Shredded? Maybe you didn’t read Dyson’s original review, which was about sequestering CO2 with plant life. Which is what he said. It sounds as though May was just confused.
In any case, you’re changing the subject. Whether or not one agrees with Dyson’s interesting ideas about high-tech futuristic adaptation (he is also invented the Dyson Sphere that would surround the entire sun) has nothing at all to do with his comments on Nordhaus.
Bart,
A big difference between the hard sciences and economics, that I see, is that the practice of science seldom needs compulsion of people. All the practice of economics in our history has as some level needed guns and prisons.
In this argument, the economist hasn’t explained how he, and we, would compel people to forego using cheap fire to make themselves comfortable. International carbon trading maybe?(joke)
You, me and he may value icecaps, what if the rest of the people don’t?
All that I can see at present are industrial titans pocketing money for boondoggles like solar farms and electric windmills.
In response to Brown’s speech, which I just read.
(On pure democracy) “A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”
Federalist 10: The Same Subject Continued: The Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection. From the New York Packet. Friday, November 23, 1787. Author: James Madison. http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_10.html
WHT-
[Dyson] tries to rationalize by suggesting that he was talking about residence time in another context, that of artificially sequestering CO2 with additional plant life.
Tries to rationalize? Another context? Of course this is the context Dyson would be using. Dyson has said that the work of which he is most proud – over his entire career – is his analysis of using carbon sequestration by plants as a CO2 mitigation solution.
Yet this sequestration idea would create legions of losers from those wedded to CO2 tax and trade schemes. Perhaps that is why some of the criticism directed towards Dyson is transparently disingenuous. Be careful not to add to it.
billc,
You restate my main point well. The models are not working, the people using the mdoles are shown to be massaging data and hiding inconvenient digressions from their models, and hiding this. AGW promoters have gotten a very expensive free ride at the public’s expense. It is time to end the free ride Colose and his ilk have received from us.
Scott, LLL and others have been promising fusion energy in a few years for about 60 years. I doubt if fusion is any closer now than it was decades ago.
Brandon, thank you!
WHT,
You are pooping in your own nest when you asert someone has shredded Dyson.
The Ents march with Dyson.
=======
This is odd. Explain the high percentage of fruit loops from Australia appearing here.
Its kind of hard to miss the fact that Chief Kangaroo, Girma, Doug Cotton, StefTheDenier, Fitzhenry, Ian, now Jinan Cao and probably other Australians have crossed my path and directed pointed attacks at my comments (no problem, they are free to). Yet, IMO, each one of these cats has a problem with scientific reasoning at the most fundamental level. So that is statistically odd and if that same ratio was extended to the USA population, we would have almost 100 of these guys running open loop on this site spreading nonsense.
It’s possible that this is just a statistical glitch but I have a feeling that the odd theories by scientists such as Plimer and Salby and bloggers such as Nova and Marchasy stir things up down there, and it bubbles up.
Tim Lambert at Deltoid has a full time job blogging about Plimer, et al.
Name some other Australians who have contributed some insane theories to this site.
You guys deserve each other. There you have Norm explaining the GHG theory in a perfectly acceptable fashion, and then he goes ahead and denies it is occurring.
Climate scientists agree that H2O has a stronger infrared effect than CO2 and CH4 due to its greater atmospheric concentration, but these are all greenhouse gases and that’s what Chief Kangaroo and others can’t seem to accept.
The DICE model? That’s ridiculous! Monkeys throwing darts would be a lot more scientific than Mann.
I agree with the comments of others here that to say that models merely solve the fundamental conservation laws of physics is very deceptive. It’s a gloss on the truth which is that you must transform these conservation laws into a finite dimensional system of equations that can actually be solved in finite time. This is where the problems begin. The scales of the motions of the atmosphere range from millimeters to thousands of kilometers. Unless you have an infinite computer, approximations must be made and then we get into subgrid models and all the problems hiding there. For those who are interested, we discussed this at length on the previous thread on Lindzen’s seminar at the House of Commons. You can see Lacis, Moolton, Chief, and myself go over the issues. By the way Fred, did you look into turbulence modeling?
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Again this violates blog rules being contentless drivel. Add some content and I will address the issue and not the person. Just like I did here.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/03/authority-in-political-debates-involving-science/#comment-190259
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/03/authority-in-political-debates-involving-science/#comment-190307
And in many other instances.
Peter, Webby is a little bit testy from time to time. His problem is that he doesn’t know that some of us actually have real credentials and experience and are much better trained than he is. Alas, we don’t know who Webby really is so we have no way to know if he is a poseur or not. He does like global conservation of energy however. It is indeed strange that climate science spends so much effort on GCM’s and then says “I know the errors are large, but the results agree with global conservation of energy arguments, ergo, the GCM’s must be telling something of value.”
leaving aside for the moment the climate physics,the first non trivial problem is how robust is the intergration of economic classical theory into a coupled model.
If the so called growth model is so robust,why have we seen the greatest destruction of wealth in history ie an economic tipping point.eg 2009 figures.
Credit related losses $2 trillion
Equity markets $30 trillion
Housing market $4 trillion
Lost productivity $3 trillion
This is the fundamental debate,rather then the physics .The arguments by Nordhaus etc are limiting,and often counterproductive ie centrist focused.
The debate needs to be broader so as to move from partisan ideological idioms.
