I am rather agnostic toward “climate change” or “global warming” as it was called before the expression mutated for reasons that may be known only to our loving intelligentsia. I must say I was impressed by Tyler Cowen’s argument for (government) combatting climate change but, having now escaped his spell, the reasons for my agnosticism triumph again. The Economist’s story on the United Nations sixth report on climate change comforts me (“The IPCC Delivers its Starkest Warning about the World’s Climate,” August 9, 2021):
The oncoming dread registers yet more clearly than it did in the IPCC’s previous major assessment, AR5, published in 2013-14. The Earth has warmed over a tenth of a degree since then; it is now approximately 1.1ºC (2ºF) hotter than it was in the second half of the 19th century. Even if the countries of the world cut their greenhouse-gas emissions dramatically (they are not yet on a consistent downward trend of any sort) the IPCC finds that temperatures are very likely to be 1.5ºC higher than they were in the 19th century by 2050—if not before. That breaks the more ambitious of the goals for limiting climate change that the world signed up to in the Paris agreement of 2015.
The Wall Street Journal‘s title read “Some Climate Change Effects May Be Irreversible, U.N. Panel Says.” The lead paragraph adds the precision that it means “irreversible for centuries.”
One reason for my agnosticism is that ecological systems are extremely complex and naturally change over the centuries. Climate models are uncertain, by the very nature of modelization. With its chimneys and plastic bottles, Industrial Man still looks small compared to that. Scientists tell us that there was agriculture in Greenland before the Little Ice Age that started in the 14th century and lasted until the mid-19th. But I admit that I know close to nothing about the topic, by which I mean no more than what the typical environmentalist knows about economics and the logic of liberty.
Another reason is that we have heard about coming environmental catastrophes before. It is not the first time that politicized science cries wolf. The 1970s were full of predicted catastrophes. Time magazine of June 24, 1974 expressed the fear of global cooling:
However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.
I mention other manifestations of the environmental scares of those times in my Law & Liberty review of Paul Sabin’s The Bet—for example:
In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, [Stanford University biologist Paul] Ehrlich warned, à la Malthus, that the population explosion was hitting resource constraints. He predicted that within a decade, food and water scarcity would result in a billion or more people starving to death. Governments should work toward an optimal world population of 1.5 billion. He opposed immigration, since the United States was already above its 150 million population limit. He talked about the imminent “disintegration of an unstable world” and said, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
I suspect that a large number of the 234 experts who wrote the UN report have skin in the money game, because the scare is subsidized by governments, or in the ideological game. Moreover, the summary of their work has been revised by the governments that pay their salaries. The Economist notes:
A crucial part of this document is the “summary for policymakers”, which is, to some extent, also a summary by policymakers. During a five-day plenary process which ended on August 6th the governments that are part of the IPCC worked through a draft summary prepared by the scientific authors to produce a text on which all could agree. In the past this process has sometimes been vexed, with some governments unwilling to see things they found politically troubling expressed as bluntly as the scientists wished. On this occasion, though, the governments’ editing prerogatives were mainly used to ensure the inclusion of language various parties wanted in order subtly to bolster the negotiating positions they intend to take at COP26, the UN climate conference which will take place in Glasgow this November.
It seems that a large majority of climate alarmists harbor a view of politics that is properly totalitarian or, if not, extremely naïve. (I am sure, though, that many are well-intentioned.) A climate emergency certainly requires unconditional obedience to, and respect for, the climate czar, right? Propaganda will help. There is nothing wrong with flower children as long as they don’t try to dictate to others how to live.
Still another reason for my climate agnosticism is that adaptation to climate change may be much less costly for most people than a Quixotic battle to prevent it, especially so if you include the cost in terms of tyranny and lost prosperity for perhaps generations. (See “Henderson and Cochrane on Climate Policy,” Econlog, September 2, 2017.)
Even assuming that the climate situation is as desperate as governments and their subsidized researchers proclaim, it is not clear if anything could be done without seriously compromising our already fragile liberties. If there is an endangered species, it is individual liberty and thus prosperity. This reminds me of what Milton Friedman was already arguing in his Capitalism and Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1962):
If, for example, existing government intervention is minor, we shall attach a smaller weight to the negative effects of additional government intervention. This is an important reason why many earlier liberals, like [U. of Chicago economist] Henry Simons, writing at a time when government was small by today’s standards, were willing to have government undertake activities that today’s liberals would not accept now that government is so overgrown.
