Heiko

More equal incomes = socialism = poverty for all?

2011-12-03T22:37:00.000-08:00

There's a truth behind the idea in the title. But it's not so much the income distribution, but the incentives provided that make an efficient economy. And, taxes are not the only means to influence the income distribution, regulation can do its bit too.

Let's think of football. Clubs willingly pay very high salaries to star players. Does this enhance economic activity by providing a bigger incentive to work? Methinks, not. Rather, the high salaries for the stars draw resources away from salaries for the people needed to make the game run, and also resources away from other worthwhile activities, such as education or investment in renewable energy. It is even questionable whether the players themselves are truely better off.

Which tells me there should be room to adjust the incentives system here through regulation, ie outlaw football player salaries greater than the salary of say the Dutch prime minister. I choose that comparison for a reason, as for public entities and companies that are majority state owned there is precisely such a regulation in the Netherlands.

There are two ways to argue for such regulation, one is belittled as envy by some, and called a desire for social justice by others. The other is to say that far from there always being a trade-off between more equality and economic success, there are in fact situations, where a regulation can achieve both.

Unlike the tax the rich question, which lends itself to partisan arguments we all know too well, about how the party of the right wants to take from the poor to give to the rich, and the party of the left supposedly is out to destroy the economy, intelligent regulation to affect incentives to work, invest and protect the environment and other public goods, is not easily put into a simple yes/no paradigm.

I'll give a few examples of regulation. For employees whose main role is to provide leadership a government imposed ceiling seems to have few drawbacks to me. Their employers benefit, because they have to pay less, and they do not suffer from their employee being enticed to work for the competition through higher salaries. They therefore have to spend more on other things, and with a sufficiently high ceiling, a few hundred thousand Euros, employees will be motivated a plenty to work hard, both by the money, and by the status leaderships roles provide. Don't forget people who have plenty of money still compete to become US president, a role which provides little monetary benefit compared to their 100 million Euro plus fortune.

For entrepreneurs who put their own money at risk for a risky venture, I think the reward of outsized returns is an important motivating component; so here I'd be more careful about regulation that imposes reward ceilings.

For music and literature, I'd restrict copyright severely, and possibly on top of that impose other restrictions, for example, a maximum entrance fee for visiting a concert.

Israel and the Arab Spring

2011-12-03T22:11:00.000-08:00

The Arab Spring is one of the most important developments towards world peace and it has motivated me to think again about the danger posed by the unresolved Israel/Palestine issue.

On the one hand, Israel's Jews have a legitimate fear that they will be treated as second class citizens, if they accept a solution, where they are no longer the majority in their state. And they also have a legitimate fear that they might even be thrown out of the Mid East and forced to migrate to Western countries.

On the other hand, the current situation is also clearly unacceptable. Palestinians are neither citizens of Israel, as they would be with proper annexation of the occupied territories, nor are they allowed to form their own proper state. They are therefore second class citizens, unless they choose to emigrate to Western countries.

For the good of everyone, in Israel, in the wider Middle East and for the world as a whole, much more needs to be done I think to force the parties to come to an equitable deal. In my opinion, this needs to involve more pressure on Israel, especially from Western countries. Arab countries should also emphasise their opposition to violence to resolve the issue and equally importantly, show that Jewish citizens have nothing to fear by enhancing the rights of Jews in the Arab world.

And Israel should offer to withdraw completely to something close to the 1967 borders, make everyone inside the new borders an Israeli citizen, and clearly communicate that the long term aim is freedom of movement and equal rights for all, so that in 50 years it would be perfectly acceptable for Jews no longer to be a majority in Israel.

Defending the science and the left/right political divide

2011-12-03T21:22:00.000-08:00

What I want to explore a bit more here is the concept of uncertainty. At the activist/left end of the spectrum much of the focus is either on small probability, high impact climate outcomes, or on the near 100% probability that we need to act.

Why is there often so much partisanness in the discusion? Is the other side evil? Out to cause death and destruction because they love to see people suffer, or because they are greedy and heartless and only argue for their own interest?

Methinks these explanations are attractive because of the way evolution has shaped our nature. But, they are also rather inadequate. Much of the debate is done in people's spare time and with very little direct benefit for the participants. I believe people engage in climate debates out of idealism and secondarily for the entertainment value, so it's a mix of charity work and football supporter. Which does not answer though how people decide which side to support, or why there are two sides in the first place. Aren't the facts clear and supportive only of one course of action? Which is where we can come back to the subject of uncertainty and the limits of knowledge.

How can we predict outcomes? For smoking, apart from models and fundamental insights, we can take two groups and compare and see what harm smoking does. But for the probability of predicting ecosystem collapse or nuclear war? There aren't multiple Earths to do controlled experiments on and neither is the past a very good guide. During the Roman Empire there could be no nuclear war. There were no nuclear weapons. This rather limits extrapolation from the past. We haven't had nuclear war for over half a century, so it's a good bet we won't have one in the next month. But how probable is it in the next 100 years?

So, how does this give an explanation for the existence of two sides in the debate again?

There is no rational way to assess the risks of societal or ecosystem collapse or the benefits of technological developments far out into the future.

I tend towards the non activist camp primarily because I love technology and the promise for the future it holds, and secondarily because I am hopeful the world is moving towards complete peace in analogy with the evolution Europe has experienced over the last 50 years. Many other non activist minded people I think are motivated by what they think the free market does for people, and a distrust of the state limiting people's freedom. Activists I think worry about societal instability, as well, but as a consequence of the greed of corporations. And they worry a lot more about ecosystem vulnerabilities. Some of this is about values, sure, but a large part is about implicit assessments of unknowable probilities.

By now you must be wondering about the title I chose. What I am pleading for here is more awareness of the limits of science in deciding political issues, more awareness also of the danger that partisanness leads us to underestimate the reasonableness of opposing views.

Climate myths continued

2011-11-27T01:53:00.001-08:00

The key question in the climate debate is always what it all means for policy.

So, the 0.8 C may be 0.8 rather than 2.0C at present because of "natural factors"* or because of aerosols and ocean heat uptake.

What does it mean for policy on:

Geoengineering

CO2 capture and storage

Nuclear energy

Energy efficiency

CO2 taxes

Feed-in tariffs

On geoengineering, I notice that both sides vehemently agree that they do not want it now and that only some research is permissible. Neither follows from the climate sensitivity debate. In fact, if climate response was perfectly independent of the forcing applied and all types of forcing were perfectly additive and always linear, it should follow that geoengineering is a perfectly reasonable response.

I have noticed though that both sides agree on this one on the notion of not messing too much with nature.

Also for the other topics where actual policy decisions are required, ...

how does people's stance on nuclear power relate to the degree that masking to date is "natural" or due to anthropogenic aerosols and ocean heat uptake?

how would it relate to their views on feed-in tariffs for solar power?

* Defined here as if we had a billion Earths to experiment with, then taking a 1000 with the CO2 change and a 1000 without them, we'd have a change of 0.8C in either case on average. The Earth system acts like a thermostat towards CO2 and the reason the temperature rises is the same as with a house where the thermostat during the day is set 2 degrees higher and the rise of the outside temperature is purely coincidental and not causative of the temperature change inside the house.

Some climate myths

2011-11-27T01:37:00.001-08:00

Some people just do not get the concept of a thermostat, at least with regards to climate.

On Wattsup this got illustrated with our core body temperature. That stays constant even when the forcing is changed.

Now while there is somewhat limited evidence in my opinion for the climate being like a thermostat, there's also precious little against it. We just know too little about world albedo and relative moisture content. We cannot measure these terribly well now and have a very poor grasp of past changes.

These factors are quite capable of completely counteracting CO2. We do not have a billion Earths, where we could pick 2000 for controlled experiments with statistics derived from 1000 runs on Earth without anthropgenic effects and 1000 with them included.

But let me do a thought experiment. In that thought experiment, we leave out CO2 changes and everything else constant and a physically possible result would be that the temperature change is identical up to date.

While I consider the notion that a climate thermostat is unphysical a myth, there's another myth shared by both sides of the debate.

The 0.8C or thereabouts increase is supposed to be much smaller than it would be based on the forcing, because much of the increase is temporarily hidden by aerosols and ocean warming.

Now suppose, the aerosols did in truth cancel out in their effect and there was no ocean warming, it's blithely assumed that this would continue to be the case in the future.

It's quite possible that clouds or the ocean surface through albedo changes keep temperatures down now, but there is no guarantee they would in the future. In fact, all thermostats break given enough being thrown at them.

I like another example of a thermostat, a petrol tank open to the atmosphere. It'll resist the forcing through evaporative cooling; at some stage though, it stops acting like a thermostat and there is an explosion.

The variability of renewables

2011-09-04T02:58:00.000-07:00

Actually I think it is mainly wind, where this is an issue. Hydropower, biomass or geothermal are much like baseload or peaking power plant.

And solar is not nearly as problematic as one might think at first glance. It is largely quite predictable. At 3 in the morning it is always zero, and peak output is always around lunchtime. Seaonal differences are predictable, and after a few months of regularly looking at the daily output graphics provided by transparency EEX, I see that cloudiness also gets averaged out quite well even over an area as small as Germany.

On all days this summer solar has flattened out the load profile for conventional power plants, effectively it has been nearly like peaking power, and to me it is clear a lot more solar could be employed across Europe without requiring any storage.

For wind this is different, wind power I have seen at well above 10 GW in the middle of the night and at 200 MW during peak demand hours. There tends to be more wind in the winter than the summer, but with solar, you can rely on the output enough I think that conventional power plants can go into maintenance in June, while for wind that is not the case.

Libya, climate and partisanness

2011-08-22T09:25:00.000-07:00

http://www.juancole.com/2011/08/top-ten-myths-about-the-libya-war.html

These days I am amazed at who I am in agreement with, both Juan Cole and William Hague. And how these people have come to the same conclusions as me without being prompted along by partisan leanings. Unlike a lot of people whose opinions on Libya are based on either opposition to Obama or opposition to supposed Western imperialism.

Much of the climate change debate has degenerated to the level of pure partisanness. When I hear about "scientists" supposedly "defending the science", I strongly feel neither side is talking about facts. So, I have somewhat lost interest in that particular debate, which is mostly about angels on pinheads, while the world is largely taking the right action given a threat that is hidden by a fog of unknowable unknowns, but clearly does not require banning the car tomorrow and equally clearly isn't a figment of leftwing activists' overworked imagination.

---------------------

Congratulations Libya! I wish for a bright future for all Libyans.

The load profile in Germany on a typical working day this spring

2011-05-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

From transparency.eex.com

How important is the Arab Spring?

2011-05-15T12:45:00.000-07:00

I am hopeful that the world in 50 years will have made the same transformation as Western Europe over the last 100 years, no more war and freedom of movement for everyone on the planet.

There are no guarantees though and I think supporting the Arab Spring may be the most important thing we can do today to get to a free world without war.

This support can take many guises, from co-operation on solar projects in North Africa to pressure on Israel, to humanitarian aid, to accepting refugees, to indeed military means.

Broadly, my concern isn't so much the detail of the how, much of what the EU or US do and aspire to goes in the right direction, what worries me is that there is too little empathy, too little interest, too much half-heartedness, too much focus on partisan politics.

Runaway warming

2011-01-30T06:03:00.000-08:00

Many people just dismiss the possibility out of hand with little thinking, or drag in the fact that it hasn't happened for billions of years and with much higher CO2 levels.

The most obvious thing the comparison with past climate leaves out is that the sun is steadily turning brighter. Billions of years ago it was 30% less bright than today.

As an interesting aside, this throws up the question whether we really still have billions of years on this planet without some anthropogenic cooling thrown in. Life without man might end in a billion years with runaway warming boiling the oceans away even with very low CO2 in the atmosphere.

One way we can attack the problem is always radiation management, make the sun less bright through aerosols and the like and comparability with past climate is restored.

That doesn't work for a mad max future, where humanity is down and consists of remnants after being ravaged by disease, nuclear war etc. take your pick.

On the other hand, maybe it's not possible after all, but then what's the reasoning?

Sea level change and runaway climate change

2011-01-21T15:17:00.001-08:00

We'll all agree that 70 m sea level change without warning and within a second is pretty catastrophic, a billion or two dead on the spot. And that 70 m sea level change a billion years from now isn't exactly something to lose sleep over.

But, how about 500 years or 5000 years?

Some people do worry about that. I take a pretty relaxed view here, because in 500 years:

1. People have plenty of time to move
2. Or to build dikes
3. Or to raise cities
4. Or to lower CO2 levels again
5. Or to do some clever geoengineering
6. Or to do something about the melt water lubricated Antarctic ice sliding into the water, from dikes to anti lubrication additives to the melt water

Building a 200 m tall and 3 km wide dike I've discussed before

http://heikoheiko.blogspot.com/2007/05/some-thoughts-on-sea-defenses.html

Where I take a less relaxed view is on runaway warming, where Earth gets turned into a pressure cooker with pressures of hundreds of bar of steam and steam temperatures of a few hundred degrees Celsius. After a nuclear war and the like, people mightn't worry too hard about Amsterdam being not just nuked, but also 70 below sea level. On the other hand, with civilisation down and a tipping point towards runaway warming crossed, there might be no way to avoid the end of all life, as even bacteria won't survive that pressure cooker.

I am still wary of taking the above scenario too seriously in my assessment of the risks posed by global warming, and the kind of action that is justified. But I worry rather more about that, than about 70 m sea level rise by the year 7000.

The problem with "consensus"

2011-01-20T12:40:00.000-08:00

Interesting article by Ron Bailey:
http://reason.com/archives/2010/06/29/agreeing-to-agree

Now I take a similar view as to what there is consensus on as William, namely on whether it's warmer now than 200 years ago, there's a lot of consensus, on climate sensitivity there's bit less of consensus, and on what sort of damages or worthwhile actions it implies, there's none or a pretty wide range of reasonable opinion.

See, as I said in my earlier post I rather like William, now I also like Wattsupwiththat. It's part of the climate wars that reasonable people with reasonable views lose all reasonablenss about who is reasonable when they realise someobody is batting for the wrong side.

Back to "consensus". The problem I have with the word as applied to the climate wars is that notoriously consensus for stuff there actually is consensus on gets mixed up with consensus for the things there actucally is no consensus on. Most notorious in that regard, that dubious 97% of climate scientists agree number. What 75 out of 77 hand picked climate experts agreed on was stuff you'd even get most people on the dark side (quoth William) to agree with, like is it probably at least a little warmer now than 200 years ago and can humans have at least some influence on the climate (the question didn't specify whether through CO2, or land use change, or aerosols or where the cut off between significant and not so significant influence is).

Should we throw more money at research?

2010-12-17T13:47:00.000-08:00

Lomborg may say it's a wonderful idea, arguing from some very narrow definition of "energy research" that little money is being thrown at the problem at the moment, from which it should somehow follow that throwing more money at the problem will have gargantuan real returns.

Knowing university and research institute energy research, I am rather wary of this call for more money. A lot of university research is me too research where some unfortunate PhD student redos things over again done by hundreds of researchers before, with the only real benefit being some training. Which also is largely lost, when the PhD student moves onto something else. And university professors can get away with a lot of wining and dining, as I'd call it, as long as they can write well. Checks on how good they are at actually managing laboratory based research can be amazingly poor.

Not that feed-in tariffs and the like could not also produce waste, but at least private companies have to produce some actual kWh's to get the subsidy and not merely be good at writing and impressing decision makers.

