Kristof on PWG
April 20th, 2008Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Nicholas Kristof has a column in the Sunday NYT on the recent Nature paper by Tom Wigley, Chris Green, and me. Here is an excerpt:
Three respected climate experts made that troubling argument in an important essay in Nature this month, offering a sobering warning that the climate problem is much bigger than anticipated. That’s largely because of increased use of coal in booming Asian economies.
For example, imagine that we instituted a brutally high gas tax that reduced emissions from American vehicles by 25 percent. That would be a stunning achievement — and in just nine months, China’s increased emissions would have more than made up the difference.
China and the United States each produces more than one-fifth of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. China’s emissions are much smaller per capita but are soaring: its annual increase in emissions is greater than Germany’s total annual emissions.
Please read the whole thing.
And if you are new to our site — Welcome! — and you can find our Nature paper here (in PDF), a short essay on adaptation here (in PDF), and my book The Honest Broker, here.
April 20th, 2008 at 9:04 am
There are many viewpoints on climate change: three basic types are alarmists, deniers, and skeptics. If you are on the alarmist side (including their zombies) anyone not of your opinion is off in the same direction and if you’re shortsighted you can’t tell if they’re skeptics or deniers. So, you call them skeptics because you have a vague feeling it encompasses more of them. Kristoff is typical of the press and to sell more papers (typical) falls into that category: “If you’re a skeptic about climate change, stop reading here.” The truth is there are also deniers that anything except ghg’s affect climate.
Realists, on the other hand, understand that our models are way too weak to call their results data as the IPCC does. A realist is a true skeptic, thinking it might be bad or it might not be bad, we don’t know yet. Once again the silver bullet in the heart of the argument that ghg’s are the sole cause of “global warming” is here, the data (yes, “data”) over two solar cycles:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17257
There’s no soot at the South Pole, but there are just as much ghg’s:
http://climatesci.org/2008/03/25/new-paper-elevates-the-role-of-black-carbon-in-global-warming/
This all just makes the point that we have a much better handle on what it takes to slow ghg emissions (massive) vs. what it takes to adapt (unknown).
The one thing that’s certain about climate change is that it’s not accelerating. Heck, for the last ten years it hasn’t even happened (if you realize the difference between warm and warming and reference the only unbiased source we have – satellites).
So, rather than stifle the world’s economy (which China and India aren’t going for anyway) should we not put resources into finding out the reality of climate change instead of wasting effort cutting back on emissions? CO2 is, after all, the base of the food chain.