This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.Isn't that a bit of a Godwin? It's very bad if scholarly debate is being suppressed, but I don't think anyone is being sent to the gulag for doubting climate change. And if it's true, then why are they comfortable publishing this in the WSJ?
But this is why arguments from authority are stupidFair enough, but the last time I studied any science was my junior year of high school, and I just don't consider myself qualified to evaluate the arguments for and against man-made climate change. So to some extent, I'm stuck with relying on authorities.
The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.--CapitalIt's weird that so many on the Left fail to keep Marx's warning in mind. Perhaps it is because the established Left is often the beneficiary of the ideological pronouncements of scientists. On climate change, for example, most scientists have taken a position that is at least vaguely in accord with Leftist thinking. But where is the general critique of the whole ecology/energy regime? Where are the demands for a solar economy? C'mon, scientists, its time to commit.
Obviously, if a highly complex human societv could be visualized to operate like a primitive ant society, its recuperative ability could be taken for granted. If 1/3 of the ants of one ant hill have been destroyed together with 9/10 of the material of the ant hill, it is safe to conclude that the remaining ants will start all over again, building up the ant hill and reproducing until the next catastrophe will force them to start all over again.From "The Commitments of a Theory of International Politics," published in Politics in the Twentieth Century, Volume 1.
But it is a moot question whether a human society has this type of mechanical recuperative ability. Perhaps societies have a breaking point as do individuals, and there may be a point beyond which human endurance does not carry human initiative in the face of such unprecedented massive devastation. Perhaps under the impact of such devastation civilization itself will collapse.
Benjamin Valentino writes that like in the USSR during the famine of 1932-33, peasants were confined to their starving villages by a system of household registration, and the worst effects of the famine were directed against enemies of the regime. Those labeled as "black elements" (religious leaders, rightists, rich peasants, etc.) in any previous campaign were given the lowest priority in the allocation of food, and therefore died in the greatest numbers. According to genocide scholar Adam Jones, "no group suffered more than the Tibetans," with perhaps one in five dying from 1959 to 1962.In the aftermath of the famine, Mao was sidelined, and Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping took over. (Mao later regained power through the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976, which was basically a civil war.)
J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting;Neither of those journals with have anything to do with weather. Think predictive modelling, quantifying uncertainty, etc - not "will it rain tomorrow". In other words, his domain is exactly the kind of work climate scientists do.
Slap*Happy: "Weather is not climate. Not his field."
Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society;The APS covers many branches of physics - it ain't all neutrinos and quarks and optics and crystals and shit. For example they publish PRE, which is all about chaos, fluid dynamics, and computational physics (i.e. stuff that most certainly is related to climate modelling), and have also hosted a few discussions and topical groups on climate change.
Slap*Happy: "Not his field."
Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service;I wouldn't be so dismissive of his credentials, since he's the author of some of the most-cited books and papers on turbulence and atmospheric processes, as well as being a noted skeptic of the ability of modelling to encapsulate complex systems.
Slap*Happy: Weather is not climate. Not his field.
In the late 1990s, a limit of 2°C global warming above preindustrial temperature was proposed as a ‘guard rail’ below which most of the dangerous climate impacts could be avoided. The 2009 Copenhagen Accord recognized the scientific view ‘that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius’ despite growing views that this might be too high. ...posted by russilwvong at 9:54 PM on January 27
In the final plenary at a scientific conference on climate change in Copenhagen in March 2009, a discussion with the Prime Minister of Denmark, Anders Rasmussen, produced an interchange that demonstrates the tensions between evolving scientific knowledge and policy decisions. When told by a scientific panel that even a 2°C target might allow too much warming, with serious damages and possible tipping points occurring below 2°C, the Prime Minister expressed frustration: ‘It was a hard battle to get agreement on two degrees, a real challenge, and now you tell me it’s not enough and we need less than two!’.
At the same time that science was suggesting that 2°C might not be as safe a guardrail as previously thought, there was growing evidence suggesting that dramatic emission cuts were required to have any reasonable chance of staying below the 2°C target. For example, Rogelj et al. argued that having a 50:50 chance of constraining warming to 2°C would require developed countries to cut emissions by up to 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050, but that even the best case commitments prior to Copenhagen only resulted in a 4 per cent cut by 2020 and a 63 per cent cut by 2050. They concluded that there was ‘virtually no chance of limiting warming to 2°C above preindustrial temperatures’.
