Climate policy fails because the proposals are eye-wateringly expensive, amounting to trillions of dollars annually. In contrast, the CFC protocols and treaties worked splendidly because they were cheap, costing only billions of dollars to switch to chemicals which didn’t interact with ozone.
Changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is not the only way to change the climate, and is unlikely to be the cheapest way to change the climate. But acknowledging that would require having a diplomatic/societal technology to determine what the optimal climate should be.
> Changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is not the only way to change the climate, and is unlikely to be the cheapest way to change the climate.
We are changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and it is the main driver for the climate change. You probably wanted to say, that not changing the amount of CO2 is unlikely to be the cheapest way to keep the climate as it is, didn't you?
"If there is an iron law of climate policy, it is that when policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time."
Except the two are not mutually exclusive, and TFA points out that tax and price incentives tend to be successful. I would take anything from Pielke with a grain of salt. As much as he loves to pay lip service to supporting the most minor climate policies, he notoriously downplays the effects of climate change. But that's just par for the course to be on the AEI payroll, I suppose.
If we sit on our thumbs and do nothing about it perhaps (the uncertainty bars around long term damage are massive though). But changing CO2 levels is not the only way to avert that damage.
If anything shows the great failure of the church of economics, it's this attitude. "Everything has a monetary value".
Here's a clue to those in denial: economics can only value things in the past and the present, and only in approximation, and only in human terms of immediate utility.
Because economics CANNOT properly value virtually anything that has not yet occurred. Accounting systems may exist for it and of course they are the favorite of the cooked book. The faith that the free market is some vastly hyperintelligent entity that exceeds the power of human cognition.
Of course human perception of reality is fundamentally flawed, even for those with heavy scientific training in the compromises our senses and psychology make to perceive the world. And yet economics treats the flawed everyday idiot as some ultrapowerful computational unit of valuation of reality. Of course, that is dogma.
What is the economic value of a recently extinct species? What is the economic value of a non-acidic ocean? What is the economic value of the continued operation of oxygen-producing microorganisms in the ocean?
What is the value of the human race if it goes extinct?
The core of the problem is the function of money and monetary value: it has an essential component of whitewashing virtually all environmental impacts and damage, as well as human misery, inflicted in the generation of the "currency number". Once the "currency number" has been "earned", the sociopathy involved in the generation is blessed by the church of economics as a completely forgiven sin: because the money is the only point, a tautological pursuit.
What oil executive, car executive, politician, industrialist, coal mining executive will every face the music for their environmental sins? Because they have been immediately pardoned from the confessional booth of the limited liability corporation.
One of my prayers for cryptocurrency was a way of creating a currency that could somehow devalue these fortunes of destruction once their true macabre consequences became apparent, but it would just be another farm of energy-sucking servers, and lets face it, the damage is mostly done at this point.
So, rant aside, it doesn't FUCKING MATTER WHAT THE DOLLAR FIGURE IS IF WE GO EXTINCT. Dollars don't exist without humans, and humans don't exist without a functional biosphere. The cost is Infinite Floating Point Overflow. It is NaN.
Who cares about the optimal climate, we just need the rate of change to remain at a low enough level that nature (including humans) can adapt. We seem to be on the edge of that limit already.
I remember all the hate USA got when it didn't sign the Kyoto Protocol. Its emissions have fallen ever since then, despite population rising by a quarter.
The US target in the Kyoto Protocol was a 7% reduction from the 1990 baseline in 2008-2012. That target has still not been reached, because the emissions continued growing until the mid-2000s.
Probably the easiest way would have been to draw a line around each factory in the US, declare that those now counted as outside-US for emissions purposes, and then declare that now the US was a zero-emissions country.
It’s like saying “John refused to do chemotherapy yesterday and he’s still alive today”.
Yeah, he had some improvement. That doesn’t mean anything about whether or not a certain action would have led to more improvement or not.
Further, specifically regd. The Kyoto protocol, the largest economy in the world not signing the Kyoto Protocol or exiting the Paris agreement has massive knock on effects on other countries as well. Their leaders will find it much more difficult to push better policies and can easily refuse being bound to actual targets because why should they do it if the largest economy in the world doesn’t.
The headline focuses on a difficult number but the article pointed out 63 effective policies that government can focus on. Unfortunately, these seem to be the tougher policies like carbon tax which people aren't fans of... But it makes sense, you pollute you should pay for the cleanup.
I would really like the cost of CO2 emission to start to tend towards the true cost of capture and storage of CO2. At the moment that price is heavy and I think that should be the goal and any fines for organisations that breach emissions laws should be set on that basis. It might never come down but I hope it does but in the meantime that is the price of emissions.