And of course good communcation skills are important, and of course there are a lot of smooth talkers in private business. But, in private business eventually real kWh's need to be delivered. A university professor can blow his way through millions and millions of subsidies and do so for decades and produce nothing of real value, and get away with it, as long as he can make research papers, review papers and proposals for research sound nice. The quality check there is in peer review is made for checking ability to write and make research sound high quality, and in my opinion awfully poor at checking actual quality.

So, the bottom line?

I do think there's a role for government in research, but blindly throwing money at basic research is not what we should do. We still need to switch on our brains and think hard about why specific research should be done at universities, rather than being supported via such means as feed-in tariffs, or simply be left to private business without any help. And increasing the basic research budget hugely I think is switching off our brains and I think is much more likely to be a recipe for wasting resources, than one for creating lots of value with the gargantuan returns envisioned by Lomborg.

Are scientists too stupid to make money or Republicans too stupid to become scientists?

2010-12-17T13:30:00.000-08:00

Readers of my blog will surely have heard about that little factoid, which left leaning fellow travellers on this planet in the first instance put down to Republicans being too stupid to become scientists, or most scientists being too intelligent to be Republicans ...

namely that a mere 6% of US scientists say that they are Republicans.

I am rather skeptical about the idea that Democrats are more intelligent than Republicans, in the first instance it does not square with the equally well known factoid that the well-off tend towards parties of the right.

I see part of the explanation in the typical response of more Republican minded people, namely that Republicans tend to trust business more than government; or as put above, only people too stupid to make real money actually stay research scientists in academia.

But, I think the true explanation is a feedback mechanism with partisanship, peer pressure and a desire to be among people who share your views strongly amplifying the split:

Scientists often present information, as if they were the propaganda arm of the Democratic party, which unsurprisingly does ire Republicans, who are anyway already more pro-business and more anti big government. So they hit back. Combine that with talented, but Republican minded people in university quickly discovering what academics really believe, leaving for better paid work, and the remainder just becomes more Democrat in outlook.

Citizen science

2010-11-30T05:34:00.000-08:00

http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2010/11/citizen_science.php

When I hear the word I think of Linux or Wikipedia, and when I read William's and Bart's posts on the matter I think they are rather influenced by their political leanings.

The problem with citizen scientists I think isn't that science is too hard for non paid private citizens to contribute much, it's rather that most citizen climate scientists are "on the wrong side".

Now I really like William, it just so happens that I think he goes a bit gooey when talk turns to paleoclimate and temperature indexes. Neither I categorise as hard, difficult science requiring great minds and all. The tree ring stuff I see about in the same light as so called technical stock market analysis and working out the world's average temperature is a task for glorified national statistics offices, the people who work out inflation or average life expectancy data and the like.

The main reason citizen scientist contributions don't amount to a great deal in the case of these two subsdisciplines of climate science is that no amount of effort will provide a great deal of return for tree rings, and for temperature statistics extra effort at gathering good quality data is what's really required.

As for funding, I'd defund the tree ring scientists entirely, and am no longer convinced there's any real benefit in improving the temperature indexes.

Uncertainty and climate change

2010-11-14T23:04:00.000-08:00

http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/what-we-know-is-most-important/#comment-9355

Commenting over on Bart's blog:

If you think of climate change in the context of us playing Russian roulette with the world by emitting GHG’s, you are bound to see a greater urgency in stopping with this mad game when you hear the word uncertainty.

On the other hand, when you look at the issue like a cautious investor being peddled an investment, the word uncertainty will make you run away from said investment.

And finally, based on an analogy from the climate economist Nordhaus, when some people hear the word uncertainty in the climate debate they react like peace activists who hear the argument that uncertainty about a potential threat posed by country B to country A is a good reason for a preemptive war.

I wonder whether these differences are really due to different risk averseness in the generic, or different levels of willingness to suffer now for the benefit of future generations. To me these can be seen as very unattractive reasons for favouring high discount rates, they suggest selfishness and some other not so nice character traits.

Maybe a better reason is that people have different preconceived views about how the world is likely to develop and what could threaten that development, and that these preconceptions colour their take, when faced with probabilities that are simply unknowable.

Some people for example worry very much about totalitarianism/communism and see this as the key threat, and tend towards the peace activist reaction to climate change ;-), or rather to what they fear is being proposed as policies to deal with the problem.

We’ve only got one world, so we can’t assess probabilites like for house fires, an interesting example used above.

Suppose we did have a 100 Earths with slightly different initial conditions.

I could imagine that the key to survival of the human race to the year 2100 may be in economic policy. And if you did the throwing of the die 100 times over, you might find that no matter the GHG policies in place, all that mattered was say free trade, and without the right free trade policies, economic doom always follows by around 2050, and around 2070 to 2080 some mad cult of doom in the chaos that follows is then able to develop a disease that kills all of humanity.

Or, maybe the free trade stuff matters little, and without the right GHG policies, agricultural productivity takes a dive by around 2050 due to changes in rainfall patterns, crops being eaten by bugs or smothered by weeds, leading to chaos and, along some chain of events, to certain doom.

In the house fire insurance case, everybody involved, or at least the insurance companies, have a good basis for assessing probabilities. But, with only one Earth, and one humanity at our current stage of technological development, we haven’t got a huge record of previous occurrence. Instead we must work out probabilities from first principles and by analogy with past events. Yet, the past events aren’t properly comparable, anything we have developed through technology may mean this time will be different. And, no model is good enough to work out how a system as complex as human society or the biosphere will function, when put to stresses never experienced before.

We are inherently left in the position of having to make policy choices in the face of incomplete knowledge and unknowable probabilities. Put in some tribalism, which humans appear to have a tendency for inherited from our evolutionary past, and the fears of the other tribe are readily belittled, and probabilities are readily assigned for unknowables in the process based substantially on the perceived rightfulness of your own tribe.

Comment on economics elsewhere

2010-11-14T23:00:00.000-08:00

http://jeffreyellis.org/blog/?p=6698#comments

What are the relevant facts in the climate debate and how hard are they?

2010-10-07T23:08:00.001-07:00

There are some very hard facts in the climate debate that few, but the most partisan would debate. The radiation properties of CO2 for example as measurable in a laboratory.

Experts on specific areas will know these facts more accurately than the general public.

And then there are a great many issues, which are rather less hard. The ideal carbon tax at present from economic models is one example. This comes in from slightly negative to huge values of a thousand Euros per tonne C or higher.

I think it is the least hard facts, those relating to the effects of concrete policy measures that are the most policy relevant.

And I think that for those questions, the opinion of the public is perfectly in line with expert opinion. These are issues, where there is large uncertainty and a large personal values component, and reasonable expert opinion therefore covers a wide range and is not focused on a point estimate.

Comment over on Bart's blog

2010-10-07T23:03:00.000-07:00

http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/science-ignored-by-politics/#comment-8556

Who's side are you on?

2010-09-08T02:41:00.000-07:00

I do notice that a lot of the climate debate revolves around which camp people belong to, left vs right, positive about technology against sceptical, worried about species loss versus more worried about people, positive about private enterprise versus worried about corporate greed, positive about the power of government to do good versus sceptical.

I figure that a lot of academics and the media are more to the left, more so I think in the case of ecologists, sociologists and climate modellers, and for media, more so for government owned media than for private ones, while a lot of well educated people outside of these sectors, especially entrepreneurs and engineers, have more right wing instincts.

The basis for this are for example the surveys I recently saw cited by Ron Bailey and which I have already commented on, personal experience and also surveys that show that while the average academic or journalist is left of centre (and white and male and has median to high income), the average person right of centre is also more likely to be wealthier than average (and white and male).

Lomborg may say that he's leftwing and cares about effectiveness, but his first book was a full frontal assault on environmentalism as a movement, funnily enough ascribing many of the attributes Democrats in the US love to assign to Republicans to that movement, ie they are a bunch of religious nutters, with doomsday and pointless ascetism thrown in; oh and they are not actually effective at helping the environment.

The trouble is, I think debates about the need for action have reduced the discussion to a simple yes/no choice, when maybe it is actually not so important to try to move the willingness of the world to take action either up or down, but rather to ensure that what it is willing to support actually does some good.

Comment over on Bart's blog

2010-09-08T02:40:00.000-07:00

http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/09/06/future-generations-global-warming-is-not-our-problem/#comments

I have to think of another thing to plot with that graph, namely a proxy for the amount of effort the world is willing to make. That graph would look just like the one you put up, except that in the low emission scenario it’s the effort that rises exponentially rather than emissions, while in the high emissions scenario the level of effort the world is willing to go to tails off, while emissions and temperatures rise exponentially.
This is a somewhat different view than the action/inaction dichotomy, in which the proxy for effort is 0 until we take the decision to take action, at which point said proxy goes to 100% of what’s necessary.
What’s a reasonable proxy? Maybe willingness to spend as a fraction of global GDP, and I figure this is currently something between 0.1 to 0.5% of global GDP, with some countries it’s close to 0, with the US or China it’s probably closer to 0.1 or 0.2% and with Germany or the Netherlands maybe it’s between 0.5% and 1%.
Now I think that this willingness to make an effort is also a variable that’s going to react quite slowly. So, I figure it’s likely that the world will be a little more willing to put an effort into combatting climate change in 2015 than at present, and bending this line upwards or downwards through advocacy is itself going to be a slow business.
What I am wondering about is. If we assume that the level of overall effort the world is willing to go to is a fixed variable, short term at least, how much difference in effectiveness is there between alternatives with the same level of required effort?
This is similar to the Pielke and Lomborg lines, respectively (Pielke: targets have yielded little, so try something different, ie throw money at research; Lomborg: we need to spend money effectively, so throw it at research). The counter-argument I frequently hear to this is, throwing money at research is risky, because it might yield little, and in the mean time emissions are rising. This counter-argument implies there’s a real choice to spend enough to arrest emissions rises in the near term. When the actual looks more like, we’ve got a few hundred billion to spend, which if spent on emissions reduction alone will only slightly slow the near term rise, and have little long term effect, and to have a big effect on actual near term emissions we’d need to be willing to spend trillions now. Which patently the world is not willing to do and is unlikely to any time soon. So, instead to square the circle, politicians come up with targets and emissions trading schemes that appear to have a big near term impact on emissions, but where cost containment loopholes have the effect of rendering the targets meaningless, and thereby keeping the level of effort asked of the population to what they are actually willing to bear. The risk of that sort of strategy at the expense of research is that it neither yields much near term emissions reduction, nor much in terms of long term technology gains.

Policy exchange paper on housing

2010-09-02T23:42:00.000-07:00

The basic message is the same for the UK and the Netherlands. Not enough is being built because of restrictive planning permission and resulting very high land prices for land with planning permission.

http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/publications/publication.cgi?id=202

This could be alleviated by giving local councils and existing homeowners incentives to allow more building in their neighbourhoods, similar to how it is done in Germany, where local councils compete with each other in providing an attractive environment in which people enjoy living.

Where do I stand politically?

2010-08-26T00:59:00.000-07:00

On the traditional left right scale, I am dead centre.

In the Netherlands, there's plenty of choice along that scale and I'd consider both the right of centre VVD and the left of centre PvdA.

How can I possibly do that I was asked the other day, haven't these parties very different policies?

Well, yes, but it so happens that the policy mix I like is spread across the two parties. Say, I am against mortgage interest rate relief, a key platform of the VVD, but I am also for building more infrastructure, such as roads and houses. And the VVD is a lot more open to this.

My ideal mix, ie much more liberal planning permission for housing and no mortgage interest rate relief is supported by neither party.

What "action" on climate change should we take?

2010-08-26T00:50:00.000-07:00

My answer is:

1. Technology development with large scale intervention by government to create markets

2. Education and technology transfer to countries like India and China to raise their adaptive and innovation capabilities at a small short term cost to Western countries and with a large long term gain for everybody

3. Continued government investment in climate basic research and monitoring

4. Spreading the research investment, and putting great emphasis on the usefulness of options, so fund CO2 sequestration developments or research on making clouds or the ocean or grassland whiter

What I would not recommend is a price on carbon or carbon equivalent for methane or to take account of the climate impact of aerosol emissions while designing pollution abatement policies for aerosols.

The closest I'd get to a carbon price would be for long lived minor but very strong greenhouse gases. And I'd set that price low per tonne of carbon equivalent and use it only to evaluate the impact of government regulation. I would not want to actually reward factories for reducing their emissions of these gases. Rather, I would want them punished, if they don't, and punished modestly when put on a CO2 price basis, ie of the order of 1 Euro per tonne of CO2 equivalent.

"Extreme" events and climate change

2010-08-26T00:33:00.000-07:00

What's meant with "extreme" is often poorly defined.

Let's start with extreme heat and cold. I often see the connection between climate change and extreme heat being made on the basis of a normal distribution of temperature which gets moved by some amount. The effect of this is to make say temperatures 6C higher than the previous average high occur not once in 1000 years, but once in 10 years say, and vice versa for extreme cold.

I have loads of issues with this approach. It starts with the fact that extreme cold is a bigger contributor to mortality by a large margin than extreme heat.

But that aside, the statistical model (ie normal distribution gets shifted by x degrees) does not reflect reality or climate models. These predict polar amplification and in general a skewed increase with the lows much more affected than the highs.

And for specific locations, this gets more complicated still. Climate models even for the yearly average and for the same latitude foresee large differences in how much temperature should rise. For a local climate property like the frequency of days with temperatures in excess of 40C, you may find that in some locales even with no change in average world temperature, climate change moves this frequency up by a factor 100, and for other places, even an increase in world average temperature of 4C, actually decreases this frequency.

On rain my opinion is that it's wrong to just say that more rain and more evaporation equals more droughts and more floods. Unless you think that the climate of Antarctica is wonderful, and the climate of Malaysia terrible. There is little evaporation and precipitation in Antarctica, yet agriculture is impossible there. There is plenty of both in Malaysia, and the highest agricultural yields in the world are achieved in tropical countries.

On other extremes, storms, tornadoes, hail, my opinion is that it is still quite unclear how they'll change, and in any case, there should be no visible trend in the record of economic damage due to extreme weather and there is not.

The importance of government creating a market for innovative technology development

2010-08-26T00:31:00.000-07:00

I think there is often too little emphasis on the technology development benefits when discussing subsidies and other policy measures.
The prime reason why electric cars or photovoltaics are supported today is to provide a market for these products so that technology development occurs. It's not the immediate emission reduction.
Politically possible and in my opinion sensible CO2 prices will induce very little private technology development activity in these areas, because entrepreneurs now investing will not catch much of the benefit. The knowledge they generate just diffuses away to competitors, or is only useful in conjunction with knowledge created by competitors, or would only be useful in 30 years by which time any patents have run out, or may not even be patentable.
So, if the US governemnt were to spend a 100 billion on PV or electric cars, the million cars on the road by 2020 might very well give a cost of a 1000 Dollars per tonne CO2 while marginal fuel switching from coal to natural gas would come in at 10 Dollars per tonne CO2. Or maybe depending on the fuel mix, the electric cars would save nothing at all in 2020.
But these million cars may bring technology development benefits that in 2040 or 2050 enable huge savings of a hundred billions tonnes of CO2, so that the real cost per tonne of CO2 taking a long view is more like 1 Dollar per metric tonne of CO2 or even lower.
Or indeed the cost per tonne might be negative, because in addition to the emissions reductions benefits in 2040 and beyond there might be financial benefits of the technology development.
These are mights, but buying options or insurance has value even when the chance of getting something out of it is not 100%.

An environmentalist's take on geoengineering

2010-08-04T23:25:00.001-07:00

http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/media/documents/articles/dr_strangeloves_return.pdf

It's an interesting paper.

