Quote:

Quote:Q You charge that the hysteria that's been created around global warming is an enormous financial scam. It's all about money?

A Well, how shall I put it? It's not all about money, but boy, there's a lot of money floating in it. I mean, emissions trading is going to be a multi-trillion dollar market. Emissions alone would keep small countries in business.

Q Are you suggesting that scientists manipulate their findings to get in on the gravy train?

A You have to differentiate the interests of different groups. In the scientific community, your interest is for your field to be recognized so that it will have priority in government funding.

Q So you are not accusing your scientific colleagues of corruption?

A No, I'm accusing them of behaving the way scientists always behave. In other words, some years ago, when Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, almost all the biological sciences then became cancer research. I mean, I don't call that corruption, I'm saying you orient your research so that it has a better chance to get resources.

Q And i thelps if your findings suggest something catastrophic is about to happen?

A In this case it certainly has helped. First of all, the funding increased so greatly that it exceeded the capacity of the existing field to absorb it. You'll notice that Working Group 2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came up with lots of scary things, but everything was always preceded by could, might, may, all these qualifiers. And the reason it was is those studies start out assuming there's a lot of warming. They assume all the science is in, and then they say, 'Well, how will this impact my field of insect-borne diseases, or agriculture, or health?' So they are almost, by definition, going to generate catastrophic scenarios, but they will never be based on anything other than the hypothesis that this will already happen.

Quote:... Professor Lindzen ...

Quote:Is that the professor Lindzen who likes disagreeing so much that he'll even claim there is little connection between smoking and lung cancer? link

Quote:http://www.newsweek.com/id/78772 <-- Most Lindzen articles cite this one. Good try though. He's a Democrat, and a real climatologist, at one of the worlds leading and respected technology schools.

Quote:He might tick the "D" box on the ballot, but he's firmly in the other camp on these issues. Being a contrarian scientist is one thing - publishing in the National Post and the WSJ is another.

As always, the question is the balance. Where does the weight of evidence sit? You can find isolated individuals (even ones with credentials) arguing just about any side of any issue. Sometimes, they're right. Often, they're not. Lindzen's academic credentials are fine, there's no reason to dismiss his work out of hand. However, on climate, his views are against the grain of the field. (The same is true of smoking, although that one obviously isn't his field.)

Quote:I actually think he is more of a moderate.

Quote:It's the old adage, "Correlation does not indicate causality". Yes, the temperature is on balance rising, which may have something to do with CO2. But, it might also have something more to do with something else (like micro particulates or the sun). I don't see the big disaster looming around the next decade, or probably even the next century.

Quote:The bottom line is that whatever the politicians are cooking up in Copenhagen will not undo whatever CO2 build up that has occurred over the past 200 years.

Quote:We aren't talking about solutions like salting the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide or building solar powered automaton catamarans that sail around the oceans churning up salt mists now are we.

Quote:No, in Copenhagen they are negotiating how to create a global tax on the citizens of the industrialized nations to be deposited in the world bank. Follow the money.

Quote:Hi,
Well, that sounds a lot like what I've been saying.

Quote:Sounds like a great idea to me. Easiest way to solve the problem, and the money gets put in a place where it can be put to good use.

-Jester

Quote:Sure. A moderate - who writes editorials for right wing newspapers excoriating the great global warming scam, who takes shot after shot at Al Gore, who's hangin' with the folks at Cato, Heartland, and so on... very moderate.

Quote:There's a chance he might be correct. There's no chance he's in the middle of the pack, scientifically speaking.

Quote:None of these other explanations have gained much traction - even in journals that regularly publish denialist papers. Everyone and their monkey believes they've found the thing that's actually causing warming, but none of it fits the data as well as CO2 does, not by a long shot.

Quote:You keep saying this. What does this matter? The current level of CO2 is not catastrophic. It is the current *rate of emissions* that is the problem. That's a problem for the future, not the past.

Quote:Unless you're a freakonomist, then no, I guess not. Mostly because these solutions, while novel, are generally untested, impractical, and in some cases, the cure is worse than the disease. I'm all for studying geoengineering, but these mechanisms are hardly ready to be deployed tomorrow - unless we *really* like gambling with the environment. Besides, they'd all have their costs - who pays for them?

Quote:Sounds like a great idea to me. Easiest way to solve the problem, and the money gets put in a place where it can be put to good use.

Quote:1) Denialists publish. See Lindzen, Pielke Sr., McKitrick and MacIntyre. Read Energy and Environment for the whole mess.

Quote:2) Your solutions are wishful thinking fairy tales that will not solve the problem in time to prevent CO2 concentrations from reaching 700 or 800 ppm - if it even stops there.

