Exchange of Views on Climate Policy
August 19th, 2008Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Over at Cato-Unbound you can see four perspectives on climate policy from Jim Manzi, Joe Romm, Indur Goklany, and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus.
You’ll see that the four perspectives are not all mutually incompatible, and in fact, each person has something insightful to add to the discussion. I particularly like the Nordhaus/Shellenberger notion of “Disagreeing to Agree”. It is nice to see an exchange of views from diverse positions on the climate issue. Cato doesn’t appear to allow comments, but if readers would like to discuss the policy debate on this thread, I’d be happy to join in the discussion.
August 19th, 2008 at 10:53 am
“If Manzi thinks it is not the government’s role to make large investments to enable the emergence of new industries then he should explain how America could have become such a rich nation without having invested in the railroads, the highways, the electrical grid, the Internet, microchips, the computer sciences, and the biosciences.”
Yes, and let’s not forget the large investments that built the synfuels industry in the U.S.! Or the large investments in NASA that have led to humans as a spacefaring civilization.
I don’t have the time nor interest to address each one of the industries mentioned, but the Great Northern Railway was built with private money:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern_Railway_(U.S.)
And I doubt a majority of people in the microchip industry would agree that government investments in microchips have had any significant effect on “Moore’s Law.” I’ll bet investments by Intel, AMD, Motorola, etc. have completely dwarfed any federal investments in microchips.
Just because the U.S. is rich, and the government has spent a lot of money on a lot of things, doesn’t mean that if the government hadn’t spent a lot of money on a lot of things, the U.S. would not be rich.
Look at India, where the government “invested” far greater proportions of the economy on various industries. How did that work out for India?
August 20th, 2008 at 6:20 am
I’m puzzled as to where Joe Romm gets his “best estimate” of 5.5K from. It’s certainly not in the IPCC document he referenced which gives 4K as the most pessimistic, and presumably most unlikely, scenario. Romm’s entire argument stems from this high number. Manzi’s 3K is much nearer what the IPCC document supports. Of course, as Indur points out, you can’t rely on these models at all until they have been proven to predict anything. So far they have been always on the high side for temperature predictions and to assume that they will be more accurate further out is risible. So in the light of what is known, Manzi’s 3K is more than sufficiently pessimistic and 5.5K is ridiculously alarmist.
August 20th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Hi James,
You write, “I’m puzzled as to where Joe Romm gets his “best estimate” of 5.5K from. It’s certainly not in the IPCC document he referenced which gives 4K as the most pessimistic, and presumably most unlikely, scenario. Romm’s entire argument stems from this high number. Manzi’s 3K is much nearer what the IPCC document supports.”
This is the crucial problem of the IPCC “projections.” They are not scientifically valid, so people can say whatever they want about the projections, and they can’t be shown to be wrong.
I don’t know why Joe Romm says even half of the ridiculous things he says, but I suspect his reason for that the IPCC’s “best estimate” was 5.5K was that current emissions of CO2 (note that this does NOT include other important forcings, like SO2, which cools, or methane or black carbon, which warm) have for the last 5 years or so had a reasonable resemblence to the A1F1 scenario. So he picks the temperature (in 2100!) associated with that scenario, and says that’s what the IPCC’s “best estimate” is.
And the kicker is that no one can say he’s wrong, because the IPCC does not offer any “best estimate” for temperature change in the 21st century.
If you want to see a similar version of the scam (that the IPCC is pulling), just look at the 30 years of “Limits to Growth” books.
Just like the IPCC, they offer a wide of “projections,” and then when the real world looks like one of them, they can claim they were right. (Even if the real world is very much at the outer portion of their range of projections.) Or even if the real world looks like none of their projections, they can claim that the they were “projections,” not “predictions.”
Mark
P.S. Note that in a July 2001 Science paper, Tom Wigley and Sarah Raper assumed that all the IPCC scenarios were equally probable (a demonstrably false assumption, but at least a start). Wigley and Raper then calculated there was a 50 percent chance of warming of 3.06 degrees Celsius from 1990 to 2100, and that the chance of warming by more than 4.87 degrees Celsius was less than 5 percent. So at least Wigley and Raper performed something close to science (as opposed to the IPCC’s pseudoscience).
August 26th, 2008 at 4:10 am
Roger, thanks for drawing our attention to these.
I’ve posted a few reactions to Jim Manzi’s essay here:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/08/18/jim-manzi-cato-on-climate-i-with-flabby-quot-libertariarian-sinews-quot-advocates-domestic-climate-science-and-technology-investments.aspx
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/08/24/more-on-manzi-cato-on-climate.aspx
For a conservative, Manzi seems both quite worried about climate change and to have puzzling little faith in carbon pricing to drive investments that Manzi believes are needed.