I wish you had a look in HoChiMin City (Saigon, Vietnam). You would reconsider this last paragraph about the drop in a bucket. There, I'd say (without checking numbers, just by the impression when I was there) that most of the pollution must be caused by motorbikes (maybe, if you remove construction from the equation, which is quite significant).
Here, and in France, the installed base is people driving cars, and a relatively small number of cyclists, hence a tiny market.
/me cannot agree with the above. In Paris many many people went away from using their car (at least, that's what I heard from my friends and the medias, I don't live there anymore...), and went to use scooters. There WOULD be a big market for electrics, if it didn't cost as much as petrol based. Plus there's absolutely no reason an electric scooter would cost as much as a petrol based one, it's a way more complex to control an explosion than it is to just use electrons. Yes, (very stupid) regulations are making the bikes a lot more expensive (you need a registration like a motorcycle, the bike got to be approved for market, etc.), and also the ban on lead batteries (a big part of the additional cost as well).
I thought I was quite clear that the consensus I was talking about was among climatologists, whose specialty it is to study these things.
That's precisely the issue! Climatologists, without a global warming issues and fundings around it, wouldn't get funds. And not surprisingly, it's mostly not Climatologists that have opposite views on the subject. Courtillot for example is a Geologist. Never the less, his studies can't be discarded just because he doesn't have a diploma in climat...
For the (multiple) debates I mentioned, most were in French language, some on the LCP channel, France 5, and others. But also, there was one were the press was not invited, after a lot of controversy, and the end report was that quite that there was a controversy.
From your link: "As the name suggests, climate sensitivity is an estimate of...". This is a MODEL, on which we can agree or not. The thing is, OBSERVATION doesn't show the same thing. It does work on paper, but there are other variable that these equations don't have. See also: "Studies have given a possible range of values of 2-4.5C warming for a doubling of CO2 (IPCC 2007). Using these values it's a simple task to put the climate sensitivity into the units we need, using the formulas above:", so to trust these equations, you got to trust the IPCC AR4 from 2007. The thing is, the AR4 is highly criticized. I didn't write that there is no quantification, I wrote that people do not agree on them, and so, I don't know what to think, and so should the policy makers.
[Citation needed] because Phil Jones has been very good with double speech, saying officially that they would help anyone willing to do peer reviews, but yet he's not. Also, that's the first time that I'm hearing about French weather station data being copyrighted and not available to French researchers. If you're talking about meteo France, It'd be weird, because it's funded at 300 million euros per year by the state (according to wikipedia).
Did I wrote such a dumb thing? I don't think so. Of course, I'm all for more public transportations and clean energy. But that has NOTHING to do with CO2 taxes.
Please defile "poor range". Mine does 60 km on a single charge, and a single battery. You can put a 2nd battery if you want, but I didn't need one. 60 km is enough to go on the other side of Shanghai (though, at 30km/h with the clamping that I still didn't removed, it's a bit slow, I have to admit). In Beijing, there's no petrol motorbike anymore, it's banned, and everyone dealt with it and move to electricity.
Look at the price difference between regular bikes in China and France, I bet that's also pretty big.
If you removed the kind of bike that I once tried, that worked for few hours before needing a repair, it's only about twice the price in France.
Besides, electric bikes are mostly bought to replace old fashioned bicycles, not petrol motor bikes, so the CO2 savings would be fairly small.
Wrong. I'm guessing that you never tried one. You can get an electric scooter that can do 60 km with a single battery. If you add a second one (many people do), then you can go even more far. Remove the clamping and it can go up to 50 km/h. Electric bikes really CAN replace petrol motor bikes, it works extremely well, and besides that, electricity costs a lot less than petrol.
So, if we can't remove coal electricity, and can't move away from polluting cars, what will be the effect of a CO2 tax? According to you, nothing, right?
Let me quickly give you an example. In China, there's a lot of electric bikes. I mean A LOT. In Beijing, it's even forbidden to use any kind of motorcycle if they don't use electricity. But in France, if you want to sell a bike on the market, it has to be "electricity assisted", which means that you have to move your legs, and not pressing a button, to have the electricity motor to kick in. Otherwise, it's considered a motorized vehicle, and has to comply to all sorts of regulation. The result? In China, such an electric bike is sold for 200 Euros, but in Paris, the starting price is 2000. There's a justification on having prices higher in France, but not that much: it really is because of the regulation. I suspect that you'd see the same kind of policies in other countries as well (otherwise, how come we don't see electric bikes everywhere, when they are so common in China?).
Pushing for a tax on CO2 emissions by vehicles is only part of the needed regulation, and we're skipping all the part that makes it possible to afford having electric.
