To elaborate on my comments on the Stern Report, they use artificially low discount rates when computing the value of future costs (and argued to do otherwise was to be "immoral").
So what is your take on the Stern Review [wikipedia.org] then, which reached exactly that conclusion? Do you not know about it, or do you specifically challenge it on some points? Can you give stronger evidence of the contrary?
I think it's an interesting starting point for discussion (especially as one of the first attempts to quantify actual harm from AGW), but it suffers from blatant bias in favor of AGW mitigation. For example, I think they greatly overstate the cost of sea level rise while simultaneously downplaying the cost of AGW mitigation (though they did admit that it would be a percentage of global GDP as a cost).
Basically, the UK Prime Minister of the time, Tony Blair needed political cover and the Stern Report provided that cover.
And I am obviously still claiming it is the better choice. "Survivable" is a (slightly sarcastic) reference to your claim that it would lead to "economic, societal and military destruction". In other words, what I'm saying is that your claim is wrong.
Well, I grant that ColdWetDog was engaging in a bit of hyperbole. but the high costs of AGW mitigation are a key criticism.
Are you so sure that humanity could ever pull off interstellar travel?
Humanity has already pulled it off. Since the first Homo Sapiens was known (about 43k years ago), the Solar System has moved roughly 31 light years.
It requires long-term thinking and generational sacrifice, and we can't even deal with a measly few-decades-long effort to stop global warming.
I think we're nearing the apex of that few decades effort. I think over the next few decades we will see some degree of evidence for AGW, but it'll be considerably less effect than claimed by AGW advocates of the past few decades. At that point, the con will gradually fold and we can then begin rational discussions of what to do about AGW, if anything, in context with the other serious problems we will have.
Democracy doesn't mean everyone gets to make their own rules and facts.
Like the counterexample going on in this thread? I guess being wrong didn't stop you from putting in your two cents and putting in your "rules and facts", did it?
Thirdly, even if the effects of current emissions will take centuries to peak, you are harming future prospected revenue and by extension current value.
And benefiting future prospected revenue and so on. There's not just costs to not doing anything about AGW. Your refusal to consider the other side of the ledger is telling.
while ignoring how much it will cost our kids and grandkids to deal with the fucking mess we created
The same insane carbon policies that kill people today would be killing people in the future, Unless, of course, that we don't implement them unless some day an actual need is demonstrated.
It's internalisation of the costs that are already inherent in the emissions
Costs which no one has demonstrated are actually there. This is a frequent problem of pollution, that the actual damage is hard to grasp and depends on what one values.
It's worth noting here that such additional costs are usually imposed to pay for stuff or change behavior not to internalize externalities.
it would be more accurate to say that there is as much scientific consensus behind human-influenced climate change as there is behind nuclear fission.
[...]
but that does not change the fact that it happens or that we can predict the general event.
Here's the vast difference between physics and climatology. One can repeat physics experiments, sometimes trillions of times. One can repeat Earth's climate zero times. All we know of Earth-like climates comes from our very limited measurements of Earth. Even the physics has great uncertainties because we both don't actually know that much about the upper atmosphere of Earth and we don't know much about how weather (for example, the heating and cooling effects of clouds and storms) changes the basic radiative model we use.
While I would compare the AGW model with both evolution and various physical theories, the comparison would not be favorable to AGW.
There is as much scientific consensus behind human-influenced climate change as there is behind evolution.
Well, this is an example of the problem at hand. The assertion above is wrong. There isn't as much scientific consensus. And it should be noted here that there shouldn't be such a high level of scientific consensus due to the considerable weakness of both paleoclimate data and predictive models in climatology. There's also considerable uncertainty in both the temperature sensitivity of carbon dioxide (by at least a factor of two, perhaps more) and the degree of effect that human activity is supposed to cause.
Evolution has a vast amount of evidence supporting its claims - fossils, genetics, organism morphology and behavior, etc throughout all living organisms. It's current biggest problem is the difficulty of demonstrating what is called "macroevolution", the evolving of new species with substantial differences.