READER COMMENTS
Evan Sherman
Aug 10 2021 at 12:01pm
It is always worth remembering that climate experts have ideological and political incentives that push them away from a purely rational analysis. Lemieux is valuable on this front as always.
But even if we take the basic climate science consensus as a given (the world is getting hotter, a lot of it is anthropogenic, higher temps will hurt people with an effect we can call X, X is bad and so we should want to avoid it or reduce it, etc.), those claims would at most be necessary-but-not adequate elements to a productive discourse on climate change. That is to say, even if the costs of climate change are bad, the economic costs (i.e. human suffering measured in utilitarian terms like material standard of living and lifespan – we can call them Y) incurred by deploying currently known methods of combating climate change might be worse than the damage caused by climate change. And if Y is greater than X, then we should probably just muddle through for now. We can also always hope that unknowable future innovations bring down Y so that the exchange is more worthwhile.
And, while I could absolutely be convinced otherwise, I find it hard to believe that Y would not be greater than X. Developing countries are, well, developing, and billions of people are on the cusp of entering a material standard of living comparable to middle class lifestyles in developed countries. If meaningfully blunting the rise of average temps would mean reforming all global economic activity, then surely that would put the development of developing countries at risk. And if delaying for generations the entry of billions into middle-class material living standards is the price of massive sustainability reforms, it’s hard to imagine how that could possibly be worth preventing the costs of climate change. How to we even begin to grapple with a human cost of billions of people with lower material standards of living multiplied across generations?
Again, I could be guessing wrong. I have just rarely seen any serious, credible effort to compare X to Y – and never seen such an analysis that convinces me that X might be greather than Y. It’s always just “X is bad, so everyone should be willing to do what I recommend to prevent X.” (If anyone knows of something that really plausibly does big picture cost/benefit projection on this, let me know please.)
(None of this means, btw, that we should do nothing. Some discrete reforms may have better cost/benefit ratios, and presuming political consenus for them, we can do them. But that’s very different than the radical proposals and hysteria crowding into all the popular publications this week after the IPCC report.)
I am also reminded of Caplan’s post on crusades as a problematic method for social reform per se, regardless of the cause. Certainly crusaders never want to hear “just muddle through for now, because it’s not clear that doing something is better than doing nothing”.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 11 2021 at 7:55am
Why would a tax on net CO2 emissions prevent millions of people from escaping poverty? Are the costs of solar, wind and nuclear power generation THAT much greater than from fossil fuels? And do not the effects are ever higher CO2 concentrations in he atmosphere also make escape from poverty more difficult?
You seen to accept that a cost benefit framework is proper for deciding on climate change policy, but I think you ae mistaken about the parameter values.
Jon Murphy
Aug 11 2021 at 11:59am
Because demand curves slope downward.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 12 2021 at 7:37am
Could I see your model?
Jon Murphy
Aug 12 2021 at 10:17am
That demand curves slope downward?
Evan Sherman
Aug 11 2021 at 3:13pm
I’m sure that a strawman was not intended here, but that is the effect.
I am not categorically against any of the specific measures you mentioned in your post. I do presume, however, that the proposals mentioned apparently constitute relative smallball measures proportionate to the level of CO2 reduction needed to meaningfully lower temp in the way that increasingly mainstream environmentalists propose. Even if moderate CO2 reduction policies were to be enacated and enforced, the rise of the middle class in the developing countries (i.e. industrializing countries with more and more consumption per capita) will on net significantly increase global CO2 production. Conversely, if more radical CO2 reduction policies are enacted, such that we get the temperature results environmentalists demand, the resultant reduction in, say, year 2100 global wealth vs. the counterfactual would be ruinous – and would obviously hurt disproportinally (in real terms vs. nominal terms) people not living in already wealthy countries.
All of this assumes utilitarian logic and a single global common good. On top of that, though, I think we have to consider the sheer nasty unfairness of the world, lead by rich countries, asking that poorer countries slow down their industrialization and modernization. I don’t generally support imposing inefficiencies on even wealthy countries, but proposing that poor countries grow less efficiently, knowing as we do how much their increased consumption corresponds with higher standards of living, seems particularly distasteful to me.
