rigorousintuition.ca

Posted: **Mon Nov 30, 2009 2:34 am**

Changing the tax code to selectively apply a consumption tax (?) to goods?services that you/god/a commitee believe are frivolous would be a nightmare, far more complex than ETS's and far more susceptible to rorting. Playing the 'bogeymen we can only imagine' card doesn't convince.

If i understood, you asserted that raising cost of all fossil fuel energy including that used to build renewables would hinder renewables; are you sure you're not misunderstanding the nature of money. Each dollar does not represent an absolute amount of energy or resources: all dollars are relative and relative cost is the only meaningful way to consider it. I agree that building renewables (along with repairing biospheres capacity to support life) is our best investment of remaining fossil fuels and it might help to excuse the resources used to build renewables from carbon cost so they're cheaper, but to treat CO2 differently depending on where & why it was emitted is an administrative nonstarter. As a rebate post-manufacture it might be possible, but wouldn't it be easier to just subsidise renewables as we subsidise fossil fuels now?

Again, i disagree that coal will become decisively unattractive as the net energy of its extraction declines. The huge existing investment in infrastructure dependant upon coal will remain a big incentive to mine coal. Centres of power will ensure their basic needs are met by whatever means necesary. Renewables also wont fuel modern warfare, so the War Parties will ensure fossil fuels continue to be extracted & burnt, no matter the net energy. I think 50,000 slaves removing Virginian mountaintops to make coal for aviation fuel for the Whitehouses last helicopter gunship is a distinct probability.

It is interesting that we share assumptions but differ on analysis & policies, i'll take it as a happy sign of the increasing sophistication of understanding of our problems.

Posted: **Tue Dec 01, 2009 4:22 am**

LOL, i had to look up "rorting".

To be honest, I had to do some reading to do in order to intelligently answer some of the issues you raised. Thanks. I learned quite a bit.

Most of the critics of ETS raise the same issues I have, so i won't bother repeating them, except this from the Wiki entry:

There has been longstanding debate on the relative merits of price versus quantity instruments to achieve emission reductions.[22]

An emission cap and permit trading system is a quantity instrument because it fixes the overall emission level (quantity) and allows the price to vary. Uncertainty in future supply and demand conditions (market volatility) coupled with a fixed number of pollution credits creates an uncertainty in the future price of pollution credits, and the industry must accordingly bear the cost of adapting to these volatile market conditions. The burden of a volatile market thus lies with the industry rather than the controlling agency, which is generally more efficient. However, under volatile market conditions, the ability of the controlling agency to alter the caps will translate into an ability to pick "winners and losers" and thus presents an opportunity for corruption.

In contrast, an emission tax is a price instrument because it fixes the price while the emission level is allowed to vary according to economic activity. A major drawback of an emission tax is that the environmental outcome (e.g. a limit on the amount of emissions) is not guaranteed. On one hand, a tax will remove capital from the industry, suppressing possibly useful economic activity, but conversely, the polluter will not need to hedge as much against future uncertainty since the amount of tax will track with profits. The burden of a volatile market will be borne by the controlling (taxing) agency rather than the industry itself, which is generally less efficient. An advantage is that, given a uniform tax rate and a volatile market, the taxing entity will not be in a position to pick "winners and losers" and the opportunity for corruption will be less.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading

But technicalities aside, unless and until the US of C (United States of Carbon) adopts some kind of pollution curtailment system soon, the world is f*cked. And there lies the rub: how to convince a majority of the American people (or just the elite) that this will be good for them in the long run. The lower Congress has passed a carbon cap and trade bill, but it will languish in the Senate with the CRU Climategate scandal. After the TARP bailout, Americans are deeply suspicious of any type of trading scheme involving Big Money.

And how much will the rest of the world trust anything the US of C claims it has done under these regulations? Will anyone in the rest of the world be willing to trade carbon offsets and credits with us, given our conversion of Wall Street into a casino? Our reputation for dishonesty precedes us.

From what i have read about both emissions caps and trades vs taxes, it looks like the world will probably need some combination of both (the speed of ETS in reducing emissions and a tax scheme to protect against energy price volatility undoing it along with incentives to alternative energy sources).

And the super-greenies call ETS "free market environmentalism". Sheesh. Humanity just can't seem to get a break. If coal plants emitted no CO2, I would still want them to go away because of the mercury (50 tons annual in the US of C).

Posted: **Wed Sep 01, 2010 12:44 pm**

well, well, well...

Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change
Exclusive 'Sceptical environmentalist' and critic of climate scientists to declare global warming a chief concern facing world

The world's most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is "undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today" and "a challenge humanity must confront", in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled "sceptical environmentalist" once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN's climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.

But in a new book to be published next month, Lomborg will call for tens of billions of dollars a year to be invested in tackling climate change. "Investing $100bn annually would mean that we could essentially resolve the climate change problem by the end of this century," the book concludes.

Examining eight methods to reduce or stop global warming, Lomborg and his fellow economists recommend pouring money into researching and developing clean energy sources such as wind, wave, solar and nuclear power, and more work on climate engineering ideas such as "cloud whitening" to reflect the sun's heat back into the outer atmosphere.

In a Guardian interview, he said he would finance investment through a tax on carbon emissions that would also raise $50bn to mitigate the effect of climate change, for example by building better sea defences, and $100bn for global healthcare.

His declaration about the importance of action on climate change comes at a crucial point in the debate, with international efforts to agree a global deal on emissions stalled amid a resurgence in scepticism caused by rows over the reliability of the scientific evidence for global warming.

The fallout from those rows continued yesterday when Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, came under new pressure to step down after an independent review of the panel's work called for tighter term limits for its senior executives and greater transparency in its workings. The IPCC has come under fire in recent months following revelations of inaccuracies in the last assessment of global warming, provided to governments in 2007 – for which it won the Nobel peace prize with former the US vice-president Al Gore. The mistakes, including a claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, prompted a review of the IPCC's processes and procedures by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), an organisation of world science bodies.

The IAC said the IPCC needed to be as transparent as possible in how it worked, how it selected people to participate in assessments and its choice of scientific information to assess.

Although Pachauri once compared Lomborg to Hitler, he has now given an unlikely endorsement to the new book, Smart Solutions to Climate Change. In a quote for the launch, Pachauri said: "This book provides not only a reservoir of information on the reality of human-induced climate change, but raises vital questions and examines viable options on what can be done."

Lomborg denies he has performed a volte face, pointing out that even in his first book he accepted the existence of man-made global warming. "The point I've always been making is it's not the end of the world," he told the Guardian. "That's why we should be measuring up to what everybody else says, which is we should be spending our money well."

But he said the crucial turning point in his argument was the Copenhagen Consensus project, in which a group of economists were asked to consider how best to spend $50bn. The first results, in 2004, put global warming near the bottom of the list, arguing instead for policies such as fighting malaria and HIV/Aids. But a repeat analysis in 2008 included new ideas for reducing the temperature rise, some of which emerged about halfway up the ranking. Lomborg said he then decided to consider a much wider variety of policies to reduce global warming, "so it wouldn't end up at the bottom".

The difference was made by examining not just the dominant international policy to cut carbon emissions, but also seven other "solutions" including more investment in technology, climate engineering, and planting more trees and reducing soot and methane, also significant contributors to climate change, said Lomborg.

"If the world is going to spend hundreds of millions to treat climate, where could you get the most bang for your buck?" was the question posed, he added.After the analyses, five economists were asked to rank the 15 possible policies which emerged. Current policies to cut carbon emissions through taxes - of which Lomborg has long been critical - were ranked largely at the bottom of four of the lists. At the top were more direct public investment in research and development rather than spending money on low carbon energy now, and climate engineering.

Lomborg acknowledged trust was a problem when committing to long term R&D, but said politicians were already reneging on promises to cut emissions, and spending on R&D would be easier to monitor. Although many believe private companies are better at R&D than governments, Lomborg said low carbon energy was a special case comparable to massive public investment in computers from the 1950s, which later precpitated the commercial IT revolution.

Lomborg also admitted climate engineering could cause "really bad stuff" to happen, but argued if it could be a cheap and quick way to reduce the worst impacts of climate change and thus there was an "obligation to at least look at it".

He added: "This is not about 'we have all got to live with less, wear hair-shirts and cut our carbon emissions'. It's about technologies, about realising there's a vast array of solutions."

Despite his change of tack, however, Lomborg is likely to continue to have trenchant critics. Writing for today's Guardian, Howard Friel, author of the book The Lomborg Deception, said: "If Lomborg were really looking for smart solutions, he would push for an end to perpetual and brutal war, which diverts scarce resources from nearly everything that Lomborg legitimately says needs more money."

Posted: **Fri Feb 24, 2012 8:53 pm**

Does anyone want to believe that AGW is real? Wouldn't we all like to learn it's not and that there's been a terrible mistake?

That's a huge advantage the denialists enjoy.

I want to be convinced AGW is not real.

