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Comments 9051 to 9100:
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nigelj at 11:27 AM on 16 October 2019Brief overview of new IPCC report on oceans and ice risks
"Misleading title, there is nothing skeptical here with all that about carbon dioxide levels causing climate change."
Read the full title.
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Daniel Bailey at 09:26 AM on 16 October 2019Brief overview of new IPCC report on oceans and ice risks
"there is nothing skeptical here with all that about carbon dioxide levels causing climate change"
That the climate changed naturally before the impacts of humans became the dominant forcing of climate is uncontentious.
That the impacts of human activities are now the dominant forcing of climate is equally uncontentious, from a scientific basis.
Scientists (the actual skeptics) have evaluated all natural forcings and factors capable of driving the Earth's climate to change, including the slow, long-term changes in the Earth’s movement around the Sun (Milankovitch cycles or orbital forcings), and it is only when the anthropogenic forcing is included that the observed and ongoing warming since 1750 can be explained.
Natural vs Anthropogenic Climate Forcings, per the NCA4, Volume 2, in 2018:
Scientists have also quantified the warming caused by human activities since preindustrial times and compared that to natural temperature forcings.
Changes in the sun's output falling on the Earth from 1750-2011 are about 0.05 Watts/meter squared.
By comparison, human activities from 1750-2011 warm the Earth by about 2.83 Watts/meter squared (AR5, WG1, Chapter 8, section 8.3.2, p. 676).
What this means is that the warming driven by the GHGs coming from the human burning of fossil fuels since 1750 is over 50 times greater than the slight extra warming coming from the Sun itself over that same time interval.
In the early 20th century human activities caused about one-third of the observed warming and most of the rest was due to low volcanic activity. Since about 1950 it's all humans and their activities.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0555.1
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcc.522Further, the detection of the human fingerprint in the observed tropospheric warming caused by the increase in atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases like CO2 has reached 6-sigma levels of accuracy.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0424-x
There have been many, many scientific studies over the past 175 years examining the properties of greenhouse gases, the radiative physics of carbon dioxide and the role it plays in the Earth’s atmosphere. One of the most comprehensive, recent and openly-accessible is the US 4th National Climate Assessment (Volume 1, released in 2017 and Volume 2, released in 2018). You can download the whole thing or by chapter:
https://science2017.globalchange.gov/
https://science2017.globalchange.gov/downloads/https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/
https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/downloads/FAQ’s:
https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/chapter/appendix-5/#section-1In short, human activities (primarily via the human burning of fossil fuels) have warmed the globe, which in turn are impacting the Earth’s climate.
Please demonstrate actual skepticism by reading the furnished sources before replying. -
cobrwst12 at 08:47 AM on 16 October 2019Brief overview of new IPCC report on oceans and ice risks
As this is your first post, Skeptical Science respectfully reminds you to please follow our comments policy. Thank You!
Misleading title, there is nothing skeptical here with all that about carbon dioxide levels causing climate change.
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william5331 at 05:16 AM on 16 October 2019Brief overview of new IPCC report on oceans and ice risks
Although a little harder to understand, perhaps we should be reporting the decreased alkalinity in sea water rather than the change of pH.
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ilfark2 at 01:47 AM on 16 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
At this point we don't know how much time we have before the climate disrupts the weather system to the point of crop then societal then general collapse. Some of this year’s weather suggests it could happen sooner than later.
The fastest way to re-organize societies would likely be WWII fashion mobilizations... hopefully done in a democratic (certainly more democratic than WWII were done) way.
Likely the most important part of such an effort would be to identify what is materially needed (I'd argue food, shelter, healthcare, education, community), and how to ensure everyone gets this using the least number of joules possible.
Yes this implies, especially in the USA, ceasing useless activities like moving millions of 2 — 6 ton pieces of steel on particle producing synthetic rubber in a circle everyday. If people insist on continuing their materially needless Financisphere activities, at least do them via computer and convert all those offices to housing.
Even keeping a market system, we could arrange for walking cities, more efficient buildings, cradle to grave products (make planned obsolescence illegal)… of course this would likely require banning corporations (as other societies have done in the past) and/or making a very strong referee.Easier, convert to a rational society whose goal (Graeber’s idea) is to make good people. i.e., the sort of people you’d like you and yours to be. That leads to a society that produces food, shelter, healthcare, education and community. Considering our current production capabilities, we’d end up with lots of people staying in school, doing research and having a very short occupation week. Real life examples are Mondragon, Catalonia of the 1930s, Zapatistas, Rojava (not for much longer though) and many worker owned and operated production communities throughout the world.
Either way, keeping a market system or transitioning to a rational society, discount rates wouldn’t come into it.
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Why the 97% climate consensus is important
Jay1988 - One of the major delaying tactic of the tobacco industry, copied by lobbyists for fossil fuel interests (in many cases the very same people and lobbying groups moving to the next customer) is manufactured dissent, claiming that because of varying scientific opinions (usually by quoting a very small number of dubious papers) that 'sound science' requires yet more study, and yet more study, not action.
The studies on the scientific consensus are simply an answer to that false claim and delaying tactic - showing that the vast majority of scientists who can be expected to know the subject conclude that AGW is happening, and has impacts. And since one of the most successful strategies for the non-specialist is to look at the conclusions of the experts, that has a significant impact on public opinion and policy.
For that very reason the climate denialists get very very upset by proven consensus. And spin all kinds of bovine excrement in attempts to cloud and confuse the issue...
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RedBaron at 21:57 PM on 15 October 2019Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
Hedron,
I wouldn't call it false. I would call it ambiguous.