It's very clear from a quick google of Vincent Courtillot that his opinions are not held in high regard by climate scientists. Indeed one of the leaked emails suggests Phil Jones rejected one of his papers as "awful".
Of course Phil Jones doesn't like Courtillot, because he has a complete different opinion as his, and he is giving out numbers, curves, and plausible scientific explanations on what he says, WITH the data together.
Therefore why should a scientist bend over backwards to satisfy his requests?
Maybe because:
- It may give a chance to anyone to prove or disprove what has been researched
- It is what everybody does on all science field
- Because your dislike of someone who doesn't agree with you isn't a scientific argument
- Because it's public financed research
- Because it's the only way to do a satisfying peer review
I do agree that some protocol should be put in place for scientists to release data and in return to be immune from being pestered by FOIA requests but that's a separate topic altogether, and certainly does not imply that absence of arbitrary-data-request-being-satisfied that somehow it implies conspiracy.
Come on! Nobody is pretending we are in a James Bond movie. We are just saying that the head of the IPCC is refusing to have his work peer-reviewed by people he dislike, or who will have enough knowledge to redo all the calculation and maybe disagree. That's important! It's not at all what you just wrote. We aren't just talking about the average scientist here, but THE HEAD OF THE IPCC, Phil Jones. To date, we still don't have his data (unless I'm mistaking), even after the leaks. Shame on these researchers.
The UEA emails don't reveal any "smoking gun" at all, just a bunch of scientists engaged in technical, mundane and occasionally bitchy chitchat with their peers.
It does reveal however that Jones doesn't like his opponents to peer review his work, and is hiding behind copyright.
Bullshit. Poor people get a 2nd hand car (which pollute a lot) because they live far away in the cheaper area, where public transportation is almost not existing, and at least isn't enough for them to go to work. This isn't an hypothesis, this is reality.
The only issue is that "climate scientists" are the one pushing for the GW theory, and most of the ones that don't agree are Geologists or from other fields not directly related to Climatology. However, he found cures, Paster wasn't a biologist... You don't need to be on the field to make scientific observations.
Please, name ONE policy with isn't tax, heading toward less CO2 emissions. Give me one example of a country that wants to ban petrol-based cars, or at least push for electric. The profit here, is simply going through a tax, and the enslavement of poor people having no choice but to use fossil fuel for their car, because there's simply no other alternative available, and that nobody cares to make policies to push for such a change. Open your eyes!
We aren't talking about "armchair bloggers", but about real scientists. Vincent Courtillot, a geologist (so not a climatologist) asked the university of East Anglia, and they really were hiding behind copyright, just as how they wrote on the leaked emails. VC isn't exactly just bloging merely to nitpick, he built his own data sets from many weather stations, and found very different results, simply because he couldn't get the original data sets from the AR4. Yes, they disclosed for a part their methods, and then we saw the leaked Pascal source code having some fudge factor written by hand, with no way to know where it came from.
All the above isn't joke, and you can't just dismiss all these facts because you trust blindly only one side. Recognize that it's a highly politicized field, and that we should be extremely careful reading each results, and we SHOULD ASK and CHECK FOR THE DATA. There's no other field on science where this doesn't happen. Why should we do an exception for climatology?
Please don't reply with insults, I'm sick of it, and FYI, I'm not on any side of this, I just think a CO2 tax isn't a good answer, and that currently, there's NO consensus and we should ask for more research, AND THE DATA that goes with it.
During the French revolution, they rushed into the "Bastille" prison. Not in order to save or free people from there, but because there was guns in it. We got to remember that one...:)
Just a guess, but he might be talking about the data from East Anglia, NASA and MIT, which were used to build the IPCC AR4 in 2007, which is always the report everyone talks about. The issue is that gathering all the data is both very hard and very expensive. And what would be a peer review if we had no data sets to work with? Those who asked about these data, like Vincent Courtillot, later tried to gather data from other data sets, as they were in front of walls when asking. And their conclusion are very different. So yes, asking for the data sets on which all the later CO2 policies are extremely important.
Think again. Instead of trying to fix real existing threats that we have in front of us (waste management, water resources, starvation, pollution, etc.), the goal is to have a CO2 tax for something we aren't sure about. And we're not talking about banishing fossil fuel cars here, and replacing them with electricity, which would be the first thing to do. No, just tax them... Tax everyone, make a bank of the world which will be privately held, and go with that, continuing to pollute the world. If you think that will save you from dying, you are mistaking!