I went looking for my own evidence since no one else seems to be able to find anything that stands up to scrutiny. I didn't find what I was looking for but I did find this article on Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis:

wikipedia wrote:
Kary Banks Mullis (born December 28, 1944) is a Nobel Prize winning American biochemist, author, and lecturer. In recognition of his improvement of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, he shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Smith[1] and earned the Japan Prize in the same year. The process was first described by Kjell Kleppe and 1968 Nobel laureate H. Gobind Khorana, and allows the amplification of specific DNA sequences.[2][3] The improvements made by Mullis allowed PCR to become a central technique in biochemistry and molecular biology, described by The New York Times as "highly original and significant, virtually dividing biology into the two epochs of before P.C.R. and after P.C.R."[4]

Since winning the Nobel Prize, Mullis has been criticized in The New York Times for promoting ideas in areas in which he has no expertise.[5] He has promoted AIDS denialism,[6][7][8][9][10][11] climate change denial[6] and his belief in astrology.[5][6]

Personal views
Mullis has said that the never-ending quest for more grants and staying with established dogmas has hurt science.[13] He believes that "Science is being practiced by people who are dependent on being paid for what they are going to find out," not for what they actually produce.[13] Mullis has been described as an "impatient and impulsive researcher" who avoids lab work and instead thinks about research topics while driving and surfing.[21]

In his 1998 autobiography, Mullis expressed disagreement with the scientific evidence supporting climate change and ozone depletion, the evidence that HIV causes AIDS, and asserted his belief in astrology. Mullis claims climate change and the HIV/AIDS connection are due to a conspiracy of environmentalists, government agencies and scientists attempting to preserve their careers and earn money, rather than scientific evidence.[6] Mullis has drawn controversy for his association with prominent AIDS denialist Peter Duesberg,[7] claiming that AIDS is an arbitrary diagnosis only used when HIV antibodies are found in a patient's blood.[8] The medical and scientific consensus is that Duesberg's hypothesis is pseudoscience, HIV having been conclusively proven to be the cause of AIDS[22][23] and that global warming is occurring because of human activities.[24][25][26] Seth Kalichman, AIDS researcher and author of Denying AIDS, "[admits] that it seems odd to include a Nobel Laureate among the who's who of AIDS pseudoscientists".[9] Mullis also wrote the foreword to the book What If Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? by Christine Maggiore,[10] an HIV-positive AIDS denialist who, along with her daughter, died of an AIDS-related illness.[27] A New York Times article listed Mullis as one of several scientists who, after success in their area of research, go on to make unfounded, sometimes bizarre statements in other areas.[5] An article in the Skeptical Inquirer described Mullis as an "...AIDS denialist with scientific credentials [who] has never done any scientific research on HIV or AIDS".[11]

Use of LSD
Mullis details his experiences synthesizing and testing various psychedelic amphetamines and a difficult trip on DET in his autobiography. In a Q&A interview published in the September, 1994, issue of California Monthly, Mullis said, "Back in the 1960s and early '70s I took plenty of LSD. A lot of people were doing that in Berkeley back then. And I found it to be a mind-opening experience. It was certainly much more important than any courses I ever took."[28] During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, "Hofmann revealed that he was told by Nobel-prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis that LSD had helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences."[29] Replying to his own postulate during an interview for BBC's Psychedelic Science documentary, "What if I had not taken LSD ever; would I have still invented PCR?" He replied, "I don't know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it."[30]

Extraterrestrial life
Mullis writes of having once spoken to a glowing green raccoon. Mullis arrived at his cabin in the woods of northern California around midnight one night in 1985, and, having turned on the lights and left sacks of groceries on the floor, set off for the outhouse with a flashlight. "On the way, he saw something glowing under a fir tree. Shining the flashlight on this glow, it seemed to be a raccoon with little black eyes. The raccoon spoke, saying, ‘Good evening, doctor,’ and he replied with a hello." Mullis later speculated that the raccoon ‘was some sort of holographic projection and … that multidimensional physics on a macroscopic scale may be responsible’. Mullis denies LSD having anything at all to do with this.[31]

He starts talking about climate change at ~ 21:30

Posted: **Fri Feb 24, 2012 9:53 pm**

brainpanhandler wrote:I want to be convinced AGW is not real.

Well, of course you do, because you're not insane.

But you are convinced that AGW is real, because you're also not stupid.

Posted: **Sat Feb 25, 2012 12:10 am**

Simulist wrote:
brainpanhandler wrote:I want to be convinced AGW is not real.

Well, of course you do, because you're not insane.

But you are convinced that AGW is real, because you're also not stupid.

