Anteros- I’d appreciate you letting me know where you think I went “to far”. I acknowledge that Fred really frustrates me so i may have.
Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by Rob Starkey
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Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by Anteros
Peter -
Thanks for your response. I yake note of what you’ve said about efficiency and economics.
I think the point we agree on about climatic effects and approaching resiliency to them can be taken a step further. From climate change to climate, then from climate to development.
I think it is easy to take the resilience to climatic effects out of context. By that I mean that extracting the idea of a communities vulnerability to a certain kind of climatic effect – flooding, snow, heatwave, whatever – we can miss that these vulnerabilities are all correlates with something else. In England we have resilience to all these possibilities, but this wasn’t always the case. The difference isn’t that we looked at these problems and solved them in isolation, but that as a consequence of development, prosperity and infrastructure, we have become immune to almost every kind of climatic event [as a nation].
So, wherever I see people being identified as vulnerable to climatic events [or bizarrely climate change events] I see people in need of development [+ of course good governance, peace, education etc - the usual things!]
Somehow I feel our choice of perspective is important. Even moving from a focus on climate change to climate itself still obscures the most important variable – not the weather, but the circumstances of the people themselves.
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Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by Peter Hartley
Fred (2:26)
My claim that “many factors impact climate change and any given change has so many different effects geographically” is not based on climate science so much as simple observation of history. Isn’t there plenty of evidence, in just the historical era (i.e. since we have had written records) of climate changes of substantial magnitude in the absence of large changes in CO2?
With regard to my “third argument” you comment “Is this truly an either/or proposition”. That really gets to the heart of my comment in the original piece that to an economist these are either/or propositions. For policy to be efficient, we want to do the lowest cost things first (normalized for their expected benefits). It is a waste of resources to pursue a less efficient alternative.
As regards the issue of whether China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and other high population countries will impose effective controls on growth of CO2 emissions in the foreseeable future, I again simply point to the evidence of emissions growth and observe that a very good explanation for it is that, to the leaders of these countries, raising the standard of living of their people is a far more important issue than climate change. For that matter, dealing with more conventional environmental issues and with disasters happening today are far more pressing than reducing the chance of an adverse change in climates.
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Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by Anteros
Rob -
I didn’t say you went too far. I said I wouldn’t go quite so far. Not a big difference and I agree with everything behind your comments.
To an extent I was being diplomatic. I too can let my frustration come out very easily on blogs and it isn’t the best way to get a thoughtful response from Fred – which I was after. I too find Fred quite frustrating, but the feeling might be mutual and I think I need to make a bit of an effort if I’m to find out why Fred sees the world upside down..
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Comment on Argument and authority in the climate fight by hunter
Jim D,
Then you mostly missed the main point.
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Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by vukcevic
With likely future ‘global cooling’ demand on the energy is bound to increase.
Recently I produced 3 mutually independent long term forecasts using different data and different methods. Return of the 1970’s temperature range is a very real possibility.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Fc.htm
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Comment on Argument and authority in the climate fight by Chief Hydrologist
So here is numbnuts temperature plot – http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/plot/wti/from:2001/trend -
Here is Roy Spencers – http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_current.gif – although he doesn’t seem to have updated his graph.
The peaks and troughs are mostly ENSO – the fast response due to energy moving between the ocean and atmosphere. There is a pretty solid correspondence between ENSO and global temperature variability. 80% explanatory power in the tropics I have read.
The graphs are pretty much the same. So for the global dataset – we can say that temp. peaked in 1998? As a result of the 1997/98 ‘dragon-king’ in the 1998-2001 climate shift?
Just as an aside – less snow in Britian? – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8615789.stm -
‘Solar activity during the current sunspot minimum has fallen to levels unknown since the start of the 20th century. The Maunder minimum (about 1650–1700) was a prolonged episode of low solar activity which coincided with more severe winters in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Motivated by recent relatively cold winters in the UK, we investigate the possible connection with solar activity. We identify regionally anomalous cold winters by detrending the Central England temperature (CET) record using reconstructions of the northern hemisphere mean temperature. We show that cold winter excursions from the hemispheric trend occur more commonly in the UK during low solar activity, consistent with the solar influence on the occurrence of persistent blocking events in the eastern Atlantic. We stress that this is a regional and seasonal effect relating to European winters and not a global effect. Average solar activity has declined rapidly since 1985 and cosmogenic isotopes suggest an 8% chance of a return to Maunder minimum conditions within the next 50 years (Lockwood 2010 Proc. R. Soc. A 466 303–29): the results presented here indicate that, despite hemispheric warming, the UK and Europe could experience more cold winters than during recent decades.’ – http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/2/024001 -
The cold winters are a result of UV – which changes much more than TSI.
