I’ve always been envious of John Holbo’s discovery of the two-step of terrific triviality, a manoeuvre we’d all seen, but never properly identified. I’d like to solicit names for a manoeuvre I run into all the time in debates over climate policy which goes along the following lines
A: The planet is doomed unless we abandon industrial civilization/adopt my WWII-scale emergency program
B (me): On the contrary,we could cut emissions by 50 per cent quickly and with minimal effects on living standards.[^1]
A: What about cars, methane from ag production, air travel etc?
B: (me) We could cut vehicle emissions in half just by switching to the most fuel-efficient cars now on the market, methane by eating chicken instead of beef, air travel by videoconferencing and taking one long holiday in place of two short ones. The same for most other sources of emissions.[^2]
A: That’s absurd. No one would ever stand for that.
So, does anyone have a name for this manoeuvre, or, alternatively, a defense of this kind of argumentation
[^1]: Actually, we need a 90 per cent reduction by 2050. That would be a bit harder, but once you accept the idea that we could greatly reduce emissions without harming living standards, we’re down to arguing about parameter values in economic models. All economic models yield the conclusion that we could decarbonize the economy over 40 years while still improving living standards greatly.
[^2]: I’ll leave aside the question of whether it’s better to bring this about using prices (eg a carbon tax) or direct controls. My preferred answer is a bit of both, but either will work for the purposes of this example.
John Quiggin 
The Lomborg Twist
Re air travel, modern planes if full are relatively fuel efficient. Globally air travel emits about the same proportion (3%) of GHG as does the power needed to run the Internet. (I heard this via Robyn Wiiliams ABC)
The “two-step of terrific triviality” reminds me of P.F. Strawson’s “non-sequitur of numbing-grossness”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bounds_of_Sense
“We could cut vehicle emissions in half just by switching to the most fuel-efficient cars now on the market, methane by eating chicken instead of beef, air travel by videoconferencing and taking one long holiday in place of two short ones. The same for most other sources of emissions.” – JQ.
Yes, we could try that and one would hope it would be a first step. Crucially, you go on to admit in note 1 that it’s really not nearly enough. I think the changes needed to achieve the 90% reduction will never come about from the free market nor from emission trading schemes. They will indeed only come a dirigist program in every country.
You say “All economic models yield the conclusion that we could decarbonize the economy over 40 years while still improving living standards greatly.” If that is the case, one wonders why it isn’t happening. The answer is that the current dominant market players are clearly reactionary rather than progressive in this regard. Those invested in fossil fuels and BAU generally are committed to BAU to avoid being stuck with stranded assets. A circuit breaker is needed and that circuit breaker is dirigist action.
However with the election of very right wing governments again in Australia and elsewhere we can see the pendulum has swung even further away from the possibility of action. I can’t see any action happening until it’s too late. The trouble is the long lead time. By the time it is obvious to everyone, even the right wingers, that we are in serious trouble it will be far, far too late to do anything about it.
Replacing all cars on the road in the world with the latest model and changing everyone from eating beef to chicken sounds a lot like a war-scale emergency program. Especially if you also consider that will only reduce emissions where they are but we also have to mobilise resources to make those the attractive public policy choices in China, Brazil, South Africa, India etc.
“We need” – who is the “We”? If you are saying, as I suppose you are, that the “we” is all the CO2 emitters of the world then you know that it won’t happen and what Australia should do and according to what reasoning, factoring in stated moral and scientific and economic/financial premises needs to be stated to avoid triviality so gross that it equates to irrelevance.
You’ve probably got a bit of mathematical nous JQ so perhaps you could tell us why we should put any trust in the IPCC with its outrageously unsuitable president and its 23 models (I said 7 but a physicist friend told me it was 23) that clearly are only guesses cooked up after a coincidence between rising greenhouse gases and actual warming was perceived with tweaks from time to time to improve the ability of the models to retropredict that last 50 years or so in the climate variables they are interested in. I note that the makers of the 23 models (or 7) see the need for difference and that none of them have been able to account for such obviously expectable correlates as the rising level of CO2 in the atmosphere and the almost static (high level compared with the previous 100 years or so) average atmospheric temperatures for 10 years and more. (The leaked East Anglia emails made it clear that already the failure of temperatures to go on soaring was regarded as a problem for the warmists).
I note too that several major problems haven’t been dealt with by that (mythical) 97 per cent of climate-consensus scientists. One is whether there is any and if so what positive feedback from the small temperature rises occasioned by the rise in CO2. This is of course critical though you write sometimes as if you don’t know that. Another is the failure to account convincingly for cloud formation and the effect of clouds on temperature. A third is the substantial failure to account for (or even to discover the important facts about) the movement of oceanic waters and the chemistry and temperatures therein. As the mass of the oceans is about 300 times that of the atmosphere and the CO2 in the oceans is also about 300 times that in the atmosphere it is hardly an unimportant point. Perhaps most telling if you want assurance that the models that worry us adequately take account of what nature does unaided by industry is the failure of the models to retropredict any of the major climatic catastrophes or just big changes in the past; e.g. the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, the Little Ice Age, the drying up of the Great Lakes, the collapse of the first Indus civilisation, the collapse of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (and second major drying out of the Sahara during the Holocene), successive Indian famines at about 80 year intervals.