Look, maybe the disconnect between us is just a misunderstanding about baselines. If the kinds of reforms that you’d propose are less onerous than I’d assume (e.g. a lower rate than I’d assume and imposed on a smaller range of countries), then it’s at least arguable that those could be on net acceptable tradeoffs. (I may disagree, but it’s not crazy.) But if we are talking about only relatively mild/moderate reforms, then we have to recognize that they add up to spitting into the wind of the coming higher global consumption rates.
Either way, to re-emphasize, the point here is not that the potential consequences of climate change, CO2 accumulation, etc. are nothing – or even that they are not very bad. It’s just that almost everyone seems to vastly underestimate the costs of using less efficient energy production – costs that, in real material terms, would be born unfairly by the poor.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 11 2021 at 6:03pm
I think we are still disagreeing about parameter values. What I have in mind is a tax on net CO2 emissions of $100-$200 ton in every country. Instead of expanding electricity production with fossil fuel plants Chad builds nuclear power stations. Is the additional cost fatal to Chad’s development? The only big looser in this will be fossil fuel exporting countries, some of which — Angola, Nigeria — are poor, of course and richer countries could compensate them or other poor countries for their loss.
Warren Platts
Aug 12 2021 at 9:00pm
That amounts to a tax of about $1 to $2 per gallon of gasoline.
Evan Sherman
Aug 18 2021 at 11:19am
Apologies, I’ve been travelling for several days, so I appreciate that this is a late response that may not be answered again. That said:
To be clear, I do agree that our disconnect comes down to a gap in parameter value assessment, especially on the cost-of-intervention side. (I agree that the benefits of preventing climate change might be high, so there may be no disagreement there.) That is to say, from the last post, I feel like you are still wildly underestimating both A) the net costs of these regulations and B) just how heavy-handed the regulations would have to be to mitigate against the increased energy needs of people in developing countries consuming massively more goods and services.
For example, a CO2 tax like the one you describe would be costly for more than just net-fossil-fuel-exporting countries. Remember, taxes are always paid, one way or the other, by the end-consumer, and even if the supply side vendor is also hurt in the process, I am really more interested in how the tax would hurt consumers, as that is basically everyone. Either a) we would discover that fossil fuel-based energy production is so much more cost-effective than alternative energy sources that it’s worth paying the tax, all the way down to the consumer or b) we would switch to less cost-effective energy sources, such that everything costs more to make even if its production avoids the tax. (Or some combination of (A) and (B).) Again, this is particularly brutal for poor people. If you’re already rich, then paying more for goods and services hurts a lot less because your income beyond basic needs provides diminishing returns for material quality of life. If you’re poor, and you’re already spending just about all of your money on necessities, having everything cost more is brutal.
All of that presumes that there is political will in all of these different countries to actually enforce a universal global standard, btw. Seems quixotic to me, to be honest.
Two caveats to the above apply:
Nuclear power is, per your point, often way more cost effective than other low CO2 emitting energy sources. But it requires a lot of upfront capital to build and highly skilled labor to safely maintain, which seems like a big obstacle to a plan to just modernize countries like Chad with nuclear power. Also, given current battery technology, nuclear power is not really an answer for transportation energy needs. (Unless you also presume building out countries like Chad with all electric cars and related infrastructure, which, again, seems very costly upfront and difficult to maintain for poor countries.)
More broadly, people postulate that if we dove in aggressively (via policy) with scaling up non-CO2 intensive energy production, costs of those sources would scale way down, and the rate of innovation in those areas would exponentially accelerate. Big if true, but still seems very risky – especially if you’re not already a rich county. We know that fossil-fuel based modernization definitely works to improve standards of living in developing countries. Seems risky to go another way – especially if you are in one of those developing countries.
Let’s presuppose, though, that all of that CO2 regulatory policy works out – such that you reduce by 1/3 the CO2 emissions that correspond to the consumption of any given good or service across the board. (This seems rather optimistic to me, but worth considering as a hypothetical.) When countries like Chad reach US levels of modernity, material standard of living, etc., they will consume much, much more than 1.5X the goods and services they currently consume. So even successful scenarios, with their attendant costs, do not appear to suffice to actually reduce CO2 emissions to anything approaching the degree that would prevent rising global temps (and other ‘climate change’ vs. mere ‘global warming’ outcomes). (As I’ve previously indicated, I’m happy to see data that suggests otherwise, but most climate analysis I’ve seem focuses on other aspects of the problem and ignores this question more or less completely.)