Yes, Liberals (such as me) like carbon taxes. But even among liberals taxes aren't a popular subject. Especially not a potentially regressive tax like some carbon taxes.
And with the worsening weather events (Hurricane Helene ripped through the Florida Keys and other areas in its path), we are seeing the consequences of our collective inaction.
> In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases have caused a change in past Atlantic basin hurricane activity that is outside the range of natural variability, although greenhouse gases are strongly linked to global warming.
Don't forget about the category 4 Hurricane Helene from September of 1958.
Every time there's a huge storm you shouldn't just go about yelling "climate change!", just like you can't claim we've fixed climate change just because we have a few nice calm sunny days.
Right. It's not about 1 storm in isolation. Climate change is evident through the very clear and measurable patterns of weather over time, not to mention glacial loss, ocean acidity, etc.
are graphs of temperature and CO2 going
back to the end of the last ice age.
There have been many efforts to model
the temperatures and make predictions.
At
http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg
is a graph showing several predictions
starting in 1975. The predictions were
from small to big changes. The
comparatively accurate predictions were
from the comparatively small changes.
Every time I open Apple Weather and look at the daily average it seems to be ~ +5c the norm, about a year ago I just put it down to "must be a warm summer" but it's been like that for almost 12 months now. It's autumn and it's crazy warm.
Either Apply weather has some serious bug, or it's the climate that's ruined. Even the trees seem a bit confused.
What's that data going to look like in a decade? I really hate to think.
Its a (well known in climate science) impact that the temperature over land is about double that of the average warming. The other effect is that the warming isn't evenly spread across the world so some places are gaining temperature considerably faster than others.
Sure, but after so long of seeing +5c it's getting a little unnerving, plus, it's just hot all the time, I love cooler weather and wearing jeans when working outdoors etc, usually by now it's very cool, but We just can seem to get to that point yet.
When there are cold years we are told this is short term weather and not long term climate. But every warm year and storm is evidence of long term change.
Record high temps are almost 75% of new temperature records. The ~25% that are new lows ate due to arctic cold slipping down with our more wobbly jet stream. And the ice melt has hidden almost 90% of the net heat increase. Ice melting the last degree consumes much more heat than going warmer. This is all happening much faster than any time in our geologic record. We are at serious danger of runaway warming.
As a group, wealthy people (in the global sense — i.e. anyone reading this) aren’t inconvenienced enough by climate change yet. So there’s a 0% chance that they’ll supports any climate policy that negatively impacts their quality of life in any way.
But they also don’t want to feel like Part of the Problem, so they’ll enthusiastically support do-nothing policy.
I know someone who was a post-doc researcher in climate policy. a seeming sorely needed are of expertise. But a large enough group of the population just wanted to cry, the government is too big, and we don't want to waste money on policy analysts so there has been no opportunity to actually do anything.
> So there’s a 0% chance that they’ll supports any climate policy
/me reviews dozens of serious mass actions, hundreds of long form publications, and legislation in California and elsewhere.. wondering how this fits with "zero percent" of anything.. can we regroup and rephrase a bit here?
Yes, exactly. People won’t trade their QoL today for a better future for the planet. At some point that will have to be done by force rather than choice. So yes, you’d better hope the magic policy that both A) Works and B) improves QOL today is found.
Although to be honest, this point won’t come until everyone alive today is probably long dead so it doesn’t matter that much.
I can't say for 1998, but this paper[1] compares the IPCC projections made from 2000 and onwards.
The earlies estimation underpredicted temperature rise while later ones did better.
I also checked the IPCC predictions from 2001 myself a couple of years ago[2], and across multiple factors like sea rise, glacier loss etc observed values seemed to be within the predictions.
> We find that
climate models published over the past five decades were generally quite accurate in predicting global
warming in the years after publication, particularly when accounting for differences between modeled and
actual changes in atmospheric CO 2 and other climate drivers.
Readit News
Changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is not the only way to change the climate, and is unlikely to be the cheapest way to change the climate. But acknowledging that would require having a diplomatic/societal technology to determine what the optimal climate should be.
We are changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and it is the main driver for the climate change. You probably wanted to say, that not changing the amount of CO2 is unlikely to be the cheapest way to keep the climate as it is, didn't you?
It is :
"If there is an iron law of climate policy, it is that when policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time."
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-iron-law-of-climate...
It looks like a pretty good rule of thumb.