It somehow got me to think about parallels with religion again. Why is emission reduction better than geoengineering?

Because emission reduction is about being humble and reverend and abstaining from sinful behaviour, about acknowledging the greatness outside ourselves, while geoengineering is hubris, playing God and motivated by a desire to keep engaging in sinful behaviour.

The economics of climate blogging

2010-06-25T00:53:00.001-07:00

I am going to devote this post to a question every climate blogger has always wanted an answer to, that is, what's the point of climate blogging, what's the return on the climate blogger's investment, the untold hours slaving away at zero pay for the common good?

I often find discussions of climate change terribly vague, with talk about urgency, action, delay and the like without any numbers. So, I thought to myself. Surely, there's a neat way to turn this vague talk into numbers via some policy modelling.

I then thought of the example of subsidies for PV and their relationship to whether people supporting them actually believe in climate change.

For this policy model I assume that the whole science entirely rests on a simple yes/no choice between climate sensitivity being 1C or 3C. With as a consequence high or negligible CO2 prices between 2030 and 2040. I further presume that there is a simple yes/no choice between investing 100 billion Euros now in PV deployment (say via feed-in tariffs) and that the return on this investment is a 10% reduction in costs in the decade 2030 to 2040, with thereafter no benefits. And that this simple yes/no choice is the only one being affected by the truth of whether a doubling of CO2 will give 1C or 3C.

I then further presume that if the "skeptics" are right the PV market in that decade will be 10 billion Euros a year, and if the "mainstream scientists" are right, it'll be 1000 billion Euros a year.

This yields a return on the R&D investment of 10 billion or 1000 bilion over the decade. I further presume we all agree that for comparison with other investment possibilities we assume a discount rate of 5%. That is, if we cannot beat that return, we better invest the money into something else that can get the 5%.

Another way of putting this is that an original investment of 100 billion Euros would grow to just under 400 billion Euros over 25 years with that 5% rate of return and we better get a return above 400 billion Euros in 2035 for an alternative investment to be preferred.

Now that all the above assumptions are agreed, and the only thing there is dispute over is the science, that is the probability that the skeptics are right, we can address a number of questions including the all important one for climate bloggers worried whether they shouldn't spend their time doing something else.

From the above it is clear that we should invest in the PV research if sensitivity is 3C with 100% certainty.

So if you know the truth of the matter, but think the public is going to make the wrong decision with 100% certainty unless you invest a bit of effort in convincing them otherwise, how much should you be willing to invest when the probability of successfully convincing the public is 100%?

The answer is, it makes sense as long as you stay above the 5% rate of return and roughly you can put in another 100 billion Euros of investment. With that 5% rate of return, your then 200 billion Euros total (100 billion for the PV and 100 billion to convince the public to actually spend the first 100 billion) still turn into more than the 800 billion Euros a 5% rate of return gives.

Suppose you are a blogger and are near 100% certain you are right, but only 10% certain the public will take the wrong decision, what probability do you need to make a difference with your blog to justify your time?

Say your blogging is 10000 hours and we put in 10 Euros per hour. That's a 100000 Euro investment. The return is 100 billion Euros. So, a mere chance of 1 in a million is a good deal!

On the other hand, the skeptics tend to emphasise the need to make the science more certain. Suppose you believe the probability of the skeptics being right is 1%. What's the value of reducing that 1% chance to 0%?

In our agreed model, it is roughly 1% of 100 billion, as the return on the PV investment is very close to 0 in case the skeptics are right. Knowing that this 100 billion investment is a waste is worth nearly 100 billion Euros, but this needs to be discounted with the low probability.

So, obviously "mainstream scientists" who believe the real probability is 99% think little should be invested in improving the knowledge base further. We know enough for action (=to go ahead with the investment in PV) and research attempting to prove otherwise would need to be really, really cheap to be worth the bother.

Now look at a skeptic who sees a 50/50 picture. On that split it is actually a good idea to invest the money. Your average return beats the 5% hurdle rate (the averaging implies that the 50% chance of getting near zero return gets calculated in, namely 50% times 10 billion + 50% times 1000 billion = average return of 505 billion, which is above the required 400 billion needed to beat alternative ways of investing the money).

However, it is also a great idea to invest more time in showing the "science is wrong", that is an investment in further research on whether the science is wrong that can change the 50/50 picture to a 100% certainty has great value, namely it's worth nearly 50% of 100 billion. And if a skeptical blogger thinks he's got a chance of even 1 in a million of "disproving global warming", and he's willing to sacrifice his time for the greater good, he should be willing to spend up to 5000 hours in this great service to the rest of humanity.

What does "the science say"?

2010-06-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/06/07/tijd-voor-de-politiek-om-wetenschap-serieuzer-te-nemen/#comments

According to a commenter on Bart's site, the science says emissions need to go down by 90% by 2050 and only the Green Left party in the Dutch party spectrum supposedly heeds the advice of scientists.

Rubbish I say. What the science says is that the current value of CO2 emissions is somewhere between zero and a whole lot (hundreds of Euros per tonne) depending on a range of assumptions that are either inherently uncertain or value laden. Not only does the spectrum of scientific opinion cover the same type of range as public opinion in the Netherlands, near term CO2 emissions reduction are hardly the only metric that matters. To the contrary it is widely acknowledged that innovation and technology development may matter a lot more to the long term emissions trajectory than emissions reductions goals set down in treaties, laws or party manifestoes.

Geoengineering, Environmentalists and Wattsupwiththat

2010-06-09T06:42:00.001-07:00

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/30/the-fix-is-in/

I have spoken about techno-optimists and environmentalists in the past (look a bit through my archives, if you are not sure what exactly I mean with these terms, or just ask, I am getting sufficiently few comments on my blog I'll likely address a serious question in depth). Now, I have noticed that the skeptics on wattsupwiththat are rabid environmentalists, at least once the subject geoengineering comes up.

This:

The answer to such proposals must surely be that if there is only the smallest chance that such things could go catastrophically wrong and thus extinguish human civilization, the precautionary principle forbids doing them.

is quite typical really. Me wonders how come this doesn't get applied to CO2?

I have a rather different take on geoengineering. We are already doing it, namely keeping Earth temperatures down through sulphate aerosol emissions, and, I think we seriously should consider our options in depth. A split second decision based on exactly nothing but intuition, which to me seems to be how most people opposed to geoengineering come to the conclusion it's definitely a non-starter, is surely not the way to go. Yes, there may be side effects, these may be positive or negative though, and unlike for climate change experiments resulting as an unintended by-product of other activities, ie what we are doing now, when intentionally modifying climate we can choose the one option among billions that has the greatest positive and least negative effects. Surely, we should study options such as cloud whitening carefully rather than simply opposing them from the get go, with the opposition already clear after 1 second's worth of thought, and that thought basically boiling down to "let's not play God, this might go terribly wrong, let's not even start, this is arrogant tinkering ..."

My preferred economic and tax policies

2010-05-19T22:50:00.000-07:00

I have talked about the consequences of a basic income for everyone. In Western states, we do in fact guarantee such a basic income. The strings attached to that income are usually related to discouraging savings (ie you won't get the income support, or Harz IV in Germany, if you have significant savings left) and to mild bullying into getting a job that does not provide better net income than the basic income guaranteed by the state, with the main incentive to getting the job not being financial rewards, but rather being rid of the nannying by income support government officials.

My solution is, reduce the basic income to around 500 Euros a month, make it non means tested (ie you get no matter whether you have other income or not, whether you have savings or not and whether you are actively looking for work or not) and put in progressive tax rates of
0% for the first 10000 Euros
10% for 10000 to 20000 Euros
20% for 20000 to 40000 Euros
and so forth until
60% for anything above 320000 Euros

On the expenditure side I want less military spending, but also much more efficient health care and education spend.

For education, this means a later start for schooling and fewer formal teaching hours, and more time for their own activities.

For health care, it means changing the system to make doctors and the public more aware of health care effectiveness. For much health care spend, I would put the customer in charge and that means also in charge of paying for the health care, with government checked and supported independent information on quality. For things like expensive surgery or hospital treatments, I'd change the pay structure, so that doctors do not have an incentive to prescribe treatment that has zero medical effectiveness, but lines their pockets. And for much front line care, I'd put in staff with fewer formal qualifications. It's not necessary to have 15 years of medical training to decide whether people may be allowed antibiotics or similar treatments, or whether they deserve to be referred to a specialist. These are the types of things occupying much of the time of general practitioners, who are typically paid royal salaries for that.

The limits of trusting experts

2010-05-19T22:23:00.000-07:00

In the context of climate change I've often heard the question asked, would you rather trust a doctor or a quack?

Surely I shouldn't trust a quack, but it does not follow that trusting doctors is always a good idea.

It's an especially bad idea when we are talking about managing health care resources. Doctors have a proven track record for choosing highly ineffective, but costly treatments, when they are paid for, well, choosing costly treatments.

Is a by-pass operation a good idea? Should you spend an extra day in hospital or go home? Does a doctor have to prescribe antibiotics or could somebody with fewer qualifications also do this, do it better and do it more cheaply?

With these types of questions, doctors get trusted as the expert. But they have a self interest and biases. What you find is that a by-pass operation can have very high costs indeed, and zero medical benefit. Extra hospital care may get you the infectious disease you die from. Will doctors judge these things well?

In my opinion, no. They have little incentive to look at costs, and for marginal decisions, they don't even have much of an incentive to look at health effectiveness. The consequence is that health care expenditure correlates quite poorly with health outcomes, once the most cost effective and health care outcome effective things have been paid for (vaccinations for example).

A nice quote from Bart

2010-05-19T08:03:00.000-07:00

http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/open-letter-of-us-nas-members-on-climate-change-and-the-integrity-of-science/

I’d say that the main problem now is, that given our current understanding of climate change, how are we going to respond? There is no such thing as ‘no response’. Any action (including business as usual) is a response, and it better be decided on rationally and based on all the available evidence. That’s the way I look at it. (original formatting lost in making it all italics)

Lester Brown on climate action

2010-05-19T07:54:00.000-07:00

http://www.grist.org/article/a-wartime-mobilization

Like me, he points to WWII as one example of what's possible:

What they did not yet know was that the sale of new cars would soon be banned. From early 1942 through the end of 1944, nearly three years, there were essentially no cars produced in the United States.
In addition to a ban on the production and sale of cars for private use, residential and highway construction was halted, and driving for pleasure was banned. Strategic goods -- including tires, gasoline, fuel oil, and sugar -- were rationed beginning in 1942.

My take on this is that the vast majority of scientific and public opinion is that this type of effort is not yet justified, but it's certainly feasible in an emergency.

An interview with Judith Curry

2010-04-23T06:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.collide-a-scape.com/2010/04/23/an-inconvenient-provocateur/

This is a very nice interview with Juditch Curry. She says for example:
"To keep this short, I will only itemize some topics where I think the confidence levels in the IPCC are too high and uncertainties have been inadequately characterized: much of what is in the IPCC WG2 report (impacts), the 20th century external climate forcings, the historical surface temperature record prior to 1960, attribution of the 20th century climate variations (including the role of the multidecadal ocean oscillations), the impacts of land use change, sea level rise, paleoclimate reconstructions, uncertainties of climate models and lack of metrics for evaluating climate model performance."

Do scientists and the public differ on climate change?

2010-04-23T01:34:00.000-07:00

Bart really likes studies that show a 50/50 split on a pretty generic attribution question among the public, and near agreement among 100 or so experts with plenty of peer reviewed papers on climate modelling.

I think this is a bit like asking the public whether the boiling point of ethanol is higher than that of water, finding the split to be close to 50/50, comparing that to what experts think and then jumping to the conclusion that the public therefore misunderstands the dangers of drinking and the types of measures that should be used to combat it. And the solution is to educate them better.

When the issue of climate change is expressed in terms such as "what is the appropriate CO2 tax?", the spectrum of scientific opinion is actually right where the public is. Richard Tol has tabulated studies of the ideal carbon price and also looked at studies of public support for specific CO2 tax rates, and they show the same kind of spread.

Also expressed in terms of "risks" I think the public is right where the spectrum of scientific opinion is, and in so far as it is not, this has little to do with the narrow attribution question of present warming in my opinion.

---------------------------

I should add that actually expert opinion does not give a 100% probability of warming to date being at least 50% due to anthropogenic causes. The boiling points of ethanol and water are by contrast indeed 100% certain.

There are various sources of uncertainty on the attribution question, the most significant has to do with aerosol cooling. Aerosol cooling might be so large as to cancel enough of the greenhouse warming that of the warming at least 50% is due to natural causes.

The other reasons for it not being 100% certain relate to uncertainty with respect to the climate system, things like cloud albedo are poorly measured today, the mechanisms are poorly understood and there is little knowledge of historical changes absent anthropogenic factors (such as aerosols and greenhouse gases, both of which impact clouds and cloud reflectiveness). If we had good albedo and temperature data for a 1000 "unforced" years, we would have a much better handle on these issues and could exclude them with much greater confidence.

Do we have the technology?

2010-04-15T01:52:00.000-07:00

I'll chime in on a cat fight between Roger Pielke and Paul Krugman.

Do we have all the technology we need to reduce CO2 emissions to zero? My answer is that we do, but not at zero cost compared to using fossil fuels.

Some people come up with scenarios, where 100% renewables will meet energy demand at a similar cost as fossil fuels in a BAU with fossil fuel costs higher than at present.

I think those comparisons confuse fossil fuel costs and prices. The current oil price is not representative of the cost of production. That's determined by the marginal barrel, resource rents and very high discount rates for investments.

When fossil fuel demand is reduced to zero, we are talking about shutting down existing wells with operating costs of a few cents per barrel of oil equivalent. That's a very real cost to society, and should not be waved away by assuming the barrel costs society 100 Euros to produce. It doesn't, the 100 Euros is largely resource rent or a reward for past investments, it's not what it costs to produce the barrel.

I do not think we have the technology to reduce CO2 emissions to less than zero at zero marginal cost (marginal = the last few barrels saved through efficiency or replaced by renewables have a real cost associated to them; for the first few barrels, on the other hand, there might indeed be a negative cost)

I think what Roger Pielke means with "we don't have the technology" is that without breakthroughs or use of geoengineering, and assuming for the moment that climate sensitivity is 3C, we won't achieve staying below 2C because the cost/benefit ratio is not good enough. And assuming great returns on R&D, we might achieve the 2C, as after technology has improved loads the costs of staying below 2C are sufficiently depressed to make it politically feasible.

Which gets us back to a question I've discussed previously, namely what kind of R&D investments are likely to have outsized returns? And how narrow a definiton of R&D ought we to apply here? Are for example feed-in tariffs for PV part of R&D, or do we purely get expensive solar cells on roofs and little development benefit?

I happen to think that there is a role for feed-in tariffs and similar mechanisms, the kind of stuff derided as governments deciding technology options, and where it is often said the market would do a better job. Because, well, I don't think it does. PV isn't going to get anywhere without scale, without people who see a future in the business, without actual manufacturing plants to try things on. And an acceptable carbon price in the teens is not going to get us that. Nor will purely lab scale government funded research on 3 year grant cycles, in my opinion, be the sole factor to getting costs down, as is sometimes argued (just dump a few billion on universities and wait until they come up with 50% efficient PV cells that cost next to nothing to produce).

What influences climate?

2010-04-15T00:05:00.000-07:00

And in how far can we say much about that based on 20th century temperature trends?

Bart likes to talk about "energy balances". For chemical engineers, it's a neat idea, you look at what's coming in and what's going out and any difference must be accumulation. The big heat reservoir on Earth that is only heating slowly are the oceans, so accumulation could also be measured by looking at the increase in ocean heat content.