We know the earth started warming with no help from CO2 about 250 years ago which is why the Little Ice Age ended? If we don’t understand how that happened and therefore can’t model its progress we can’t say anything much that is convincing about the latest phase of a warming which hasn’t been continuous anyway over the last century or so for reasons largely unknown though they seem to have a lot to do with oceanic oscillations.
None of this means that there isn’t some contribution from CO2 emissions to the scale of warming experienced over the last 50 years (or at least since the great Pacific Climate Shift of 1976 – try the Chow Test on that John) and that it mightn’t be a good thing if we could accelerate the world’s move to renewables without huge opportunity costs (including externalities like blights caused by windfarms to historic gardens and landscapes).
Also, the world is not listening… http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/09/12/us-autoshow-frankfurt-merkel-eu-idUKBRE98B0SZ20130912
I am pretty sure this ‘manoeuvre’ already has a title, that is, ‘The all or nothing principle’ way of thinking. Guess it could be up for re-naming though, if you want to add it to your C.V 😉
“or, alternatively, a defense of this kind of argumentation”
This “kind of argument” is basically “efficiency measures”, which has never worked globally (or even at a major economic national level). Ever.
Having recently come back from exile for standing up to some pretty hard provocation, it’s good to see that the host is so tolerant of Angus and his interesting views.
Free speech is obviously a subjective concept.
On topic, however, I would add to Ikon’s contribution: “Free Public Transport”
– No ticketing expenses
– No cash-handling
– No queues for tickets, policing or turnstiles
– Much less congestion for drivers
– Much less road building/maintenance/expansion
– Much less GHG emissions per traveller
– Massively reduced fossil fuel consumption…. oh, hang on that would upset the 1%. Aha, that is why this isn’t possible.
We simply can’t have a viable planet AND an economic system run on eternal growth controlled by a small number of ‘Wall Street’ elites. That way lies doom.
I don’t have a snappy name for it, but it’s basically letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Eco-perfectionism or bust?
In the USA, this sort of all-or-nothing argument is inevitable. “We” are opposed to the very idea of taking any action that subordinates “economic rights” to anything that can’t be spun as an immediate existential threat.
“There is a conspiracy afoot, Holmes, and Angus is onto it.”
The notion of industrial civilization creates in my mind a negative image,and not simply as smoke stacks. Civilization presupposes material and social technology, but to this point in human consciousness and development it has not included environmental sustainability. When this happens we will have qualitative, creative change, that is, “growth”.
Most of the time reactionary argument represent a partial state of mind for many of us, but I suppose it could be permanent.
In response to Angus’ unsupported assertions Pew research has the world putting climate change at the top of the list whereas in the US it is not a political priority, despite the science being accepted by a large majority.
http://www.pewresearch.org/key-data-points/climate-change-key-data-points-from-pew-research/
“A: That’s absurd. No one would ever stand for that.”
Treat it simply as another ill-informed assertion and refute it along the lines of “governments with bi-partisan support convince people to go along with all kinds of things, good and bad, smart and stupid” and give a few expmples. Some things governments do by a kind of stealth, such as neo-liberalism. Next.
Climate change is not our greatest problem anyway, sustainability is, which I remember JQ has said before.
http://theconversation.com/our-sustainability-crisis-didnt-start-and-doesnt-stop-at-climate-change-17471
@rog
What people say is not important. What they do is all that counts. We continue to do CO2 emissions at high and ever increasing levels. That’s all that counts. Systems governed by physical laws are unaffected by human opinions and unacted intentions. They are only affected by real quantities of matter and energy.
The road to climate change hell is paved with good intentions.
Look up ‘technocopian’ in the Urban Dictionary. Where the salvation requires a degree of personal sacrifice that the speaker has not demonstrated I’d be inclined to use the term ‘bullsh**ter’. I’m always amused by what I’d call mouse-humps-elephant arguments. For example Australia generated 1.1% of its electricity with solar in 2012. Therefore it is a simple matter to get that to 90%.
The collapse in the Greens vote may be explained by their disconnect from mainstream thinking on a range of issues. However if something really upsets people like coal ships on the GBR or World Heritage area logging then the Greens vote may be restored. People will ignore uncomfortable elements of the ideological package to send a message on key issues.
Exactly — climate change is one urgent manifestation of a more general problem. But that makes the situation less, not more, threatening, as the general issue isn’t manageable by technocratic means. If all we ‘fixed’ was climate change, we’d almost certainly still make our small planet unserviceable in the medium to long-term. I don’t know what social/political resources are needed to redirect the disastrous trajectory we’re on, but it’s become crystal clear that representative democracy doesn’t have them (at least not while corporations are allowed to rule the informational roost).