We are adding to the short carbon cycle with fossil fuels and habitat biomass losses. We have also reduced the capacity for natural biological systems to mitigate CO2 levels by those same habitat losses with their resulting loss of ecosystem function.
Yes there are some humans striving to do the opposite, but as noted above, in most countries that % is a very tiny decidedly inconsequential minority.
We could change that. I am an advocate that we change that. Humans are just as capable of habitat restoration as they are for habitat degradation. Farming in particular does indeed have methods for every crop and food type that can sequester massive carbon in the soils of the world.[1]
But the approximately <3% doing that sort of farming right now isn't enough to matter. It's like the exception that proves the rule right now.
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Cedders at 18:28 PM on 15 October 2019Antarctica is gaining ice
Comment 475 and its references are very helpful. Comment 452 is undoubtedly spam!
Zwally (2015) is still doing the rounds on social media, although there seems to have been much research reconciling it since. I also found the Scambos & Shuman comment, Martin‐Español et al (2017) (press release here), IMBIE (2018) highlighting the possible range of East Antarctica loss or gain, and then a couple for 2019 not directly linked in these comments so far:
- Shepherd, Gilbert, Muir, Konrad, McMillan, Slater, Briggs, Sundal, Hogg, Engdahl: Trends in Antarctic Ice Sheet Elevation and Mass, Geophysical Research Letters, 2019, DOI: 10.1029/2019GL082182
- data and animation here
- Eurekalert press
- Rignot, Mouginot, Scheuchl, van den Broeke, van Wessem, Morlighem: Four decades of Antarctic Ice Sheet mass balance from 1979–2017, PNAS 2019 116 (4) 1095-1103. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1812883116
The Scientific American article "What to Believe in Antarctica’s Great Ice Debate" by Shannon Hall says 'Most scientists agree that East Antarctica—unlike its western counterpart—is gaining mass in the form of snowfall or ice'. I notice that Shepherd et al agrees with that (East Antarctica subtracting 1.1 ± 0.4mm sea level rise since 1992), but Rignot at al says E Antarctica has contributed 4.4 ± 0.9 mm in the same period. All the above agree that Antarctica as a whole is losing mass (mostly from glacier flow into the sea), but one study says three times more than the other.
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hedron at 10:08 AM on 15 October 2019Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
The point being is that it's a false statement. The average is completely irrelevant. I assume that that fact simply slipped the authors mind when he wrote that. But now that, I assume, the author is aware of that error. I don't know why a website that bases itself on science would leave a false statement up.
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zooplankton at 09:53 AM on 15 October 2019CO2 is just a trace gas
For this topic, the arguments I see from friends revolve around "it's only .04% of the atmosphere". I'd like a simplified argument for them related to how thick the troposphere is and how small the air molecules are.
I don't know how to do this, but perhaps one of you can...
If we look at the "million parts" of air as a single layer of molecules, how thick would it be on average?
Given the avaerage size of the molecules, if they are in one layer, what would be the area of that layer?
(there would have to be some assumptions on air pressue and humidity, changing air pressure with altitude, and the vacuum space between molecules I presume).
So the result I'm looking for is something like
"based on [assuptions specified], a single layer of air molecules would be on average xx nanometers thick, and cover an area of y.yy sq meters. In the ~12km of tropshere a photon would have to travel through zzz million (billion?) layers. So while the trace concentrations are low, travelling through zzz million layers over a 12km thickness drastically increases the possibility of encountering CO2 molecules."
It's kind of like the visability you experience on a clear day vrs a rainy (or smoggy, or foggy) day. Over a short distance, I can see my hand fine, over a longer distance my visibility is reduced even though the percentage of raindrops in the air is low, and I cant see islands/mountains which are only kms away.
Am I making any sense?
(another angle would be to have a single stack of air molecules 12km high... how many would there be?)
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Eclectic at 09:32 AM on 15 October 2019Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
JamesKL , I am not clear whether you are meaning average temperature for daytime, for nighttime, or for a strict average over the 24 hour day. Then there are the monthly or seasonal averages (or for "annual average" ~ which is almost a meaningless concept for temperate regions).
Speaking generally, deserts are "pale" (high albedo = high reflection of sunlight energy) . . . and rainforests are dark, low albedo regions, which absorb more sunlight energy ~ nevertheless much of their temperature difference comes from the cooling effect of evaporation from vegetation. And for deserts at night, the dryness of the land & air means more heat is lost to space.
Thermometer temperatures are one thing. But humans' sensation of regional temperature will be perceived according to the extremes of daytime highs and overnight lows, and we tend not to notice those periods when it's "comfortable". As you know, a high-humidity "hot" day (or night) will be felt as hotter.
I would imagine that the town of Adrar is quite pleasant, part of each day at least! Except when the weather produces heat wave conditions
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JamesKL at 05:05 AM on 15 October 2019Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
Eclectic - The Gobi desert is high in attitude, so will be colder.
I have found three places at similar latitudes, with average annual temperatures:
Midway Atol (Pacific Ocean): 28 °N, 22 °C
Taipei, Taiwan: 25 °N, 22 °C
Adrar, Algeria: 27 °N, 24 °C
Despite Adrar being at a slight altitude (258m), and a very dry climate compared to the other two, its the average temperature is higher! I can not think of anything related to prevaling winds cooling Taipei or Midway Atol which have humid climates.
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Tom Dayton at 04:02 AM on 15 October 2019Why the 97% climate consensus is important
Naomi Oreskes has a new book coming out next week: "Why Trust Science?" She was interviewed on Science Friday a few days ago; the audio is available for free. A major message in her interview was that science always has included consensus as a core feature.