This is the SORCE data on TSI – we are close to peak and we can project a decline over the next several years. – http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/ts.gif -
Here is Claus Wolter’s Multi-variate ENSO Index. – http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/ts.gif -
The other correspondence to make is the dominance of La Niña to 1976, El Niño to 1998 and La Niña since. Slow change in the energy dynamic associated with cloud changes as the decadal modes switch between cold upwelling dominant and cold upwelling suppressed.
So enough mouthing – are they going to take my bet? 50 quatloos each year that the 1998 peak monthly temperature is not exceeded for the rest of the decade and 50 quatloos that this decade will be cooler than the last.
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Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by Rob Starkey
TY, I appreciate the feedback. I personally feel that many of us who post here would be completely willing to alter our positions if there was data to justify the change. (at least I would, and I suspect you are similar). I just don’t understand the religious like positions of people like Fred.
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Comment on Argument and authority in the climate fight by Rob Starkey
Chief
It is a bold prediction that I would think you would be more likely to loose (the part of this decade being cooler especially). If you were willing to wager real money we can discuss the specifics off line.
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Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by Girma
Is it possible that “Energy Policy” is the last stage of the following metamorphosis?
Global Warming=>Climate Change=>Extreme Weather
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Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by Chief Hydrologist
Stuff climate. We need the cheapest possible energy sources to maximise economic growth as a humanitarian objective. I am over millenialist d…wads with their well meaning but ultimately perverse objectives.
Rich and resilient cultures can handle anything. Poor and corrupt cultures lead to nothing but death and failure.
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Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by Fred Moolten
Peter – I’m reluctant to engage in an extended discussion of anthropogenic vs natural climate variability. It’s an enormous topic – far too broad to do justice to here. I think it would be more useful for me to repeat a point I made above – if you want to convince individuals with a strong background in climate science that you have a valid economic point to make, you will need to base it on the expectation that continued anthropogenic carbon emissions are likely to exert significant adverse effects (even if their magnitude is controversial), and that substantially reducing carbon emissions will substantially reduce the severity of those effects.
I could devote much space to detailing the evidentiary basis for those conclusions, and provoke many arguments from blogosphere partisan warriors in the process. Whether the conclusions are right or wrong, though, doesn’t in my view change the fact that if you depend on their being wrong for your arguments, your arguments will be seen as unpersuasive by the majority of those who know the science very well. I also assume you genuinely want to arrive at a position that is accurate rather than to merely win arguments. In that case, you’ll have to try to evaluate as objectively as you can how likely those scientific conclusions are to be wrong. Blogs are probably not very helpful for that purpose, but I don’t know if there’s any quick way to get an accurate perspective on climate science without running into personal biases. Perhaps consulting a wide diversity of expert sources would be helpful.
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Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by Mark M
Anthros says at 2:19 pm- “One other question I have is about efficiency. I agree that it seems obvious that it is a sensible thing to aim for. How could it not be? But I wonder. Is there any convincing evidence that genuine increases in efficiency have actually had the effects we assume that they, indeed, will have?”
A recent paper discusses this topic-
“Is There an Energy Efficiency Gap?”