Trouble is, we don't seem to be able to measure outgoing radiation to a sufficient degree of accuracy to tell whether there is accumulation or not. And neither have we got a terribly good grip on ocean heat content, especially so for the deep ocean below 700 m of depth.

I think that there are several key factors that could influence climate, greenhouse gases like CO2 are one, but there is also albedo and water vapour. I also think that these can act as feedbacks, for example it is reasonable that higher temperature from CO2 should lead to more water vapour, which itself is a greenhouse gas. But, they may also change based on other factors, for example ocean albedo could change based on algal blooms, or cloud albedo could change because of aerosol changes due to biological cycles.

I also see how the oceans could have a big impact. There is a lot of water at a temperature of 4C at great depth. If this moves to the top of the ocean, the surface should cool.

Lindzen likes to point out that we are already at a significant fraction of the greenhouse gase forcing expected from a doubling of CO2, that is the forcing from all greenhouse gases now is something like 3/4 of that you'd expect from a doubling of CO2 on pre-industrial. If there were no accumulation and the net total of all non greenhouse gas forcings was zero, we'd therefore expect more than 2C warming by now with a climate sensitivity of 3C.

I think that 20th century temperature trends tell us little about climate sensitivity. In fact, it is quite possible that a doubling of CO2 actually would cool the Earth. What would be required would be for example that said douling causes more than 1C of cooling due to ocean or cloud albedo changes (say via biological processes). Nothing unphysical about this, just the natural chemical and biological processes in principle being quite capable of doing geoengineering all on their own.

I also noticed something else recently. When you look at actual stratospheric temperature trends, two volcanic eruptions stick out clearly, so clearly that a cause effect relationship looks likely to me. What I took from that is that stratospheric cooling together with tropospheric warming can come about from aerosols. Ergo, it could also come from biological or chemical or astrophysical processes impacting cloudiness. Or in other words, if solar forcing acted not via changes in total solar output (solar constant in W/m2), but rather in changes of the reflectiveness of particles in the atmosphere, it could explain stratospheric cooling. In fact, it does not seem all that unlikely to me that at least some of the stratospheric cooling of the last 30 years has to do with aerosols, at the very least, any least squares trend will be influenced by the peaks (hmm troughs) in stratospheric temperature apparently related to volcanic eruptions.

Climate sensitivity, physical limits to random walks

2010-04-09T07:20:00.000-07:00

Over on Bart's blog Tom Fuller talked about his belief that climate sensitivity is 2C. It's interesting that 2C is what the Economist says doubled CO2 plus water vapour feedback alone would give (1C from the CO2 alone, an extra 1C from the water vapour feedback). And that most of the model uncertainty comes from clouds, with them getting a range that would be 1.6 to 2C or so with water vapour alone, to the much wider 1.5 to 4.5C.

Over on Bart's blog there's also been plenty of discussion of 20th century temperature trends. Now I accept on faith that CO2 alone will give 1C extra and that this is laboratory measured and reliable. So what else could impact temperature?

Ocean albedo, cloud albedo, relative humidity are some particularly prominent examples. These could be directly impacted by CO2, via a temperature feedback or more indirectly via biological processes.

It is possible that say extra CO2 induces changes in the biosphere that change ocean or cloud albedo sufficiently to counteract that 1C increase from radiation greenhouse physics, or to even more than counteract it. It's also possible that ocean or cloud albedo could change based on biological cycles, ie even change if CO2 and temperature stay constant. Or that cloud feedbacks are negligible for doubled CO2, but strongly positive four quadrupled CO2.

It is therefore far from clear that large "unforced" climate fluctuations in the last 2000 years would imply large climate sensitivity. In truth there may have been a big forcing, say an algal bloom causing a lot of sea salt aerosols whitenting clouds off Africa, but we aren't aware of it to give an example.

I also don't think that a "random walk" implies either terrible instability of the world's climate, or is plain unphysical. It all depends on the types of forcings and feedbacks in the system and how they interact.

Now, in principle albedo changes should be measurable, but I gather that a simple energy balance approach to the Earth's radiation budget is actually surprisingly difficult (so says James Annan on global change). We don't actually have a good handle on how cloud or ocean albedo is changing.

In this context I found this news item quite interesting:

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/april/early-sun-research-040610.html

Fairness in income

2010-04-09T06:48:00.000-07:00

Could a gross income of 180000 Euros per year for a medical doctor be quite "fair"?

Let's assume that 10 Euros per hour of net earnings is a fair salary. Let's further assume that the net salary of the medical doctor is 10000 Euros per year between age 16 and age 36 and 110000 Euros per year between age 36 and age 56. And that he actually needs to put in 3000 hours per year for the whole 40 years. On average he is making 60000 Euros per year (net) over 3000 hours per year, so that's 20 Euros per hour. But, for 20 years he is working like a slave and getting awfully little compensation. There are plenty of reasons to use discounting here. A factor 2 over 20 years is, according to the rule of 70, equivalent to a rate of 3.5% (70 divided by 20). Use the discounting and a gross salary of 180000 Euros per year for somebody putting in 60 hour work weeks with no holidays may be far from outrageous.

Now could a lifetime income for a sports star of 1 billion Euros be "fair"?

Here I think the only way to get towards actual earnings of 10 Euros per hour is by assuming the lottery principle, namely 1000 prospective sports stars each invest 100000 hours with a 0.1% chance of getting the payout. The average reward is then indeed precisely 10 Euros per hour, with the actual per person being either 10000 Euros per hour or 0 Euros per hour.

I do have a problem with this type of reward, but then again I do not like lotteries, precisely because I do not think it is right that plenty of poor people should give up part of their wealth so that a few utterly undeserving people can get filthy rich.

Now the above is about fairness, how about incentives to work?

I do think it is troublesome to put in very high taxes on jobs that require huge amounts of hours like medical doctors or specialised engineers. It's all very well and good to say that 150000 Euros is so much it needs to be taxed at 60% or higher, but if this destroys the incentive to put in 3000 hours per year of actual work and decades of slothing away at getting educated enough to to do the job, it's a problem.

On the other hand, I am dubious that a 90% tax rate on football player earnings above 2 million Euros a year is going to do much damage to the economy.

Update: Let me stress that the example of doctors has limits. I am also convinced that there is much consumption value in status and job enjoyment. My brother is a veterinary surgeon and vets get much less money than medical doctors dealing with people, yet he still does the job on similar hours, both in training and when fully trained. Furthermore, I am somewhat dubious about the value of some of the training medical doctors receive and I am also skeptical of their judgments. I feel that they may often be driven towards "expensive" surgical procedures that add very little in terms of health benefits, or even may be downright harmful. And what drives them is precisely the high pay associated with executing these specialised procedures, together with incentives that push them to do as much of those as possible.

Or in other words, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to pay medical doctors much less, and to link their pay not so much to the quantity of surgical output.

Two good reads for activist climate scientists

2010-03-22T03:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.slate.com/id/2248236/pagenum/all

http://www.slate.com/id/2247487/

A dangerous idea has taken hold in modern politics, and the sooner it is discredited, the better. The idea is that political disagreements can be resolved by science. Its basic logic seems sensible: As good children of the Enlightenment, we should turn to science to establish the facts about problems such as climate change before deciding what policies to implement. Yet the types of things that scientists are good at figuring out don't have much to do with the types of things that politicians need to decide.

....

It turns out that science contributes most to politics when nobody really cares that much about it.

How fair are markets in determining income distribution?

2010-03-09T19:41:00.001-08:00

I've posted on income taxes recently, but what also matters is how salary is determined by the market. People can demand a lot, if they have unique skills or assets.

So, a football player can get a salary of tens of millions. Yet, if he didn't get that salary and chose not to play or to retire earlier, that would not change total economic output.

A company owner and 100 unskilled workers might produce 1 billion Euros worth of output or 100 billion with the same input in terms of time and effort from the 100 unskilled workers. But, if there are thousands of people to choose from, the company owner is in a much better negotiating position. There is no pressure on him whatsoever to share any of the 100 billion Euro output, yet he might not be able to produce as much as 10000 Euros worth of output, if he didn't have access to such a labour pool.

Would the company owner choose not to be an entrepreneur and instead earn 10000 Euros, if there was a 99% tax rate on him, but he'd still be left with nearly a billion Euros?

Yet another post on statistics

2010-03-07T23:37:00.000-08:00

I find the notion expounded in earlier posts that random yearly variations might be (partially) cumulative very interesting.

I do think it is worthwhile pointing out that natural variability may mask the underlying trend and that there may be a structural trend break, eg because great efforts get made between 2010 and 2030 to clean up aerosols in Asia.

Taking these things together temperature increases of 1C per decade to 2030 or anything down to nearly nothing over that period seem quite consistent with our understanding of forcings and climate sensitivity. To get a serious rethink, temperature would have to rise by more than 1C, or actually decline substantially, say by 0.5C over 10 years (assuming no massive increase of aerosol forcing).

What should we do about climate change?

2010-03-07T06:44:00.000-08:00

Unsurprisingly, negative cost actions, also known as using climate change as an ancillary argument for doing something you would want done anyway, are worthwhile no matter how serious climate change is as an issue.

What's negative cost is very much in the eye of the beholder. If you think nucelar power is great compared to coal, irrespective of climate change, then you won't take much convincing that climate change justifies your preferred form of electricity generation.

Now, a price for carbon is much talked about these days as a key response to climate change. As long as this price is around where it's now in the European Emissions Trading System, I think action and non action on climate change are not actually far removed from each other. We are already taxing some fossil fuels a lot more heavily than that.

But, for methane and CFC's this does not apply. It's sometimes pointed out that the Montreal protocoll has done more to combat climate change than Kyoto, without any carbon price involved. For CFC's, N2O and methane a lot can be done quite cheaply, and without using "markets", but rather regulation. I particularly like this regulatory action for long lived minor greenhouse gases that are difficult to remove from the atmosphere.

Carbon capture and sequestration with large coal fired power plants is something that deserves research and development, but it is very expensive and costs efficiency, ie we need more coal for the same amount of electricity.

Solar radiation management (eg making clouds more reflective with sea salt aerosols) is a very interesting option, but it's an option I think we should do research on, not one that should be implemented now. Largely, because I don't think climate change is causing net damage right now.

Once needed, we can still use it. Likewise, I am not in favour of stopping the reduction of aerosol production from ships for climate reasons. Yes, the health benefit of desulfurisation may be small, and yes, there may even may be some fertilisation side benefit from all that sulphur, but again, aerosols can be emitted later. They are a fast option to combat climate change, unlike CO2 management which is a slow business with decades passing before there is an impact on world climate.

Statistics continued

2010-03-07T06:29:00.001-08:00

The reason I started thinking about climate statistics again was this post by Bart:

http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/global-average-temperature-increase-giss-hadcru-and-ncdc-compared/

There he calculates confidence intervals for trends. These are based on an assumption that the temperature in a given year equals a trend + random component with the random component for one year entirely independent of that of the two neighbouring years.

Simple statistics packages will work out the trend then + an uncertainty for the trend. This uncertainty is due to the yearly random component and will decline over time relative to the trend. So, say for 1995 to 2010 you might get a trend of 0.12C per year with a probability greater 95% that the real trend will be between -0.01C and +0.22C.

There are several problems with this probability. One is that the data themselves have sources for error, which are not captured by the confidence interval. Another is the assumption about the random component for individual years being strictly independent from each other.

Statistics continued

2010-03-06T23:55:00.001-08:00

I've now looked at getting a hundred year temperature graph assuming a random cumulative component of +/- 0.06C per year and a trend of 0.5C per century.

I get this:

Or this:

Or in other words, a trend of 0.5C per century is difficult to distinguish against random noise, if the noise is cumulative that is.

A trend of 5C per century, however, is very easy to distinguish. After twenty attempts, the

lowest increase I got was this:

Interesting statistics discussion

2010-03-06T21:20:00.000-08:00

Assume that yearly temperatures are the previous year's temperature plus a random number between -0.03 and +0.03C.

In Excel, this is easy to do. Add RAND()/100-0.03 one hundred times and you get graphs like this one:

What's noticeable is how similar this looks to actual temperature trends, even though there is no "forcing" in the temperature function used to generate the graph.

Biases and framing

2010-03-05T00:25:00.000-08:00

A while back Bart (which one? look at my side bar) picked up the storyline that polling experts on a specific global warming question (>90% likelihood more than 50% of warming between 1850 and now net anthropogenic) gave near unanimous agreement where the public gave a 50/50 split.

I noted that a different question (Is global warming discernible in disaster damage trends?) would also give a 50/50 split among the public in all likelihood with the experts with peer reviewed papers being near unanimous.

Or in other words, the public isn't that wrong overall, just wrong on the details.

However, it's not as if the underlying ideology of members of the public, or interestingly, the messenger, didn't matter:

http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/23/everyone-who-knows-what-they-a

People are tribal. If global warming is used as a wedge issue by left leaning scientists and communicated across as justifying preconceived notions about how society should be run, people with different preconceptions will become very hard to convince.

Are climate scientists more keen on taxes and big government than the public at large? The above article cites polls indicating a large gulf.

It also shows that given the right messenger and message, skepticism about an issue can shift markedly along ideological lines.

If the main messenger for global warming was not Al Gore, but rather Dick Cheney or Margaret Thatcher, and the main message was that we needed more nuclear power and above all needed to crush the coal and auto unions, lower wasteful spending on single mothers and keep immigrants out, you'd find rather more scientific skepticism about global warming on the left. In fact, I can't quite remember members of the left talking about coal death trains (remember Hansen?) in 1983, when Margaret Thatcher picked her fight against the miners.

Interesting submission by the Institute of Physics

2010-02-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc3902.htm

Memorandum submitted by the Institute of Physics (CRU 39)

The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia

The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of over 36,000 and is a leading communicator of physics-related science to all audiences, from specialists through to government and the general public. Its publishing company, IOP Publishing, is a world leader in scientific publishing and the electronic dissemination of physics.

The Institute is pleased to submit its views to inform the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee's inquiry, 'The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia'.

The submission details our response to the questions listed in the call for evidence, which was prepared with input from the Institute's Science Board, and its Energy Sub-group.

What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself - most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC's conclusions on climate change.

...

A guaranteed basic income and marginal tax rates - Keeping it simple

2010-02-26T05:38:00.000-08:00

I'll do this post without lots of calculations, because I fear that my other post on the matter will make eyes glaze over.

In Germany there is a discussion about how much people who cannot or do not want to find work should be paid by the state. This discussion is about two things, namely social justice demands that noone is left with too low an income, and secondly there must be an incentive to work.

One proposal is to formally introduce a base income that everyone is entitled to regardless of whether they wish to work or not, as an unconditional right. In practise, there already is a base income, except that formally the state demands that everyone look for work, even if the purely financial incentive is zero or close to zero.

The reason the purely financial incentive can be close to zero is that the state chooses to withdraw benefit at a rate of nearly 1 Euro of benefit per Euro of earnings. An often quoted example is a single mother of 2 children who will have net earnings of close to 1500 Euros per month either on benefits, or if she works and has gross earning of 1500 Euros. This situation is referred to as a "marginal tax rate" of 100%, ie earning an extra 1500 Euros gross gets you 0 extra net.

What my following post shows is that the average marginal tax rate is purely dependent on government expenditure and the effective basic income granted to citizens, and is especially dependent on the latter. I also show that an individual base income of 500 Euros is close to the present situation and requires average marginal rates of 50%, with a political choice having been made to obtain this average by averaging rates of close to 100% for very low incomes with rates of around 40% for the middle class and higher incomes.