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Philippe Chantreau at 02:48 AM on 15 October 2019Why the 97% climate consensus is important
You do have this wrong Jay. The non-existing lack of agreement in the science community has been touted by deniers as an argument about the fragility of the science. Then, of course, when it is shown that there is strong agreement, they launch other arguments some similar to yours, or others about forced conformism, or any other crap they can think of, because they are dishonest. And when one attempt to do a clean-cut, obvious explanation, a storm of obfuscation ensues. There is no good way to argue against bad faith.
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Jay1988 at 22:58 PM on 14 October 2019Why the 97% climate consensus is important
I May have this wrong, because I got lost a little in the verbos nature of the article, but how is this anything other than a push for an appeal to authority fallacy? Your argument is, and again correct me if I'm wrong, that the most important part of a antiglobal warming argument is that You can tell any detractor that "the scientific community agrees with me". Shouldn't your main focus be on making the argument as clean cut and obvious as possible? Shouldn't you be focused on educating people about all of the misconceptions that they already have? isn't it more important that people understand that you can generate a greater amount of oxygen from a field of grass than you can from the same acreage of rainforest? Or maybe pushing the politicians to quit lying to the citizens and admit that a switch to nuclear would drastically lower carbon footprint a in a much more realistic fashion than any of these "green new deal" jokes?
Maybe I'm just completely on my own with this thought process, but maybe people would take climate change more seriously if you didn't have so many figure heads for your argument being self-serving individuals that have no problem ignoring the actual problems as long as it gets them more notarity?
Just some ideas
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richieb1234 at 20:20 PM on 14 October 2019It's the sun
MA Rodger, Tom Dayton and Moderator
Thanks for the thorough responses to my question about the medieval maximum. Anyone not using this website is missing out on a treasure trove of information and assistance.
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One Planet Only Forever at 13:28 PM on 14 October 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #41
As william says, changing how money influences politics is part of the required corrections.
A more important action is limiting the ability of people to benefit from misleading marketing (and not just in politics). That would govern or limit the 'influence of money' in a helpful way regarding many issues.
The lack of correction of the direction of development through the past 30 years has made the problem worse. The required actions to achieve the 1.5 C impact limit are now major corrections of incorrectly developed perceptions of status, all because of harmful self interest not being responsibly governed and limited by caring.
Self Interest is one of many human thought and action drivers. Caring to not create negative impacts on others is another human thought and action driver.
And the ability to learn and develop new actions that will result in a better future appears to be uniquely human, and sets humanity apart from impulsive-animal-like competitive barbarism.
So, for humanity to have a sustainable improving future it appears that higher status needs to be limited to those humans who have higher degrees of Caring governing their self interest drivers. And the highest level leaders (the most influential, in business, political or story-telling), need to overwhelmingly care that their actions and the actions of those that they lead/influence do not negatively affect any others, especially the future generations.
The challenge for the future of humanity is to get every leader to strive to improve awareness and understanding and apply that learning to achieve and improve on the Sustainable Development Goals. Any higher status person who is not doing that should rapidly significantly lose perceptions of status.
Just one leader being able to maintain undeserved status can taint and corrupt a massive portion of the leaders, or at least seriously set back progress towards a sustainable improving future for humanity.
In a nut shell, the threats to the future of humanity are any region or business that is able to maintain Self Interested leadership that is opposed to the corrections required by Caring about the future of humanity. Their unethical competitive advantage over Others (and there is undeniably a competitive advantage for those who do not lead the required energy corrections), can enable those people to unethically over-power those who care.
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nigelj at 09:21 AM on 14 October 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #41
Regarding this concept of the fragility of modern civilisation. This is just my take: Western countries with their technology and complex societies have become very adept at dealing with natural disasters, but it's within a predictable range of extremes and cycles. The problem is climate change is changing this at a significant pace. Our societies while efficient and adaptable to short term crises, don't respond so well to negative changes that are new and longer than a couple of years (eg the great depression of the 1930's that lasted ten years, and also the dust bowl problem of that period in America). A changing climate could cause some form of breakdown to our societies that is hard to get out of.
It would then depend how fast people could learn to adapt and become self sufficient, a difficult thing for urban dwellers living in apartment dwellings so dependent on other people for all their needs.
Poor, agricultural based societies are not good at dealing with natural disasters , but would likely survive better in an extreme climate change scenario because they know how to live a simple life. But their economic development will stop in its tracks and could well go backwards.
Carbon tax seems the way to go, but will be a hard sell in the USA because taxes are ideologically toxic in this country. Perhaps government infrastructure programmes would be politically more viable.
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Daniel Bailey at 09:00 AM on 14 October 2019Greenland was warmer in 1940
It's much warmer now in Greenland than it was during the 1930's.
Let's look at that comparison graphically:
Antarctica is not part of the topic of this post.
For the interested reader, more info on Greenland historical temperatures are here.
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Daniel Bailey at 08:53 AM on 14 October 2019The upcoming ice age has been postponed indefinitely
In response to your question about the timing of the next potential glacial phase inception, here's what the AR5, WG1, Chapter 5 has to say about that:
"It is virtually certain that orbital forcing will be unable to trigger widespread glaciation during the next 1000 years. Paleoclimate records indicate that, for orbital configurations close to the present one, glacial inceptions only occurred for atmospheric CO2 concentrations significantly lower than pre-industrial levels. Climate models simulate no glacial inception during the next 50,000 years if CO2 concentrations remain above 300 ppm. {5.8.3, Box 6.2}"
Further:
"Even in the absence of human perturbations no substantial build-up of ice sheets would occur within the next several thousand years and that the current interglacial would probably last for another 50,000 years. However, moderate anthropogenic cumulative CO2 emissions of 1,000 to 1,500 gigatonnes of carbon will postpone the next glacial inception by at least 100,000 years....under natural conditions alone the Earth system would be expected to remain in the present delicately balanced interglacial climate state, steering clear of both large-scale glaciation of the Northern Hemisphere and its complete deglaciation, for an unusually long time"
Looking beyond that, research has found that the ability to offset the next 5 glacial phase inceptions lies within the purview of humans:
"Our research shows why atmospheric CO2 will not return to pre-industrial levels after we stop burning fossil fuels. It shows that it if we use up all known fossil fuels it doesn't matter at what rate we burn them.
