These targets are about a 2% cut in global CO2 emissions per year, and extend multiple decades into the future. This is not difficult. Many countries are already planning paths to decarbonization at those kinds of rates. People still saying don’t even try may have other motives or just underestimate what human ingenuity can do in that timeframe. It won’t happen tomorrow, but 2% per year is just incremental. It is not a complex situation at all, because there is a well known direct and doable solution. This is also a decision strategy that everyone can just get on with rather than going through the one-step-removed diversion of talking about how to make decisions before even starting any planning process.
Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by Jim D
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Comment on The Siddhartha heuristic by Ragnaar
“Essentially, borders are barriers to trade.”
“Some economists have projected that allowing free immigration to any country could, as a median estimation, double world GDP.”
New one to me. Restricting the flow of labor. We could ship pigs and turkeys to Mexico from Minnesota to pack them, but that’s too far away. It’s more economical to move the people here. A can of Spam is much more economical to ship than a pig. So Trump is taking on Austin, Minnesota. He is tilting a bit against free trade. Minnesota likes its agriculture products.
“What can be done to spread freedom around the world? One answer is to make different governments compete for citizens.”
We can fight a drug war in Columbia or just invite all their people here. We’ve tried the first and not the second. How do we deescalate? Push away or welcome? We have pretty good laws, minimal corruption, our courts are pretty good, and we have land and jobs. We have contributed to some suffering South of our border and going to South America. I’d argue we have a debt to some of these people that can be repaid, morality requires it, by welcoming them.
Quotes from here: http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-argument-open-borders#.osstvq:ya4W
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by Curious George
Decrease your income by 2% a year. This is not difficult. Many countries are already doing it. (It is called a depression.)
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by richardswarthout
AK
“very expensive.
How certain are you of that? 10 years out? 30 years?”
Only trying to spoof Mosher’s previous comment. However, if you are a small business owner of a electricity intensive business, and your local power company has to tear down its existing coal burning plant, “very expensive” might be the point that forces you to close shop.
Richard
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by tomdesabla
You don’t go solving a non-problem Jim D. You are a long way from clearly establishing that a problem even exists. We don’t even know for sure that getting a few degrees warmer with higher CO2 levels isn’t a good thing. There is certainly evidence that it is a good thing. All the evidence we have been supplied that it is a bad thing is highly questionable, because those who supply that evidence are highly politicized, biased people who have placed their agenda above all else. Their evidence reeks of incompetence, and fraud.
I gotta say…I’m very skeptical, and getting more so all the time.
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by tomdesabla
This is not a mature science right now – and it is being driven by a predetermined belief system, not a unbiased search for knowledge
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by Jim D
For energy consumption you can personally get more than this by changing your light bulbs or going to a more fuel efficient car, and even save money in the process. It is not much. Let’s just call it a no regrets solution: a slow reduction until we have convinced the remaining few skeptics that this is right.
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by Willard
> If concerns are not adequately addressed, why wouldn’t someone keep bringing them up?
If concerns are adequately addressed, why wouldn’t contrarians keep bringing them up?
For instance:
The costs of reducing emissions doesn’t rise linearly with the amount of emissions to be reduced. It rises more or less exponentially. That makes your argument that we’ll be richer in the future moot, at least beyond a certain level. There are arguments made that 4% emission reduction per year is more or less the maximum achievable; beyond that the regular way of innovation and change (learning curves etc) doesn’t apply anymore. It would necessitate much stronger and much more costly and invasive measures to go beyond that. Typically the kind of measures that the “sceptics” oppose most strongly.
Those who oppose strong control by the government, should really favor emission reductions to start sooner rather than later, to reduce the pain that the measures would otherwise cause. That point is easily overseen.
The last point, and in addition the fact that more uncertainty should make one more, not less careful, are the key concepts that “sceptics” are missing the mark on, I think.
https://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2009/12/27/tom-fullers-advice-for-warmists/
Vintage 2009.
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Comment on Intermittent grid storage by Scottar
Renewables is like trying to power your car with a wind sail. There are no alternatives to the efficiency of the old petrol auto, not even electric except if you have a petrol engine driving a generator powered motor. The motor replaces the drive train and could be put on each wheel.
I think the current 2 best contenders is Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor and the PRISM reactor. Both are proven designs and are being built in the UK, Russia and China. But here we are still fooling with a centuries old power. Don’t get me wrong but the best form of solar harnessing is passive while wind is limited. And I think there are much better wind designs then those prop jobs.
Anyhow the 4th gen reactors make the Fukushima designs look like 50s clunkers and they are very much safer from meltdown.
http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/ThoriumSite/resources.html
http://gehitachiprism.com/what-is-prism/
But one never knows when a breakthrough in energy technology will occur but I doubt it will be in renewables as the fuel is no where near the density of nuclear fuel and only about 1% of fossil.
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by beththeserf
‘Understanding an issue and its complexities.’
Lots of uncertainty regarding effects of big jumps,
not ter mention uncertainty of evidence of the
necessity ter act grand slam.
Where we can claim certainty is in evidence
of the past benefits of fossil fuels fer human
development, energy that released humans from
slavery, made animal power, wood and wind energy
uneconomic and created the economic miracle of
the Industrial Revolution.