Not sure whether John is smiling at the predictability of it all, but already the comments have amply illustrated Ken’s Komments Kaos Theorem: regardless of the point of a blog post, 80% of commenters will use it as an excuse to talk about something else.
@Crispin Bennett
I think some sort of disaster has to befall rich nations, like running out of coffee or chocolate.;)
Chicken Little’s sour grapes?
@ Ikonoclast @rog
I didn’t expect to be agreeing with your terse and cynical statements but you’ve got the most important aspect of my reply to rog. Indeed that PEW research link has zero relevance to assessing the probabilities of Australian policies, words, expenditures, subsidies etc. being other than P**ing in the wind against the forces which may, or may not, affect Australia.
BUT, rog, what are my “unsupported assertions” – whether or not they are the ones that inspired your citing of peripherally and minimally relevant PEW research? I’m happy to clobber you with support even if most of what I say is easily verified, common knowledge or common sense for those who have lived a few adult years in the company of human modern human beings.
@ Salient Green to Crispin Bennett
That is a well attested truth that apply to the preservation of the environment. You mightn’t like my favourite example. That is the rescue of the New Zealand economy by Labour in the 1980s after a so-called conservative National Party government led by “Piggy” Muldoon which just kept on borrowing and spending to keep itself in office. It was of course just an extreme example of what politicians had been doing under the false banner of Keynesianism (the great JMK would not have countenanced it). I suppose you could count the Reagan-Volker rescue of the US economy in the early 80s as another example though Reagan’s spending on defence was a factor only possible in a more or less disaster proof country like the US. The Thatcher revolution had been made possible by “the winter of discontent” when the garbage piled up before the 1979 election though it wasn’t until after her second vicitory, assisted by the Argentinian junta, that she was really able to transform the economy. (Maybe the UK needs another disaster now).
Please rog, please, don’t do it. Just accept they used to grow grapes in England in King Alfred’s time – the local wine was so potent he burnt the cakes, you’ll recall – and let it go.
Not a defence, but an explanation: the argument arises from ignorance of the concept of incentives, or from disbelief in their operation. Without incentives, only compulsion and custom can guide behaviour. That’s why “no-one would stand for it” in the absence of compulsion.
Greg Mankiw is right this far: everybody would benefit from learning this much economics.
(And that almost all real markets are monopolistic, despite our best efforts; and about frictions. In macro, a thorough understanding of The Circular Flow of Income and the resulting “paradoxes” about covers it.)
One can get it from Tim Harford’s books, if one is prepared to treat them as textbooks rather than entertainment.
And policymakers need to figure out how to counter rational ignorance. That’s the hard bit, I guess.
@Megan
You are missing the point completely. Within very broad limits, and subject to not repeating the same point ad nauseam, commenters can express whatever views they like on this blog. Bans, enforced holidays etc are imposed on people who are abusive, or get into slanging matches with other commenters.
My reasons for this is straightforward. I don’t think much of Angus’ ideas, but readers can just skip his comments, and the replies, unless they feel like reading them. By contrast, when commenters start abusing each other, I have to try and straighten things out or risk driving away the rest of the audience. I don’t have the time for careful adjudication, so I don’t allow provocation as a defence – I just tell everyone involved to stop, or else be banned.
I’ve taken some time over this in the hope of settling the matter, but I’ll remind you that talking back to the ref (me) is also grounds for being sent off. So, please, no further discussion on this. Just keep clear of the commenter you’ve tangled with in the past, and don’t get into similar disputes with anyone else.
I’m impressed by your sensible take on AGW, PrQ.
In an attempt to be strictly on topic, let me suggest.
If B had responded by seeking clarification of A’s assertion, or by paraphasing it, the exchange of views and insights might have been more productive. Notwithstanding B’s response, A could have sought clarification. A could say, ” I am hearing what you are saying, but how quickly could the 50% reduction in emissions be achieved, because surely it possible that we will reach a unknown tipping point at which we will have no ability to influence outcomes. And then “What about . . .” I am not sure I can justify A’s final response, other than as an understandable emotional reaction. A could say, “I am feeling that you have not fully considered my premise that has more validity than you seem prepared to get it credit”.
I would describe the process as a dead-end dialectic, and the responsibility rests with both parties because they attempting to apply logic without emphatic listening.
” the argument arises from ignorance of the concept of incentives, or from disbelief in their operation.”
Belief in the ineffectiveness of disincentives, and an understanding that there is no precedent (ever) for the current proposed measures to work (even at a national level), would be an alternative view.
soundbite city strikes again.
looking for that mental hook to trigger a cascade of info(already publcally available)?
i wish you well JQ.
but
the only way i can see to have everybody individually and collectively act in our own self interest,is a broadcasting media campaign along the lines of the one that delivered the treasury benches to the incoming claimants of some sort of “mandate”.