Craig
Aug 10 2021 at 12:50pm
The sky is falling! One might be agnostic as to whether global warming is happening, I would also suggest one can be agnostic that global warming is necessarily a negative. Unpopular opinion of the day, for sure. Coming from North Jersey I lived in a valley that been under, first a massive glacier, and then as it melted, underneath Glacial Lake Passaic. To this day believe it or not Glacial Lake Passaic is still draining, except of course its called the Meadowlands and other swamps that exist throughout North Jersey like the Great Swamp and the meadowlands stretching from Parsippany thru Lincoln Park as the Passaic River meanders its way to Newark.
Thank God those glaciers retreated, right? I mean, what good would North Jersey be today if glaciers were still there? Well, it’d be a boon for polar bears, I suppose. Same goes for the Great Lakes and I speculate Canada might not even exist.
Even in most recent times North Jersey has warmed quite substantially. There are records of NY Harbor freezing over such that during the Revolutionary War the Continental Army was able to wheel cannons over from Staten Island to Manhattan. Likewise, the famous picture of Washington crossing the Delaware shows an ice laden river which in this day and age is unheard of. Similar stories from London and people ice skating on the Thames.
If I see another attempt to shame me into not driving a car by showing me a picture of an emaciated polar bear swimming, I promise, I’ll shoot Yogi’s fair-haired cousin myself.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 10 2021 at 4:20pm
Craig: You write:
Good question. New Jersey is already strange as it is.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 11 2021 at 8:02am
Do you seriously doubt that estimates of the costs of CO2 accumulation do not take account of the benefits? They are quite well known: some CO2 fertilization of plant growth, longer growing season at high latitudes, an ice free Artic passage, etc. But these do not outweigh the costs of extreme weather events, lower agricultural yields at lower latitudes, sea level rise, etc.
Craig
Aug 11 2021 at 10:48am
“Do you seriously doubt that estimates of the costs of CO2 accumulation do not take account of the benefits?”
Apparently I should be floating in Biscayne Bay by now, but I digress. I woukd challenge the ability to make the calculation AT ALL. It is simply incalcuable and I would suggest along the same lines as the Mises calculation problem.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 11 2021 at 6:12pm
If you doubt the we can measure costs of CO2 accumulation at all then this is not the right venue and I’m not the right person to discuss this with. And I thing Mises is talking about calculating everything, not a small perturbation in the relative price of fossil fuels and carbon capture.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 11 2021 at 2:18pm
Thomas: Yours is a value judgement, that is a moral judgement, not a scientific conclusion. For many environmentalists, it’s a religious judgement.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 11 2021 at 9:39pm
Indeed, using market prices to estimate cost and benefits (probably any way of estimating them) relies on value judgements. And those value judgments are, to my way of thinking, congruent with my religious beliefs. Does anyone believe their policy judgements are “scientific” in some sense that is free of value judgements?
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 12 2021 at 11:54am
Thomas: In response to your last question: Certainly not economists–at least those who have reflected on the issue and are not blinded by political ideology. Read Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economics, 1935 (first edition: 1932). Or, as a poor second best, you can wait for my anniversary review of the book in the forthcoming issue of Regulation.
Saint Greta
Aug 10 2021 at 1:16pm
Agnostic?
How dare you!
(Craig under pseudonym)
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 11 2021 at 9:24am
I have always found it odd that climate change skeptics have to have a favorite demon. Perhaps even more curious is how they have been led “as if by an invisible hand” to shift from Al Gore to Greta Thunberg.
Evan Sherman
Aug 11 2021 at 3:22pm
https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2019-greta-thunberg/
robc
Aug 12 2021 at 8:27am
Its true of everyone, apparently, so not sure why you find it odd.
Did 4 years of “Orange Man Bad” teach you nothing?
Jens
Aug 11 2021 at 4:22am
I never understood this picture. It’s not just that size isn’t related to complexity. It is also that homo sapiens is not small. It is huge, even in pure biomass, and active and fast. Not in relation to the sun or the universe. But in relation to the damp trail of mold that covers this planet called biosphere.
