The World Economic Forum say that 2 C is not a big deal because only the poor get poorer. This is somewhat counter to development goals of the more humane organizations that want to reduce poverty and raise their standards of living.
Comment on Week in review – science edition by Jim D
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Comment on My Fox News op-ed on RICO by matthewrmarler
willard: Where, and which part of “self-sealing” do you not get, Matt?
I quoted where. Is “self-sealing” the reason that you shifted from mockery to agreement with a statement that you originally said was mischaracterized?
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Comment on The uncertainty of climate sensitivity and its implication for the Paris negotiations by matthewrmarler
Kyle: So what? Everything you said is both trivially true and of no use as an argument against either the science or mitigation.
If it is trivially true that the sensitivity of the Earth surface is lower than the sensitivity of the mid to upper troposphere, could you show me where someone has tried to calculate the sensitivities of the ocean surface, wet land surface, and dry land surface? And that an appropriately weighted average of them is lower than the mid to upper troposphere? Most of the calculations are with reference to some aggregate of land and water surface and atmosphere, following the simplifying assumption of an equilibrium.
“Against the science”? As with the newly discovered creation of isoprene in the upper layer of the ocean surface, these are indications of ignorance where complete and accurate knowledge is presumed. What else do we not know about the effects of an increase of 4 W/m^2 on the large fraction of the Earth surface that is not dry?
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Comment on The uncertainty of climate sensitivity and its implication for the Paris negotiations by matthewrmarler
NicLewis, from the paper “A Sensitive Matter”: The IPCC process of being ‘comprehensive’ allows the authors to stay away from the clear statement that we have made in this report, namely that the best evidence suggests climate sensitivity is close to the reduced, 1.5◦C, lower bound.
If the climate sensitivity is 1.5C (for example) what exactly is it that increases by 1.5C? Surface temp (wet or dry), troposphere temp (lower, middle, upper), some weighted combination?
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Comment on The uncertainty of climate sensitivity and its implication for the Paris negotiations by Peter Lang
Jim D,
At $40 per tonne, the annualized social cost of carbon is about ten times the annualized cost of mitigation.
Jim D,
You haven’t a clue what you are talking about form many reasons. I’ve already explained what is wrong with the estimate of SCC. Didn’t you read it, or didn’t you understand? Why didn’t you deal with the points I made instead of repeating your baseless assertion?
See the red line on this chart. It shows the net benefit-cost per 5 years for optimal carbon price with all the default DICE inputs but with 1/2 the “Copenhagen participation” rate:
Explanation here:
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2014/10/27/cross-post-peter-lang-why-the-world-will-not-agree-to-pricing-carbon-ii/
and here:
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2014/10/26/cross-post-peter-lang-why-carbon-pricing-will-not-succeed-part-i/
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by gymnosperm
Rivers have been flowing for billions of years. there were two glacial periods between 2 and 3 billion years ago. Clear evidence water was falling on land.
On these timescales solid deposition is not important because the oldest ocean floor existing today is about 250m years old.
What is important for GMSL is ocean ridge spreading rates and high stands. They obviously affect sea level, but really have no clue what causes the ridges to swell, nor for that matter, whether our current ridges are generally swelling or shrinking.
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Comment on My Fox News op-ed on RICO by Willard
> I quoted where [1].
Concuring on what expresses the broad interpretation of “supporters” does not imply I endorse it, Matt, more so when I immediately contrast it with an interpretation based on evidence one can find by reading the letter. It just indicates that we may be talking about the same thing.
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> Is “self-sealing” the reason that you shifted from mockery to agreement with a statement that you originally said was mischaracterized?
That we agree on the expression of your self-sealing overinterpretation does not imply I ever stopped criticizing it, Matt. It took you a while to get that there was no need for me to disprove it to show how ridiculous it was. Should I stop using black helicopters and switch to drones?
As for the second part of your rhetorical question, I have no idea what it means. By “mischaracterized,” are you referring to your misinterpretation of the “guilty of the misdeeds that have been documented in books and journal articles” bit?
[1]: http://judithcurry.com/2015/09/28/my-fox-news-op-ed-on-rico/#comment-734511
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Comment on The uncertainty of climate sensitivity and its implication for the Paris negotiations by Peter Lang
-1=e^in,
You didn’t say if you’d looked at the link I gave you with the declining discount rates.
You also need to explain why the US Government requires that all cost benefit analyses to justify programs need to use bot 3% and 7% discount rates in their analyses, but the EPA ignored that and did not use the 7% in estimating SCC.
You also need to explain why we use much higher discount rates for comparing the cost of electricity generation technologies – such as renewables, nuclear, coal gas, etc – than we use for estimating SCC. How can that discrepancy be justified?