(the medium doesn’t have to be the message)
as for the “landslide”?
more like a mudslide.
they’d better watch out,a rash of non-aligned MPs definitely does make things unpredictable.
On topic: If you wish to use a label, I suggest the term is “Attempting to battle brains with bullshit” (a favourite expression of my father).
My reasoning is that the final “rebuttal” from your provocateur (That’s absurd. No one would ever stand for that) is just a confusing nonsense.
1. On the one hand, “No one would ever stand for that” could mean that “Not everyone would permit actions (pricing or other interventions) that would curtail their activities to that extent”. No-one is arguing that everyone must change their actions – rich people may indeed increase their consumption/emissions, just to show how rich they are. The point of pricing or interventions is to change the actions of society as a whole, not of every individual member in a society (which would be absurd). So you (JQ) and your provocateur are in agreement.
2. On the other hand, “No one would ever stand for that” could mean that “No one person would permit actions (pricing or other interventions) that would curtail their individual activities to that extent”. This is a nonsensical argument, essentially claiming that price elasticity does not exist, or is insufficient to move consumption to the degree claimed (travel halved, chicken replace meat, etc). Some simple pricing studies could refute this claim/meaning, to show how absurd the position being put by your provocateur is.
3. On the other other hand, “No one would ever stand for that” could mean that “No society would permit actions (pricing or other interventions) that would curtail their individual activities (in totality) to that extent, without voting them out of power at the next election by a party whose platform is to negate the pricing/intervention activities and resume normal emissions.” One could debate the possibility of this happening, weighing up an increasingly educated society versus society being increasingly biased by advertising. [Add/debate here a party offering different pricing/intervention activities, that would meet our international obligations while promising better outcomes … for voters.]
I suggest seeking clarification from your (JQ) provocateur: 1 (an absurd thing to say, so you agree with your provocateur), 2 (an absurd thing for your provocateur to say) or 3 (something you could discuss)? Or do they mean something else? Regards.
@Angus Cameron
Angus, there is definitely a name for your manoeuvre. It’s called the “Gish Gallop”, in which an uninformed commentator attempts to throw out as many grossly incorrect claims as possible, hoping that no-one will be bothered to refute them all. I certainly can’t be bothered to go through all of them, but here’s a selection:
*NB To save time I’ll be providing as many supporting references as you did (none) but everything I say can be easily verified by an honest person with Google access.
1) “23 models” There are rather a lot of ways to model a system as complex as the climate, with broad categories including Ocean Atmosphere General Circulation Models for large scale effects and Regional Climate Models appropriate for smaller scale. Then there are a large number of different statistical methods for each, leading to a plethora of different models. You don’t seem to grasp that the large number of differing models and the strength of broad agreement between them regarding AGW is what makes the evidence so compelling. This point, fairly obvious to people who do science/modelling, often seems to confuse the uneducated.
2) “only guesses cooked up after a coincidence between rising greenhouse gases and actual warming.. tweaks from time to time to improve the ability of the models to retropredict that last 50 years “. Nonsense. Although obviously being refined (by well motivated physics research), for years now the IPCC models have shown excellent agreement with the temperature record for the last 150 years. For example Hansen’s now ancient modelling from 1988 was extremely consistent with the past record and, more impressively, has successfully predicted temperatures to the current day.
3) “whether there is any and if so what positive feedback from the small temperature rises occasioned by the rise in CO2″. This is probably my favourite in that only someone with literally no understanding of climate science could make this claim. This is because a roughly equivalent statement of the AGW hypothesis is precisely that there *is* such a feedback, and the nature of that feedback mechanism is one of the most intensively studied topics in the field.
4) ” …the Little Ice Age ended? If we don’t understand how that happened and therefore can’t model its progress” The ending of the LIA is quite well understood, being extremely well explained by variation in solar activity.
@Angus Cameron
Help me Angus ; there is a scientific model(experiment) that shows light to be a particle and one that shows it to be a wave . It cant be both ,but its really hard to stop believing in light .
And ,Quantum theory cant be reconciled with Relativity but my microwave oven still works ! Im confused .
;- It’s a process bro ,it’s the best we’ve got.
@ Nathan
Well you may have satisfied Medieval debating standards by being able to find a name to apply but “Gish Gallop” won’t get you far because you couldn’t sustain what I take to be a pretty well accepted definition, namely, “the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time.” That could better be applied to your string of assertions but let’s get past that.
Your point 3. shows best how self-satisfied arrogance can stumble. Indeed AGW does depend absolutely on the hypothesis that there is positive feedback (from additional water vapour from the oceans resulting from the oceans being warmed by additional net infra-red radiative forcing as a result of increases in atmospheric CO2.
What do you think I meant by saying it was “critical”? You even affirm my point by asserting that “the nature of the feedback is one of the most intensively studied topics in the field! Now why would that be if the answers were clear?