Here's a clue to those in denial: economics can only value things in the past and the present, and only in approximation, and only in human terms of immediate utility.
Because economics CANNOT properly value virtually anything that has not yet occurred. Accounting systems may exist for it and of course they are the favorite of the cooked book. The faith that the free market is some vastly hyperintelligent entity that exceeds the power of human cognition.
Of course human perception of reality is fundamentally flawed, even for those with heavy scientific training in the compromises our senses and psychology make to perceive the world. And yet economics treats the flawed everyday idiot as some ultrapowerful computational unit of valuation of reality. Of course, that is dogma.
What is the economic value of a recently extinct species? What is the economic value of a non-acidic ocean? What is the economic value of the continued operation of oxygen-producing microorganisms in the ocean?
What is the value of the human race if it goes extinct?
The core of the problem is the function of money and monetary value: it has an essential component of whitewashing virtually all environmental impacts and damage, as well as human misery, inflicted in the generation of the "currency number". Once the "currency number" has been "earned", the sociopathy involved in the generation is blessed by the church of economics as a completely forgiven sin: because the money is the only point, a tautological pursuit.
What oil executive, car executive, politician, industrialist, coal mining executive will every face the music for their environmental sins? Because they have been immediately pardoned from the confessional booth of the limited liability corporation.
One of my prayers for cryptocurrency was a way of creating a currency that could somehow devalue these fortunes of destruction once their true macabre consequences became apparent, but it would just be another farm of energy-sucking servers, and lets face it, the damage is mostly done at this point.
So, rant aside, it doesn't FUCKING MATTER WHAT THE DOLLAR FIGURE IS IF WE GO EXTINCT. Dollars don't exist without humans, and humans don't exist without a functional biosphere. The cost is Infinite Floating Point Overflow. It is NaN.
Done and dusted, problem solved.
It’s like saying “John refused to do chemotherapy yesterday and he’s still alive today”.
Yeah, he had some improvement. That doesn’t mean anything about whether or not a certain action would have led to more improvement or not.
Further, specifically regd. The Kyoto protocol, the largest economy in the world not signing the Kyoto Protocol or exiting the Paris agreement has massive knock on effects on other countries as well. Their leaders will find it much more difficult to push better policies and can easily refuse being bound to actual targets because why should they do it if the largest economy in the world doesn’t.
Not a huge expert but this is a huge talking point on the right. They don't like the carbon tax. E.g. second result from a simple search: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carbon-tax-political-popula...
Yes, Liberals (such as me) like carbon taxes. But even among liberals taxes aren't a popular subject. Especially not a potentially regressive tax like some carbon taxes.
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
> In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases have caused a change in past Atlantic basin hurricane activity that is outside the range of natural variability, although greenhouse gases are strongly linked to global warming.
Every time there's a huge storm you shouldn't just go about yelling "climate change!", just like you can't claim we've fixed climate change just because we have a few nice calm sunny days.
There have been many efforts to model the temperatures and make predictions. At
is a graph showing several predictions starting in 1975. The predictions were from small to big changes. The comparatively accurate predictions were from the comparatively small changes.Every time I open Apple Weather and look at the daily average it seems to be ~ +5c the norm, about a year ago I just put it down to "must be a warm summer" but it's been like that for almost 12 months now. It's autumn and it's crazy warm.
Either Apply weather has some serious bug, or it's the climate that's ruined. Even the trees seem a bit confused.
What's that data going to look like in a decade? I really hate to think.
"Melting Glaciers force Switzerland and Italy to Redraw Borders"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/29/melting-...
As a group, wealthy people (in the global sense — i.e. anyone reading this) aren’t inconvenienced enough by climate change yet. So there’s a 0% chance that they’ll supports any climate policy that negatively impacts their quality of life in any way.
But they also don’t want to feel like Part of the Problem, so they’ll enthusiastically support do-nothing policy.
/me reviews dozens of serious mass actions, hundreds of long form publications, and legislation in California and elsewhere.. wondering how this fits with "zero percent" of anything.. can we regroup and rephrase a bit here?
Although to be honest, this point won’t come until everyone alive today is probably long dead so it doesn’t matter that much.
Iirc, “An Inconvenient Truth” was put in 2006. I remember it winning Best Documentary.
The earlies estimation underpredicted temperature rise while later ones did better.
I also checked the IPCC predictions from 2001 myself a couple of years ago[2], and across multiple factors like sea rise, glacier loss etc observed values seemed to be within the predictions.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-16264-6
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27166369
https://eps.harvard.edu/files/eps/files/hausfather_2020_eval...