No, he is talking about the data used to write the AR4 from the IPCC, which multiple times, the university of East Anglia refused to give out, hiding behind copyrights. He isn't exactly writing about any random data here, but about the data set that everyone talks about in policy making meetings.
I'm quite aware that truth is not subject to democracy, but dismissing scientific consensuses [...]
The word consensus, is used to describe both general agreement and the process of getting to such agreement, not only by a majority, but also by the minorities. It is mostly used in democracy. So, basically above, you are saying: "Science isn't democracy, but you can't dismiss the majority [...]". The minority that do not agree does exist, but it has no voice, it's being shut at by the IPCC that refuses any kind of controversy. I once heard Jouvel and Courtillot in a debate, it was really funny: Courtillot gave scientific arguments, while Jouvel (from IPCC) was only attacking the person. This doesn't work, it never will, and it wont ever in Science. Forget about the consensus thing, this is pure bullshit which is just not the case today, and it's used by one side to expose the other as wrong (but of course, the simple fact that there are 2 sides means there's no consensus).
I'll reiterate one more time that the model does quantify the effect of human carbon emissions have on temperature. It is just not as simple as X carbon means Y degrees, but it's definitely quantifiable within a margin of error, and that margin of error is small enough to see that a failure to reduce our increases in carbon output is highly likely to result in catastrophe (which isn't so hard - the global economy is already teetering).
If you feel the need to reiterate this, then I feel the need to oppose to this. There's no clear consensus about the quantification, and we have no way to tell how much, or even if, a catastrophe will happen. Only people involved in politicizing the IPCC agree about the consensus for it. If CO2 effect is insignificant, then it's simple: it's urgent to refocus, and push for other policies. I am currently convince that, CO2 effect or not, we are missing the most important policies (which I listed above in this thread). So yes, I need clear quantifications and solid proofs before I can accept even the idea CO2 taxes and cap-and-trade. But whatever what happens, I'll be against this system of CO2 taxes anyway, which I don't think will be efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish you had a look in HoChiMin City (Saigon, Vietnam). You would reconsider this last paragraph about the drop in a bucket. There, I'd say (without checking numbers, just by the impression when I was there) that most of the pollution must be caused by motorbikes (maybe, if you remove construction from the equation, which is quite significant).
Here, and in France, the installed base is people driving cars, and a relatively small number of cyclists, hence a tiny market.
/me cannot agree with the above. In Paris many many people went away from using their car (at least, that's what I heard from my friends and the medias, I don't live there anymore...), and went to use scooters. There WOULD be a big market for electrics, if it didn't cost as much as petrol based. Plus there's absolutely no reason an electric scooter would cost as much as a petrol based one, it's a way more complex to control an explosion than it is to just use electrons. Yes, (very stupid) regulations are making the bikes a lot more expensive (you need a registration like a motorcycle, the bike got to be approved for market, etc.), and also the ban on lead batteries (a big part of the additional cost as well).
I'm simply arguing against what appears to me to be an argument consisting of "it's a tax, and taxes are bad."
Don't you worry, I am NOT a US citizen... :) I truly believe that such tax will have no effect on petrol consumption.
I thought I was quite clear that the consensus I was talking about was among climatologists, whose specialty it is to study these things.
That's precisely the issue! Climatologists, without a global warming issues and fundings around it, wouldn't get funds. And not surprisingly, it's mostly not Climatologists that have opposite views on the subject. Courtillot for example is a Geologist. Never the less, his studies can't be discarded just because he doesn't have a diploma in climat...
For the (multiple) debates I mentioned, most were in French language, some on the LCP channel, France 5, and others. But also, there was one were the press was not invited, after a lot of controversy, and the end report was that quite that there was a controversy.
From your link: "As the name suggests, climate sensitivity is an estimate of...". This is a MODEL, on which we can agree or not. The thing is, OBSERVATION doesn't show the same thing. It does work on paper, but there are other variable that these equations don't have. See also: "Studies have given a possible range of values of 2-4.5C warming for a doubling of CO2 (IPCC 2007). Using these values it's a simple task to put the climate sensitivity into the units we need, using the formulas above:", so to trust these equations, you got to trust the IPCC AR4 from 2007. The thing is, the AR4 is highly criticized. I didn't write that there is no quantification, I wrote that people do not agree on them, and so, I don't know what to think, and so should the policy makers.
[Citation needed] because Phil Jones has been very good with double speech, saying officially that they would help anyone willing to do peer reviews, but yet he's not. Also, that's the first time that I'm hearing about French weather station data being copyrighted and not available to French researchers. If you're talking about meteo France, It'd be weird, because it's funded at 300 million euros per year by the state (according to wikipedia).