When Lindzen and Choi, with serious qualifications in whatever counts as “climate science” – unlike the mythical 97 per cent – publish a paper which suggests that, if anything, the feedback is negative, one is entitled, even if that paper is now 3 or 4 years old to regard them as pointing to a very big hole in the IPCC position (as it was anyway: there is some allegedly leaked info about its next report which I shall come to). If the doubts had been cleared up no doubt we would have heard. Instead we have seen a gradual backing down on many of the live issues.
Your 4. You are of course right to note the importance of solar activity to the Little Ice Age but it iis not persuasive to merely assert that it is “extremely well explained” unless you explain just how those explanations give you a model of the natural causes (not all solar by any means) of the Little Ice Age and the exit from it. Then we could test that model to see how far it predicts continuing increases in average atmospheric temperature well after the Thames ceased to freeze over.
And what do you say about all those great climatic events of the past I mentioned? To have any faith in current models which do a reasonable job, for some purposes anyway, on the last 100 years or so of temperatures, don’t you have to show an understanding of the causes and course of much greater climatic changes in the past, even confined to the Holocene? Karoly told me that the models did retropredict such events, but that was when he was on his feet and embarrassed, and he never followed up.
The short answer to the suggestion that some measure of agreement amongst the many models makes “the evidence so compelling” is that it depends. It depends on how they went about creating the models, their starting points etc., and it depends on whether the models whose results one sees are only those that have found favour with editors, IPCC panels, funding bodies, governments etc. (You will have read I take it, unlike some of those who immediately provided adverse Amazon reviews, Donna LaFramboise’s “The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World”s Top Climate Expert”. I have waited well over a year since reading it to have it rebutted successfully. It basically leaves the IPCC looking disreputable thereby undermining the basis (the IPCC’s summaries for policy makers) on which 99 per cent of politicians who have decided that they must do something about climate change form their view). A quick search shows it still has 5 stars on Amazon and a typical warmism-as-religion response is, amusingly
http://nittygrittyscience.com/2011/11/03/an-open-letter-to-donna-laframboise-or-you-have-got-to-be-f-kidding-me/ (another who even asserted that he hadn’t read the book).
If you have faith in editors of journals, peer reviews etc. have a look at the sad state of medical research as exposed by Prof Ioannidis. For a good start on this see
http://www.theatlantic.com/…/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269
David Freedman has also been on the ABC
And if you have faith in modelers of complex non-linear systems just consider the great contributions of the Chicago school and others to the understanding of economic events of the last 10 years. True, humans providing deliberate model beating feedback are even worse than volcanoes, asteroids, underwater eruptions of magma etc. but, on the other hand we know less about the motions of the oceans than we do about human beings en masse as consumers.
Since I gave up physics a long time ago I have to resort to long tutorials with old physicist friends when I hear them scoff at the Hansens and others in the warmist camp. As I didn’t even know what the Standard Model is/was when I found myself at dinner with the winner of the Nobel Prize for it, I do my best at cross-examination of the expert witnesses I know so my all-round sceptical instincts can be satisfied, as far as practicable. What I am sure about is that they are applying their old standards as serious hard scientists with tenure at great universities and are totally uninfluenced by money or status or career. I can’t find the conference paper delivered somewhere in Europe anywher online but the following will give some of the flavour of my reasons with being unimpressed with your assertion that the IPCC modelers agreements give weight to the IPCC’s warmist conclusions. Just six of the IPCC’s preferred models are in the Table, which is why, I think I thought that was about the limit of its selection of models:
Table 1
Fossil Fuels Coal Oil Natural Gas Total
Reserves in gigatonnes 847 190 129
Contained carbon in gigatonnes 413 137 97 647
If it is assumed, following the IPCC, that about half of the CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are captured by the oceans and the continents then 324 gigatonnes of carbon would remain in the atmosphere.
The present atmosphere has at a CO2 concentration of 380 ppm, some 800 gigatonnes of contained carbon. So if the fossil fuel reserves were exhausted this would only add another 154 ppm of CO2 thus taking the CO2 concentration to 534 ppm.
Table 2 is a comparison of this limit with the 2100 endpoints for the IPCC scenarios.
Table 2
Scenario CO2 Maximum in 2100.
Projected concentration
ppm Shortfall of reserves to CO2 in
projection ppm Radiat-ive forcing
Wm-2 CO2 Shortfall
Contrib-ution
Wm-2 Temperature increase from 2000 to 2100
0C Temperature reduction from CO2 shortfall
0C
A1B 700 166 6 1.29 3.0 0.7
A1FI 1000 466 9 2.98 4.5 2.1
A1T 500 5 2.5
A2 850 316 8 2.20 4.0 1.5
B1 500 4 2.0
B2 650 116 6 0.94 2.8 0.5
The comparison in Table 2 would suggest that scenarios A1FI (where FI stands for Fuel Intensive) and A2 are not constrained by “external” limits and if the constraints were applied the temperature increase would be significantly reduced. The radiative forcing reductions have been estimated using Modtran where a doubling of CO2 and CH4 produces an incremental forcing of 3.7 Wm-2.
