. Wink

monica38 wrote:

Glad to see you agree with me, Thomas, on the WSJ editorial (to some extent anyway). I don't know how much you read that paper but while I love their reporting, their op-ed stuff is usually fantasy.

I read it online, and many of their columns are actually reporting in type -- David Wessel's stuff for example. It's kind of hard for me to see a clear line between their opinion columnists and their analysts, but I agree: The columns on the opinionish side are much worse than those on the reporting-ish and analyst-ish side.

monica38 wrote:

Call me selfish and peevish, but I don't want to have to abandon the already semi-arid areas of the US due to climate change, which would have to include central California where I grew up, or sea wall in lots of fabulous areas on the coasts such as the beaches I grew up playing volleyball on or the Outer Banks of North Carolina where we like to vacation.

Well, the projected rises in sealevels are nowhere near the level that would endanger Big Sur. And as for the climate, maybe this a good time to recall that we are talking decades and centuries here. So if your granddaughter likes the 1980 climate in Sacramento, what's wrong with her enjoying it in 2050 Redding, and her granddaughter in 2100 Portland?

monica38 wrote:

I wager that most Americans wouldn't want to make this trade off if you put it to them either -- thus my sense that Bush and Co. are sticking to "we don't know if it's happening" because they don't want to deal with the follow-up questions when they have to admit (as they will have to soon) that it IS happening.

I agree with that. Judging by the responses I get when I argue my opinion here on A2K, I don't believe my opinion can survive in the political marketplace. It is much easier to just deny everything about global warming.

monica38 wrote:

We need to act on the best information we have, and the best information we have indicates this is going to make life harder for those to follow. Not impossible, but materially harder.

First of all, hypothetically, if the best information we have is white noise, there is no good reason to act at all -- and I am not convinced our information is sufficiently more reliable to justify a lot of action. Second, while it is true that global warming makes life materially harder for our children, so do the steps we take to prevent them. In my opinion, judging by the best information we have, the particular steps Kyoto specifies are a net loss to our children. I believe presidents Clinton and Bush were right not to agree to it, even if at least one of them did it for the wrong reason.

monica38 wrote:

(By the way you were a little hard on sharpsprocket there on the vast marginal cost thing, Thomas. I thought it was clear s/he was saying it would add vast additional costs to each item produced above the fixed cost -- thus marginal).

I just looked up my post, and you're right.

monica38 wrote:

The people in the southwestern US who just went through 7 years of drought will not take comfort from your reasoning.

Generalizing wildly, the people in the southwestern US are living down quickly the huge underground water reservoirs that took nature millenia to make. If current trends continue, this area will run out of affordable water in a matter of decades, no matter what happens with global warming.

monica38 wrote:

As to Secretary Rice -- excuse me for being a Democrat for a moment, but she was demagoging (sp?!) an issue by pushing a very hot button when she knew the facts were likely that such an outcome was unlikely. For some reason that still escapes me, she, her boss, and their cadre were just bound and determined to invade Iraq and they would say anything to get people to sort of buy into it so they could do it.

Before the election, there were many books coming out that illuminated the Bush team's internal decision making process. (Tom Clarke, Stuart O'Neill, Bob Woodward, Tommy Franks, ...) I admit I haven't read a single one of those books, but the summaries I read in the press paint a fairly consistent picture. There was good reason to believe that Saddam had a WMD programm going, and that it was already producing. Bill Clinton confirmed that this suspicion was plausible. This was against his partisan interest, so it's a good reason to believe it's true. Given this initial suspicion, a group dynamic developed under which vigilance and suspicion of Saddam were rewarded as responsible and forward looking, while non-alarmists like Colin Powell were dismissed and ignored as complacent. (Man I miss Colin Powell!) From the outside, this looked like a bunch of people determined to defraud the world. As the Downing Street Memo said, "the intelligence was being fixed around the policy". I gather that from the inside, it felt like a bunch of people hell-bent to do the responsible thing. From this perspective, any lies and exaggerations were justified by the good cause. I think the parallel to the global warming debate is fairly close.

monica38 wrote:

So while I see the parallel you are drawing, Thomas, with respect, I'm going to vehemently deny that I am arguing like Sec. Rice.