I also show that raising the basic income very quickly escalates the required average marginal tax rate. At around 1500 Euros, everybody has to be taxed at 100%.

I further illustrate the choices I would make and that the German socialist party aims at. Namely, I would lower the base income to 375 Euros per capita (ie down by 25% compared to the present situation) and thereby lower average marginal tax rates to around 25%. However, I'd do that taxation progressively starting with 0% for low incomes and getting to 60% for very high incomes. The net effect would be to make work very attractive at the bottom end, be it part time work or low paid work. In this tax system, not working would get you 6000 Euros income per year, on 10000 Euros of gross salary, you'd get 15000 Euros as net salary. This would make it extremely attractive for pensioners or housewives to take on part time work and for people with low skills to accept a job paying 800 Euros per month.

What the German socialist party wants is a base income of well above 1000 Euros to be financed by confiscatory taxes on the rich, with marginal tax rates around 90% for the wealthy. The effect of this would be that somebody who does not work at all would get around 50% of the net income of someone who is on 5000 Euros a month.

A basic income and marginal tax rates

2010-02-26T04:59:00.001-08:00

A few days ago I heard about the idea of a basic, guaranteed income on Spiegel. It's an idea that's also discussed in the German CDU (Althaus) and the Greens and German Socialists also have put it forward.

So, I've devised a simple model to look into what it means. This model presumes for simplicity that German GDP is 24000 Euros per capita and is fully made up of income from labour. It also assumes that half the population is employed at 4000 Euros monthly income per person and the other half has 0 income.

I then further assume that the current rate of government expenditure is 25% of GDP for transfer payments (child benefit, pensions, income support) and 25% of GDP for other expenditure (education, the military, building roads).

I then look at what base incomes of 500, 1000 and 1500 Euros mean, especially in terms of marginal tax rates.

Case I 500 Euros base income

Monthly income for people who earn nothing: 500 Euros

Monthly income for people who earn 4000 Euros: 2500 Euros (= 4000 - 500 as each person with an income from employment has to pay for one person who is without employment - 2 times 500 as each person with an income has to finance other government expenditure at 25% of average earnings of 2000 Euros for 2 people)

Average marginal tax rate 50%

Case II 1000 Euros base income

Monthly income for people who earn nothing: 1000 Euros

Monthly income for people who earn 4000 Euros: 2000 Euros

Average marginal tax rate 75%

Case II 1500 Euros base income

Monthly income for people who earn nothing: 1500 Euros

Monthly income for people who earn 4000 Euros: 1500 Euros

Average marginal tax rate 100%

What I noticed is that the average marginal tax rate is purely dependent on two things:

other government expenditure apart from social transfers
the guaranteed base income

A consumption tax doesn't change things. Say, we finance other government expenditure with a 25% consumption tax. Then the 1000 Euro case say is replicated with a base income of 1333 Euros. Because the consumption tax is levied on that, that reduces to 1000 Euros and the 2625 Euro left to the person on 4000 Euro labour income is reduced to 2000 Euros through the 25% consumption tax.

Germany is in fact quite close at present to case I, with the base income that is guaranteed in practise around 500 Euros + what's necessary to pay indirect taxes (ie consumption taxes) and the average marginal tax rate around 50%.

What the present system does is to average a very high initial marginal tax rate (close to 100% for very low incomes) with a lower marginal tax rate for the middle class (closer to 40%).

What are the real choices we have?

To lower average marginal tax rates (and therefore improve the incentive to work) there are only two choices, lower the effective basic income or lower government expenditure.

Once the average marginal tax rate has been determined, we can make it more or less progressive. The present choice as said is very high rates for low incomes combined with rates around 40% for the middle class. Another choice would be marginal rates of 50% for all. Or low rates for poorer people and rates of 75% and more for everyone from the middle classes and up.

What is my preference:

A nominal base income of 500 Euros per capita, together with 25% consumption taxes and progressive tax rates. The marginal tax rate could then be

0 to 10000 Euros 10%
10000 to 20000 Euros 20%
20000 to 40000 Euros 30%
40000 to 80000 Euros 40%
80000 to 160000 Euros 50%
160000 and upwards 60%

What is the preference of the German Socialists?

A base income of 1333 Euros per capita with a 25% consumption tax and marginal tax rates of 75% on average, with lower incomes more around 50% and higher incomes approaching 100%.

Good interview with Ted Nordhaus

2010-02-25T05:46:00.000-08:00

http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2010/02/daily_caller_interview_ted_nor.shtml

Some excerpts I particularly like (could nearly have written them myself ;-)

Both sides in the climate debate have conspired to conflate what are many different findings and conclusions from what are many different sciences into a single thing called climate science and then reduce the world to those who accept or deny it. So I think it is fair to say that some skepticism is more rational than other skepticism.
...
If the question is public opinion, I think that one should not take any of the polling too literally. The public has always actually understood that there was a lot of uncertainty in climate science and the way that pollsters try to reduce that to "do you believe in climate change" or not or various variations on that question does the public and our understanding of public opinion on the subject a great disservice. For two decades, publics around the world, including the American public, have typically supported action to address global warming by large majorities so long as those actions did not seem too costly or draconian. No amount of new science is likely to change that one way or another. Most folks are willing to accept that climate science is telling us we should do something about global warming so long as that something involves something they basically support doing anyway and they are skeptical of climate science to the degree that climate science is telling them to do something they don't want to do.

Significance of IPCC errors

2010-02-24T00:13:00.001-08:00

As I repeatedly have written, it's the impacts that matter. I am not happy with the line of defense that working group II is a bit sloppy, but the real science is in working group I and stands. Sorry, but the physical basis is unimportant on its own, it is indeed just a basis, namely a basis for working out the impacts.

Have the IPCC got the overall message wrong about impacts? I think the answer is yes to that, on several key points the science is misrepresented and exaggerated and, importantly, this has made it into the popular media and into the heads of policy makers.

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/02/policy-impact-of-ipcc-misdirection.html

Glaciers in perspective

2010-02-23T23:50:00.000-08:00

http://nsidc.org/glaciers/questions/located.html

A few years back McIntyre uncovered an error in US temperature data after the year 2000 of around 0.15 K.
http://climateaudit.org/2007/08/11/does-hansens-error-matter/

A commonly heard argument why this error did not matter was, oh the US is only 2% of the Earth, so the impact on the world average is nearly nil. I took a different tack, namely that those 2% had the best station coverage of the world and the error occurred at a time when people were actually trying to measure climate trends as opposed to the daily weather, and therefore the 0.15K error indicated the lower end of plausible error margins in the present, and much more so when comparing with the past. Considering that 0.15K (per decade) is also the often claimed trend in the warming rate over the last three decades that's hardly small.

Anyway, what has this got to do with glaciers?

A quick look at how much of the world outside of Greenland and Antarctica is covered with glaciers will show you that this is not 2% of the world, but a rather measly 0.1%. In Africa, there's a grand total of 10 square kilometers of glaciers. Compare that to the 10 million square kilometers covered by the US.

Yet, glaciers are regularly pulled in as a major argument supporting the notion that the world has warmed, usually by stating that the vast majority of glaciers are retreating.

I've got a few more problems with this glacier argument, notably glaciers also react to precipitation and conventional pollution (dirt, soot).

And like for sea ice, what's the historical perspective? How unprecedented is the behaviour of the glaciers?

Now all else equal, glaciers outside of Antarctica and Greenland ought to retreat if it gets warmer, and while they only cover a very small percentage of the planet, they are widely distributed, so that the retreat of Alpine glaciers say (covering a mere 2900 square kilometres) may reasonably be seen to say something about temperatures in a wider area, but

the glaciers are retreating line is actually quite weak and comes with many caveats. It is not particularly strong evidence on its own that the Earth has warmed over the last 150 years.

Nice post on energyoutlook

2010-02-17T13:47:00.000-08:00

http://energyoutlook.blogspot.com/2010/02/shaken-consensus.html

Geoffrey Styles is very reasonable and not partisan in the climate change blog wars, and brings very interesting opinions to the table. In the comments he writes this:

The whole temperature data issue drives me nuts. Here's something that is at the core of the whole climate problem, and it should have been the first thing to be nailed down systematically, rigorously and transparently. I nearly picked up the phone to call NASA when I saw that they had again revised their figures for 1998, altering a comparison that just 3 years ago left 1934 0.02 deg. higher than 1998 (within the accuracy of 0.1, so in practice tied) to where 1998 now beats 1934 by 0.12 deg.--unambiguously more than the measurement accuracy. Without accusing anyone of cooking the numbers, that is precisely the sort of thing that undermines confidence in the entire edifice of climate change.

Climate policy in the face of uncertainty and irreversibilities

2010-02-17T07:43:00.000-08:00

Dealing with uncertainty is something widely done in the insurance industry, or when pricing options to buy shares.

A key issue in the pricing is how serious a delay is. In health insurance say people will be much less likely to invest in paying expensive insurance premiums, while they are healthy, if they can still get insurance at the first sign of health problems. A major fraction of US uninsured are uninsured for precisely that reason.

Similar issues apply to climate change. Why is research in solar power or carbon capture so valuable? Because, it is presumed, that if the research is not done between 2010 and 2040, getting the technology scaled up between 2040 and 2050, when it might be needed, would be much more expensive. That is delaying would be very costly.

One of the most important questions for climate policy in my opinion is how serious delays in emissions reductions are. I take the position that CO2 can be scrubbed out of the atmosphere again, and therefore we can discount scenarios with heavy impacts in the far future substantially, because, basically like healthy people in their 20's in the US who decide they can do without health insurance for the time being, we can still buy the insurance later with little penalty.

About thermostats

2010-02-17T07:20:00.001-08:00

It is sometimes argued that CO2 causes warming, therefore if CO2 varies so must temperature.

Let me give you an analogy. A home with central heating. Switching the TV on should raise the temperature of the room. It's a heat source. But the temperature of the room doesn't change, because the home heating system is set to a temperature with a thermostat and if there is extra heat from the TV, then the central heating system supplies a bit less. What will change the temperature of the room is somebody setting the thermostat to a different temperature.

So, it isn't so that it is elementary physics that CO2 variations must have an effect on world temperature. In principle, it's quite possible that the impact of CO2 varations doesn't get amplified, but rather regulated away by the climate system, and that the Earth system's thermostat is set by something else.

There are good reasons to think that the CO2 temperature effect doesn't get regulated away, but rather amplified by about a factor 3. However, it's a bit too simplistic to state that simple radiation physics is enough to prove that more CO2 must mean higher temperatures. It's a bit more complicated than that.

The limits of averaging impacts out

2010-02-10T00:30:00.000-08:00

I do actually understand that positive and negative impacts may not always readily cancel, just look at the consequences of cap and trade. If a few people are hit really hard (say coal miners), they'll scream and be extremely unhappy, and this is not readily compensated by benefits elsewhere.

However, there is also natural variability in where droughts or hurricanes occur. If the displacement of say droughts that is driven by anthropogenic climate change occurs in such a manner that it is qualitatively similar to natural cycles, I do have a big problem with preferentially counting the negative impacts, say with climate change there is a big drought in the 2050's in India, but not in China, and vice versa.

Besides, if it is clear that one area is hit hard and it is due to fossil fuel emissions, a few large blocs (China, EU, USA) have such large resources that they can come up with some form of compensation then (in 2050 when the drought in India happens).

Can climate change amount to 0C in the world average and still be a net negative?

2010-02-10T00:22:00.001-08:00

Clearly yes, this is in the end one of the main arguments against solar radiation management, namely that, while it might precisely cancel the warming on average, there might still be a large net negative residual (Bart came up with less rainfall in the Amazonas as one educated guess).

It is commonly said that the IPCC claim that warming to date is largely anthropogenic. In fact, because of the poorly known magnitude of negative aerosol forcings, they leave an up to 10% likelihood that warming to date is largely natural with the positive and negative forcings that are anthropogenic largely cancelling each other.

Say it was so, that wouldn't mean that impacts could not be severe and negative, say because of massive droughts in India and other hugely populated areas dependend on agriculture.

On the other hand, neither does it mean much, if warming to date is 0.8C of which exactly 0.8C is anthropogenic. Net impacts can be quite positive.

A few issues

2010-01-30T03:53:00.000-08:00

1. No regrets

It's often said that no matter how impacts of climate change are exagerated or unclarity is brought in whether something is happening now, will happen in 2050 or might only happen in 2300, why worry, it's all about getting action on things we should do anyway, even if climate change was no threat whatsoever.

I strongly reject this reasoning. It's precisely when real sacrifices and regrets are introduced when it matters how serious the impacts of climate change are.

2. "Science" is under attack

I think this framing is very misleading, because it is usually used in the context of a yes/no diagnosis with the end of the world or a no regrets alternative, false choice.

The vast majority of scientists who don't claim that their work indicates this false choice is real don't have any people hounding them. It's invariably the crusaders who get attacked.

That's not to say that there are not many people getting scientific facts very wrong, but it's really very few researchers who have to worry about personal attacks on their scientific work like Mann say has to.

3. There is a conspiracy by fossil fuel interests that's succeeded to convince large fractions of the public of falsehoods, and if they were just better informed, they'd demand "action"

I think this is also a highly misleading framing of the issue. The public understand the nuances of the debate quite well where it's policy relevant. They might not know how much of current warming is anthropogenic, but then little follows from that of policy relevance. What does matter is impacts, where they are likely to occur, how serious they'll be, and on that the facts are quite uncertain and open to interpretation; and the public is definitely on a line with expert opinion there.

Impacts are what matters

2010-01-30T03:37:00.000-08:00

It is amazing how often I come across statements like "The majority of scientists agree that the world has warmed due to human influences ... and that this represents the most significant challenge humanity faces in the 21st century".

There is this logical jump from an innocuous statement implying very little about even how serious the problem is, let alone how it should be priority ranked,

to it's the most serious issue facing us.

Sorry, the attribution of world temperature change to date implies very little about how climate change should be prioritised. It's clearly the impacts that matter.

Is it a greater priority to deal with climate change if temps are up 1C with 100% of this due to man and there being a net positive impact now, and even a net positive impact with 4C extra, or if global temperature is down 0.1C with the CO2 warming fully negated, but still the net impacts being negative now and with a quadrupling of CO2 we'll be boiling the world's ocean away by 2100?

Again, it is the impacts that matter, a simple reasoning "climate change is real, ergo it is the greatest problem faced by humanity" is plain wrong.

Should Pachauri resign?

2010-01-28T13:26:00.000-08:00

It's all very well and good to claim that the glacier claim must surely have been a typo unless you believe in conspiracy theories or to point out that it did not make it into a summary for policy makers.

But, if it is true that the Indian minister of the Environment had to commission a study to investigate the claim and after presentation of the study to the IPCC Pachauri called this well researched study "voodoo science" and only ages later admitted error and actually lobbied for half a million Dollars for his institute based on the claim,

these excuses cut little ice with me and Pachauri has to go or the IPCC loses a great deal of credibility.

Update: Bart's pointed me to a post by William that I had read two months ago, but rather superficially, and William wasn't overly impressed by the Indian glacier study.

More importantly, I found this Times article:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6999975.ece

Which helpfully pointed me towards the High Noon EU website:

http://www.eu-highnoon.org

and this presentation
http://www.eu-highnoon.org/nl/25222819-%5Blinkpage%5D.html?opage_id=25222886&location=-714253156641779,10305425,true,true

by Anastasios Kentarchos.