Well you're in good company...

Posted: **Sat Feb 25, 2012 8:01 am**

...

I always rather liked Kary Mullis.

...

Posted: **Sat Feb 25, 2012 10:04 am**

Ben D wrote:..

Keep up the mere ridicule BenD, lets us all know thats all you got.

I hear its raining again in Qld - 200mm in a few hours on the Sunshine Coast (on edit: and an aquaintance reports 312mm in 4 hours @ Pomona). Maybe your god is trying to tell you something.

Posted: **Sat Feb 25, 2012 1:25 pm**

hlos wrote:I don't know what Ben D thinks of himself.

But I for one do think very highly of him.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32878&start=405

I used to think he at least served a somewhat useful function as a foil and representative of an opposing view. But now you see what he has chosen to reduce himself to, don't you? I presented him an opportunity in this thread to act civil and present his best evidence and you see what we got. It's too bad, because like I say I want to be persuaded that AGW is contrived or exaggerated and I am concerned that the science can be distorted by ego and $. I guess I'll have to find my own evidence for the exaggeration of AGW, if it exists.

Please read pages 20 through 22 of the Global Warming, Eh? thread if you haven't already.

Link to page 20:
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32878&start=285

I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

Posted: **Sat Feb 25, 2012 5:33 pm**

Record warm ocean temperatures across much of Earth's tropical oceans during the summer of 2010 created the second worst year globally for coral-killing bleaching episodes. The warm waters, fueled in part by the El Niño phenomena, caused the most coral bleaching since 1998, when 16 percent of the world's reefs were killed off. "Clearly, we are on track for this to be the second worst (bleaching) on record," NOAA coral expert Mark Eakin in an interview last month. "All we're waiting on now is the body count."

The summer 2010 bleaching episodes were worst in Southeast Asia, where El Niño warming of the tropical ocean waters during the first half of the year was significant. In Indonesia's Aceh province, 80% of the bleached corals died, and Malaysia closed several popular dive sites after nearly all the coral were damaged by bleaching. ..
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMa ... rynum=1722

Posted: **Sat Feb 25, 2012 5:40 pm**

Since 2006 , federally declared weather-related disasters in the United States have affected counties housing 242 million people--or roughly four out of five Americans. That's the remarkable finding of Environment America, who last week released a detailed report on extreme weather events in the U.S. The report analyzed FEMA data to study the number of federally declared weather-related disasters.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMa ... rynum=2038

Posted: **Sun Feb 26, 2012 4:51 pm**

So it looks like "serious skeptical scientists" are in agreement with the majority here:

The Skeptics Case

Posted: **Sun Feb 26, 2012 7:07 pm**

tazmic wrote:So it looks like "serious skeptical scientists" are in agreement with the majority here:
The Skeptics Case

So it looks like the AGW-deniers are recycling some previously mulched talking points...

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/26/the-skeptics-case/
David Evans
..In reality there was no hotspot, not even a small one. So in reality there is no amplification – the amplification shown in Figure 1 does not exist.xvi

Wrong again:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/10/14/t ... s-quashed/

No missing troposphere hotspot:

...Our results contradict a recent claim that all simulated temperature trends in the tropical troposphere and in tropical lapse rates are inconsistent with observations. This claim was based on use of older radiosonde and satellite datasets, and on two methodological errors: the neglect of observational trend uncertainties introduced by interannual climate variability, and application of an inappropriate statistical ‘consistency test’.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 6/abstract

But do lets talk about rocket scientist David Evans, beloved of 2GB renta-mouth shockjocks and speaker at Heartland Institute funded conferences.

Posted: **Sun Feb 26, 2012 7:20 pm**

wintler2 wrote:Wrong again:
http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/10/14/t ... s-quashed/

No missing troposphere hotspot:
...Our results contradict a recent claim that all simulated temperature trends in the tropical troposphere and in tropical lapse rates are inconsistent with observations. This claim was based on use of older radiosonde and satellite datasets, and on two methodological errors: the neglect of observational trend uncertainties introduced by interannual climate variability, and application of an inappropriate statistical ‘consistency test’.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 6/abstract

Ah, settled science rescued by uncertainty, yet again.

Posted: **Mon Feb 27, 2012 2:26 am**

If I may interrupt the normal programing for a special announcement of interest to climate change commentators...the 2012 Weblogs Awards have been announced..

..and Anthony Watts has won the Best Science Blog Award for the second year running....2012 Weblog awards – SKEPTIC CLEAN SWEEP

The tide it is a changing...sorry, now back to the program..

rigorousintuition.ca

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