The result would be the same if we burned them at present rates or at more moderate rates; we would still get the same eventual ice-age-prevention result."
And
"Burning all recoverable fossil fuels could lead to avoidance of the next five ice ages."
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bjchip at 08:47 AM on 14 October 2019Greenland was warmer in 1940
It is now 2019. We would do well to discuss this.
How much did Greenland actually melt in the 1930's and how much of that was happening at the same time as melting/warming in the Antarctic?
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CO2 is good at 08:31 AM on 14 October 2019The upcoming ice age has been postponed indefinitely
How much CO2 will we have to keep emitting to keep glaciation at bay for the next 10k years?
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steve501 at 06:33 AM on 14 October 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #41
In order to rapidly replace fossil fuels we should cosider using GHG energy to power our civilization.The same energy source that heats our planet can be used to replace our existing dirty energy sources.
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william5331 at 04:53 AM on 14 October 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #41
Doesn't it seem a little foolish to be talking about removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere when we are still subsidizing fossil fuel companies. We will continue to do so as long as the election of politicians depends on money from these same fossil fuel companies. Make this illegal and perhaps, just perhaps, the politicians could be pursuaded to stop these subsidies and we would pick up the pace of transition to renewables. Already wind and solar are more economic than fossil fuel.
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MA Rodger at 03:09 AM on 14 October 2019It's cooling
richieb1234 @306,
The GISP2 ice core temperature record is Greenland temperature not global temperature. High Northern latitudes will have cooled more than global averages since the Holocene Climate Optimum (5,000 years ago). As a result, a reconstructed Greenland temperature would show today's Greenland temperatures still below those of the Holocene Climate Optimum.
The GISP2 data is often recycled by denialists (the graph below is from your link) suggesting the final data point represents today when it is actually 95 years before 1950 = 1855. CarbonBrief have a recent factcheck of the GISP2 data's misuse by denialists, along with a Greenland temperature reconstruction from multiple ice cores and brought up-to-date with modern instrument data, the today's temperatures being Berkeley Earth 20-year averages to 2013.
Your link also features the infamous IPCC FAR Fig 7.1c saying "it has become so 'inconvenient' they haven't mentioned it since & some scientists have tried to eliminate it." Again FAR Fig 7.1c has been much misused by denialists. Yet it was always a “schematic diagram of global temperature variations” with the “dotted line nominally represents conditions near the beginning of the twentieth century.” If anybody reads the text of IPCC FAR, it would also indicate plainly just how schematic Fig 7.1c was. Additionally, if Fig 7.1c were meant to be an accurate global temperature record, the 0.15 deg C temperature increase shown for 1900-50 would be a bit of a clue.
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Tom Dayton at 01:35 AM on 14 October 2019It's cooling
Richieb1234: Regarding the Medieval Warm Period, see this post. For a more recent and better temperature reconstruction see here.
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richieb1234 at 23:48 PM on 13 October 2019It's cooling
Here is an example of an argument I see over and over between climate researchers and climate skeptics: https://www.quora.com/What-stage-of-which-Milankovitch-cycle-are-we-in-and-does-this-have-any-bearing-on-current-climate-change. (Sorry, I haven't mastered how to paste the graphics into my comment). It relates to whether the current global average temperature is higher than the medieval maximum. The dueling groups each seem to have their own set of facts. Can someone clear this up for me? Thanks.
Moderator Response:[TD] In those Quora responses, David was correct. The GISP2 graph that Allen posted ends in 1855, which is why the spike at the right is absent. Just as problematic is the fact that GISP2 is from a single location and therefore not well representative of the entire world. GISP2 is explained in a three part series here. In the Search field at the top left, enter “Crux of a Core” to find them.
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swampfoxh at 23:27 PM on 13 October 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #41
On another note, if it took about 120,000 years to produce the end Permian, and if estimates of 3 to 4 thousand ppm of "emissions" characterized a planet with a pale green sky and purple seas, whose to say that a much milder impact, say at the 2,000 year mark of that event hadn't already wiped out 97% of life forms? Or the 200 year mark? Seems to me that the outrageously rapid upswing in present GGEs could wipe out humans rather quickly...since humans are much more vulnerable to climate changes than are other lifeforms. We need houses, heat, air conditioning, three meals a day....we already had a very hard time surviving on a planet that, prior to the industrial revolution was, otherwise, a pretty hospitable place. But now? Tomorrow? In 2035 when CO2 equivalents reach, maybe 500ppm?
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swampfoxh at 22:33 PM on 13 October 20192019 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #41
Looks to me like a carbon tax/fee scheme would have to settle in at $200/ton to make a dent. That's only 50 cents/gallon at the pump. Of course, a 92% reduction in global population would solve the whole problem...which makes me bet it isn't going to get solved.
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One Planet Only Forever at 07:59 AM on 13 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
nigelj@38,
As a follow-up to my comment@39 I think a more interesting, but missing, part of the comparison of the impacts of more aggressive correction by 2030 would be what the 'required responsible actions' look like from 2030 to be carbon-neutral by 2050, or more properly to be the 'same total carbon impact' by the time carbon-neutral is achieved.