But evolution doesn't have to deal with the climatology elephant in the room, tens of billions of dollars a year that go to climate change research and mitigation, renewable energy development and subsidy, carbon emissions controls, electric vehicles and mass transit, etc. There's a vast industry that is predicated on sufficiently catastrophic AGW being true. Even many of the fossil fuel companies are jumping on this band wagon.
And of course, there's a lot of people who assume that AGW has to be a major threat because that's the better story.
I think that's why we're seeing such false certainty in AGW and why we have studies that look into the psychology of only one side of this climatology debate.
but if we don't get there we will eventually reach a tipping point from which there is no recovery for human civilization as we currently know it.
Well, 5000 parts per million is supposed to suck due to CO2 toxicity. That's about 1500 years at current rates. At some point past that, it'll grow too toxic for unprotected human life. So maybe we should stop some point before that. But stop now? What's the reason?
but we can certainly cut down fast enough to avoid a disastrous impact with little negative (or perhaps even positive) economic consequences
This type of Pollyanna crap is embarrassing. You're fucking around with the core of society - energy and transportation. Somehow that's going to result in a society with better energy and transportation alternatives? Why hasn't it happened already, if it's so wonderful?
Instead, I think we'll be lucky after the dust settles, if most of the world will still be able to feed itself. But don't worry, evil corporations and greed will be blamed for any resulting starvation and such, not a little negative ("or perhaps even positive") economic consequences of your profoundly bad idea.
No, that is not the rational answer, that is the short-sighted answer. Everything suggests that doing nothing will incur significantly greater costs than doing something.
Except that "everything" doesn't suggest that. I think one of the more tiresome parts of this debate is the insistence both to completely mischaracterize the arguments against climate change mitigation and vastly overstate the strength of evidence supporting climate change mitigation. My view remains that no one has shown that there will be significant less costs from substantial carbon emission reduction and the like than from ignoring the problem except to move stuff uphill every few decades when rising sea levels cause the occasional bit of trouble.
I'm pretty sure we'll be able survive a reduction in fossil fuel use
Before you were claiming this was the better choice. Now you're merely promising that it is survivable. I'll note that doing nothing is survivable as well.
What they did actually worked to a large degree and things don't seem so bad unless your a Anne Rand level Libertarian.
Why is the EPA still pushing through new regulations? Why is it finding novel and unconstitutional ways to enforce its regulations?
The couple, Chantell and Michael Sackett, had started to fill the home site with dirt and gravel to prepare for construction. But the EPA intervened, announcing that the property was a regulated wetland. Agency officials ordered the couple to restore the land to its original state or face up to $75,000 a day in fines.
The Sacketts disputed the EPA's wetland designation and filed a lawsuit to litigate the issue in federal court.
The EPA argued that the Sacketts' lawsuit must be dismissed because the EPA's Clean Water Act compliance order did not amount to final agency action.
In other words, the EPA claimed that the plaintiff's didn't have standing to sue the EPA even though they were being fined by the EPA $75,000 a day if they didn't comply with costly reversal of their construction efforts. One doesn't have to be an Objectivist to think that's very unfair.
The thing here is that the EPA pretty much fixed the problems that led to its creation. Yet it's still growing. It should be like a fire department where it's funded a fixed amount to do a set job and doesn't keep enlarging itself to do more and control more.
And the EPA is far from alone in this mission creep. The NSA is another fine example which has extended itself to the point where it's eavesdropping on the entire world. A little while back in the Fast and Furious scandal the ATF was equipping the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico with high quality US firearms under the pretext of trying to stop gun smuggling. And it appears that such guns were found at crime scenes involving more than 200 murder victims in Mexico and the US.
I don't believe, however, that we can solve these problems and maintain our current lifestyles.
Well, what is a lifestyle? I see a lot of attempts to equate lifestyle with a certain level of consumption of resources. I see it rather as what I can do or how healthy I am. Those sorts of things don't require a certain level of hydrocarbon consumption or land occupied. I wouldn't mind exchanging my current lifestyle for a better one that happens to more efficiently use resources.