Did I wrote such a dumb thing? I don't think so. Of course, I'm all for more public transportations and clean energy. But that has NOTHING to do with CO2 taxes.
Please defile "poor range". Mine does 60 km on a single charge, and a single battery. You can put a 2nd battery if you want, but I didn't need one. 60 km is enough to go on the other side of Shanghai (though, at 30km/h with the clamping that I still didn't removed, it's a bit slow, I have to admit). In Beijing, there's no petrol motorbike anymore, it's banned, and everyone dealt with it and move to electricity.
Look at the price difference between regular bikes in China and France, I bet that's also pretty big.
If you removed the kind of bike that I once tried, that worked for few hours before needing a repair, it's only about twice the price in France.
Besides, electric bikes are mostly bought to replace old fashioned bicycles, not petrol motor bikes, so the CO2 savings would be fairly small.
Wrong. I'm guessing that you never tried one. You can get an electric scooter that can do 60 km with a single battery. If you add a second one (many people do), then you can go even more far. Remove the clamping and it can go up to 50 km/h. Electric bikes really CAN replace petrol motor bikes, it works extremely well, and besides that, electricity costs a lot less than petrol.
So, if we can't remove coal electricity, and can't move away from polluting cars, what will be the effect of a CO2 tax? According to you, nothing, right?
Well, not exactly the AR4 itself, that is public. But the raw data used to build it yes.
Let me quickly give you an example. In China, there's a lot of electric bikes. I mean A LOT. In Beijing, it's even forbidden to use any kind of motorcycle if they don't use electricity. But in France, if you want to sell a bike on the market, it has to be "electricity assisted", which means that you have to move your legs, and not pressing a button, to have the electricity motor to kick in. Otherwise, it's considered a motorized vehicle, and has to comply to all sorts of regulation. The result? In China, such an electric bike is sold for 200 Euros, but in Paris, the starting price is 2000. There's a justification on having prices higher in France, but not that much: it really is because of the regulation. I suspect that you'd see the same kind of policies in other countries as well (otherwise, how come we don't see electric bikes everywhere, when they are so common in China?).
Pushing for a tax on CO2 emissions by vehicles is only part of the needed regulation, and we're skipping all the part that makes it possible to afford having electric.
It's very clear from a quick google of Vincent Courtillot that his opinions are not held in high regard by climate scientists. Indeed one of the leaked emails suggests Phil Jones rejected one of his papers as "awful".
Of course Phil Jones doesn't like Courtillot, because he has a complete different opinion as his, and he is giving out numbers, curves, and plausible scientific explanations on what he says, WITH the data together.
Therefore why should a scientist bend over backwards to satisfy his requests?
Maybe because:
- It may give a chance to anyone to prove or disprove what has been researched
- It is what everybody does on all science field
- Because your dislike of someone who doesn't agree with you isn't a scientific argument
- Because it's public financed research
- Because it's the only way to do a satisfying peer review
I do agree that some protocol should be put in place for scientists to release data and in return to be immune from being pestered by FOIA requests but that's a separate topic altogether, and certainly does not imply that absence of arbitrary-data-request-being-satisfied that somehow it implies conspiracy.
Come on! Nobody is pretending we are in a James Bond movie. We are just saying that the head of the IPCC is refusing to have his work peer-reviewed by people he dislike, or who will have enough knowledge to redo all the calculation and maybe disagree. That's important! It's not at all what you just wrote. We aren't just talking about the average scientist here, but THE HEAD OF THE IPCC, Phil Jones. To date, we still don't have his data (unless I'm mistaking), even after the leaks. Shame on these researchers.
The UEA emails don't reveal any "smoking gun" at all, just a bunch of scientists engaged in technical, mundane and occasionally bitchy chitchat with their peers.
It does reveal however that Jones doesn't like his opponents to peer review his work, and is hiding behind copyright.
Bullshit. Poor people get a 2nd hand car (which pollute a lot) because they live far away in the cheaper area, where public transportation is almost not existing, and at least isn't enough for them to go to work. This isn't an hypothesis, this is reality.
We don't care if polluters are paying a tax. We want them to stop the pollution. Banishing coal electricity really is possible.
Well, the solution that John Aldren is pushing for in hist book "Ecoscience" is forced women infertility by poisoning public water. Oh, and that guy is an Obama advisor... Read for yourself: http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5204667/Ecoscience.-.Population_.Resources_.Environment.(1977).PDF
The only issue is that "climate scientists" are the one pushing for the GW theory, and most of the ones that don't agree are Geologists or from other fields not directly related to Climatology. However, he found cures, Paster wasn't a biologist... You don't need to be on the field to make scientific observations.