The actions that would be 'less negative to the economy' by 2030 likely require significantly more negative actions after 2030. That is an extension of the 'creation of someone else's problem' that was perpetrated by the self interested resistance to correction through the past 30 years. Not only will the challenge be bigger after 2030, the total accumulated impacts will be higher unless the challenge after 2030 keeps the total impact to the same target level rather than just continuing to meet a 'carbon-neutral by 2050' plan.
And, back to the use of a discount rate, using a discount rate makes actions today that make bigger problems in the future "look better". And the bigger the discount rate the better the evaluation of the future looks.
As Greta said (paraphrased), the concerned and aware youth today do not want to hear leaders today express admiration and confidence regarding how brilliant the future generations will be at solving the challenges they will face.
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MA Rodger at 20:17 PM on 12 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
Postkey @40,
I'm not sure the relevance here of UK tax policies, but you are not correct.
I'm assuming you are dividing household equivalised post-tax income by gross income to reach your 53% figure (when it works out as 55%). The big mistake here is mixing equivalised values and raw non-equivalised values. These two measures should not be combined in this manner within the same calculation. Note, the ratio tax(direct+indirect):gross income remains constant between the two measures.
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Postkey at 18:23 PM on 12 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
If I have 'worked this out' correctly?
In the UK, the lowest decile pay 43% percent of their gross income in direct and indirect taxes. The highest pay 34%.
If 'equivalised income'is considered, then the bottom 10% pay 53%.
Moderator Response:[DB] Shortened link breaking page formatting.
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One Planet Only Forever at 13:17 PM on 12 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
nigelj@38,
Regarding how negative it would be to implement more aggressive action regarding GHG emissions, the Canadian Federal elections are happening and as part of the election policy coverage the CBC just published a comparison of the Party plans regarding GHG reduction: Confronting Carbon: Comparing Party Platforms.
The analysis shows that the Green Party plans (to do significantly better than Canada's current 2030 targets), will not put the Canadian economy into a recession They will reduce projected economic growth by about 0.5%. The compound annual economic growth rate through to 2030 for the Green Party plan would be 1.25% vs. 1.74% for continuiing with the plans of the current govenment that miss the target.
Note that the Conservative Plan is to change things in a way that increases how much Canada misses the 2030 target from 110 Megatonnes to 134 Megatonnes but will only increase the GDP growth rate from 1.74% to 1.78%.
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nigelj at 12:48 PM on 12 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
Eclectic, well thanks, I'm glad someone understands what I'm going on about!
Yes I can believe poor and rich pay about the same proportion of income as total tax. I checked this issue for New Zealand and I can't find anything much and don't have the time to dig deeply, but this jumped out: "As you can see, the richest tenth of New Zealanders pay 47% of all income tax, but that's hardly surprising when they earn 34% of all the income."
We do have a pretty generous programme of income support for families that probably effectively does reduce the tax of the very lowest income earners in a proportional sense, and maybe more so than America. But it has reduced serious poverty and we have had nothing like tent cities or trailor parks. Our problem is very high house prices and rents recently, similar to the isssue in California, and thats causing poverty to creep back. But I digress...
Digressing back to the climate issue, I can't help but wonder if a massive "GND" style of programme would really reduce economic growth as some claim. During WW2 America undertook a rapid conversion of the economy to manufacture armaments, I think a staggering 30% of gdp went into this, yet economic growth was strong and surprisingly standards of living went up. I know the climate issue is a bit different because we are being advised to reduce consumption, but still its worth thinking about.
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Eclectic at 08:21 AM on 12 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
Nigelj , your post #35 was excellently well stated.
One extra point (from the American scene) is the proportion of taxation burden. The standard narrative is that the rich and the upper middle class pay the lion's share of revenue supporting the government (or call it supporting the social contract, if you prefer the term).
That may not be entirely fair, as a description. Earlier in 2019, I came across two graphs (but I can't vouch for their accuracy). The first was the standard "income tax paid as a proportion of income" ~ where the rich in the top decile were paying the bulk of absolute tax dollars . . . reducing down to the poorest deciles paying close to zero income tax. [Disregarding social security benefits paid.]
However, the second graph showed the effect of the addition of sales taxes, state taxes, local taxes of various kinds.
Remarkably: each decile from poorest to richest, paid close to the same percentage of their income, as total tax.
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One Planet Only Forever at 07:49 AM on 12 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
markpittsusa@34,
I believe that your claim, that a diversity of political competitors would agree with my point, is incorrect or missing important clarification. Conservatives and Libertarians (if that is what you mean by far-left Liberals) who genuinely want to help any and all Others in ways that ensure that no one suffers a harsh short existence (a clearer example of a non-decent life) might agree, but not the New age of Populist Leaders or the self-professed Good Conservatives or Good Liberals who choose to support and defend them. Admittedly there are different opinions about what is Decent, and Yuval Noah Harari does a decent job of presenting that issue in his book "21 Lessons for the 21st Century". But Decent is not a term that is wide open to any Opinion. And there is far less room to dispute what is 'negative', especially regarding climate change impacts.
My comment means that Opinions need to be judged against the achievement of and improvements on the Sustainable Development Goals, especially being judged on the fullness and accuracy of their presentation (more complete presentations of what is actually going on). I try to evaluate things that way, especially the actions of leaders (business, political, and purveyors of information - storytellers like the media).