He has this to say on page 3 about why they decided to hand out some 3 million Euros or so in funding to a project where Pachauri's TERI was the lead organisation in India:

After careful consideration of the
proposed areas for further research, it was
decided to have a call for proposals in the
area of Himalayan glaciers retreat.
Topic of high scientific and societal
importance !
• IPCC 4AR: ‘Glaciers in the Himalaya
are receding faster than in any other part
of the world and, if the present rate
continues, the likelihood of them
disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps
sooner is very high if the Earth keeps
warming at the current rate’ …….. ……….
• ‘as a consequence of climate change could
likely affect the economies in the region’.

What's wrong with equating science with a clarion call to remodel society

2010-01-28T13:00:00.000-08:00

There is much on Climate Resistance I very much like.

http://www.climate-resistance.org/2008/09/biased-broadcasting-climate.html

I'll quote a short passage:
"See what he did there? A seamless switch from the scientific to the political. Most scientists agree that humans have something to do with recent increases in global temperature, therefore we inevitably have to accept the politics of restraint. We all now have to change our lifestyles and give up our freedoms… because ‘most scientists say so’.
No argument is offered as to how Stewart knows that most scientists agree. As far as we are aware, no such poll has ever been taken. But more to the point, even if all scientists agreed, the way we live our lives, and the decision as to what liberties we ought to be entitled to are absolutely none of their business. Stewart clearly believes that an ‘ethical’ and political argument for action on climate change can be constructed purely on the basis of ’scientific facts’. But how? And why should normal ethics and politics be suspended?"

---------------------

I have said that I've got big problems with the doctor analogy. The strong point of the analogy is that expertise matters. The weak point is that it is far too suggestive of a simple yes/no diagnosis with just one treatment on offer or death as the alternative. Which is the same problem I have with the precautionary principle "Even if climate scientists only had a 50% chance of being right, rather than the near 100% that's closer to the truth, would you want to take that chance and leave our planet uninhabitable?". It reduces the issue to a false choice.

The true situation is rather different. We don't have a choice between just one course of action that has a 100% or 50% chance of wiping out humanity according to the science, and another course of action which has a 100% of causing little harm and and a 50% or better chance of avoiding the end of humanity.

The precautionary principle

2010-01-21T02:24:00.000-08:00

http://www.climate-resistance.org/tag/precautionary-principle

Interesting blog and blog post. What I like is how he takes on the "wouldn't you trust a doctor" and "even if there is only a 50% chance that climate scientists are right" precautionary principle type arguments, though he is far too long winded and the way he attacks environmentalism will put some people off.

Geoengineering and runaway warming

2010-01-15T23:40:00.000-08:00

I am partial towards having CO2 of 500 to 1000 ppm, assuming that either climate sensitivity is low enough to keep temperatures to around 2 to 3C above pre-industrial, or that climate sensitivity is low enough that 1 to 2C of aerosol geoengineering can get us to 2 to 3C above pre-industrial.

It's rather different to use aerosol geoengineering to deal with 10 to 15C from 1000 ppm of CO2, plus high HFC's and other greenhouse gases and a high climate sensitivity, when it's credible that such high forcing puts us right on the edge of a runaway towards the boiling temperature of water.

The End of Magical Climate Thinking

2010-01-14T06:17:00.000-08:00

A thought provoking article, which I largely agree with:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/13/the_end_of_magical_climate_thinking?page=0,0

Predicting weather and climate

2010-01-13T06:57:00.001-08:00

Recently somebody on the BBC was wondering aloud how much trust we should place in forecasts for 2050, when the Met Office cannot seem to get their seasonal forecasts right.

Well, most people will agree that we can reasonably predict with little computing power what would happen if we put Earth into the orbit of Mercury or Pluto.

The far range forecasts boil down to:

1. Radiation properties of CO2 indicate a 1C increase from a doubling
2. If relative moisture in the atmosphere stays the same, this greenhouse gas will go up and cause more warming, getting us to around 3C
3. Other things might change, like cloudiness or relative moisture, so "climate sensitivity" might be 1.5 to 4.5 C instead

And of course they might be wrong and we are overlooking something.

Runaway warming

2010-01-13T06:42:00.000-08:00

http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange/browse_thread/thread/5ef0208131d348bf

The summary answer is, runaway warming on Earth is plausible given a sufficient forcing, and especially plausible once the ice sheets have melted and we are at around 300K (ie of the order of 25 to 30C) already.

"The dark side"

2010-01-13T05:28:00.000-08:00

Climate change is a very complex subject, yet there is a huge tendency to simplify the issue in blogs or the news media, and to divide people into groups, typically along an axis of more/less action or more/less impact expected from greenhouse gas emissions or more/less temperature rise expected from a doubling of CO2 emissions or more/less action of a specific nature (technology support/cap and trade). The people on your side are then the reality or science or common sense based community and the other side are conspiracists, arrogant, rude, reality denying and generally tainted by vague association with other really despicable people on their side.

A denialist can be someone who thinks we don't emit a significant amount of CO2, or someone who thinks that doubled CO2 will lead to a 3C temperature increase, but who disagrees that cap and trade is the right policy instrument to use.

An alarmist may be someone who thinks that doubling of CO2 will lead to a 3C temperature increase and that a carbon tax of 20 Euros per metric tonne of CO2 is the right policy instrument, or someone who thinks that it's 100% certain past emissions have already put us over the threshold of Venus like global warming with the oceans boiling away before 2050.

Carbon pricing / lessons from ozone depleting refrigerants

2010-01-13T05:10:00.000-08:00

There is no emissions market for ozone depleting HCFC's, no equivalent at all for the carbon price widely discussed for climate change.

A simple measure outlawing ozone depleting substances was sufficient.

----------------

Today I attended an interesting colloquium on refrigerants and global warming. A point I very much liked was that for short term national goals measures aimed at reducing refrigerant loss through better maintenance procedures was the better option, but long term and worldwide whole system replacement with different refrigerants being used looked better.

I see how this applies to climate change. Short term to meet Kyoto goals, it may be best to spend money on burning nat gas rather than coal, long term and worldwide, it pays to develop cheap technology that is entirely emissions free.

Hansen on Ice Age prevention

2010-01-02T20:52:00.000-08:00

http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2007/11/interesting-claims-from-james-hansen.html

"In contrast,
prevention of an ice age is a trivial task for humans, requiring only a ‘thimbleful’ of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), for example."

Interesting how casually Hansen drops in what I'd refer to as geoengineering as a way of preventing ice ages. Imagine he would say something like "Oh, it's trivial to deal with greenhouse gases, requiring only a tiny amount of the right aerosols."

How to quantify people's stance on climate change?

2010-01-01T02:01:00.000-08:00

It would be nice to have a simple, one dimensional scale measuring the amount of action people want.

One such scale would be carbon taxes which could range from 0 to thousands of Euros per tonne.

But, there is more to action than just carbon taxes or even a carbon price. There are many measures that involve no explicit price point. For example, such a measure could be that no new coal fired power stations are permitted and old ones are no longer allowed to use coal from a certain date on. Or major coal and oil producers such as Saudi Arabia and Australia could outlaw any fossil fuel extraction activities on their territories.

Being against carbon pricing does not imply being against drastic actions to reduce emissions. And being in favour of 20 Euros per tonne may be based on seeing the need for 100% reductions by 2050, but lots of optimism about what's required to achieve that, or it might be based on a perception that BAU is pretty close to optimal up to 2050 and 20 Euros per tonne is not going to make much of a dent in BAU emissions and does not have to.

Hansen on runaway warming

2010-01-01T01:53:00.000-08:00

http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange/browse_thread/thread/5ef0208131d348bf

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427381.700-will-you-stand-up-...
"James Hansen, is telling it as he sees it, and the result is the most frightening book I have ever read, for three reasons.
First, Hansen has come to believe, based on studies of past climate change, that the threat facing us is far worse than he thought even a few years ago. The very survival of life on Earth is at stake, he says. The sun is 2 per cent brighter than it was just 250 million years ago, and if we burn up all the fossil fuel on the planet - all the oil, coal, tar sand and tar shale - we will trigger a runaway greenhouse effect that will ultimately lead to the oceans boiling away, he claims."

The IEA on how to achieve 2C

2009-12-30T03:09:00.000-08:00

http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2009/climate_change_excerpt.pdf

They think 450 ppm CO2equ will do the trick, and don't deal with aerosols or non CO2 greenhouse gases in this report. They also allow an overshoot (to 510 ppm by 2035) before the concentration target is reached and only discuss measures to 2030.

I think this report is very strong on clearly laying out what investments are required to achieve the CO2 emissions trajectory they assume. It gives estimates of capital cost and splits this down into country and technology categories (eg CCS in China).

Compared to the work of Tol, there is also much emphasis on measures that do not require carbon prices, notably end use efficiency standards and industrial sector agreements. Examples would be fuel economy standards, building insulation standards or carbon intensity standards for steel producers.

I find the IEA report quite persuasive and realistic in this respect. We are not going to get 100 Euro per tonne CO2 taxes in China anytime soon, but convincing them to put in a mandate that CO2 emissions per km for cars may not be higher than 100 g of CO2 by 2025 say. Well, that's doable. They also assume most of the heavy lifting after 2020, with actual emissions 6% higher in 2020 than in 2007 and the 450 scenario only 11% below BAU. 3/4 of the additional 10 trillion in investments are for the 2020's rather than for the 2010's.

Where the report is clearly weak is on the modelling of the overall economic impact and the cost and benefits. As far as I can see, economic growth is simply assumed as a background variable. It's not affected by the greenhouse gas measures. World GDP in the reference and 450 cases is precisely the same, and as far as I can see, this does not come out of the modelling, it's what's put into it.

The costs and benefits of the 450 scenario are largely reduced to the investment cost, on the one hand, and the fuel savings, on the other. Now, there are good reasons for efficiency standards and there can be market failures that mean a standard can achieve a reduction at 0 cost to the consumer, where 100 Euro per tonne of CO2 taxes would not do the trick. Fine.

But, there's more to the cost benefit picture than just fuel savings and investment costs. There are the costs that may result from impacts on economic growth, which are as far as I can see are simply not modelled at all. And, 8 trillion Dollars of fuel savings is not as clearly a benefit to the world as a whole, as it might seem. For Mid East oil producers who can produce the oil at negligible cost, that's trillions of Dollars of lost benefits. The oil consumers spend the same amount of labour, so they are off the same, but the oil producers will notice that they no longer benefit from the fruits of that labour. In simple terms, think of the oil consumers producing 2 cars in the reference scenario, one they use, and one they sell to Mid East oil producers; in the 450 scenario, they now produce one more efficient car and don't sell anything to the Mid East with the net effect that the Mid East doesn't get a car.

Carbon tax in France

2009-12-29T23:59:00.000-08:00

http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2009/12/29/01011-20091229FILWWW00515-taxe-carbone-fillon-annonce-une-suite.php

The carbon tax in France is not popular, it is a right wing government that is trying to implement it, and the main left opposition is strongly against it. The tax is 17 Euros per tonne of CO2 and more than half of emissions are exempted entirely.

Nevertheless, the opposition decided to appeal to the constitutional court and managed to get the tax revoked for the time being. The conservative government is trying to modify the measure and see whether they can still get something adopted.

------------------

My comment: Let me be clear, I am against carbon taxes and cap and trade and other means of putting a price on carbon at this point. I think the properly discounted value of reducing CO2 emissions is zero or modestly below zero. Seeing how high taxes on petrol already are, and as I think there are good reasons for high taxes on some fossil fuels, I am not going to throw a monster fuss over a 30 Euro per tonne tax or equivalent cap and trade regime which properly address leakage and fraud concerns. But, I am hardly going to cry tears, if a 17 Euro per tonne of CO2 carbon tax in France gets shredded, even though over half of emissions are exempted, electricity production is already largely carbon free and the country is fairly wealthy. I do say though, good luck to anybody who is hoping that China will implement a 100+ Euro carbon tax anytime soon that doesn't exempt coal.

I see most value in measures that lead to technology development, and to justify those measures it's enough to see the potential for carbon reduction to have some substantial value sometime in the medium (20-100 years) future.

What uncertainties do really matter for formulating climate policy?

2009-12-28T06:22:00.000-08:00

Much has been said about discount rates and impacts. What I think is less obvious are the effects of technology development assumptions, such as whether technology development is

1. primarily very sensitive to pure research and development spending (the Lomborg position, increase clean energy R and D by a factor 50 and we'll solve the climate problem at 0.2% of GDP cost, because so little qualifies presently as real R and D by his definition)

2. there is also a large component to technology development from large scale implementation and substantial network and path dependency issues (we need large scale implementation of PV or wind or electric cars and then the private sector will do the development work)

3. technology development occurs at its own pace

4. technology development can be advanced, but the most efficient path is that chosen by the invisible hand of the market

Very high carbon taxes starting in the very near future are the recommendation, if:

1. Impacts are high, and depending on how you look at discount rates, also preferably near term
2. Technology development cannot be banked on, or only so with very high carbon taxes

Now, assuming technology development can be advanced cheaply through either basic R and D support, or somewhat less cheaply, but still at a good price point, via either government support for getting an industry started (PV feed-in tariffs, ethanol blending mandates, electric car mandates or subsidies) or 20 Euro a tonne of CO2 carbon prices,

obviates the need to hammer energy demand down and impose sky high taxes on fossil fuels permanently to make alternatives viable.

In an all to frequent skeptics vs alarmists fight, skeptics claim mitigation costs will be high, justifying only low carbon prices, and alarmists claim mitigation costs will be low, thereby concluding that high carbon prices will not be necessary.

Which leaves my head spinning.

Political reality is that a very high (of the order of current taxation of petrol in Europe), universal carbon price is not going to happen anytime soon, unless a lot more evidence can be brought forward that this is really the only way a major catastrophe for humanity (definition, think of nuclear war wiping out most of humanity and reducing the rest to the living standard of the Roman Empire) can be avoided.

Therefore it seems to me that the key policy question is how best to support technology development. Is it mandates for electric cars? Feed-in tariffs? Multiplying the energy research budget of universities by a factor 50? Increasing taxation on fossil fuels that are not already taxed highly (respectively reduce subsidies in places where they are highly subsidised such as Venezuela)?

And how to deal with leakage issues and providing fair incentives to those investing in technology development.

Non conclusions

2009-12-24T04:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.e3network.org/papers/Economics_of_350.pdf

Here is a paper that claims:

"The most important conclusion involves what we did not find. There are no reasonable studies that say that a 350 ppm stabilization target will destroy the economy; there are no studies that claim that it is desirable to wait before taking action on climate protection. On the contrary, there is strong, widespread endorsement for policies to promote energy conservation, development of new energy technologies, and price incentives and other economic measures that will redirect the world economy onto a low-carbon path to sustainability."

Unfortunately, they do not give a recommendation for a carbon price, making it rather difficult to compare with Tol's work.

And more importantly, this means I've got little idea what they are actually recommending in the near term. "Taking action" is awfully vague.

So, would they favour a 10 Euro per tonne of C tax on coal in Europe, or should it be 50? Should steel producers get a refund of 50 Euros per tonne of steel produced to prevent leakage?

What should be done about taxes on fuel oil, petrol, diesel?

They may think that by talking down costs they are creating momentum for "strong policy action". I am not so sure.

Update:

http://www.pik-potsdam.de/research/research-domains/sustainable-solutions/research-act-intl-climate-pol/recipe-groupspace/working-papers/recipe-synthesis-report/

The above is a very detailed report, which does have carbon price projections.