The crucial driver for the adoption of solar energy has not been technology but policy. Focusing on initiatives in Germany, Johnstone describes the use of the "feed-in tariff" as the most successful policy mechanism yet invented to spur widespread deployment of solar energy.posted by No Robots at 11:02 AM on January 28
Muller, Mendelsohn, and Nordhaus have a new paper in the American Economic Review that should be a major factor in how we discuss economic ideology. ...posted by russilwvong at 8:59 PM on January 28 [6 favorites]
What MMN do is estimate the cost imposed on society by air pollution, and allocate it across industries. The costs being calculated, by the way, don’t include the long-run threat of climate change; they’re focused on measurable impacts of pollution on health and productivity, with the most important effects involving how pollutants — especially small particulates — affect human health, and use standard valuations on mortality and morbidity to turn these into dollars.
Even with this restricted vision of costs, they find that the costs of air pollution are big, and heavily concentrated in a few industries. In fact, there are a number of industries that inflict more damage in the form of air pollution than the value-added by these industries at market prices.
It’s important to be clear about what this means. It does not necessarily say that we should end the use of coal-generated electricity. What it says, instead, is that consumers are paying much too low a price for coal-generated electricity, because the price they pay does not take account of the very large external costs associated with generation. If consumers did have to pay the full cost, they would use much less electricity from coal — maybe none, but that would depend on the alternatives.
At one level, this is all textbook economics. Externalities like pollution are one of the classic forms of market failure, and Econ 101 says that this failure should be remedied through pollution taxes or tradable emissions permits that get the price right. What Muller et al are doing is putting numbers to this basic proposition — and the numbers turn out to be big. So if you really believed in the logic of free markets, you’d be all in favor of pollution taxes, right?
“Economic Impacts from the Promotion of Renewable Energies, the German Experience” was produced by a right-wing think tank, RWI Essen. Unlike his counterparts, Dr. Frondel also opposed Germany’s much costlier coal subsidies and supports cap-and-trade systems. Frondel concedes that the feed-in tariff created Germany’s world-class solar and wind industries, but predicts that they will disappear, so the subsidies will have turned out not to be worthwhile. He also notes a reality for Germany that does not apply to the United States — the feed-in tariffs are complementary policies to high fuel taxes and the European cap-and-trade system, which he supports.The implementation of pro-solar energy policy is the decisive political advantage of our time. The United States can spend its treasure taking over oil fields, but this will not help it maintain any semblance of economic leadership.
When a firm pollutes a river, it uses some of society's resources just as surely as when it burns coal. However, if the firm pays for coal but not for the use of clean water, it is to be expected that management will be economical in its use of coal and wasteful in its use of water.Or in this case, when bread is artificially cheap, it's rational for farmers to use it wastefully.
While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science.It's kind of ironic that a response that begins with a "stay in your lane" admonition to climate-skeptic scientists ends with a broadly drawn economic claim. What do climatologists know about economics?
...
In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth. Just what the doctor ordered.
Just as there is a rough consensus among climate modelers about the likely trajectory of temperatures if we do not act to cut the emissions of greenhouse gases, there is a rough consensus among economic modelers about the costs of action. That general opinion may be summed up as follows: Restricting emissions would slow economic growth � but not by much. The Congressional Budget Office, relying on a survey of models, has concluded that Waxman-Markey �would reduce the projected average annual rate of growth of gross domestic product between 2010 and 2050 by 0.03 to 0.09 percentage points.� That is, it would trim average annual growth to 2.31 percent, at worst, from 2.4 percent. Over all, the Budget Office concludes, strong climate-change policy would leave the American economy between 1.1 percent and 3.4 percent smaller in 2050 than it would be otherwise.posted by russilwvong at 9:02 AM on February 15 [1 favorite]
And what about the world economy? In general, modelers tend to find that climate-change policies would lower global output by a somewhat smaller percentage than the comparable figures for the United States. The main reason is that emerging economies like China currently use energy fairly inefficiently, partly as a result of national policies that have kept the prices of fossil fuels very low, and could thus achieve large energy savings at a modest cost. One recent review of the available estimates put the costs of a very strong climate policy � substantially more aggressive than contemplated in current legislative proposals � at between 1 and 3 percent of gross world product.
« Older Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Lif... | Musaic Box is a puzzle game th... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by No Robots at 6:02 AM on January 27 [1 favorite]