You have got to be kidding me. Something serious needs to be done to transition from depleting supplies of liquid fossil fuel. The USA has a bit of a reprieve and some breathing room but not so with the rest of the world.
The climate skeptics and fossil fuel cornucopians have some sort of blood compact going on.
Whatever it is, its not healthy.
lolwot: The fact is there is no free market solution in this case.
Right now, there isn’t a solution that will be implemented. India, China and others will continue to increase total fossil fuel consumption for decades. The US and Canada will continue to expand oil and natural gas development for decades, and the US will most likely continue to substitute natural gas for coal while increasing coal exports.
What to do?
Lacking perfect knowledge of the future, take calculated risks and invest in a diversity of possible, partial solutions. For example, continue for 20 years the recent trends of investment, increased power, and decreased costs of alternatives such as solar. As progress is made, the market will choose them, as it does now for special purposes. When commercially viable biojetfuel will hit the market can’t be foretold, but it looks to me like it will hit the market in under 20 years. And continue for 20 years research on weather and climate. Looking forward, 20 years seems like a long time; looking backward, it seems a short time and barely conceivable revolutions (optic fiber networks, computers) have occurred quickly.
20 years from now we shall collectively know much more about climate change and adaptation/mitigation technologies.
This is why progressives should never be allowed any where near the real economy. As if the results of the current and previous administrations aren’t evidence enough.
When an investor uses leverage to buy more of a security, say a mortgage backed credit default swap, he agrees to pay his portion of any losses should the underlying debt be defaulted. These CDSs were issued based on the amount of debt the seller had. The value of the CDSs was believed to be a secure flow on income from the mortgages.
Leverage has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of loss on the mortgage in the event of a default. It simply determines how much loss a particular a particular investor will face. (There is a larger issue with respect pure futures contracts, not actually tied to any commodity or financial instrument, but those were not the issue in 2008).
When a trillion dollars in mortgages go into default, they go into default no matter who owns what percentage of them. The losses are there regardless of who incurs them. Leverage does not increase the total amount of the loss due to the default, nor does securitization. It is the morons like Jeffrey Immelt who led GE Capital into the subprime abyss by buying tons of the garbage CDSs based on his fealty to progressive government subsidies and expectation that the government would bail him out if things went south, that ruined individual companies.
But if you think the subprime collapse would not have brought the economy to a halt without leverage, well, whatever government paid job you have, let’s just hope it’s not as en economics or logic, instructor.
One last time, mortgage backed securities and leverage work just fine if the underlying investment is sound. Millions of loans to people who never had a prayer or repaying them, were never sound.
But this is all really just about trying to avoid the responsibility of stupid progressives forcing bad investment practices on the banking industry. So like with CAGW, no amount of real contradictory facts will bother the acolytes.
I agree. I’m not opposed to models. Nor am I opposed to models that assume CO2 forcing (despite the fact they tell us absolutely nothing useful). I am, however, opposed to modelers that assume CO2 forcing and then conceal and/or fail to fully disclose that the CO2 forcing quantity in their model is assumed and not measured, and then go on to make alarmist pronouncements. This isn’t science. It’s pandering.
I think proposing a 3 year degree program in order to join the climate debate is ridiculous. But in any case I was responding to his attack on my K-12 curriculum work. The debate is already occurring in 4th grade, where the alarmists have a host of online propaganda.That is where my focus is. His goofy program is not an alternative.
People protecting six figure salaries??
“They have a functional government over there.”
Quite. Surprising that a genius like Barack Obama can’t get ours to work.
Andrew
I think you are talking in generalities and only confusing the issues, and yourself. You speak of confirmation bias and, ironically, ignore the fact that it is the skeptics that have concluded that the science on this subject is inconclusive.
Leverage has absolutely nothing to do with the amount of loss on the mortgage in the event of a default.
Gary – if you’re going to argue with me about that I said, you should at least start off with arguing with what I said.
The leveraging up to 40-1 to buy bundles of bad debt, by private sector entities that account for a substantial portion of our GDP, undoubtedly, had a significant impact on our economy.
If you choose to believe otherwise, well, more power to you.
If you want to argue with someone who said what you’re arguing against, you should go in search for such a person.
He may know some statistics but is weak in physics. He has to defer judgement or he will get stomped on by those who understand the modeling.
