Beta blocker – what is your estimate wrt the overall cost of “creating a renewable friendly econmic climate”?
I suspect it has the potential to turn CA into an economic wasteland.
Comment on True costs of wind electricity by Barnes
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Comment on Quantifying the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 by AK
Oh, and <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2015/05/06/quantifying-the-anthropogenic-contribution-to-atmospheric-co2/#comment-702721" rel="nofollow">this:</a><blockquote>No, I’m not, Bartemis. A trend’s not an explanation. A trend’s only an indicator. There’s no <b>mechanism</b> in a trend. [my bold]</blockquote>A “<i>descriptive</i>” model doesn't include “<i>mechanisms</i>”. Certainly doesn't prove them.
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by gymnosperm
Another analogy.
Some of us climb. Climbing is a high risk, high consequence endeavor. You don’t just go broke, you die.
The risk is “non diversifiable”. All you, baby.
The risk is managed by judgment and skill as climate risk must be.
My answer is to be convinced of “global warming” would require evidence of judgment and skill from the purveyors. Neither is evident.
The tax will be used for yet another suffocating layer of regulation whether or not so specified, and that layer will be eternal, even if we enter the next glacial stage.
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by Mike Jonas
We don’t need a carbon tax. The IPCC reports alone were enough to stop global warming. [A sort of high-level Gore effect].
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by Ron Graf
GaryM,
I’m not sure where you are getting that libertarians want to tear down anything. The simplest definition of a libertarian is a believer in the ideals of Jefferson, Madison and Franklin as embodied in the Constitution and more particularly in its Bill of Rights, the idea that liberty unleashes the creative power and unbounded energy of the free.
As I heard Thomas Freedman once say, (not realizing its implication,) “You can stop people from doing bad but you can’t force them to do good.”
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by micro6500
Nightly cooling, logging temps while doing astrophotography got me to apply what I do for a living (constructing databases) to surface data, and it shows on average it will cool more tonight, than it warmed today.
It also shows that there is no trend in temps, but swings in localized areas minimum temp.
What ever is happening to surface temps, it’s mostly not from Co2.
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by Jim D
A revenue neutral national-scale carbon tax could stay within the energy bills, and actually bring down fuel costs for those using less carbon than average, which would be most of the poorer householders. This also allows for renewable energy costs to be mitigated more for those whose energy providers are moving towards them more quickly because the rebate would be flat regardless of how much carbon was used. Or the rebate could be calculated to favor those areas with a higher carbon efficiency as an added incentive. Set at the right level it could alleviate fears of the poor not being able to afford it, or of renewables increasing prices by actually bringing their bills down.
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by Ron Graf
+10
You explained the libertarian ideal better than I have seen.
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by Jim D
Another not neutral way to use carbon tax would be for adaptation, which includes repair of damage, mitigating the effects of droughts, flooding etc. There are surely costs for all these things, and adaptationists should be looking for a revenue stream that is in some sense proportionate, which is what I would call a carbon premium.
A more capitalist way of using a carbon tax revenue is for bonds for adaptation and repair. This is not just giving the money away, but lending it for a long-term payback with a low interest rate. This way the tax can build in a long-term growth of capital while paying for near-term costs.
An even more capitalist alternative to a tax is what I would call buying carbon bonds or climate bonds. This would be where people just voluntarily invest in climate adaptation/mitigation by buying bonds specifically aimed at lending for climate/energy related projects and getting back interest. This may be like the idea of war bonds.
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by thomaswfuller2
The argument I see most frequently against a revenue neutral carbon tax is that they don’t trust that it will remain revenue neutral. There’s a bit of a point there–taxes have been introduced with promises they would be low level, temporary or both and they are high and still with us.
I guess the only responses are that a) that is an insufficient reason to avoid action that would be beneficial and b) write better laws! Put a Sunshine provision in or something…
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by thomaswfuller2
Sunset… well, I’m in Asia… it looks different…
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by thomaswfuller2
Why not social security taxes?