But I wouldn't care to sacrifice my lifestyle for preservation of resources that are rather plentiful (such as energy or air).
My point here was that a number of the sort of arguments discussed in this thread seem reserved for certain poorly thought out belief systems. I didn't at any time advocate censoring expression of these belief systems. I think such attempts would merely lend credibility to the belief systems in question.
Yet every so often I am reminded by others of the principles of free speech. I don't know why since I have yet to put on the jack boots. Merely noting that a dangerous argument (dangerous in a real world implementation of the idea in question can cause considerable harm to others, that is) is dangerous, isn't a call for censorship.
People do not always agree, so there will always be reasons to try to censor speech. I'm saying freedom of speech is more important than those reasons.
I agree. But what's the point of reminding some of free speech principles merely because they happen to disagree with another person? That was my rather oblique point here.
In fact as I said, I don't see what's wrong with people proposing solutions that might make things worse. It's a non-problem that the free market will weed out like everything else.
Except when there isn't a market to weed such things out. Some of these ideas, if implemented, would poison that particular means.
Our friends with 220 outlets can push about twice the number of watts thru the same sized wires as we can. When they do resisitve losses are halved at the same power.
And twice something that is near zero is still near zero.
Nor needed. It's remarkable how people think every minor advance in technology will yield large dividends. Delivering electricity to a wall socket is just not that hard a problem to where a "smart" system is going to do a lot better than a "dumb" system.
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To elaborate on my comments on the Stern Report, they use artificially low discount rates when computing the value of future costs (and argued to do otherwise was to be "immoral").
So what is your take on the Stern Review [wikipedia.org] then, which reached exactly that conclusion? Do you not know about it, or do you specifically challenge it on some points? Can you give stronger evidence of the contrary?
I think it's an interesting starting point for discussion (especially as one of the first attempts to quantify actual harm from AGW), but it suffers from blatant bias in favor of AGW mitigation. For example, I think they greatly overstate the cost of sea level rise while simultaneously downplaying the cost of AGW mitigation (though they did admit that it would be a percentage of global GDP as a cost).
Basically, the UK Prime Minister of the time, Tony Blair needed political cover and the Stern Report provided that cover.
And I am obviously still claiming it is the better choice. "Survivable" is a (slightly sarcastic) reference to your claim that it would lead to "economic, societal and military destruction". In other words, what I'm saying is that your claim is wrong.
Well, I grant that ColdWetDog was engaging in a bit of hyperbole. but the high costs of AGW mitigation are a key criticism.
The cost of those efforts is probably going to make $16T look like a drop in the bucket.
No offense intended to the rest of humanity, but I'm pretty sure I could do a lot about AGW with 16 trillion present value dollars.
Are you so sure that humanity could ever pull off interstellar travel?
Humanity has already pulled it off. Since the first Homo Sapiens was known (about 43k years ago), the Solar System has moved roughly 31 light years.
It requires long-term thinking and generational sacrifice, and we can't even deal with a measly few-decades-long effort to stop global warming.
I think we're nearing the apex of that few decades effort. I think over the next few decades we will see some degree of evidence for AGW, but it'll be considerably less effect than claimed by AGW advocates of the past few decades. At that point, the con will gradually fold and we can then begin rational discussions of what to do about AGW, if anything, in context with the other serious problems we will have.
Democracy doesn't mean everyone gets to make their own rules and facts.
Like the counterexample going on in this thread? I guess being wrong didn't stop you from putting in your two cents and putting in your "rules and facts", did it?
Thirdly, even if the effects of current emissions will take centuries to peak, you are harming future prospected revenue and by extension current value.
And benefiting future prospected revenue and so on. There's not just costs to not doing anything about AGW. Your refusal to consider the other side of the ledger is telling.
while ignoring how much it will cost our kids and grandkids to deal with the fucking mess we created
The same insane carbon policies that kill people today would be killing people in the future, Unless, of course, that we don't implement them unless some day an actual need is demonstrated.