Quote:3) The atmosphere is not measured in GDP. This would be like claiming that Bill Gates can survive arsenic poisoning, because his arsenic/income ratio is very low. It's simply nonsensical.

Quote:4) Your simple equation is hilarious. Would you like a side of saccharine with that?

Quote:5) The service sector produces very little CO2 - all the declining countries are de-industrializing, except China, whose GDP is growth is starting to wash out emissions, slightly. But look at China these last few years, as it becomes the world's workshop.

Quote:Afterthought - it would be fascinating to see the emissions/gdp density for the last few years. Surely the collapse of the global financial sector has sent that way up, even as emissions come slightly down due to collapse?

*Admittedly, that normalized graph does not tell the whole story by far - Japan's ratio is quite good already, as is Germany's. The US' intensity is relatively poor (Canada worse - cold country), and China's is simply terrible, even after the dramatic decline from 1991. Chad and Cambodia, on the other hand, are doing fantastically, with their terrible GDPs and near-zero emissions. Although service-heavy Switzerland is doing almost as well...

Quote:Wouldn't the e-mail leak suggest there is some reason for concern over the objectivity of peer review in climate science?

Quote:No, not silly. GDP = production = emissions. You can cut emissions by hammering production. What we desire is to cut emissions without hammering production, so that is what should me measured. To ignore "per capita" ignores the role of each individual in GW, and to ignore GDP ignores the role of production on GW. China could also cut GW by executing 50% of their population, but that is not a desirable outcome either.

Quote:Hand calculate Switzerland... I don't get 8.9 thousands. 360.152 billion / 40457 thousands is actually 8,902.09358 Thousands... I haven't checked the others, but that one jumped out as wrong.

Quote:The atmosphere is about *emissions*. It is not measured in people, or income, or whatever else. It does not care one whit how the carbon gets there - only that it is there. We cannot say "it's okay to produce limitless carbon, so long as income always rises faster than emissions". That's ridiculous.

You also can't cut per capita emissions by killing people. That would raise, not lower, your per capita stats. It would cut total emissions - but that's precisely my point. We can ignore per capita stats, in some sense, because the final tally is measured in CO2 relative to the atmosphere, and not the economy or the population.

Quote:1) Direct the energy department to work on streamlining the process of implementing (pick a number) more nuclear power plants. Aim at getting them all online within 10 years, and heck if we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to be at least as advanced as France.

Quote:2) Support an Act of Congress to underwrite the banking industry in offering reduced interest 30 year loans (with a small percentage subsidy to be paid with tax dollars) for replacing coal and oil fired power plants with power plants that are zero polluting and zero GHG emissions. Let the EPA and the Energy department decide on how to reduce emissions, and how much capital to infuse into the industry to keep energy prices affordable for consumers. Call it something grandiose, like the "Green Energy USA Act". Slow and steady wins the race.

Quote:3) Rather than cash for caulkers... (i.e. wasted unaudited spending). Offer home owners an energy credit on the taxes for passing a home energy audit from their local utility. Offer home owners low interest loans for replacing their fuel oil or natural gas furnaces with zero emissions units.

Quote:4) Remove sovereign immunity from State and Federal government polluters and give the US and State governments a grace period to clean up their messes.

Quote:There is no need for some complicated, impossible to audit, carbon trading Ponzi scheme. Let's just fix it.

Quote:You can eliminate CO2 emissions through neo-luddite legislation incrementally banning emissions. However, it will result in deaths due to cold and heat where the use of fossil fuels have allowed people to inhabit otherwise uninhabitable areas (such as your beloved Canada). Fewer people also results in fewer mouths to feed, clothe or house, so you eliminate the production needed to sustain them.

Quote:My silly idea is that you take a little time (which you say we have), and use the government to provide leadership (and maybe a little incentive) to grease the skids in the right direction.

Quote:1) Direct the energy department to work on streamlining the process of implementing (pick a number) more nuclear power plants. Aim at getting them all online within 10 years, and heck if we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to be at least as advanced as France.

Quote:2) Support an Act of Congress to underwrite the banking industry in offering reduced interest 30 year loans (with a small percentage subsidy to be paid with tax dollars) for replacing coal and oil fired power plants with power plants that are zero polluting and zero GHG emissions. Let the EPA and the Energy department decide on how to reduce emissions, and how much capital to infuse into the industry to keep energy prices affordable for consumers. Call it something grandiose, like the "Green Energy USA Act". Slow and steady wins the race.

Quote:3) Rather than cash for caulkers... (i.e. wasted unaudited spending). Offer home owners an energy credit on the taxes for passing a home energy audit from their local utility. Offer home owners low interest loans for replacing their fuel oil or natural gas furnaces with zero emissions units.