Please, name ONE policy with isn't tax, heading toward less CO2 emissions. Give me one example of a country that wants to ban petrol-based cars, or at least push for electric. The profit here, is simply going through a tax, and the enslavement of poor people having no choice but to use fossil fuel for their car, because there's simply no other alternative available, and that nobody cares to make policies to push for such a change. Open your eyes!
We aren't talking about "armchair bloggers", but about real scientists. Vincent Courtillot, a geologist (so not a climatologist) asked the university of East Anglia, and they really were hiding behind copyright, just as how they wrote on the leaked emails. VC isn't exactly just bloging merely to nitpick, he built his own data sets from many weather stations, and found very different results, simply because he couldn't get the original data sets from the AR4. Yes, they disclosed for a part their methods, and then we saw the leaked Pascal source code having some fudge factor written by hand, with no way to know where it came from.
All the above isn't joke, and you can't just dismiss all these facts because you trust blindly only one side. Recognize that it's a highly politicized field, and that we should be extremely careful reading each results, and we SHOULD ASK and CHECK FOR THE DATA. There's no other field on science where this doesn't happen. Why should we do an exception for climatology?
Please don't reply with insults, I'm sick of it, and FYI, I'm not on any side of this, I just think a CO2 tax isn't a good answer, and that currently, there's NO consensus and we should ask for more research, AND THE DATA that goes with it.
During the French revolution, they rushed into the "Bastille" prison. Not in order to save or free people from there, but because there was guns in it. We got to remember that one... :)
Just a guess, but he might be talking about the data from East Anglia, NASA and MIT, which were used to build the IPCC AR4 in 2007, which is always the report everyone talks about. The issue is that gathering all the data is both very hard and very expensive. And what would be a peer review if we had no data sets to work with? Those who asked about these data, like Vincent Courtillot, later tried to gather data from other data sets, as they were in front of walls when asking. And their conclusion are very different. So yes, asking for the data sets on which all the later CO2 policies are extremely important.
Think again. Instead of trying to fix real existing threats that we have in front of us (waste management, water resources, starvation, pollution, etc.), the goal is to have a CO2 tax for something we aren't sure about. And we're not talking about banishing fossil fuel cars here, and replacing them with electricity, which would be the first thing to do. No, just tax them... Tax everyone, make a bank of the world which will be privately held, and go with that, continuing to pollute the world. If you think that will save you from dying, you are mistaking!
People doing moderation on the above should use the "Reply to This" link instead. That's how you express yourself when you do not agree!
No, he is talking about the data used to write the AR4 from the IPCC, which multiple times, the university of East Anglia refused to give out, hiding behind copyrights. He isn't exactly writing about any random data here, but about the data set that everyone talks about in policy making meetings.
I'm quite aware that truth is not subject to democracy, but dismissing scientific consensuses [...]
The word consensus, is used to describe both general agreement and the process of getting to such agreement, not only by a majority, but also by the minorities. It is mostly used in democracy. So, basically above, you are saying: "Science isn't democracy, but you can't dismiss the majority [...]". The minority that do not agree does exist, but it has no voice, it's being shut at by the IPCC that refuses any kind of controversy. I once heard Jouvel and Courtillot in a debate, it was really funny: Courtillot gave scientific arguments, while Jouvel (from IPCC) was only attacking the person. This doesn't work, it never will, and it wont ever in Science. Forget about the consensus thing, this is pure bullshit which is just not the case today, and it's used by one side to expose the other as wrong (but of course, the simple fact that there are 2 sides means there's no consensus).
I'll reiterate one more time that the model does quantify the effect of human carbon emissions have on temperature. It is just not as simple as X carbon means Y degrees, but it's definitely quantifiable within a margin of error, and that margin of error is small enough to see that a failure to reduce our increases in carbon output is highly likely to result in catastrophe (which isn't so hard - the global economy is already teetering).
If you feel the need to reiterate this, then I feel the need to oppose to this. There's no clear consensus about the quantification, and we have no way to tell how much, or even if, a catastrophe will happen. Only people involved in politicizing the IPCC agree about the consensus for it. If CO2 effect is insignificant, then it's simple: it's urgent to refocus, and push for other policies. I am currently convince that, CO2 effect or not, we are missing the most important policies (which I listed above in this thread). So yes, I need clear quantifications and solid proofs before I can accept even the idea CO2 taxes and cap-and-trade. But whatever what happens, I'll be against this system of CO2 taxes anyway, which I don't think will be efficient.
Like many, I don't care, and I wont use an iPad or Safari. Why is this important exactly?