When evaluated based on the need to help improve awareness and understanding and its application to develop sustainable improvements for all of humanity, a variety of Opinionators (and their associates) do worse than score lower than others, they often fail to pass the test, often trying to dismiss or discredit the evaluation rather than be judged on that basis.
I am quite confident that certain, not all, 'political and business entities (which by default include the less correct information purveyors)' would be more averse than others would be to being required to present the fuller story more accurately, no misleading marketing.
I will close by adding a point I failed to include in my comment @33. Self Interest can cause a person to want to justify their desires through the Negative-Negative evaluation I commented about @25. And it can motivate them to go further and want that incorrect evaluation to be done with a higher discount rate.
That leads to a response to nigelj @35. I accept nigelj's point about Self Interest needing to be governed or limited. I disagree that it is should be given a prominent moral standing. Parfit's arguments very powerfully leave no doubt about the understanding that Self Interest needs to be Governed by concern for Others, and that Others does not mean just Other Family members, or just Others that a person is aware of and likes.
Moving out from under a falling piano is a Good Instinct, but it has nothing to do with ethics and their application to thoughtful processes like determining what to do about the harmful abuse of fossil fuels. Self Interest being allowed to influence that type of evaluation is Not Helpful.
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nigelj at 06:44 AM on 12 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
markpittsusa says "I agree with you completely. But then so would the most conservative Republican, and the furthest Left Democrat. That's because everyone has their own definition and opinion concerning what's "decent," "negative," etc. Also, everyone disagrees about who is being greedy and controlled by self-interest."
These are real problems that must be resolved. The term self interest shouldn't be demonised, because if we didn't have self interest we would probably die pretty fast. Humans are self interested by our very nature, however we also observably mostly have a counter balancing altruistic side to our character. Helping others has some obvious benefits to our selves that don't need repeating here, and is a moral good, so we should obviously promote altruism but not by suggesting self interest is evil. A good moral and economic case can be made that altruism is a virtue.
Greed is easier to define and to accept as a moral wrong and also a behaviour that destablises economies. For any group of people to cooperate to improve their circumstances clearly requires rules, and one rule is not taking more than your fair share of the resources by force, as in the basic resources of the land, and stealing from other people. In a free market economy people earn the rights to resources, and thats ok up to a point.
The problem happens when people earn the rights to a lot of resources and others get left well behind working hard yet still living in poverty, or disabled etcetera. In this case most people agree to some level of income redistribution to help them enforced by government's The problem is those on the right of politics (in the main) that resent income redistribution being forced by governments (taxation is allegedly theft) and they resent other government impositions. Yet their objections create a situation where it become virtually impossible to solve poverty and other problems.
Those on the left sometimes have artificially high expectations on what governments can achieve, and are very idealistic about human nature.
Everyone is susceptible to accumulating wealth as a status display almost like a drug, and gaming the system to perpetuate this regardless of cost to other people and the environment. This includes left and right, business and government, although the left at least have the virtue of recognising the problem.
There is a sensible middle ground. But its being lost in America in a tribal political war thats getting dangerous, and one big casualty is climate change mitigation.
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Doug Bostrom at 04:55 AM on 12 October 2019Video: Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Volumes 1979-2019
Our drink is warming while we blather for decades. :-(
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markpittsusa at 03:39 AM on 12 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
One Planet,
I agree with you completely. But then so would the most conservative Republican, and the furthest Left Democrat. That's because everyone has their own definition and opinion concerning what's "decent," "negative," etc. Also, everyone disagrees about who is being greedy and controlled by self-interest.
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One Planet Only Forever at 02:24 AM on 12 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
I offer the following higher level of thoughts for consideration as a follow-up to my comments in this thread (and almost every comment I have made on SkS). This is my latest developed way of presenting this, and it appears to align with the thoughts being expressed by others.
“Everyone being sustainably decently self-sufficient, now and into the future” should be the Governing Objective.
Self Interest can actually be a serious impediment to the achievement of that Objective. Derek Parfit explained the fundamental unacceptability of Self Interest in robust, very hard to reasonably refute, detail in his book “Reasons and Persons”.
My two ways of presenting that point are:
- Self Interest leading to Greed can result in people pursuing more personal benefit in ways that limit the ability of others to be sustainably self sufficient by taking a larger than required share of available renewable resources, damaging and reducing the robust diversity of renewable resources, and harmfully wastefully using up non-renewable resources. Those negative results of greed appear in many forms including the pursuits of 'cheaper and easier' ways to personally benefit. It produces popularity of harmful actions. And it can create less compensation for, or no employment of, significant portions of the population. It also results in a lack of decent affordable housing or a lack of access to decent food and water.
- Self Interest leading to disliking of people who are harmlessly different is another negative aggravating factor, especially when it gets tied to the reduced opportunities for self-sufficiency that Greed produces.
Requirements of that understanding include the following:
- Within the whole of global humanity, different ways of achieving The Objective by any sub-set can be acceptable.
- A diversity of ways of trying to achieve it can be helpful, as long as the actions of any sub-set do not cause negative consequences within the sub-set or for any Others.
- The results of the sub-set actions must be monitored for negative impacts to achieving the Objective.
- Collective governing actions will be required to effectively correct any resulting 'activity that has negative impact', including correcting for 'less than decent self sufficient life experiences' created in any of the many 'socioeconomic-political trials/experiments'.
- Corrections need to be effective and rapid to minimize the negative impacts, ensure that the negative activity does not become popular or produce significant reward for anyone.
- Corrections need to collectively help those who are unable to be sustainably self-sufficient. A person should only experience a less than decent basic life for a short duration before they are collectively helped.