Warren Platts
Aug 11 2021 at 9:27am
Total biomass of the biosphere is ~550 gigatonnes of carbon. Of that, total animal biomass is about 2 gigatonnes of carbon. Of that mammals comprise ~0.167 gigatonnes of carbon. However, humans and their mammalian livestock are 96% of total mammalian biomass. See my comment below.
Knut P. Heen
Aug 11 2021 at 5:03am
Read the report. Here is one paragraph from the summary for policy makers.
A.1.6 It is virtually certain that the global upper ocean (0–700 m) has warmed since the 1970s and extremely likely that human influence is the main driver. It is virtually certain that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main driver of current global acidification of the surface open ocean. There is high confidence that oxygen levels have dropped in many upper ocean regions since the mid-20th century, and medium confidence that human influence contributed to this drop.
How can anyone think that it is extremely likely that human influence is the main driver when they are not completely sure it actually has happened? How difficult is it to produce a confidence interval for the warming? The same type of language is repeated in paragraph after paragraph for different types of evidence. Not sure it has happened, but extremely likely that human influence is the main driver. Notice the vagueness too, is virtually certain a higher probability than extremely likely?
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 11 2021 at 7:45am
The term “climate change” mutated 😊 from “global warming” because some of the effects of the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere (ocean acidification) have little to do with “warming” per se. Now you know.
“A climate emergency certainly requires unconditional obedience to, and respect for, the climate czar, right?” No, it “requires” a relatively low dead-weight loss tax on net CO2 emissions.
“Still another reason for my climate agnosticism is that adaptation to climate change may be much less costly for most people than a Quixotic battle to prevent it.” Yes, so we’d better mount a low cost, “non-Quixotic” battle. In fact, I propose to you a Pascal Wager. Do nothing and if climate change dose have high costs we suffer those costs AND the likelihood of “Quixotic” measures rises, or support a net tax on CO2 emissions now and costs are reduced at the expense of a bit of discounted present consumption.
“Not clear if anything could be done without seriously compromising our already fragile liberties.” I submit that finding the relative prices of gasoline, electricity and other high-CO2 intensive goods rise by several percentage points and the shifts in consumption and investment pattern that those relative prices will entail does not “compromise our already fragile liberties.”
It appears to me that you think that the best way to oppose high cost, liberty-infringing measures the supposedly reduce the costs of “climate change” is to argue that climate change is not in fact happening. I think that is a self-defeating strategy.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 11 2021 at 9:17am
I went back to the Henderson Cochran piece and did not find discussion of any policy, such as a tax on net CO2 emissions, that would reduce the costs of climate change they estimate. If their position is truly that no policy should discourage the net emission of CO2 (and the silence is not just virtue signaling to the Libertarian community) they need to argue explicitly that net CO2-reducing policies costs exceed the benefits.
Warren Platts
Aug 11 2021 at 9:18am
In the sense that the world is still in a quite cool phase compared to geological history, one can say that. We’re at about 14 C — at the warm end for Pleistocene temperatures — so we got a long way to go before we get crocodiles in Patagonia (~28 C). But if we get to 18 C, we might expect to start losing the Antarctic icesheet, although the circumpolar Antarctic current would have a big say in that matter. The summary of mean annual temperature through geological history I like best is here.
On the other hand, it cannot be denied that humans are a full on geological force these days. We coopt literally half of the planet’s primary productivity (plant growth). The amount of nitrogen cycling through the global biosphere has doubled.
Of mammalian biomass, humans comprise 36% of the total — 2nd place it turns out after cows, who together with hogs and other livestock comprise 96% of the total. Wild mammals are a mere 4% of total mammalian biomass. The global biomass of poultry is 3X the biomass of wild birds. Source here.
Bottom line imho is there is no immediate crisis, but we should not press our luck while at the same time being careful not to overcorrect. We definitely do not want to go back to the glacial mean annual temperatures that have dominated the last million years (< 10 C).
Dylan
Aug 11 2021 at 11:03am
This is one of the more annoying talking points from climate change skeptics. Yes, there was some discussion about the potential for global cooling. However, comparing that to the 4 decades worth of work that has been done on global warming, with even the early models proving largely accurate in their predictions (compare to the predictions of climate contrarians over the same time) and implying equivalence between the two…well, let’s just say I don’t find that it strengthens the authors argument.