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by JCH
If a paper concludes from the tide gauge record that sea level rise in the 20th century averaged 1.8 mm per year, explain how they arrived at that number without using algorithms.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Danley Wolfe
Energy Guardian reports: ‘Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy, under fire from both industry and environmentalists over the agency’s move to tighten its ground-level ozone standard to 70 parts per billion, on Thursday defended what she described a ‘judgment call’ based on the best available science and the legal requirements of the Clean Air Act. The agency’s final rule, unveiled Thursday, was decried as ‘burdensome, costly and misguided’ by industry groups and Republicans, who vowed to roll it back through legislation, while environmentalists and health advocates called it ‘insufficient,’ saying didn’t go far enough to protect public health. McCarthy, however, said that the law requires her to develop a ‘requisite’ standard that would provide ‘an adequate margin of safety.’ Based on the agency’s analysis of nearly 2,300 studies, she concluded that 70 ppb was the optimal level.”
So the EPA makes ‘judgment calls’ to satisfy environmentalists and not based on best scientific evidence.
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Comment on The uncertainty of climate sensitivity and its implication for the Paris negotiations by Jim D
You are not using the AR5 WG3 successful mitigation scenario that costs only 0.06% GDP when annualized, while $40 per tonne gives a cost with no mitigation around 0.5% GDP when annualized, which is a significant drag on the economy.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Lance Wallace
Nic not having turned up yet, I did a search for “Nic Lewis Olson” and found a post in 2012 in which he discusses Olson briefly.
He appears not to think too highly of Olson 2012:
“one is from Olson et al. (2012); the Olson PDF, like Knutti 02’s, is extremely wide and contains almost no information.”
My search also found a post from Dana Nucc of the SKS kiddies defending a later Olson paper in 2013. Interesting that Dana was called out for misrepresenting Nic Lewis by his own readership (Tom Curtis, mainly).
Needless to say, the Nordhaus paper does not mention any of the recent papers (Otto, Lewis, etc.) finding about half the climate sensitivity of Olson.
So strange that they deal explicitly with uncertainty and then hang their hat on a single study that happens to agree perfectly with the estimates in IPCC reports through AR4, but even the IPCC finally couldn’t maintain their faith in a value of 3 in AR5.
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Comment on The uncertainty of climate sensitivity and its implication for the Paris negotiations by -1=e^iπ
“You didn’t say if you’d looked at the link I gave you with the declining discount rates.”
Yes, I did read the link. It was mostly a summary of the paper by Arrow et al. It even stated:
The panelists also agree that the Ramsey formula provides a useful framework for thinking about intergenerational discounting
Which is the position I take.
“You also need to explain why the US Government requires that all cost benefit analyses to justify programs need to use bot 3% and 7% discount rates in their analyses, but the EPA ignored that and did not use the 7% in estimating SCC.”
Okay.
Look at the Office of Management and Budget’s justification for 7%:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/circulars_a094
“Constant-dollar benefit-cost analyses… should report net present value and other outcomes determined using a real discount rate of 7 percent. This rate approximates the marginal pretax rate of return on an average investment in the private sector in recent years.”
What are ‘recent years’? Well given that this is from 1992, this recommendation of 7% is 23 years out of date.
What has happened to interest rates during the past 23 years? Well they have been gradually dropping:
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/DGS1
For a person choosing a discount rate in 1992, 7% makes perfect sense. But for a person today, 4-5% makes more sense as it is more in line with the long term average of risk free real interest rates.
Recommended interest rates for cost benefit analysis varies greatly by country. http://www.neweconomics.org/page/-/publications/Economics_in_policymaking_Briefing_5.pdf
New Zealand: 10%
Canada: 8% (it says 10% but that has been changed)
Australia: 8%
USA: 7%
Italy: 5%
France: 4%
UK: 3.5%
Germany: 3%
Imo, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and USA are out of date and need to lower their recommended interest rates to be in line with recently observed real interest rates.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FR.INR.RINR
Also, I’m not sure about France and Germany, but from memory, I’m pretty sure that the UK uses an elasticity of marginal utility of consumption of 1 when evaluating projects (where as Canada, US, Australia and New Zealand just go by what is potentially pareto improving so effectively have a value of 0), someone correct me if I’m wrong, so by Ramsey’s equation, a lower value can be justified by the UK.
Secondly, if you are doing a more traditional cost benefit analysis where you are just trying to determine the policy that maximizes the potential pareto improvement, then effectively you are doing social welfare maximization under the assumption that the elasticity of marginal utility of consumption is zero. Under this assumption, the social rate of time preference is equal to the real interest rate, so it makes sense to a higher discount rate corresponding to the real interest rate.
However, if you are trying to take into account risk aversion and inequality in the analysis, then you need a positive elasticity of marginal utility of consumption, which suggests a lower social rate of time preference. Note that the fact that you are discounting future consumption by less is offset by the fact that people in the future will be richer and the value of an additional dollar to a rich person will be less than the value of an additional dollar to a poor person under a positive elasticity of marginal utility of consumption.
“You also need to explain why we use much higher discount rates for comparing the cost of electricity generation technologies”
Same as what I just wrote above. The 7% discount rate is out of data / too high and the discount rate used should be lower for a social welfare maximization approach compared to a maximizing the potential pareto improvement approach. Also, the 3% rate doesn’t make much sense either in many cases where it is applied. Rather, the choice of the discount rate should satisfy Ramsey’s equation; which means that it should be determined by real interest rates and the choice of the elasticity of marginal utility of consumption.