- Leaders need to constantly work to improve the understanding of how to govern and change the diversity of systems to better achieve the sustainable self-sufficiency Objective. On the Total Population issue - That would include understanding the importance of global awareness of effective birth control and the potential value of abortions to help develop Sustainable Self-Sufficiency - but the more important population related understanding being the need to reduce (eliminate) the negative impacts of the highest impacting portion of the population to make it easier for all others to be sustainably self-sufficient.
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Eclectic at 22:59 PM on 11 October 2019Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
JamesKL , the answer is more complex, because there are different cases.
For the classic "hot desert" (e.g. the Sahara, near the Tropic of Cancer) then it's true that the adjacent equatorial forests have a higher temperature at night. During the daytime, the forests are cooler ~ presumably from the evaporative cooling effect ~ but I stand to be corrected if you have some good official data saying otherwise. Since the air temperature is measured at 200cm altitude, you get variation according to shading from the forest canopy versus open areas of (moist) grasses/shrubs. But then we get to the question of day/night averaging & how often in 24 hours the temperature is measured for calculating the average. And seasonal or summer vs winter average temperatures for desert/forest.
Then there's the case of a "cold desert" (e.g. the Gobi in Mongolia) compared with adjacent coastal forests having much higher rainfall. The Gobi is indeed cold at night, and the coastal forests warmer. But during the daytime . . . do you have any official temperature figures? I could imagine if you scouted around, you could find some contradictory desert vs forest (or grassland) cases.
Difficult enough to find nicely matched cases, of similar latitude / altitude / ocean proximity / or exposure to prevailing or seasonal winds & rainfall. (Monsoonal rain, or annually well-distributed rain.)
To boil your question down, and over-simplify : you have to balance daytime evaporation in well-vegetated areas, versus nighttime cooling in dry (deserty) low-humidity areas. So I am not giving a black-and-white answer to your original question ~ but I hope you can take consideration of the underlying physical principles involved.
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JamesKL at 20:07 PM on 11 October 2019Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
If this were the case, wouldn’t you expect average temperatures in humid parts of the world (like rainforests) to be higher than drier areas (like deserts) at the same latitude?
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nigelj at 12:33 PM on 11 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
doug_bostrom @29, I agree, and I have had these sorts of discussions elsewhere. Humanity is mostly raiding the cupboard of the cheese, and not leaving much cheese for the grandkids . It could be severely problematic, and doesn't feel right to me as a matter of conscience.
No doubt some people gamble that the gandkids will be smart enough to get the remaining cheese. Good luck with that plan.
This generation can obviously help the situation by consuming less, wasting less, recycling more, and building products that last longer, and stock piling waste so its easy to recycle, and by having small families. I doubt that there's much governmnets can or should to to force those things on people. It is very much a case of us talking about it and spreading awareness. Governments can do a bit to encourage lower birth rates, and have good environmental laws, and encourage recycling, but thats about it. There needs to be a mostly voluntary corporate culture change that goes beyond green washing, and its encouraging to see some green shoots of this. But I have no idea how far it might go.
Of course we have a problem because capitalism in its present form tends to encourage the opposite of these better ways of behaving. Capitalism encourages maximum consumption and throw away products and is hostile to business regulation. But it may be possible to bend capitalism enough to solve the problems, without compromising it's main attributes.
I also doubt that people would dramatically reduce their level of consumption for a problem thats well into the future and devilishly hard to quantify. Wasting less etc, and getting the size of global population down to reduce demand pressure looks like the least painful mechanism, although it's not without its own problems. If we all adopt a fertility rate of 1.5 kids in the following decade or two, global population starts to fall in absolute size by 2100. Some countries are already near this level so its a realistic plan. With reduced demand pressure virtually all environmental problems improve, but such plans are obviously not sufficient in themselves.
Could all be a train wreck. The best plan is probably harm minimisation. Do what we can.
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One Planet Only Forever at 11:10 AM on 11 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
markpittsusa,
My first thought is a more effective process to more rapidly identify and thoroughly correct misleading marketing (why I stay tuned-in to SkS). The achievement of, and improvement on, the Sustainable Development Goals would be a primary set of guiding principles for doing that (they were globally developed through decades of collaborative pursuit of improved awareness and understanding and continue to be open to improvement, expansion and correction).
Marketing is great, as long as it is helpfully increasing awareness and understanding. New products and services need to be developed. And helpful promotion of new products and services is essential. Providing consumers with a fuller awareness and understanding of their choices is very helpful, but is very difficult to do when business interests or political interests can keep the reality of their activities 'secret' (people unaware) or 'misunderstood' (people misled by appealing misleading claim making, especially passion-triggering marketing).
It would be best if everyone wanted to helpfully improve their awareness and understanding and apply that learning to helping others, by helping achieve and improve the Sustainable Development Goals at whatever level they are able to act at. But some aspects of human nature makes that universal dedication to helpfulness a fantasy. It will always be likely that some members of humanity will try to personally benefit in ways that produce negative consequences for Others. Vigilant and sustained global governing is required with the SDGs as the overarching Objectives, governing everything including governing the acceptability of laws, law-makers, judges, lawyers, policing, military, businesses, education (rule of law can be corrupted).
Specifically for the matter of climate impacts, I believe that people like Stephen Gardener, author of "A Perfect Moral Storm", are leading in a helpful correction direction. He is pushing for international governing rules with teeth, not aspirations that can be Opted-out of without penalty.
And if you want to better understand the reasoning behind my thinking you could try to read Derek Parfit's 1984 book "Reasons and Persons".
Before I read Parfit's or Gardener's books I had independently developed a similar understanding by my own efforts to come up with explanations of what can be seen to be going on and reading a lot of other books by other people trying to do the same thing, specifically related to society and the environment and what had developed and why, especially why the resistance to understanding climate science was so persistent and powerful.