And with just as much respect, I think the main difference is that you are taking the "inside perspective" on global warming and the "outside perspective" on the WMDs.

monica38 wrote:

I appeal again for links or cites to good economic analyses and/or good summaries of the strengths and weaknesses of climate change science. Thanks.

For economic analysis, I would start with the homepage of William Nordhaus ("The Yale guy" Smile

), who created the field. For weakness in the global warming story as commonly told, I would start on the home page of the MIT's Richard Lindzen. A good book against environmental scares in general is the much-maligned Skeptical Environmentalis by Bjorn Lomborg. Lomborg has not done any original research in any of the relevant fields, but does a very good job at mining the sources by those who have, and reconstructing the big picture from them. His book also contains a comprehensive chapter on global warming.

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Thomas wrote:

monica38 wrote:
I have to say this board has turned into my guilty pleasure. When I should be balancing my checkbook, doing laundry, sleeping, or all of the above, instead I am reading your all's posts.

I can sympathize. When posting here, it certainly doesn't help to have a life. But it's not a showstopper either, and don't worry -- your life will fade away eventually. Nothing to worry about.

monica38 wrote:
Glad to see you agree with me, Thomas, on the WSJ editorial (to some extent anyway). I don't know how much you read that paper but while I love their reporting, their op-ed stuff is usually fantasy.

I read it online, and many of their columns are actually reporting in type -- David Wessel's stuff for example. It's kind of hard for me to see a clear line between their opinion columnists and their analysts, but I agree: The columns on the opinionish side are much worse than those on the reporting-ish and analyst-ish side.

monica38 wrote:
Call me selfish and peevish, but I don't want to have to abandon the already semi-arid areas of the US due to climate change, which would have to include central California where I grew up, or sea wall in lots of fabulous areas on the coasts such as the beaches I grew up playing volleyball on or the Outer Banks of North Carolina where we like to vacation.

Well, the projected rises in sealevels are nowhere near the level that would endanger Big Sur. And as for the climate, maybe this a good time to recall that we are talking decades and centuries here. So if your granddaughter likes the 1980 climate in Sacramento, what's wrong with her enjoying it in 2050 Redding, and her granddaughter in 2100 Portland?

monica38 wrote:
I wager that most Americans wouldn't want to make this trade off if you put it to them either -- thus my sense that Bush and Co. are sticking to "we don't know if it's happening" because they don't want to deal with the follow-up questions when they have to admit (as they will have to soon) that it IS happening.

I agree with that. Judging by the responses I get when I argue my opinion here on A2K, I don't believe my opinion can survive in the political marketplace. It is much easier to just deny everything about global warming.

monica38 wrote:
We need to act on the best information we have, and the best information we have indicates this is going to make life harder for those to follow. Not impossible, but materially harder.

First of all, hypothetically, if the best information we have is white noise, there is no good reason to act at all -- and I am not convinced our information is sufficiently more reliable to justify a lot of action. Second, while it is true that global warming makes life materially harder for our children, so do the steps we take to prevent them. In my opinion, judging by the best information we have, the particular steps Kyoto specifies are a net loss to our children. I believe presidents Clinton and Bush were right not to agree to it, even if at least one of them did it for the wrong reason.

monica38 wrote:
(By the way you were a little hard on sharpsprocket there on the vast marginal cost thing, Thomas. I thought it was clear s/he was saying it would add vast additional costs to each item produced above the fixed cost -- thus marginal).

I just looked up my post, and you're right.

monica38 wrote:
The people in the southwestern US who just went through 7 years of drought will not take comfort from your reasoning.

Generalizing wildly, the people in the southwestern US are living down quickly the huge underground water reservoirs that took nature millenia to make. If current trends continue, this area will run out of affordable water in a matter of decades, no matter what happens with global warming.

monica38 wrote:
As to Secretary Rice -- excuse me for being a Democrat for a moment, but she was demagoging (sp?!) an issue by pushing a very hot button when she knew the facts were likely that such an outcome was unlikely. For some reason that still escapes me, she, her boss, and their cadre were just bound and determined to invade Iraq and they would say anything to get people to sort of buy into it so they could do it.