It's internalisation of the costs that are already inherent in the emissions
Costs which no one has demonstrated are actually there. This is a frequent problem of pollution, that the actual damage is hard to grasp and depends on what one values.
It's worth noting here that such additional costs are usually imposed to pay for stuff or change behavior not to internalize externalities.
I'm good with tolls on roads. Let's do it.
what exactly would it take for you to accept it?
Time. Run the clock for a few decades and see how well the models fit reality. Beats peer review any day.
it would be more accurate to say that there is as much scientific consensus behind human-influenced climate change as there is behind nuclear fission.
[...]
but that does not change the fact that it happens or that we can predict the general event.
Here's the vast difference between physics and climatology. One can repeat physics experiments, sometimes trillions of times. One can repeat Earth's climate zero times. All we know of Earth-like climates comes from our very limited measurements of Earth. Even the physics has great uncertainties because we both don't actually know that much about the upper atmosphere of Earth and we don't know much about how weather (for example, the heating and cooling effects of clouds and storms) changes the basic radiative model we use.
While I would compare the AGW model with both evolution and various physical theories, the comparison would not be favorable to AGW.
There is as much scientific consensus behind human-influenced climate change as there is behind evolution.
Well, this is an example of the problem at hand. The assertion above is wrong. There isn't as much scientific consensus. And it should be noted here that there shouldn't be such a high level of scientific consensus due to the considerable weakness of both paleoclimate data and predictive models in climatology. There's also considerable uncertainty in both the temperature sensitivity of carbon dioxide (by at least a factor of two, perhaps more) and the degree of effect that human activity is supposed to cause.
Evolution has a vast amount of evidence supporting its claims - fossils, genetics, organism morphology and behavior, etc throughout all living organisms. It's current biggest problem is the difficulty of demonstrating what is called "macroevolution", the evolving of new species with substantial differences.
But evolution doesn't have to deal with the climatology elephant in the room, tens of billions of dollars a year that go to climate change research and mitigation, renewable energy development and subsidy, carbon emissions controls, electric vehicles and mass transit, etc. There's a vast industry that is predicated on sufficiently catastrophic AGW being true. Even many of the fossil fuel companies are jumping on this band wagon.
And of course, there's a lot of people who assume that AGW has to be a major threat because that's the better story.
I think that's why we're seeing such false certainty in AGW and why we have studies that look into the psychology of only one side of this climatology debate.
on the fact
What fact? I see part of the problem being people who confuse their own opinion with fact.
but if we don't get there we will eventually reach a tipping point from which there is no recovery for human civilization as we currently know it.
Well, 5000 parts per million is supposed to suck due to CO2 toxicity. That's about 1500 years at current rates. At some point past that, it'll grow too toxic for unprotected human life. So maybe we should stop some point before that. But stop now? What's the reason?
But will those ocean currents bring this radiation from the Incidental to the Accidental?
but we can certainly cut down fast enough to avoid a disastrous impact with little negative (or perhaps even positive) economic consequences
This type of Pollyanna crap is embarrassing. You're fucking around with the core of society - energy and transportation. Somehow that's going to result in a society with better energy and transportation alternatives? Why hasn't it happened already, if it's so wonderful?
Instead, I think we'll be lucky after the dust settles, if most of the world will still be able to feed itself. But don't worry, evil corporations and greed will be blamed for any resulting starvation and such, not a little negative ("or perhaps even positive") economic consequences of your profoundly bad idea.
No, that is not the rational answer, that is the short-sighted answer. Everything suggests that doing nothing will incur significantly greater costs than doing something.
Except that "everything" doesn't suggest that. I think one of the more tiresome parts of this debate is the insistence both to completely mischaracterize the arguments against climate change mitigation and vastly overstate the strength of evidence supporting climate change mitigation. My view remains that no one has shown that there will be significant less costs from substantial carbon emission reduction and the like than from ignoring the problem except to move stuff uphill every few decades when rising sea levels cause the occasional bit of trouble.