******************
Sorry, you’ll have to do a bit of Copy and Paste into Excel to see how clearly it shows amaqzing differences in the IPCC approved models. Hardly reason for the religious certainties of those wasting billions in Australia for no good result.
******************
And the aforesaid leak? Have a look at Matt Ridley’s Wall Street Journal article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324549004579067532485712464.html?KEYWORDS=matt+ridley
According to the no-doubt-accurate leak he received on the forthcoming IPCC summary report it looks as though it is dialling back its projections considerably, though a bit coy about expressiing things so comparisons can be made with its previous reports, and it is well within the bounds of possibility,even the IPCC version, that the net effects of warming up to 2083 could be positive by whatever measure.
It makes it clear that the existence of the necessary positive feedback is still far from established.
Particularly interesting is the following:
“The most significant of these [recent papers], published in Nature Geoscience by a team including 14 lead authors of the forthcoming IPCC scientific report, concluded that “the most likely value of equilibrium climate sensitivity based on the energy budget of the most recent decade is 2.0 degrees Celsius.”
Two recent papers (one in the Journal of the American Meteorological Society, the other in the journal Earth System Dynamics) estimate that TCR is probably around 1.65 degrees Celsius. That’s uncannily close to the estimate of 1.67 degrees reached in 1938 by Guy Callendar, a British engineer and pioneer student of the greenhouse effect. A Canadian mathematician and blogger named Steve McIntyre has pointed out that Callendar’s model does a better job of forecasting the temperature of the world between 1938 and now than do modern models that “hindcast” the same data.
The significance of this is that Callendar assumed that carbon dioxide acts alone, whereas the modern models all assume that its effect is amplified by water vapor. There is not much doubt about the amount of warming that carbon dioxide can cause. There is much more doubt about whether net amplification by water vapor happens in practice or is offset by precipitation and a cooling effect of clouds.”
And this:
“….the IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri has conceded that the “pause” already may have lasted for 17 years, depending on which data set you look at. A recent study in Nature Climate Change by Francis Zwiers and colleagues of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, found that models have overestimated warming by 100% over the past 20 years.
Explaining this failure is now a cottage industry in climate science. At first, it was hoped that an underestimate of sulfate pollution from industry (which can cool the air by reflecting heat back into space) might explain the pause, but the science has gone the other way—reducing its estimate of sulfate cooling. Now a favorite explanation is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean. Yet the data to support this thesis come from ocean buoys and deal in hundredths of a degree of temperature change, with a measurement error far larger than that. Moreover, ocean heat uptake has been slowing over the past eight years.
The most plausible explanation of the pause is simply that climate sensitivity was overestimated in the models because of faulty assumptions about net amplification through water-vapor feedback. ”
Now which of my ideas don’t you like JQ? How can an economist make a case for subsidising wind farms, solar power or indeed interfering with naked market forces other than to charge for proven externalities like air pollution. I haven’t followed the back and forth about alleged subsidies to fossil fuels in Oz but suppose it refers to some businesses not being charged the same excise as private motorists (e.g.) have to pay. That could be justified on all sorts of grounds given that we don’t have and don’t want a pure Ricardian comparative advantage world to put us to the test.
@sunshine
Oops! I hope I haven’t sent the last effusion twice. it’s only just come up.
To you I say, please spell out your extremely vague chain of reasoning. “The best we’ve got” may simply be of no value for some important purposes and some detailed explanation needs to be given to show that it is worth pursuing any given process which is known to be very imperfect. And then to act on any tentative conclusions from where you’ve got to needs another lot of reasoning which may be difficult and open to rational doubt.
And your examples are, frankly, nothing more than Reader’s Digest level guff. Equating a model to an experiment is nonsense. Treating the “model” of light as particle or wave is equally nonsensical since it has no bearing on the testing of the kind of climate models which make quantitative predictions and fail if the quantities are too far out. Likewise, the sense in which quantum mechanics or relativity is a model is of no relevance to the plain failure of complex dynamic non-linear models of climate to predict the future values of variable with acceptable accuracy.
I’t OK: I remember bringing up Schroedinger’s uncertainty principle in a philosophy tutorial many ears ago. It was undergraduate guff. I was soon shown up as not knowing what I was talking about. Just put the brain in gear in future please.
I don’t think that there is a defence to the triviality. There are only better tactics.
And the tactic here is the young smoker approach that worked on my brother and sister when I (youngest) dobbed (reportedly) them in for trying out cigarettes. They were forced to sit and smoke cigarettes for hours. They never touched another one.
The equivalent to that would be to force Abbott to carry through with eliminating the carbon price. He needs to be forced to carry through his soil carbon direct action stupidity. He needs to be encouraged to subsidise petrol, and he needs to be allowed to run GM out of the country. He needs to be allowed to shut down solar programmes, even ban solar on rooftops.