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by Jim D
The annual revenue in the US would be fifty to a hundred billion dollars or so. It certainly would be tempting to not just give it back to the people, but that is why I think it needs to stay within the energy bills somehow, both in receipt and rebate.
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by Ron Graf
Jim,
Like a lot of regulation it looks better on paper. Right now our tax code is so complex due to ever continued tinkering that we lose billions in revenue is diverted to tax lawyers, tax planners and preparers. Not considered are the hours of wasted accounting for mileage journals, tax relevant receipts. Amazon and Apple shelter billions overseas to avoid taxes. And these are the good guys who simply don’t pack up and move headquarters overseas.
Consumers make responsible choices when they are used to being financially and socially self-responsible. A healthy economy providing healthy choices and income to make healthy choices is preferable to stifling government force and weighty regulation. The solar marketplace is starting to catch on. Battery technology will be a big boost to renewables, making them part of local power backup systems and grid storage. You can pat government on the back for helping via tax regulation. Or, you might consider good things can happen notwithstanding government meddling. JFK got a heck of a lot accomplished by good leadership while lowering taxes. Reagan was a JFK liberal until as he famously said, “the party left me.”
Jim D, I know you said you hoped it would be a scientific discussion. The truth is that you and I and most here agree on the knowable science. I get very uneasy though when I see scientist who know better distort the science and politicians distort that even more to scare the public, create a crisis (wag the dog.) The government climate community telling the leaders what they want to hear is not that different from the 1995-2001 intelligence community was doing on Iraqi WMD question. Policies change. Human behavior, not so much.
NASA has a whole interactive website now for teachers to overwhelm 4th graders with doom <a href="http://climate.nasa.gov/resources/graphics_and_multimedia/?scope=featured&topic=45"<here.
It’s expanded greatly in the last few months. They used to have an Arctic sea ice and land ice graphic that showed the shrinkage from 1980-2012. I can’t find it now. I challenge you to find any recent imagery of Antarctica on this comprehensive site.
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by Tucci78
I have no idea why a climatologist would be looking at law professor <a href="http://www.cato.org/people/richard-epstein" rel="nofollow"><b>Richard Epstein</b></a>, but I'm certainly eager to see what you've made of his work, Dr. Curry.
As for the libertarian perspective on the great catastrophic anthropogenic global warming/ climate change/ "climate fragility" fraud, I look back to a column uttered online by SF writer L. Neil Smith more than half a year <b><i>before</i></b> the first <b>Climategate</b> tranche hit the 'Net:
<blockquote><b>My initial doubts about manmade global warming weren't scientific, but ... I guess you might say social. I am a novelist, and — when I'm not conversant on a particular subject — I'm inclined to depend on my judgement of the character of the actors involved. To some, I know, that may seem like a terrible confession, but others who write for a living will understand. The real question, after all, is "Am I being conned?"</b>
<b>That's a social question, not a scientific one.</b>
<b>So,lacking other data, I looked at the character of those pushing the idea of Global Warming. They included leftist politicos I knew to be opportunistic liars in other contexts — particularly gun ownership — along with movie stars and other brain-dead celebrities that flock to any cause that attacks private industrial capitalism and individual liberty. Some may criticize me for <i>ad hominem</i> thinking, but when you don't have reliable scientific information (which I didn't back then), what else can you rely on but your understanding of the personalities involved? </b>
<blockquote> -- <a href="http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle517-20090503-02.html" rel="nofollow"><b>"This One's for Holly"</b></a> (3 May 2009)</blockquote></blockquote>
Being myself a physician with a little experience in clinical investigation, and by no means a "pure" research guy, I've spent my entire professional life having to rely - at one remove or another - on my best <i>"understanding of the personalities involved"</i> in the diagnosis and treatment of my patients, and Mr. Smith's pre-<b>Climategate</b> appreciation of the situation resonated with me.
Then and <b><i>especially</i></b> now.