On page 24 there are graphs for a range of models that give 450 ppm. In the technologically most optimistic model the carbon price starts around 10 Dollars per tonne of CO2, is at around 30 Dollars per tonne in 2030, around 100 Dollars per tonne in 2050 and stabilises out at that level.

The other two models have much higher carbon prices, one of them starts at around 100 Dollars per tonne (sometime between 2010 and 2020) and rapidly rises to around 300 Dollars per tonne (sometime in the 2020s). The other one is in the 10 to 30 Dollar per tonne range until 2030 and rises to very steep values, above a 1000 Dollars per tonne of CO2 later in the century.

---------------

Conversion of Dollars per tonne of CO2 to Dollars per tonne of C: multiply by 3.7

Reliability of carbon tax estimates

2009-12-23T08:05:00.000-08:00

How high do carbon taxes have to go to get to a particular temperature target?

Naturally, there is a lot of uncertainty there, and maybe the numbers economic models typically give for 2C are too high.

What I would say is that currently there are already taxes on fossil fuels, quite high taxes on transportation fuels most notably, several hundred Euros per tonne of petrol. These high taxes do already give a big incentive to drive less, to drive electric cars or use electric trains and to drive more efficient cars.

It is therefore difficult for me to see why a mere 10 or 30 Euros extra per tonne should be enough to make a difference there in the near term, and it seem readily credible that several hundred Euros per tonne of CO2 are needed to achieve significant reductions in the transportation sector.

For electricity this is less clear cut, because taxes, at least on the input coal and nat gas, are low. Nevertheless, it takes time to build new infrastructure and scrapping existing coal or nat gas fired power plant will not happen overnight.

So, also for electricity I see why substantial near term reductions would require a lot more than just 10 to 30 Euros per tonne.

Finally, I think that people who seriously think the 2C target is warranted based on the possible risks we take otherwise, and do not want to bet on big improvements in technology, should realise this. How can you say "We've got to take the 2C target seriously!" and "We can't bet on technolgoy saving the day!" and yet say "Don't believe in all that scaremongering about costs, 30 Euros per tonne is going to do the trick."?

Not that I have a problem with 30 Euros per tonne, fine policy as far as I am concerned, considering how much we are taxing petrol anyway.

New Scientist on costs of 80% UK reduction

2009-12-23T07:48:00.000-08:00

In the New Scientist there is an article suggesting minor costs. The underlying study can be found here:

http://www.newscientist.com/data/doc/article/mg20427373.400/ce_new_scientist_report.pdf

They have a carbon price of 210 Euros per tonne of CO2 for the non ETS of the UK in 2050 and of 410 Euros per tonne of CO2 for the ETS in 2050. The conversion to Dollars per ton of carbon is roughly: multiply by 1.5 to convert to Dollars, multiply by 44/12 or 3.7 to convert from tonnes of CO2 to tonnes of C. So, this is actually above the $1000/tC limit Richard Tol's FUND model can actually deal with.

The impact on GDP is, however, only 1.4% and on consumer prices for most products it's indeed minor, with some exceptions such as flights.

Anybody have an idea how they manage to combine sky high carbon prices with minor economic impacts?

There is this dubious section in there, of course:

"The ambitious nature of the target required further technological assumptions to be
made. In the modelling, it is implied that the government uses revenues from the
auctioning of EU ETS emissions allowances and from carbon taxes to help encourage
the following measures:
 the switch from gas to electricity in the domestic sector
 the increased market penetration of electric vehicles, to 90% by 2050
The rest of the revenues are assumed to be used to reduce public debt and so do not
affect consumer prices."

Low discount rates

2009-12-23T05:49:00.000-08:00

I see an obvious problem with low discount rates. With a high discount rate and a given pot of money today, you can compare different options of investing the money and you take the option that yields the most.

Calculating back from future costs is a bit more tricky. With a discount rate of zero, even 1% of GDP for hundreds of future generations will add up to more than the present generation produces, which is an obvious impossibility, we can't spend more than what we have.

Another climate riddle

2009-12-23T05:42:00.000-08:00

How can research on CO2 sequestration have any worth if an economic model says the present marginal CO2 damage cost is 0?

The answer is that the marginal damage cost runs up over time. The model can have 0 at present, 20 Euros per tonne of CO2 in 2050 and 150 Euros per tonne of CO2 in 2150.

If it is zero at present, as explained in an earlier posting, this is the sum of near term benefits from getting to an optimum temperature (say 2C) faster and the discounted costs of getting away from the optimum again in the future.

The NPV of an invention that can sequester CO2 at 30 Euros per tonne is then far from zero. It has to be discounted over many decades into the future, but also over many, many tonnes, so that you easily come to an NPV of the order of a trillion Euros.

Key difference between near term CO2 emissions reduction and aerosols

2009-12-23T04:57:00.001-08:00

CO2 reductions in the near future will get us from 5C under BAU to 4C in 2100+, near term changes in aerosols output from sea ships will impact near term temperatures and make no difference to temperature in 2100+.

If you think that 2C is optimal, depending on discount rates and how bad 5C is in comparison to 4C you can still argue that near term CO2 reductions are beneficial, but keeping aerosol emissions from sea ships high in the near term is clearly wrongheaded.

Sea salt aerosol forcing should then only be raised gradually once 2C has been passed.

------------------------
Side point: The “optimum” for temperature and CO2 are linked, but if for temperature effects alone the optimum is 2C, it may be higher for CO2, because it also has an important direct effect, namely CO2 fertilisation (and disbenefit, ocean acidification).

It can therefore be argued (I know a minority opinion that I am, however, partial to) that the optimum may therefore be to keep the temperature rise to 2C with sea salt aerosols, but for CO2 concentrations to roughly triple on pre-industrial, which with other forcings held, most notably no sea salt aerosol geoengineering being used, would give something like 4 to 5C.

Low probability, high risk events and climate change

2009-12-23T04:31:00.000-08:00

With sea level rise of 1 m per century over hundreds of years, we can just include it in the overall assessment, with some people (like me for example) happily discounting the far future away to essentially zero for this.

If it is "risks we don't know about", I do think we cannot so readily say they are lopsided, ie emissions reductions have a 0% probability of causing any "risks we don't know about" and a 100% probability of avoiding these risks.

We don't need certainty in that case, but we do need to have some case for believing that a given course of action is likely to only produce risk reduction benefits, rather than having an equal chance of causing or preventing risks.

Marginal CO2 damage cost riddle

2009-12-23T04:22:00.000-08:00

In the published literature there are studies with an ideal carbon price of 0 or less than zero. Yet, even in those studies that have a positive effect on GDP for climate change of one or two degrees Celsius, long term BAU will lead to climate change exceeding the optimum.

So, why can you still have a zero marginal cost today? After all, by emitting less today we can get from a bad 5C to a somewhat less bad 4C. And to the optimal 2C (say) we get anyway.

The answer is the timing of the optimal 2C and discounting. While emitting a marginal tonne of CO2 in these studies has negative consequences after say 2100, up to say 2050, we are getting to the optimum faster and there is a net benefit of the extra CO2 in that period. That extra benefit is in the near future and hardly discounted, the benefits of emissions reductions only come in the far future and are heavily discounted.

Richard Tol continued

2009-12-23T00:23:00.000-08:00

http://www.esri.ie/UserFiles/publications/20090311112249/WP285.pdf
(that's a free link, figures and tables are missing, Elsevier charge for access to the full article)

The feasibility of low concentration targets: An application of FUNDEnergy Economics, Volume 31, Supplement 2, 2009, Pages S121-S130Richard S.J. Tol

There are a number of interesting figures in this paper.

1. Willingness to pay by US voters

Rather than going to elaborate cost benefit models to come up with an optimal carbon price, you can also just ask US voters what they'd support. It looks like a vast majority of US voters could be gotten on-board when there is little in transfer payments, India and China participate and the measures cost less than 1% of GDP, which should be enough for a target of 3 to 4C.

2. Results of cost benefit analyses

If everybody participates right away, the cost benefit analysis presented here indicates a better than even chance of cost effectiveness for a target of 4.5 W/m2, which translates into 3 to 4C.

This drops to less than even chances without full participation with developing nations like India and China delaying carbon taxation.

3. Results of carbon trading with full costs of carbon abatement initially born by industrialised nations

A 2C target compatible forcing target is not even evaluated. For 3.7 W/m2 transfer payments to developing countries (that is also to China) amount to 0.9% of developed country GDP in 2020 and to 3% in 2030.

4. Feasibility of 2C target, economic impacts

2.6 W/m2 is somewhat compatible with a 2C target. Four cases are calculated, and for 3 of these the carbon price is above $1000/tC starting immediatately and rising further. GDP losses aren't calculated for these 3, because the model cannot deal with prices above $1000/tC.

With full participation (or developed countries paying the full costs) the model gives an immediately necessary carbon price of over 800 Dollars per ton of carbon. GDP losses are 2% of GDP in developed nations in 2020, and around 14% for the rest of the world. Transfer payments required are not calculated, but given that the rest of the world is 50% of world GDP at the moment, it ought to be 10%+ of developed country GDP.

For 2100 GDP losses are calculated of 20-50%.

The conclusion one can take from this paper is that a 2C target is neither politically feasible nor vaguely justifiable on the basis of cost benefit analysis.

To get away from these conclusions we'd need:

1. Carbon negative energy options
2. Include at least some aerosol type geoengineering
3. Cheap options to deal with other greenhouse gases (methane, N2O)
4. Reduced costs for renewable energy

----------------

My own take on the best climate policy:

Targets are all very interesting, but really what matters is policy. We already tax fossil fuels. That's fine and there are good reasons to increase these taxes and decrease subsidies over time. That has in fact been happening and will continue.

Otherwise, we need more research and development, and I include a lot more in this category than Bjorn Lomborg would.

Heleen de Coninck on Copenhagen

2009-12-22T05:04:00.000-08:00

http://cop15.ecn.nl/fileadmin/cop15/HdeC_21-12-09.pdf
(in Dutch)

Richard Tol on emission reduction

2009-12-21T13:41:00.000-08:00

"The marginal damage costs of carbon dioxide emissions: an assessment of the uncertainties"

Energy Policy Volume 33, Issue 16, November 2005, Pages 2064-2074

"One hundred and three estimates of the marginal damage costs of carbon dioxide emissions were gathered from 28 published studies and combined to form a probability density function. The uncertainty is strongly right-skewed. If all studies are combined, the mode is $2/tC, the median $14/tC, the mean $93/tC, and the 95 percentile $350/tC. Studies with a lower discount rate have higher estimates and much greater uncertainties. Similarly, studies that use equity weighing, have higher estimates and larger uncertainties. Interestingly, studies that are peer-reviewed have lower estimates and smaller uncertainties. Using standard assumptions about discounting and aggregation, the marginal damage costs of carbon dioxide emissions are unlikely to exceed $50/tC, and probably much smaller."

http://www.esri.ie/UserFiles/publications/20090326110224/WP285.pdf

"This can be kept below 2.0ºC (in the 21st century), but only for a carbon tax of $1000/tC, starting in 2013 and rising with the rate of discount, and applied to all greenhouse gas emissions in all countries. "

I like the basic idea of looking at a given carbon tax path and estimating what it'll do in principle. But, $1000/tC is not outrageous for taxing transportation fuels. It is, however, rather high compared to estimated costs for CO2 mineralisation or other CO2 negative options (say CO2 capture and storage from ethanol plants). I suspect these have been excluded from the analysis and this limits the possibilities for keeping below 2C at a more realistic cost.

And, I think at least "mild" geoengineering (sea salt spraying say to replace current anthropogenic aerosols from sea shipping and use of high sulphur heavy fuel oil) at a modest level should be part of the analysis. It's one thing to use aerosols as the whole strategy and to compensate quadrupled CO2 plus lots of methane and other greenhouse gases that would give 10C plus in the absence of aerosols with continuous injection of large amounts of sulphur based aerosols, and quite another to maintain (at least a portion of) the current aerosol related cooling forcing of 1.2 W/m2 (equivalent to about 1C for a best guess climate sensitivity).

I should also add, that while I see some reasons why people have worries about 10C from greenhouses gases being compensated by 10C of aerosol cooling; I don't quite swallow these arguments just like that. I don't like the handwavey, "how can you consider something so obviously bound to have terrible consequences" approach to rejecting it without seeing any need to consider it further.

Positive externalities

2009-12-16T00:29:00.000-08:00

Over on the global change discussion group I've put this up for discussion:

I'd like to put these up for discussion in two contexts:
1. The "guilt" question - How solid is the case for "climate debt" for past emissions? Should this debt be repaid to innocent developing countries suffering from "our" past and present emissions sins?
2. Clean technology development financing
It is often argued that developing countries will suffer most and have contributed little to past emissions. We have benefited from past emissions, they will suffer, so we should reimburse them.
This is quite a sensible argument. However, I think the positive externalities are all too easily forgotten. If Europe and the US had never burnt any coal, there would be less CO2 in the atmosphere, but there would also be no vaccines, no mobile phones, no photovoltaics, no modern wind turbines, no batteries.
The availability of these technologies is, has been and will continue to be a huge boon to the development of poorer nations, all of which have higher living standards today than a 100 years ago.
I would argue that huge transfers to developing countries are the right thing to do, because so much more good can be done there than in Europe or the US; not because of a need to atone for past sins.
---------------------------
Technology development can lead to huge external benefits. Sometimes, via patents or through first mover advantages, the developer can be fairly rewarded with the right incentives provided.
But, when it's hard to capture a reasonable share of the benefits, private investors will not cough up any cash.
That's of course the reason for feed-in tariffs of 40 cents per kWh for PV. It's also why no private investor will sink money into CO2 mineralisation technology. Or why it's so hard to get private money for fighting malaria or improving African crop yields.
Now I like the CDM as conceived. It can be much cheaper to reduce emissions in developing countries, and why not do that for 1 Euro per tonne, and then not reduce in developed countries for 10 Euros per tonne. It's development aid combined with cost reduction. In theory at least.
I am wondering whether we should in a similar manner reward clean technology development spending. Already with CDM there are questions about additionality (would the country do it anyway? or worse would it otherwise have speeded up regulatory action?) and measurement against base line.
Of necessity, this is even harder for technology spending. Say, if Germany or Spain choose to spend 10 billion Euros on feed-in tariffs, how much is that going to reduce emissions over the long term in the rest of the world?
I would propose to deal with this through a cost cap. Beyond a certain level, say 25 Euros per tonne (reviewed every year), governments can sell unlimited emissions allowances and use the proceeds for clean technology funding. Alternatively, if there are no emissions allowance markets and just hard caps for individual countries, the country could be allowed to meet some of its target by counting clean development spending at 25 Euros per tonne.

Old post on aerosols on Global change

2009-12-12T15:53:00.000-08:00

http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange/browse_thread/thread/cbe22ce1dae48e27/eddf69ceb8773abd?lnk=gst&q=gerhaush#eddf69ceb8773abd

... you get 2.14C as the equilibrium response to present GHG forcing.
But, total GHG forcing is currently offset by aerosols to a poorly known degree.
If you stick in total forcing compared to pre-industrial, namely 1.6 W/ m2, things look considerably better. 1.6 W/m2 is less than half of 3.7 W/m2, and gives you an equilibrium response of 1.3C. Due to thermal lag, only about 0.7C are already realised and another 0.6C are in the pipe-line.
One of my pet themes is aerosols. What you'll notice from these figures is the consequences of reducing sulfate emissions towards zero, while say reducing CO2 emissions just enough to keep concentrations constant. As about half the CO2 is sunk at the moment, that's also roughly the reduction required to keep concentration constant.
If we do that instantaneously, and simultaneously eliminate aerosols, we've got a slightly better than 50% chance of missing a 2C target.
If we keep all forcings constant, however, I get that the climate sensitivity would have to be above 3 times 2/1.3 or more than 4.5 C, which means I think that a 2C target could be met with greater than 95% probability.
The critical importance of aerosols is something that is completely lost in the public debate.
But it is the loss of aerosol cooling from emissions reductions that means we likely need huge cuts in GHG emissions to avoid 2C with greater than 90% probability.