My conclusion is that misleading marketing can be abused by harmful cheaters to unjustifiably prosper without risk of serious personal consequences. That is what I believe needs to fundamentally be corrected.
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markpittsusa at 10:19 AM on 11 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
One Planet. Maybe a productive approach (for me at least) would be if you could explain what you would propose in order to fix the "fatally flawed socioeconomic-political system." I agree with your general philosophy.
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Doug Bostrom at 10:15 AM on 11 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
Reasonable people can disagree on the internet. Who knew (or remembered)? :-)
What a great discussion.
One point made here really resonates with me (among others) and that's the other big problem with fossil fuels aside from the CO2 emissions defect: the fossil nature of the fuel. Nobody's making fossil fuel these days. There's a limited supply of this material and substitution by constructing molecules from elements turns out to be a fairly tough technological problem, one of many we already face and one we don't necessarily have to take on.
It being a fact that petroleum and natural gas are useful for many things less caveman-like than setting them on fire, in general the faster we get past caveman mode the better. Imagining that there were not a climate change problem attached to fossil fuels and imagining that we have some applications for petroloeum and natural gas as raw materials in the future, we can hypothesize responsible rates of investment for eliminating crude burning of what we now consider primarily as fuel.
How fast should we do this? I expect many of us like to think about what civilization will be like in 100, 500,1,000 or 2,000 years. More and ideally most of us need to think this way if we're to collectively exhibit moral and ethical integrity, behave respectably as a group. What years in the future look like for people living in those times depends in large part— short of speculation entirely— on choices we make today. They can be easier years, or harder years. If we've dispersed all the easily obtained copper willy-nilly about the globe in low concentrations, how are people 1,000 years from now to wind electric motors? What gives us the right to take away options for everybody following us?
Failing to take the future into consideration— negligent behavior with consumables— is arguably a form of theft. It seems to me that we need to act as rapidly as we can afford to so as to minimize our culpable actions.
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Lithium Valley Rocks at 10:10 AM on 11 October 2019Geologists and climate change denial
So I ask the question of causes of past climate nudges.... solar intensity, cosmic impacts, super vulcanism, tectonic forces, supercontinant creation/disintegration, chemical weathering of rocks.... so I don't recall any of these happening in the last 100 years, yet all the indicator of such an influence are present. Humans are impacting the planets systems to the same extent as a comet impact on a huge oil field or permafrost methane hydrate province....
Which past event corolates to what we are seeing today?
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markpittsusa at 09:53 AM on 11 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
@ One Planet & Nigel
Thanks for your comments; I'm understanding your views better. (I'd like to ask a few questions when I've had more time to digest your comments better.)
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nigelj at 08:57 AM on 11 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
I posted my comment @26 before OPOFs was on my screen. Sorry for any repetition.
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nigelj at 08:51 AM on 11 October 2019Skeptical Science New Research for Week #40, 2019
markpittsusa @22, I hope you don't mind but I will weigh in on some of this. You will see why.
"1) Poverty kills. ....We also know that economic development is what cures poverty....So, we have a choice to make: (1) Put the brakes on development and/or divert massive resources to replace one form of energy with another, or (2) Keep moving ahead, limit carbon emissions, plan to adapt to some environmental changes....My assessment (which you may not agree with) is that we eliminate more poverty and save more lives with the second approach than the first."
Let's examine western countries like America. Economic growth alleviated poverty in past centuries but has been ineffective in recent decades at this. The benefits of growth have been captured by certain groups. Poverty has been reduced in recent decades by income redistribution in western countries because they have plenty of wealth to do this. I have a copy of The Economist Journal September 28th, which has a huge article on poverty in America. The Economist finds that things like food stamps and the in work tax credit and entitlement programmess have been effective in reducing poverty but don't go far enough.
Let's examine poor countries. They will need more economic growth to lift people out of poverty because in the early stages economic growth does this. However their emissions are quite low and electricity grids are limited, so climate mitigation is not really about a massive and rapid programme of replacing infrastructure. Its about building wind farms rather than building more coal power. Its an additive process. So its hard to see why climate mitigation in poor countries needs to be a huge brake on economic growth. You also mentioned the western world subsidising the climate mitigation of poor countries, so this would mean growth is not compromised.
Its also a false dichotomy to somehow consider poverty reduction versus climate mitigation. There's clearly more to the issue.
"2). A zero, or near zero, interest rate makes no sense."
I dont think anyone suggested zero interest rates for the economy as a whole. It's a question of whether a discount rate at zero or near zero is appropriate to deal with an issue like mitigating climate change and it may well be. I support capitalism and interest rates etc in broad terms.
This is my take. Discount rates make perfect sense applied to problems that have many possible solutions, and project planning, where one of the solutions may be just to invest money. The world will probably get wealthier ( we would probably argue about how much) and this alone may solve some problems. However some issues are different, for example a faulty bridge really needs to be fixed immediately because its life threatining, and as I said using the excuse that medical advances in the future may mitigate the threat would be pretty weak.Climate change is more like the bridge problem in that mitigation needs to be fairly immediate and done whatever it costs (although phased in) and the problem is life threatening and a huge issue. And its worse because we cannot rule out catastrophic climate scenarios. We also need to be cautious because there are signs that economic growth cannot continue forever. So discount rates seem a dubious mechanism to decide on a carbon price, and at least they would need to be set quite low.
"5) The climate problem is more like “fix that old bridge that might hurt people in the year 2100”
Climate change is already hurting some communities, an issue easily enough googled.
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