The BAU thinking needs to be shown to be bad and clearly the wrong direction. Yes people will suffer, but they need some pain to know what not to do. That is the human condition.
We need an environmental 9/11 exacerbated by horrendously stupid government policy to force policy onto the war footing that Global Warming Action requires.
“Angus Cameron” metaphorically IS the triviality. The kid who is smoking behind the shed, who will grow to be the tobacco industry lawyer, the one who can only see that which supports his fixed view despite the reality of death all around. In a war he is the one to spy for the other side.
There is no absolute solution to the triviality, all that can be hoped is for the main body of understanding to contain the triviality to a size of insignificant influence.
The triviality has command of our economy at present. It needs to assisted to fail, however counter intuitive that may be.
My best answer to the triviality is “there is only one climate reality. Opionion has nothing to do with it. It does not matter what you or I think or believe, winning an argument will not change the outcome, the environment is either heating or it isn’t, are you prepared to risk the consequences of being wrong?”
What would help right now is a 3d graphical (google environment) presentation which allows the viewer to turn up and down the CO2 level in accelerated time to rotate and zoom to see the consequences of global warming. The connection between CO2 levels, ocean surface warming, thermohaline circulation/ocean currents, atmospheric moisture content, accelerated air circulation, the hadley circulation, and polar accelerated warming, all need to be visualisable. Scientists prefer not to get ahead of their proofs, and the upper atmosphere air movements are only now being studied in detail aided by high altitude long flight duration aircraft and soon UAV’s with flight endurances of years. With this knowledge the full picture can finally be assembled. I believe that this information will show that the upper atmosphere air flows are intensifying and are overflowing the Hadley Cell circulation to form a much more intense high pressure downflow over the poles which is forcing the cold surface air at the poles to move out of the polar air cells at an increasing rate, thus giving us the highly variable weather seen in the Northern Hemisphere (less so in the south as there is very little populated land mass near the antarctic) also giving the impression of cooling this being the cause of the supposed “warming hiatus” [see Roger Jones’ stepped warming model]. This all being driven by increased CO2 levels and consequent increased equatorial atmospheric moisture content.
As I think about it now Google is the only Super Hero with sufficent vision and “super power” to “Save the Citizen” (Fn).
Fn. You will need to watch Sky High…again…. to appreciate this.
@ BillB
Your seeming-wise “My best answer to the triviality is “there is only one climate reality. Opionion has nothing to do with it. It does not matter what you or I think or believe, winning an argument will not change the outcome, the environment is either heating or it isn’t, are you prepared to risk the consequences of being wrong?” ” is vacuous. It omits all shades of difference, all degrees of wrongness. And of course omits the obvious fact that all those who voice firm opinions on the scientific or economic causes and effects are certainly wrong in many details and in greater or lesser degree.
I’m not sure whether your contribution to arriving at optimum policy for this or any other country would be non-trivial but it would, on the evidence you provide, be unintelligent.
Well, Angus Cameron,
I’ve just checked with the Maona Loa observatory, and your opinion has had absolutely no observable effect on Carbon Dioxide emissions. The atmospheric CO2 level continues to rise at an ever higher rate.
I would therefore conclude that my proposition, far from being “unintelligent”, is rock solid.
Try another opinion and we will check again. Perhaps this time you might try being only half of completely wrong, to see if that makes a difference.
This is the scientific method in action. This is good!
Angus, do you agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that human activity has increased its concentration in the atmosphere by over a third?
Angus ; my point is that if you require certainty you wont find it in science anywhere . For the other 99% of non climate scientific opinion I bet you just trust the scientists and accept it in your daily life . If a plane had a 5% chance of crashing would you go on it ? Do you think there is a 5% chance the science is correct ? You want to zero in on the uncertainty to justify (non)action .
I find it very telling that Angus doesn’t attempt to defend any of his specific (and wrong) claims that I pointed out earlier.
@BilB
Wow, you sound important. “I’ve just checked with the Maona [sic] Loa observatory”…. Well, when I pick up the phone to the folks there I find they respond better if they realise I know it is the Mauna Loa observatory……
I think I may confine my observations to ones that just, possibly, could affect the professorial master blogger if he has the capacity and open-mindedness one hope of one in his position. (Not that I expect much have reset my standards for professorial commentators by reading Keynes’s “Essays in Persuasion” and other miscellaneous writings of that great man (who was not a professor I note before someone thinks that an important thing to point out). Why? Well, in your case BilB the last straw was the thought of someone who makes a totally irrelevant remark such as your gratuitous reference to CO2 levels still rising. It has absolutely NOTHING to do with anything I have asserted or even hypothesised contrary to your clear implication. But I do note that emissions and rise in atmospheric CO2 are very different concepts with a disputed connection which most people are unaware of (though I don’t make anything of the outcome of the dispute one way or the other. It is merely interesting to me).