Quote:4) Remove sovereign immunity from State and Federal government polluters and give the US and State governments a grace period to clean up their messes.

Quote:People don't just stand still in one place while they freeze to death, hoping to save a few nickels on their heating budget. If you can't afford to live in a place, the easy solution is to stop living there. There's a reason 90% of the population of Canada is along the US border, and it's not just because we really love our neighbours.

Quote:Regardless, since every sensible proposal has exemptions or credits for low income households, people who might conceivably be in danger of dying should not be unduly affected.

Quote:Talk is cheap, but it also doesn't do anything, so I'm not hopeful about "leadership", sans expenditures. As for incentives, I'm all for it - but they will be effective in rough proportion to cost, and every dollar of expenditure is a dollar that needs to be taxed somewhere else. Surely I don't have to explain this to a libertarian. So, you're still punishing people, just different people. That seems inefficient to me - why not penalize those who pollute directly?

Quote:Replacing the entire energy system of the US in 10 years is not slow and steady. But I support it anyway. This accomplishes the same thing as a carbon tax - changing the relative incentives of building plants that do not pollute carbon vs. those that do. The difference is that you're charging different people to do it, taxpayers instead of industries, and you're locking yourselves into sweetheart loans with specific companies. However, if that's what it takes, I wouldn't be opposed to it.

Quote:Any improvements in home energy efficiency are *very* good deals for the economy. Auditing a bazillion home projects would exceed the returns from the project, but I think on the whole, this is still a fantastic idea, and the opposite of wasteful.

Quote:The credit idea is just a roundabout pollution tax - rather than tax the polluter, you tax everyone, and credit the former polluter. Same difference. Loans for zero emissions furnaces sounds like a great idea.

Quote:Any idea that starts with the phrase "remove sovereign immunity" is doomed from the start.

Quote:We still need a systemic solution - something that plugs more or less all the holes, not just specific ones. Otherwise, the elasticity of demand is going to cause serious problems for potential solutions. As prices drop from less use, use will go up again as people find new ways to burn fuel.

Quote:Historically, no, they do stay and die. I can't think of any large population that has up and moved over a significant geography due to issues with climate (or other natural challenges for that matter).

Quote:Well, I think you might want to go back through the annals of archaeology - people move due to significant climate and geography changes all the time, throughout history. Soil depletes? Move. River floods? Move. Ice age hits? Move. Bering ice bridge forms? Move. Forest chopped down? Move. And so on, and so forth.

However, that's not the point for modern civilization. There are only a handful of countries in the far North (and only 2 in the far South) and they're all among the richest in the world - none are poor. Are modern Scandinavians, Canadians, Americans and Scots really analogous to the people who have historically died from famines, who could not afford to move? I would tend to think they are not, and have ample resources to relocate, or simply pay the extra heating costs.

If push really comes to shove, give them an extra tax credit. We're not talking about multiplying energy prices by a thousand or anything - this is essentially a carbon tax, not a ban on all heating.

Quote:Well, even in the highest tides of emigration to the new world during the 1800's, many stayed behind, and where there was famine, or war, they died in large numbers. Also, the process of emigrating is not always easy, and many died trying.

Quote:From an archeology perspective, population migration happens over eons or centuries where your son and his new wife live maybe a day or a weeks walk away, but are still connected to the family.

Quote:I fear what happens more often than not is that like in Pompeii, some escaped, but most were fried in a pyroclastic flow then buried under tons of ash.

Quote:While the untimely death of a person is a tragedy, the death of a large number is a natural selection process. It is to a species as an amputation is to an individual -- unpleasant but potentially life saving. Besides, compared to the population migrations of the first and early second millennium, those of the 1800s were only a small percentage of the populations involved.

Quote:Figuring 25 years as a generation, in less than 3 generations the Visigoths moved from the Caucasus to the central Iberian peninsula. A bit more than a week's walk per generation. They were not the only ones during that period (mid first millennium). The spreading of the Vikings was also pretty much series of long jumps interspersed with long periods of static settlement. Our knowledge of the movements of large numbers in Africa and the Americas is limited because these movements were not recoded in a manner that has come down to us. While the spread of humans from the Bering bridge to Tierra del Fuego may well have been at the rate you claim, there are some indications of rapid changes, especially in Central America. In Asia, we have the rapid movement of the Mongols from Central Asia as far West as the Balkans and as far East as a failed invasion of Japan.

Quote:Not at all comparable. Perhaps it was foolish to build a city on the slopes of a dormant volcano, but that has been done (and is being done) many times throughout history. From when the volcano went active till Pompeii was destroyed was, effectively, instantaneous compared to climate change.