Dylan
Aug 11 2021 at 11:04am
Also, this XKCD is timely
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Aug 12 2021 at 7:42am
And I think we ARE in an epoch of global cooling, but not on the time-scale of ACG.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 13 2021 at 12:06pm
Dylan: Four de-cades! Well, we have also had six decades of mutating environmental scares and attempts to reinforce Leviathan under these excuses, not counting the Middle Ages. And we have had, by a conservative count, 15 decades of economic analysis.
On the Middle Ages, see Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order (University of Chicago Press, 1995). Original version: Le Nouvel ordre écologique. L’arbre, l’animal et l’homme (Paris, 1992). The book is well worth reading.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 11 2021 at 2:36pm
It’s not easy for gnostics to convert an agnostic. But I am listening.
Greg G
Aug 12 2021 at 8:12am
>—-“…climate change” or “global warming” as it was called before the expression mutated for reasons that may be known only to our loving intelligentsia.”
Sometimes language conventions change for reasons that are unclear. Not this one. There is absolutely no mystery here. The effort to push the term “climate change” as a replacement for “global warming” was the product of a Republican sponsored Frank Luntz focus group. The idea was to come up with a term that made it seem less threatening.
Frank was initially very proud of this very successful bit of political messaging but has since changed his mind and now regrets having been a part of the effort to minimize the issue.
Jon Murphy
Aug 12 2021 at 10:15am
Interesting. I wonder why it was adopted, then, by the group sounding the alarm bells?
Greg G
Aug 12 2021 at 1:23pm
Good question Jon, especially because that adoption was the most important part of the change in conventional usage.
I would guess that part of it was media quoting Republicans who were the first to adopt the term and then continuing to use the term themselves because it feels more neutral. Either way, there is no real controversy over where the term originated and why.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 12 2021 at 11:56pm
Greg: Do you have a serious source for this? I thought that Republicans had never been able, and certainly not in recent times, to spread or even recognize an idea.
Greg G
Aug 13 2021 at 7:03am
Pierre,
If you Google the phrase – Frank Luntz climate change memo – you will get the actual memo (which dates to 2003) and articles by many major news outlets on the subject as well as interviews about it with Frank himself.
Here is a quote from the memo under the section “CONCLUSION: REDEFINING LABELS”:
“Climate change is less frightening than global warming. As one focus group participant noted, ‘Climate change sounds like you are going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.’ While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.”
Of course no one is claiming this is the first time any one combined the words “climate” and “change.” The point is this is the moment at which a major political marketing strategy on the issue began and it correlates quite nicely with the change in conventional usage.
I think one reason that those more alarmed about the issue didn’t resist is that they were keen to emphasis that warming is not the only change to be concerned about here. Rising ocean levels, ocean acidification, floods, droughts, wildfires etc. are also related issues. I have a friend in Northern Vermont who says his neighbors refer to the warming as “climate improvement.”
Frank Luntz was also the source of the idea of calling the Estate Tax the “Death Tax” which was yet another successful piece of Republican political marketing.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 13 2021 at 12:21pm
Greg: Thanks. I did not read the memo but found an interesting Guardian story. Note the usual high-flying intellectualism of Republican politicians:
Well, if “the democrats” can lie, we can do as well as them!
Isn’t it interesting that, to distract public opinion from the scare story of “global warming,” Luntz wanted to tame it down to “climate change,” as if people would want to avoid a tame monster more than a frightful one. But perhaps I don’t understand this thing correctly?
Michael Rulle
Aug 12 2021 at 8:37am
I wonder if there is a hypothesis that can create any kind of scientific test, observational, historical, predictive, heuristic, etc.——-that can test for the existence of “climate change”? The answer is of course no. There is no definition of climate change in any measurable sense. It is a political term
However, there are certainly many tests that could be developed for the existence of global warming, local warming, South Pole warming etc. I am sure we can test for correlations between various outputs—-let’s use CO2 and warming. I have never seen such correlations—-I assume they exist. What time frames? Rolling 30 year? Annual? I have never found one. There are predictions of course——-double in x years leads to increase of y temperature.