<blockquote><b>The 2008-2009 winter handed one public humiliation after another to Algore and his warming wonks, as their lectures, meetings, and rallys had to be postponed or cancelled due to record cold and heavy snowfalls. It was their attribution of these lower temperatures to Global Warming that confirmed my suspicion we are dealing with a new religion.
...
Sometime shortly after that, the warmoids felt a need to change the name of the supposed phenomenon from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change', the same way they'd stopped calling themselves "liberals" and begun calling themselves "progressives". In both cases, with one lie after another, one outrageous assault on life, liberty, property, and reason after another, they'd dirtied their original brand name, left it reeking on some fencepost somewhere, and found themselves a new one. </b>
<blockquote> -- Smith, <a href="http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2009/tle517-20090503-02.html" rel="nofollow"><b><i>op cit</i></b></a></blockquote></blockquote>
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Comment on What would it take to convince you about global warming? by Jeff Norman
Judith,
In your post you say:
“…we don’t have a hedging strategy that will actually protect us from the most adverse possible outcomes.”
I think you are wrong. The appropriate hedging strategy is to ensure the global economy is robust and globally distributed. By elevating everyone’s standard of living, human society becomes sustainable with enough excess to ensure the environment is sustainable.
Not only would this provide a hedge against the most adverse possible outcomes of climate change caused by humans, it would provide a hedge against the most adverse possible outcomes of climate change not caused by humans or any other change that threatens the security of the planet.
Carbon taxes or any other restrictive government directives that directly or indirectly restricts economic development in the developing world devalues this hedge.
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Comment on Quantifying the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 by ...and Then There's Physics
During the day many people come to the bank. Some make deposits, others withdrawals. At the end of the day the bank has a little more money than at the beginning. No single deposit, which happens to be bigger than the increase, is the cause of the increase.
Yes, but if we know that there is one person who made a deposit that was larger than the increase and then withdrew nothing, then we know that the sum total of all the other people’s activities is to withdraw money. Without the first person’s deposit, the account would have had less money at the end of the day.
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Comment on Quantifying the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 by Don Monfort
Thank you, Capt.
So, it was her intention in having the post but she waited until freaking May 13, 2015 at 4:58 pm to give us a freaking hint. I would have been happy to say
“Hey Fred! With the huge carbon cycle likely removing most of the 13C, don’t ya think your estimate is high?”
after the first three freaking comments, if I had known that was what she was after. It would have saved us all a total of around 8,722 man/woman hours of wading through BS. Or maybe not, with this crowd.
Fred’s estimate is just goofey, so we didn’t really need to go through this. She should have asked Ferdinand to present his coherent analysis. Then she also asked Bartemis if he would present a guest post. Why in the freak would she that do? He makes Fred look reasonable. Hmmm.
And so it goes that this is still what they are hanging their hats on:
“What we don’t know is if there is a natural CO2 flux into the atmosphere that is also increasing and if it is, by how much.”
When they find the unicorn that does exactly what Ferdinand says it has to do to qualify, they can get back to us. In the meantime we got real numbers in the mass balance and other supporting evidence that’s quite serviceable.
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Comment on Quantifying the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 by agnostic2015
One other comment regarding the one above….I never said that vegetation would not be a sink….the main source on land anyway is not vegetation but from bacteria in soil. I contend that in warmer conditions bacteria metabolise dead vegetable (and animal) matter faster releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere and faster than vegetation can absorb.
This is why rain forest floors have much higher levels of atmospheric CO2 than average.
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Comment on Quantifying the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric CO2 by Don Monfort
Ragnaar, you don’t have a clue about the mass balance. We know the total increase of CO2 per year for more than fifty straight years. We also have the total each freaking year for ACO2.
You presumably know the change in assets for your little firm for each year and you know the amount of retained earnings, because you got income statements and balance sheets that sum up all the activities of the firm. Would you be able to figure out what effect the amount of retained earnings had on the total of the assets? Think about it.
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