Another very good global change thread

2009-12-12T11:42:00.001-08:00

http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange/browse_thread/thread/de041f09df3d3873/9eebfe21d6da38d7?lnk=gst&q=extropic#9eebfe21d6da38d7

Virtually everything in this thread is worth reading.

It starts with James Annan writing the following:

Even if one assumes the premise that we are "optimally adapted" to the present climate (which I think would be difficult to rationally defend), it does not follow that changes to the climate would result in net costs.
...

Looking through posts on the global change list

2009-12-12T11:24:00.000-08:00

> However, I believe if you calculate the net present value of some > catastrophe that lies even 100 or 200 years in the future, using the > usuual discounting method employed by business economists and > government planners, you do end up with a net present value for the > disaster that makes it virtually irrelevant to people living in > present. I think the only reasonable way to determine that value is by asking people what deprivations they are willing to suffer today for the sake of avoiding a catastrophe 200 years hence.
But, I also think that when there are real investment returns, interest rates are useful.
Say I might want to do something for people 200 years hence, then I could buy some stainless steel, bury it in my garden and leave it there for 200 years to be used by my descendants then.
Or I could buy the steel, make a wind turbine from it, generate electricity with it, make more steel with the electricity and then after 200 years leave my descendants not 1 tonne of steel but 1000 tonnes of steel in the form of wind turbines.
Putting these two ways of approaching interest back into climate change terms. I think it makes no sense to discount the value of species loss or of a 10% probability of the end of humanity, but I don't want to pay 100 Dollar today, so that descendants of mine in 2300 making a million Dollar a year, can spend 110 Dollar less in dike maintenance; especially so, when assuming only slowly declining real investment returns over the long term, I could invest those 100 Dollars and turn them into a million Dollars over those 300 years paying for 10000 such dike improvements.
Nor do I want to spend 90% of my income today to prevent a catastrophe in 2300, when much richer people in 2100 could do the same with 10% of their income.
I accept Michael's point, which I think basically is (Michael may chime in, if I get him wrong), that the sum total of what we do must allow substantial real positive returns, otherwise people in 2300 will be fewer in number and poorer than we are today living on a poisoned planet, and indeed be helped more by burying something for them to use then, than they would be by us misinvesting the oil or steel today.
From a "how much deprivation today is the well being of people in 2300 worth to us" perspective, a 0% real investment return may be more than enough to justify the expenditure (not buying a big car so that some poor fellow in 2300 has enough to eat may seem like a good deal to many people), or far too little (not buying anything to eat today, so that poor fellows in 2300, 2400, 2500 ... 10450 have enough to eat may not seem like a very good idea at all to rather many people).

I've got a big logical problem with using discount rates to work out how much should be spent today to save future generations some costly damage, as I've alluded to in my previous post. A discount rate above 0 discounts far future generations to nothing, but a discount rate of 0 means a small annual damage incurred by a huge number of future generations would justify spending all our resources today, leaving our own generation nothing to live on.
Surely how much deprivation the spending means today has to figure somehow?
Put differently, I am happy to put money I don't need into an account that pays 0% interest. But even 100% interest isn't going to interest me, if I am asked to deposit the money I need to buy food to survive.
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Climate change economics boils down in practise to considerations like "I'll buy a smaller car and I'll have done my bit to save those cute polar bears."
And that's the way it should be I suppose, we compare in simple terms what we give up for our climate change investment and what we get back, and then judge whether the sacrifice is worth it. It's just that when I look at climate change economics, I do it with some awe for the real power of compound interest, and with a belief that there are many real investment opportunities with huge returns today.
Do you see what I am driving at? Just because some people use discount rates in silly ways doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water and deny that there are real investment opportunities with returns well above zero and powerful compounding opportunities, and that this needs to figure in our decision making.

CRU continued

2009-12-12T11:17:00.000-08:00

Does the information from the Cru that has found its way into the public domain change my views about what should be done about climate change?

No.

I've given the below comment on the issue elsewhere:

It's pretty hard to communicate accurately to the public what "the science" says. I think it would help to refrain from loud, but unspecific calls for action, combined with a claim that this is precisely what "the science" says.

I think what the science says, if one has to abbreviate it into a one sentence type sound bite, is that the price of carbon given by models is from somewhere around 0 to thousands of Euros per tonne, depending primarily on assumptions about the fragility of ecosystems, equity, what drives wealth and how to account for the more uncertain risks.

If you don't claim (quite wrongly in my opinion) that the climate science is the key battle ground and that everything hangs on whether climate sensitivity is 1C or possibly 5C+ (a la Lindzen), or whether today's temperatures are warmer than the MWP (lots of Hockey stick debaters) or not, climate scientists can nicely stay above the fray and bask proudly in the glory provided by their widely acknowledged independence and objectivity.

Plus, it's much easier to have sensible discussions about say what we really know about the world average temperature between the years 1000 and 1500.

Paper by Ted Nordhaus

2009-12-11T00:40:00.000-08:00

http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/scrap%20kyoto.pdf

The above is quite an interesting paper. The basic argument is that energy price increases sufficient to provide the right incentives to develop clean energy are politically infeasible, and therefore, there must be much more focus on research and development.

I would say that the arguments of Ted Nordhaus apply even more to research, where absent climate benefits, there is no potential whatsoever for monetisation, and where it may be even harder for research funders to directly monetise the benefits. One example is air capture with minerals. The theoretical potential is huge, there is more than enough silicates to capture all past emissions and all conceivable future emissions. The potential for cost reductions is also very large. The chemical reaction between CO2 and olivine is exothermic, so it's not that we'd have to put large amount of energy into the capture. The reaction is slow, because the minerals have little contact with the CO2 in the air. Over geologic timescales, CO2 being mopped up by minerals is also the natural way that excess CO2 in the atmosphere is regulated away by nature.

But, what incentive is there for private industry to invest into research?

And even for governments it's not that attractive. A feed-in tariff on off-shore wind energy can be sold by the Dutch government as a way to develop technology Dutch companies can sell at a big profit to the rest of the world. But research on how to speed up rock weathering rates in Oman or the Alps? How do you sell that as a profit spinner?

Carbon taxes and Cap and Trade

2009-11-30T11:10:00.000-08:00

I am not a great fan of using either of these instruments. I like research and development support defined pretty widely better.

However, recently I've been thinking that we also can benefit from experience with policy instruments. Fossil fuels already are subject to large taxes and subsidies. So, how much harm is there really in innovatively renaming the taxes (and subsidies)?

It seems that even when the carbon price / tax level is still pretty low, there's enough screaming by the people getting hurt the most that the system gets tweaked again and again.

So, when there is danger of carbon leakage or large social damage, we notice and learn from the experience.

CRU continued

2009-11-30T11:00:00.000-08:00

I should clarify something about adjustments. For past temperature measured by ground based thermometers there's no way round adjustments. We cannot travel back in time. Stations have been moved, time of observation has changed and so forth.

For satellite data there are other reasons for adjustment and they are in fact not thermometer based.

For ground based thermometers and future temperature trends I think we could get away from adjustments.

HadCRU

2009-11-25T10:08:00.000-08:00

It is interesting how readily people claim that data has been "stolen" or respectively assume it must be a disgusted whistleblower insider (or a stupid mistake where data got placed on a webserver available for public download without even the need for a password)

without knowing a great deal about what actually happened. It's enogh to know who the "good guys" are clearly and which side you are on.

There are a few things I take from all this:

1. It makes it even more obvious how intensely biased many people are in this debate.

2. It undermines trust in the objectivity of scientists.

and

3. It undermines my own trust in the HadCRU temperature series

It does not change my opinion much about Mann's work, it's rather low already. I strongly suspect that peer review for the tree ring studies amounts to little more than friends rubberstamping each other's work, and says as much about the validity of the approach as the opinion of fellow technical stock analysts about the value of technical stock analysis.

I am now even more worried about world temperature series. It's not a new worry. I also got worried when people tried to explain away a substantial error in the US with it being only 2% of the world's surface. Of course, it's one of the bits of the world with the best station coverage and the error occurred over a ten year period, where the data was actually collected with the aim of perceiving climate trends. Yet, apparently, for extremely sparse stations maintained under Stalin and during WWII, we are supposed to be sure there are no issues. I know now that just changing the paint on a screen, or moving a station by 2 km, can have as much of an effect as all the warming we've seen in the 20th century. And I don't trust NASA GISS or HadCRU, when they say their adjustments (for missing data, time of observation during the day etc....) are fine and we should trust their great expert judgment.

I am not convinced these temperature series are actually all that important in the great scheme of things. We can make sensible global warming policy with errors of +/-0.5 C for 100 year trends and +/- 0.1 C for recent 10 year trends in their measurement, but if we want to make claim to higher accuracy, more needs to be invested in measuring them well.

It's the same as with population statistics. If you want accurate data, you don't sample 200000 people randomly, do some statistics magic, put it into a journal, and through the magic of peer review you've suddenly got accurate data, no you go to the expense of doing an actual census and the census then does not get judged on whether it's condensed down into an academic paper which is published in an academic journal with a few peer reviewers having read the paper.

If we want really accurate temperature data from now on, we need to invest in measuring it very accurately in many, many places, taking great care that no "adjustments" are needed, and the resulting product can then be taken seriously without the need to invoke the Gods of Peer Review.

How bad is 5% of GDP?

2009-11-23T05:14:00.001-08:00

I have given this as an estimate for a complete phase-out of carbon emissions over 30 years. Now it does not sound like much and in the sense that it is doable, it is not. But, when compared to other important expenditure it is actually rather substantial.

This is firstly, because we do use some of GDP for investment and some goes to consumption. If we cut investment in education or infrastructure and so forth we will hurt future GDP badly. So the base for the 5% does not correspond to the 2% productivity growth. We cannot quite get away with having all productivity growth go towards climate change and after 2.5 years of no income growth, we’ve fully financed climate change action. This base issue becomes even worse, when you demand that certain other priorities have to grow in line with GDP (say health care or military expenditure).

As I’ve pointed out before, developing nations are especially resistant to shouldering these 5%. There are various reasons for that, among others, that they have to spend a huge fraction of their GDP on development and that this development has big returns.

It is therefore the case that developing nations want developed nations to provide the whole finance. When the GDP split is 50/50, that means the developed nations have to shoulder 10% of their GDP, half for their own reductions, and half for those of developing nations. And, they need to raise this money without damaging incentives to work and produce. They also want to keep up investment in infrastructure, research and schools. They want to keep their military expenditures, they are faced with escalating health costs.

In the face of these considerations, 5% of GDP is so high, it won’t be spent, certainly not considering the nature of the problem we are talking about. If it really was about the survival of humanity, or something close, I think we could certainly go to the 50% of GDP the US spent on WWII.

What is the cost of cutting carbon?

2009-11-23T05:13:00.002-08:00

I’ve written about this before, but I’ll be taking another tack here.

In Europe the average citizen emits about 10 metric tonnes of CO2, in the United States that is about 20 metric tones. With a carbon tax of 20 Euros per tonne, that’s 200 Euros or 400 Euros per capita respectively. For a family of four with one wage earner, you have to multiply that by four again.

But that is not the cost of the measures that’ll be taken in response to the tax. On the one hand, it ought to be much lower than 200 Euros per person. The tax might induce a 10% reduction and the measures used to do so might range from negative cost to 20 Euros per tonne and average out to 5 Euros per tonne for 1 tonne saved, ie it’s not 200 Euros per person, but just 5 Euros per person.

On the other hand, it might reduce incentives to produce and work. For example, somebody living in the countryside might look at the rebate they get, if they don’t go to work, and compare it with the costs of commuting, and decide to stop working. Or a steel company might decide to plain shut down and the steel instead gets imported from a country without the tax.

The incentives to work and produce don’t hang on the 5 Euros per person, but on the 200 Euros per person of transfers and they usually depend on a difference, such as another 200 Euros in costs per month makes a job of 2000 Euros per month nonviable or an iron works goes bankrupt because of an extra 200 Euros per minute in costs with income of 2000 Euros per minute.

If the incentives effect of the 200 Euros in transfers therefore applies to 5% of transactions, 100 Euros per person in activity might conceivably not happen. Seen in that light, the net cost per tonne saved may then not be 5 Euros per tonne, but 105.

The impact on incentives to work and produce is very dependent on transfers of large sums of money. It’s another reason to prefer Cap and Trade, because it’s easier to control the type of incentives provided, and therefore avoid that say a steel works in the Netherlands shuts down, just so that one in China can be worked a bit harder.

Cap and Trade vs Carbon Taxes

2009-11-23T05:13:00.001-08:00

One of the beauties of Cap and Trade is that it is easier to avoid redistributive effects, or in other words you don’t want the “polluter” to pay, because he’ll then kick and scream in expectation of being hit hard, while those standing to gain financially will make nowhere near the same fuss prior to the introduction of the system.

In Cap and Trade you buy off the emitters by handing them free allowances. This seriously reduces the cost of a 10% emission reduction for companies. If a company cannot reduce emissions by 10% at less than the market price of 20 Euros per ton, we’ve got a market price of 20 Euros per ton, but the cost to the company is not 20 Euros per ton emitted, but only 20 Euros per ton bought in. As that’s 10% of the total emitted, the company only has a cost of 2 Euros per ton of carbon dioxide emitted. If the company can actually achieve a 20% cut at a cost of 10 Euros per ton, it’s even better. The company then gets free allowances for 90% of its baseline emissions, but reduces its emissions to 80%. So it gets to sell sufficient permits at 20 Euros per ton (10% of its baseline emissions) to make up for the 10 Euro per ton cost actually incurred (on 20% of its baseline emissions). The net effect is that the 10% emissions cut costs the company nothing at all. In a carbon tax situation, however, the company pays a tax of 20 Euros per ton on the 80% still emitted and on top of that needs to cough up 10 Euros per ton for the achieved savings of 20%.

I say in the previous paragraph that the cost of emission reductions is reduced, but note the added phrase “for companies”. With a carbon tax, when they cannot actually reduce emissions, there is no actual cost to the measures the companies take. In that example they don’t take any measures, so they don’t cost anything naturally. But the companies still experience a cost burden, namely they need to hand money over to the state, which may then redistribute it.

Who to trust on climate change?

2009-11-23T05:12:00.000-08:00

The advice I’d give is to be wary of people making statements outside their core area of expertise, and whether what they say may be coloured by what they think will convince people of the political case they want to make.

There are good reasons why in medical science there are so called double blind trials, where there is a group getting the real medication and one getting a placebo, but where also the assessing doctors do not know whether the patient is on real drugs or not.

I’d also say that there are many credible scenarios for the future and there’s no expert in the world who can objectively assess probabilities and desirability values for them. There’s always a lot of subjectivity that comes in. Be careful, when somebody tries to sell you something as expert opinion or “consensus” or the impartial and objective opinion of scientists, when it’s about subjective assessments the average person on the street is as qualified to make as any particular expert, and what the true experts say about their individual areas of expertise has only a very indirect relation with many subjective and/or inherently uncertain variables in between, to what is being claimed as “consensus”.