Before the election, there were many books coming out that illuminated the Bush team's internal decision making process. (Tom Clarke, Stuart O'Neill, Bob Woodward, Tommy Franks, ...) I admit I haven't read a single one of those books, but the summaries I read in the press paint a fairly consistent picture. There was good reason to believe that Saddam had a WMD programm going, and that it was already producing. Bill Clinton confirmed that this suspicion was plausible. This was against his partisan interest, so it's a good reason to believe it's true. Given this initial suspicion, a group dynamic developed under which vigilance and suspicion of Saddam were rewarded as responsible and forward looking, while non-alarmists like Colin Powell were dismissed and ignored as complacent. (Man I miss Colin Powell!) From the outside, this looked like a bunch of people determined to defraud the world. As the Downing Street Memo said, "the intelligence was being fixed around the policy". I gather that from the inside, it felt like a bunch of people hell-bent to do the responsible thing. From this perspective, any lies and exaggerations were justified by the good cause. I think the parallel to the global warming debate is fairly close.

monica38 wrote:
So while I see the parallel you are drawing, Thomas, with respect, I'm going to vehemently deny that I am arguing like Sec. Rice.

And with just as much respect, I think the main difference is that you are taking the "inside perspective" on global warming and the "outside perspective" on the WMDs.

monica38 wrote:
I appeal again for links or cites to good economic analyses and/or good summaries of the strengths and weaknesses of climate change science. Thanks.

For economic analysis, I would start with the homepage of William Nordhaus ("The Yale guy" ), who created the field. For weakness in the global warming story as commonly told, I would start on the home page of the MIT's Richard Lindzen. A good book against environmental scares in general is the much-maligned Skeptical Environmentalis by Bjorn Lomborg. Lomborg has not done any original research in any of the relevant fields, but does a very good job at mining the sources by those who have, and reconstructing the big picture from them. His book also contains a comprehensive chapter on global warming.

Greetings Thomas and friends --

Just a couple quick thoughts . . . I have been letting real life intrude again and also reading the web sites you referred me to. Very interesting even if one of the most accessible things Lindzen wrote was an Op-Ed in the WSJ -- blech.

"the projected rises in sealevels are nowhere near the level that would endanger Big Sur. And as for the climate, maybe this a good time to recall that we are talking decades and centuries here. So if your granddaughter likes the 1980 climate in Sacramento, what's wrong with her enjoying it in 2050 Redding, and her granddaughter in 2100 Portland? "

Big Sur (cliffs) is one thing, the nice sloping beaches we all mostly recreate on are fundamentally different. Nothing but a big quake on the San Andreas probably threatens Big Sur, but the beaches sure seem to be in the crosshairs. And who said I liked the 1980 climate in Sacto? Just kidding. Nope, pushing everybody further and further north -- which (a) implies this will be nice and linear and (b) eventually won't work because we'll all be at the poles -- is unacceptable to me.

Re: Iraq --
"I gather that from the inside, it felt like a bunch of people hell-bent to do the responsible thing. From this perspective, any lies and exaggerations were justified by the good cause."

Oh my. This is outside the topic of this exchange, pretty much, so I don't want to get into a long discussion of it . . . suffice it to say that I understand the parallel that you are drawing but I find your characterization . . . how shall I say . . . charitable to say the least. I could say much more, but let's leave it that I gather something quite different.

Thanks again for the useful (although I suspect ultimately unpersuasive) sites.

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Whoa. Don't know why all that was quoted above, sorry.

Had to add one more note. Re: life being harder if we reduce CO2 emissions, Nicholas Kristof had an Op-Ed column in yesterday's New York Times about how Portland is complying easily with Kyoto by doing such radical things as building transit systems, making stoplights more efficient, and encouraging people to bike to work. Sounds like hell on earth. Definitely we should stick with global warming. Smile

Seriously though it is very interesting how there are >130 cities throughout the US that have pledged to abide by Kyoto and none of them seem to be having too hard a time. I'm hoping there's more reporting on this so we can better understand the disconnect between the line out of the white house on how hard it would be to comply with Kyoto and how these cities are getting it done by (gasp!) buying hybrid buses, which is what NY mayor Bloomberg is doing. As Sen. McCain said about his support for limiting carbon emissions, the downside is not as bad as the downside of no action.

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