I'm pretty sure we'll be able survive a reduction in fossil fuel use
Before you were claiming this was the better choice. Now you're merely promising that it is survivable. I'll note that doing nothing is survivable as well.
What they did actually worked to a large degree and things don't seem so bad unless your a Anne Rand level Libertarian.
Why is the EPA still pushing through new regulations? Why is it finding novel and unconstitutional ways to enforce its regulations?
The couple, Chantell and Michael Sackett, had started to fill the home site with dirt and gravel to prepare for construction. But the EPA intervened, announcing that the property was a regulated wetland. Agency officials ordered the couple to restore the land to its original state or face up to $75,000 a day in fines.
The Sacketts disputed the EPA's wetland designation and filed a lawsuit to litigate the issue in federal court.
The EPA argued that the Sacketts' lawsuit must be dismissed because the EPA's Clean Water Act compliance order did not amount to final agency action.
In other words, the EPA claimed that the plaintiff's didn't have standing to sue the EPA even though they were being fined by the EPA $75,000 a day if they didn't comply with costly reversal of their construction efforts. One doesn't have to be an Objectivist to think that's very unfair.
The thing here is that the EPA pretty much fixed the problems that led to its creation. Yet it's still growing. It should be like a fire department where it's funded a fixed amount to do a set job and doesn't keep enlarging itself to do more and control more.
And the EPA is far from alone in this mission creep. The NSA is another fine example which has extended itself to the point where it's eavesdropping on the entire world. A little while back in the Fast and Furious scandal the ATF was equipping the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico with high quality US firearms under the pretext of trying to stop gun smuggling. And it appears that such guns were found at crime scenes involving more than 200 murder victims in Mexico and the US.
Many are simply not perceptive enough to realize that yet.
I would include you in that number. Observation bias is the big problem that AGW advocates haven't bothered to overcome yet.
I don't believe, however, that we can solve these problems and maintain our current lifestyles.
Well, what is a lifestyle? I see a lot of attempts to equate lifestyle with a certain level of consumption of resources. I see it rather as what I can do or how healthy I am. Those sorts of things don't require a certain level of hydrocarbon consumption or land occupied. I wouldn't mind exchanging my current lifestyle for a better one that happens to more efficiently use resources.
But I wouldn't care to sacrifice my lifestyle for preservation of resources that are rather plentiful (such as energy or air).
Yet every so often I am reminded by others of the principles of free speech. I don't know why since I have yet to put on the jack boots. Merely noting that a dangerous argument (dangerous in a real world implementation of the idea in question can cause considerable harm to others, that is) is dangerous, isn't a call for censorship.
People do not always agree, so there will always be reasons to try to censor speech. I'm saying freedom of speech is more important than those reasons.
I agree. But what's the point of reminding some of free speech principles merely because they happen to disagree with another person? That was my rather oblique point here.
In fact as I said, I don't see what's wrong with people proposing solutions that might make things worse. It's a non-problem that the free market will weed out like everything else.
Except when there isn't a market to weed such things out. Some of these ideas, if implemented, would poison that particular means.
Ok, so one has to use slightly larger wires in a 120 V set up. Not seeing the point.
Our friends with 220 outlets can push about twice the number of watts thru the same sized wires as we can. When they do resisitve losses are halved at the same power.
And twice something that is near zero is still near zero.
Don't confuse freedom of speech with what is said. If we always agreed with each other's speech, there'd be no reason to try to censor speech.
The concept of a smart grid is unheard of.
Nor needed. It's remarkable how people think every minor advance in technology will yield large dividends. Delivering electricity to a wall socket is just not that hard a problem to where a "smart" system is going to do a lot better than a "dumb" system.
American house wiring runs on 110V, which is low enough for voltage drop to be a serious issue.
Any voltage is low enough for voltage drop to be a serious issue.