I used to have a similar position as you on choice of discount rates earlier in the year. But after looking more into it, I have to agree with the arguments made by Arrow, Tol, Nordhaus and others.
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Comment on The uncertainty of climate sensitivity and its implication for the Paris negotiations by Peter Lang
Jim D,
Clearly I was not referring to AR5. Did you read the links? If you had, you would have realised that. I am using DICE 2013R which is the most widely used and cited IAM for estimating SCC, optimal CO2 price, abatement cost and AGW damages for the commonly advocated policies. Dice is one of the three used and recommended by the EPA. It is one of the main ones used by IPCC for WG3 until recently (presumably because IPCC wanted even more alarmist analyses since the main IAMs were not giving sufficiently alarmist numbers and did not make the case to support mitigation policies).
If your single source to support your CAGW beliefs is IPCC, then you really are not keeping an open mind, Jim D. Nor are you doing objective research, Jim D.
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Comment on The uncertainty of climate sensitivity and its implication for the Paris negotiations by Peter Lang
-1=
What has happened to interest rates during the past 23 years? Well they have been gradually dropping:
For a person choosing a discount rate in 1992, 7% makes perfect sense. But for a person today, 4-5% makes more sense as it is more in line with the long term average of risk free real interest rates.
This is a very lonkg comment and there is no point me dealing with all your detail until we’ve resolved the main point. You are advocating for a discount rate to apply for 300 years for the whole world. What has been the average discount rate for the past 300 years for the whole world, not USA?
You say:
for a person today, 4-5% makes more sense as it is more in line with the long term average of risk free real interest rates.
Thrwoing money at carbon abatement is not risk free. It enormously hig risk. Many people believe that the advocated policies will make no difference to the climate. It’s almost a certain waste of money. Therefore it is very high risk. You should use private sector discount rates for mitigation policies.
Also, not the discrepancy between the discount rate we use for policy analysis for comparing LCOE of different energy technologiesd. In Australia we are currently using 10% discount rate for estimating the LCOE of new electricity technologies (Renewables, nuclear, coal, gas etc.). If we are using those discount rates for choosing energy policies to abating emissions, we should use the same discount rate for estimating the damages.
Lastly, my reason for providing the link to the EPA article on SCC was the two graphs showing the declining discount rates they are assuming for the future. Dhow me a chart of what the discount rates have been for the world over the past 300 years.
I’d also remind you again, the countries you selected to quote risk free discount rates for are not representative of the whole world nor of what the world’s average discount rate will be as the vast majority of the world lifts itself out of poverty this century.
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Comment on The uncertainty of climate sensitivity and its implication for the Paris negotiations by niclewis
matthewrmarler,
Climate sensitivity is defined in terms of the change in global mean surface temperature (GMST), not tropospheric temperature. GMST is area weighted.
In practice GMST is usually taken as referring to ~2m air temperature over land and bulk temperature of the top 5-10m layer sea temperature over ocean (SST), used as a proxy for air temperature above the ocean (MAT) since records of SST are more comprehensive and thought to be more reliable. Over the instrumental record, SST apears to have risen very slightly faster than MAT, although there are theoretical reasons to expect the opposite to be the case.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by Nick Stokes
Try this for believability, from their peroration:
Consensus, in contrast, means accepting what there is. For example:
• Nobody wanted to let Christopher Columbus set sail,
• All physicians opposed the research done by Claude Bernard and then Pasteur,
• All physicists opposed Einstein‘s work.
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Comment on My Fox News op-ed on RICO by Punksta
Perhaps the best response would be to have the RICO-20 up on RICO charges ?
Or indeed the IPCC and the whole state-funded climate estalishment, given their obvious conflict of interest.
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Comment on The uncertainty of climate sensitivity and its implication for the Paris negotiations by Peter Lang
I used to have a similar position as you on choice of discount rates earlier in the year. But after looking more into it, I have to agree with the arguments made by Arrow, Tol, Nordhaus and others.
I haven’t researched disount rates and Ramsay function to the level you have. And I am not competent to do so. So, id be interested in a link to a short explanation of why the discount rates they are choosing to use for projecting the cost and benefits of abatement out 300 years are comparable with the world average discount rates that have applied over the past 300 years.
I read Stern, Nordhaus, Tol and some others on this (don’t understand a lot of it) but am totally unconvinced by using low discount rates, risk free rates of return, discount rates that are higher for selecting abatement technologies in practice that for estimating costs and benefits of CO2 abatement.
I am also aware of the much higher discount rates that apply in the developing world and will for all this century. I am also aware that the discount rates we choose for CO2 mitigation must be the same as we use for comparing alternative policies such as to spend the funds on health, education, infrastructure, and better governance for the developing countries. The $1.5 trillion a year we are reportedly spending on the “climate Industry” seems to me to be pure waste.
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Comment on Week in review – science edition by HAS
My reading is that table 3 shows a range .1% to 99.9% for temp at 2100 of 1.75C to 7.33C.
For the purposes of this exercise I don’t think having a more tightly constrained ECS matters. That would just reinforce the findings.
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