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by Danny Thomas
It seems we can do all we can w/r/t reduction of emissions, carbon capture, geo-engineering, and good old mother nature decides to turn down the sun. Decision making under uncertainty? How do we plan for that and what do we need to do? Emit more CO2 via FF or re-emit that which we spent billions to re-capture?
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Ragnaar
“The fundamental mistake of such thinking is one that Hayek identified in his Nobel Prize lecture, “The Pretence of Knowledge,” in which he explains the problems with applying the methods of the physical sciences to the social sciences. Progressivism is an example of this kind of “scientism,” an attempt to coopt, in Hayek’s words, “the dignity and prestige of the physical sciences” for public policy decisions made by a burgeoning class of bureaucrats—as opposed to either state legislatures or the U.S. Congress. The twentieth century academy likewise embraced the intellectual vainglory of scientism, the economics profession, for example, coming to treat economies as “engineerable systems, i.e., machines.”2 Many free market economists espoused this “modernist genre of economic theory,” even as they battled the ideas of Keynesianism and socialist economic planning. The space of thought, inquiry, and political debate was narrowing, giving way to a monotonous climate of conformity.”
http://www.libertarianism.org/columns/scientism-myth-apolitical-pragmatism#.osstvq:UfgI
An engineerable system. That’s the climate. That’s the economy. They are machines, yet they give a pretty good imitation of life. My problem even with people like Greenspan was the cartoonish idea there is one or perhaps two variables to control things. To steer and economy. That would mean we elect the President who appoints a really smart economy steerer. Likewise that is the climate science answer. One variable.
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by Danny Thomas
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by Tad Alper
Your logic only holds true if you frame the question in terms of “not significantly changing course” means doing nothing and that is highly debatable. There are a lot of things improving, things like LED lights, so perhaps it is not fast enough for you, but it is not nothing. Whilst you might be certain of your facts and your logic, there are many of us that would like more evidence. And the urgency to make a decision now, versus 6 months from now, versus a year from now, and how much we need to reduce has absolutely not been agreed. Further, I have never seen a meaningful proposal that does more than “slightly reduce the rate of ‘spewing co2′ into the atmosphere”. How does slightly reducing the rate (akin to a Washington DC spending cut – aka reducing the rate not actually reducing anything) actually solve our problem with climate change? In the face of pure speculation versus a fairly well established economic cost of such policies, it is a hard sell for the common everyday folks that would bear the brunt.
As this article originally suggests, I think it would be useful to examine the solutions that you propose, Steve. Exactly how much of a cut in the rate of growth do you propose and what evidence do you have that would suggest that cut would be effective in solving the problem?
I am truly interested, because most of the time all I hear is “we have to do something!!!!!” with no evidence that it will solve the problem or is even likely to do so. I am an engineer, so “doing something” that doesn’t lead to a solution doesn’t have much value.
T.
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by Mike Flynn
Danny Thomas,
I see. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. That certainly removes the uncertainty. Nice to know the science is now settled. Or maybe not?
Damn. And I was so certain. What do I do now?
Cheers.
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by thomaswfuller2
willard: “The costs of reducing emissions doesn’t rise linearly with the amount of emissions to be reduced. It rises more or less exponentially.”
It seems to me that you’re the one bringing up something that you say has been addressed–not me, not other skeptics.
As for Bart’s point, our wealth is also expected to increase non-linearly and dramatically. As Nicholas Stern projects dealing with climate change to cost between 1% and 5% of global GDP, and GDP is variously projected to rise between $235 trillion and $500-odd trillion by the end of the century, if we don’t deal with climate change it won’t be because of its cumulative costs.
But again, you’re the one who is bring up five-year old discussions, not me, not other skeptics.
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by Danny Thomas
Mike,
EXACTLY! (I think?)
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by freeHat
'Decision analysis requires accurate and predictive knowledge of the situation, and does not work in uncertainties, with unknown or hazy outcomes. When the decision maker has no knowledge of what would "most likely" happen or the probability of a course or action happening, it becomes impossible to make a reasonable and defensible call. This limits the application of the analysis in a big way.'
<a href="http://www.brighthubpm.com/project-planning/118418-when-not-to-use-decision-analysis-in-order-to-make-a-good-decision/" rel="nofollow">http://www.brighthubpm.com/project-planning/118418-when-not-to-use-decision-analysis-in-order-to-make-a-good-decision/</a>
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by Steven Mosher
Tad
“. Whilst you might be certain of your facts and your logic, there are many of us that would like more evidence. ”
That is universally true about any decision. There will always be people who want more evidence. The fact is you dont get to set the rules about
how much evidence is required. Policy makers decide.
Look at the Figures Judith provided.
see analysis paralysis? that is what you want
See Power play “just do it” That is what is happening.
Right now power play is winning.
Analysis paralysis, the skeptics approach, is losing
Suggest you try a different approach
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Comment on Decision strategies for uncertain, complex situations by Steven Mosher
Tad
“As this article originally suggests, I think it would be useful to examine the solutions that you propose, Steve. ”
The article suggests a process.
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