He learned from the ridicule launched on his Canadian buddies Essex and McKittrick for putting out that joke of a book Taken by Storm.
Right now, there isn’t a solution that will be implemented. India, China and others will continue to increase total fossil fuel consumption for decades. …
Seriously, you do not know that. They’re not on drugs. They’re not irrational.
That’s a Charlie Sheen-style “winning” .
Not having anything left to support their arguments, they will just parade about and say “winning”.
@Vaughan Pratt | August 20, 2012 at 12:38 pm |
“I don’t know what you mean by “independent,” …”
By independent, I mean don’t count the same coin flip more than once. I believe your method counts the same coin flip many times more than once. Calculate the auto-correlation coefficient for a one-year time step on 15 years of temperature data. If you get a value quite different from “0″, then your two flips are correlated and you need a bigger time step to get an independent flip.
Yep. And he’s not the only one. Off the top of my head (and I don’t know many of the regular contributors on Climate Etc, here are some others that come to mind:
- Louise,
- Tempterrain
- Joshua
- Fan
- Steve Milesworthy
- Robert (not anti-nuke but socialist, ‘Progressive’, CAGW alarmist, pro more regulation, anti-market) and unpleasant and abusive as well – typical of the breed.
Latimer
Well they managed a 5 percent increase in 2 years then. 100% is unlikely but they are on course for 70 percent maybe.
I like the windmills. But then I’m an engineer. The pylons and associated wires are much more ugly. I hope they can stick the wires underground then everyones view of the countryside would improve. I notice nobody complains about eyesores that are regarded as essential.
Your cherry-picking of Glasgows architecture while ignoring Edinburghs magnificence tells me a lot about you.
I don’t know if windpower is a goer but Scotland is the best place to try it. Nuclear is too expensive alas and coal uneconomic. So that doesn’t leave much else but renewables or a lucky strike of gas. Or fusion of course 
Or maybe gasification of coal. All talk of C02 aside, renewables are worth a try! They are indeed getting cheaper all the time and some of the arguments here are well out of date.
TT, cherry picking again? Now why would France, with all that nuclear power generation have such low emissions?
Now, tell me about Africa.
Agnostic,
David, the question as to whether there is warming and what it is caused by is a scientific one. The question as to what to do about it, if anything is a political one.
You’ve missed a vitally important question between your first and second questions. What are the consequences of warming (or cooling)?
Without a good answer to that question, the politicians cannot do their job.
And this is the question that is very poorly addressed so far. It’s been attempted by Stern, Garnaut and others. But these studies were highly politically partisan. They have been largely discredited.
More recently Nordhaus has done some excellent work. But the inputs are extremely uncertain and many are probably biased towards exaggerating the consequences of warming. His results are most sensitive to the damage function, which is highly uncertain.
For the politicians to do their job, they need good advice on the consequences of warming. Not just scientific papers but properly documented cost-benefit analyses. These must be done and documented to the standard needed for due diligence. This work has not even begun. It is resisted by scientists. They don’t understand it and don’t believe it is necessary.
Agnostic,
By viewing the initially scientific question of whether there is dangerous warming caused by man as an initial of big v little government, skeptics put the cart way before the scientific horse.
Why do you single out the skeptic side on this point. I feel the skeptics are reacting and responding to the attrocioulsy bad policies the CAGQ Alarmists want to impose on society, such as:
– Kyoto Protocol
- Carbon tax and cap and trade regimes
- renewable energy
- blocking development of nuclear energy
- World government (Agenda21)
- ever more regulation
- oppose market based solutions (CO2 tax and ETS are not market based solutions they are government imposed, bureaucratically controlled markets that will be tampered with by government and bureaucrats for ever)
- more tax
- more bureaucracy
And all this without any proper due diligence.
As a result of reducing the argument to this, those politically opposed to them will view the skeptic view as being typically selfish motivated right wing propaganda, rather than actual legitimate scientific objections.
And then the calm, measured voices of reason gets lost in the ensuing bitch fight.
Good point. However, from my perspective it is the CAGW alarmists (i.e. the elitists who make up perhaps 5% to 10% of the electors in the western democracies and 0.01% of world population) who I see as
being typically selfish motivated [Left] wing propaganda