A number of contrasting POV abound of interest is Hallegate 2008
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268107001114
From the paper
The key parameter in NEDyM is investment flexibility. For certain values of this parameter, the model reproduces classical business cycles with realistic characteristics; in particular, NEDyM captures the cycles’ asymmetry, with a longer growth phase and more rapid contraction. The cyclical behavior is due to the investment{profit instability and is constrained by the increase in labor costs and the inertia of production capacity. For somewhat greater investment flexibility, the model exhibits chaotic behavior, because a new constraint intervenes, namely limited investment capacity. The preliminary results presented here show that complex behavior in the economic system may be due entirely, or at least largely, to deterministic, intrinsic factors, even if the economic long-term equilibrium is neo-classical in nature. In the chaotic regime, moreover, slight shocks { such as those due to natural or man-made catastrophes { may lead to significant changes in the economic system.
This paper introduces a modeling framework for macroeconomic growth dynamics that is motivated by recent attempts to formulate and study \integrated models” of the coupling between natural and socio-economic phenomena. These attempts are driven, at least in part, by public debate about global issues, such as anthropogenic climate change. The challenge is to describe the interfaces between human activities and the functioning of the earth system over the very long term. In this context, economists have used primarily longterm growth models in the Solow tradition, relying on the idea that, over time scales of decades to centuries, the golden-age paradigm is an acceptable metaphor. This approach appears, however, to be increasingly at variance with the nature of the policy debates in the field. Advocates of stringent emission limits are concerned about the cost of damages caused by climate change, while their opponents worry about the cost of greenhouse gas abatement. But balanced growth models that incorporate many sources of flexibility tend to suggest that the damages caused by disruptions of the natural | i.e., physical and biological planetary systems, as well as the mitigation policies proposed to prevent these disruptions, will entail only a few percent” of losses in gross domestic product (GDP) over this century (IPCC, 2001). Both categories of activists tend thus to suspect that the figures suggested by current models underestimate either type of costs, since real economies rarely manifest a tendency to steady-state behavior
Another with a different interpretation is energy security
eg V. G. Gorshkov, A. M. Makarieva, B.-L. Li
Comprehending environmental and economic sustainability: Comparative analysis of stability principles in the biosphere and free market economy
Abstract
Using the formalism of Lyapunov potential function it is shown that the stability principles for biomass in the ecosystem and for employment in economics are mathematically similar. The ecosystem is found to have a stable and an unstable stationary state with high (forest) and low (grasslands) biomass, respectively. In economics, there is a stable stationary state with high employment, which corresponds to mass production of conventional goods sold at low cost price, and an
unstable stationary state with lower employment, which corresponds to production of novel goods appearing in the course of technological progress. An additional stable stationary state is described for economics, the one corresponding to very low employment in production of life essentials such as energy and raw materials. In this
state the civilization currently pays 10% of global GDP for energy produced by a negligible minority of the working population (currently ~0.2%) and sold at prices greatly exceeding the cost price by 40 times. It is shown that economic ownership over energy sources is equivalent to equating measurable variables of different dimensions (stores and fluxes), which leads to effective violation of the laws of energy and matter conservation
In other words if structual asymmetry and instability is already present in both global business and the energy markets,.does poorly thought out policy redress the imbalances and create stability,or further extend both problems.
“Judith – I call this a contentless diatribe and insist it be removed. http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/03/authority-in-political-debates-involving-science/#comment-190342
It is obviously a violation of the blog rules – and I am getting very tired of it.”
Fine, they can also ban me from commenting. No skin off my nose.
The Chief has every right to fly his authoritarian Fascist groove thing (note the title of the top-level post).
As for me, I would rather mock people out of their stupor.
BTW, Colose and my descriptions are perfectly in sink. The infrared redistributes when met with a strong containing filter. Energy redistributions are meat-and-potatoes to us semiconductor physicists. We simply use Fermi-Dirac statistics (for electrons) instead of Bose-Einstein (for photons) to get the details right. Not sorry to confuse you by this as Bose is the statistical physics model used to derive Planck’s law.
This is typical – I quote Chris Colose to Webby to try to educate him on some simple radiative physics – and away from the serious nonsense of Bos-Einstein boson statisitics, the old delusion of these danged notches appearing in the IR record. And I am the denier.
‘Both of you plainly don’t understand a thing about photonics, and especially are clueless on how Bose-Einstein statistical mechanics describes how electromagnetic radiation gets dispersed across an energy spectrum.
It’s a very straightforward concept that greenhouse gases have a scattering cross-section that can partially reflect specific bands of photon frequencies until they redistribute to maintain an energy balance.’
Here are both comments – judge for yourself.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/03/authority-in-political-debates-involving-science/#comment-190259
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/03/authority-in-political-debates-involving-science/#comment-190307
Now I don’t mind so much mad theories – really the speculative can be discussed with a lack of emotion and even some fun but when it is code for an insane agenda then nothing can be discussed with any civility or amusement. I keep saying that CO2 is radiatively active in the atmosphere and chemically in the oceans. How much and to what effect is questionable. I would prefer to move away from carbon emitting technologies – and here is a roadmap. I am a trifle bored with saying that. Why do I need to? And it is never enough for them. Their underlying agenda involves government setting a price on carbon sufficient to make carbon emitting technology unviable. The underlying motivation is negative economic growth. Nothing I say is valid unless I agree with the agenda.
Australians are certainly very aware of carbon taxes. 60% will vote next year to rescind them. I am very bored with the predictability of comment by the obsessive climate tragics. They lie and insult, bully and berate in the insane hope to convince us on a tax and reverse economic growth. It would come to real wars and real bullets well before then. Une merde dans leur chapeaux – the war continues.
Robert I Ellison
The T^4 coefficient and term has to be replaced with the full spectrum profile because Bose statistics are no longer analytically expressible with all the notches due to the GHG concentrations..
Otherwise that is a viewpoint worth considering, as this is a way of propagating uncertainty to generate margins.