@ Ronald Brak
Of course, I suspect that you have just glanced at what I have written and decided to see if I am just one of the nutters who could reasonably be spared one’s ear-space like Creationists. I think one third is about right and yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas though not nearly as potent as methane and not nearly as important for keeping the earth above its black body temperature as water vapour.
Just how the manmade part works is interesting though I make nothing of any of the disputes about it one way or the other. It was interesting, however, to read a peer-reviewed paper about four years ago in which it a great deal of cogent evidence was presented for regarding the last 50 years of increase in atmospheric CO2 as being of oceanic origin. One of the reasons I am not disposed to regard that as critical to final judgment is that the physicists who propound the idea have never answered, to may satisfaction my key question. That is: given that there is an oceanic isotopic signature for the increases rather than a fossil fuel signature (it has to do with the C12 and C13 isotopes and their proportions) could it not result from absorption of fossil fuel emitted CO2 in the higher latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere where cold water, contrary to my memory of these things, dissolves CO2 more readily than warm tropical waters do. Then a slow mixture down to say 500 metres over a lengthy period would swamp the fossil fuel signature with the oceanic signature before the oceans then emitted the CO2 near the equator.
You can see I am not a broad brush man on the science that I have been able to glean. On the economics however, absent any great moral urge to set examples to the rest of the world that the rest of the world won’t even notice (even if we are not shut out of the room as in Copenhagen), I don’t see why we should spend money in a way which a hard-nosed Treasury official wanting to maximise GDP and the growth rate thereof would not approve. Rich countries, like rich people, can solve their own and others’ problems better than those who are just getting by because they are, for example, giving a quarter of their income to the Holy Rollers.
@ sunshine
I accept your obvious (indeed trivial) point that one will not find 100 per cent certainty in science.
You approach relevance when you ask in effect what degree of certainty I require in my science related decisions. As it happens the important ones for me I always go into and question from a moderately serviceable science and maths and stats basis. Does one buy the enthusiasm for reshaping corneas that some eye specialists/surgeons spent time and money learning to do 25 years ago or listen to one’s friendly eye specialist who says that no one would give informed consent to such an operation and one should wait, as members of my family did, for the excimer laser treatment. Does one accept more up to date enthusiasm for multifocal intra-ocular lenses to deal with cataract in ones’ dominant eye or go for making sure one’s tennis ball hitting ability is maximised with a monocular lens? Does one buy the expensive fertiliser or try and study the evidence? Would you not expect counsel to push his expert witnesses beyond the mere ipse dixit that their expert status allows them, unlike non-experts, to utter as evidence.
If a plane had a 5 per cent chance of crashing (during the flight I was about to go on) would I take it? You allow me by asking that more or less rhetorical question to give a short answer to the wider point you are seeking to make. It would of course depend. If the alternative was to be locked up by the government of the country I was in for 20 years I wouldn’t have a problem. If it was a plane fitted to take out my ailing child who desperately needed to go to a hospital elsewhere again I wouldn’t have a problem…. There are so many variable to take into account.
In the case of AGW I am not sure whether I would advocate expensive, if useless, action by the Australian government even if I thought there was a 5 per cent chance of climate change caused by fossil fuel emitted CO2 (and feedback from water vapour) producing what most of us would regard as a disastrous effect on the amenity of civilised life in the lifetimes of our grandchildren. That too would require, at the least, a lot more nuanced assessment of probabilities of alternative outcomes. It is true that most of us would avoid disaster which was unlikely even at the expense of forgoing many more probable good or acceptable outcomes. That is a bit like acknowledging most people’s risk aversion as investors. We dislike losses more than we like gains. But that doesn’t take us far even without going into the preferences of those who actually like and thrive on risk.
@ Nathan
Your latest piece is not “telling” of anything except that you are lazy if you are really trying to help anyone improve their thinking on and knowledge of an important subject.
(a) I did answer several of your express or implied criticisms (which you would know if you applies some diligent intelligence to reading what I said: you don’t have to but please don’t pretend that you have);
(b) you yourself have failed to deal at all with several of my points (e.g. the causes of major climate disasters in the past);
(c) you could learn something by following up quite a few of the references I mentioned or at least help others to assess them with your self-assumed authority in the field (that I see very little evidence of. I have heard friends utter similar prejudices to yours and random factoids, very like you, and they are not fools but can’t follow through very well. Can you?)
Angus Cameron,
This technique of aluding to superior knowledge in order to draw others into pointless lengthy explanations of the science for a lazy denialist’s shooting gallery, has been done to death here.
If you have substantive knowledge to prove conclusively that the IPCC and all of the scientists who subscribe to its authenticity are wrong or missled, then lay it out, show the forum what you have with explanation and references.
Else, as postulated above, you are a triviality. ie put up or shut up.
Thank you for your reply Angus. Do you also agree with me that the rise in global temperatures is highly correlated with the human caused increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? Here’s a chart showing what I mean:
@Angus Cameron
At what number comment did you reply to me at all? The reason for my last post was that as far as I can see you haven’t responded