Since we have had warming (I don’t know why 1.1 degree Celsius in 170 years seems ridiculous to me——perhaps in climate land that is a huge number) one would expect——that if warming is bad—-there would be at least SOME descriptions of all the bad things that have happened because of this.
They cannot possibly use this time frame as evidence of a coming apocalypse—or whatever—-without telling us what the damage to mankind has already been. I have never seen any description of what has happened. It is always “10, 20 30, 50 years in the future”
And—-What I see are temperature predictions——not harm to mankind predictions. And these “predictions” assume mankind will just sit around waiting to get crushed.
And not to get to realistic and political here——but who believes China, India, or for that matter, any nation will sacrifice their economy based on this junk.
Plus we caught these people lying in East Anglia—-didn’t we? Or is that a figment of my imagination?
Yeah—-agnostic is good—because it requires evidence of problems that cannot be addressed without absurd laws——which does not exist.
Dylan
Aug 12 2021 at 11:57am
I get the impression that you haven’t looked that hard.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/07/huge-climate-sensitivity-study-shrinks-uncertainty-on-critical-number/
Michael Rulle
Aug 13 2021 at 11:43am
Not really—-their 1.5% low end (how much temp increases due to ppm doubling) is consistent with observational evidence since 1980. Which is about 2% Celsius. How they get numbers as high as 4 or 6 is beyond me. There is no observational evidence remotely close to those——so we are in model land I assume.
But my comment was on correlations—-which I have never seen
David Seltzer
Aug 12 2021 at 7:08pm
IPCC, “Intergovernmental Panel.” A reason for my agnosticism.
If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand. Milton Friedman.
Student of Liberty
Aug 13 2021 at 3:03am
The Economist is wrong. This is not only crucial, it is the only part. For some reason, I downloaded the full report that is 3949 pages long (if anybody needs a proof that they do not expect anybody to read it, this is much worse than a bank’s annual report) and discovered that after page 42, it is a draft version mentioning at the bottom left corner: “Do not cite, quote or distribute”
I am no scientist but publishing nearly 4000 pages with only an executive summary of 39 pages considered final does not sound very scientific to me.
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 13 2021 at 11:44am
Thanks, this is a very interesting point. But note that pp. 42 sq. seem to be somewhat more than a draft; these pages also bear the mention “ACCEPTED VERSION – SUBJECT TO FINAL EDITS.” We would need to know more about what, in their bureaucratic process, remains to be done. The report is at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Full_Report.pdf.
Niko Davor
Aug 13 2021 at 11:50am
Dr. Lemieux,
On a scale 1-10, how dire is the threat of the Climate Change Hoax?
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 13 2021 at 12:30pm
Niko: I fear I don’t understand your question, even if I ignore the scale issue. (The scale issue: When my doctor’s nurse ask me what is my pain level on a scale 1 to 10, I immediately know that she does not understand what a measurement scale is, whether it is ordinal or cardinal and, if the latter, whether it is linear or logarithmic and has an absolute zero. In the case of pain, I obviously know what zero is, but I don’t have the faintest idea of what is 10; indeed, I don’t think a lifetime of pain would tell me. Perhaps removing your nails slowly, one by one, without anesthetic, is just 5?)
Michael Rulle
Aug 15 2021 at 9:46am
To Pierre re: comment to Niko
So you are really going to respond to a “heuristic” of “1-10” with a “scale” response? I do not believe your probably very good understanding of statistics leads you to be unable to answer such an obvious question. Do you really think Niko wants some precision answer. He, like many people, simply wants to know how bad you think things can be. And describe them. That is not hard.
Well, it is not hard if anyone really believed in “apocalyptic” style forecasts. How many “too lates” have we read about. Too late for what? Too late to prevent mass death due to heat strokes, drownings, uncontrolled weather events, losing 20% of land mass? What are the parameters of the damage that will come our way?
Ironically——what else can I call it? “Absurdly”—-actually that’s better——the IPCC did try to handicap the human damage. They came up with a lower GDP number in 2100 than we otherwise would have had without global warming—-which still was about 3.5 times higher than today per capita—-about a 7-15% reduction of “what would have been without global warming” as I recall.
Well, they came up with something——but its hard to imagine a more ludicrous response——the precision of prediction alone is ridiculous.
But using IPCC forecast, my answer to Niko is somewhere between 0 and 1. By any stat measure you chose.
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