Hunt Allcott and Michael Greenstone
From the abstract-
…..”We therefore review the empirical work on the magnitude of profitable unexploited energy efficiency investments, a literature which frequently does not meet modern standards for credibly estimating the net present value of energy cost savings and often leaves other benefits and costs unmeasured. These problems notwithstanding, recent empirical work in a variety of contexts implies that on average the magnitude of profitable unexploited investment opportunities is much smaller than engineering-accounting studies suggest. Finally, there is tremendous opportunity and need for policy-relevant research that utilizes randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental techniques to estimate the returns to energy efficiency investments and the welfare effects of energy efficiency programs…”
Download this paper in Adobe Acrobat format: http://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/pdf/working_papers/WP228.pdf
There is some data from City of Palo Alto on the costs of EE increasing over the years as noted here- http://www.energy.ca.gov/2011_energypolicy/documents/2011-08-11_workshop/comments/City_of_Palo_Alto_Utilities_Comments_TN-61893.pdf with some specifics referenced as follows:
“At the August 11 workshop, NRDC repeatedly quoted the cost of EE at 2¢/kWh. This is a misleading number. Based on the SB 1037 reports submitted by CPAU in the past three years, the levelized cost of EE, as expressed by the total utility cost divided by present value of net lifecycle EE savings, has increased steadily, from 2.9¢/kWh in 2008
to 6.4¢/kWh in 2010. Looking forward, as new lighting standards take effect and other low-cost efficiency measures reach saturation, the cost of EE will continue to increase.”
An article by Cynthia Mitchcell, et al entitled “Stabilizing CA Demand- The real reasons behind the state’s energy savings” http://www.fortnightly.com/exclusive.cfm?o_id=159 is an enlightening review of the factors that influenced the stable kw/capita usage in CA over the years. The costs of electrical energy is noted as being one of the biggest drivers…….
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Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by Joshua
Anteros -
Off topic (unusual for me, I know), but I thought you might get a chuckle out of this:
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Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by cwon1
Pete, so culturally exact!
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Comment on Human choice and climate change by Anteros
Wow, this is just too sensible for words.
Judith – why beat around the bush – tell us what you really think!
I didn’t trip up on this one, perhaps because I agree with you. For the most part anyway 
This suggestion especially struck me as not only sensible but profoundly important [and commonly ignored] -
Prepare for the likelihood that social, economic, and technological change will be more rapid and have greater direct impacts on human populations than climate change.
Funnily enough, we’ve been saying exactly this on the previous thread. The bizarre upshot [at least for the 'very-alarmed' among us] is that vulnerability to climatic events is diminishing. It has been for centuries and shows no sign whatsoever of coming to a halt.
The only way this can be obscured is to see climatic impacts as something to do with climate change which is of course nonsensical. However, forgetting that climate variability is by it’s nature an ‘impacting’ kind of phenomenon leads one into the strange world view that sees climatic events as somehow connected with an globally averaged temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree.
“6 degrees ago” when people walked into Southern Britain, climatic variations would have been a leading cause of death. If the people of that time could see us today they would have said we were climate-impact-free. Our resilience has made us immune to heat, cold, wind and rain – and given us the power to adapt in any direction we choose. Even compared to 3 or 4 generations ago, our resilience has increased by an order of magnitude.
Where in the world that isn’t the case, the forthcoming changes of importance will be in the people’s resilience, not in the climate.
And by the way, through what distorting prism can the 6 degrees of warming be seen to have been ‘harmful’?
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Comment on Human choice and climate change by capt. dallas
Is there anyway we can promote him to climate Czar or something like that?
I still think we should invest in UNtopia though, so we can EXPORT some of our climate expertise.
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Comment on Human choice and climate change by Markus Fitzhenry
We need to consider these social policies because modern man has discovered that climate changes. Astonishing.
What have we become?
Men, so frail, that we cannot control the universe or understand all of it, leading to thoughts, so fearful, we close our minds and hide in caves, sacrificing lambs to Gods.
For those cognitively challenged here, that ideology is of paganism.
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Comment on Human choice and climate change by capt. dallas
Oh, Anteros, I have been playing with the Antarctic puzzle a little more since I have a computer with real keys and everything
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/02/antarctic-uncertainty.html
Still have to figure out how to accurately interpolate between the estimates, but it is getting closer
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Comment on Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?) by Dan Hughes
Climate and Energy Policies: Two Sides of the Same Coin (?)
Nope. Each government should make policies that are in the best interests of its citizens in each area separately. The USA, for example, does not have a policy in either area.
We need to reserve some resources that are best suited for specific purposes for future applications: lubrication, as an example.
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