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Comments 104451 to 104500:

  1. Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
    I’m agnostic about which method should be used but I lean towards Cap & Trade if it’s done right. Part of right is a meaningful cap and no (or few) free allocations handed out at start-up. I worry somewhat about the trading mechanism (will we have CO2 derivatives?) but I think the biggest issue is measuring the emissions of all the players to see that they actually stay within the allocations they purchase. It’s workable when the number of players is relatively small, as was the case for sulphur emissions by power plants to combat acid rain. I don’t have the expertise to assess whether society can monitor GHG emissions with the necessary resolution – player by player – though I think so for the larger players. And I don’t know that the idea of returning C&T revenues to the public coffers to reduce taxes is really productive, as some have suggested be done. That just removes the capital from the innovation process that will find new low emission means of energy production, manufacturing, etc. and the subsequent updating to use that new technology. It just prolongs the problem. Can others fill in some of the blanks?
  2. Climate cherry pickers: cooling oceans
    Ken Lambert - Actually, there is considerable and ongoing effort in merging together and cross-calibrating TSI series, as I have referred you to previously. See here and here. Those are the top two results from googling "satellite TSI", hardly difficult to find. Your statement (that TSI measurements aren't being merged) is simply not correct. On your other argument, regarding time integrated TOA imbalances - I consider the closed loop integration you have been pushing to be overvaluing the accuracy of the various measurements over the last 150 years. You don't seem (IMO) to be treating the TSI, TOA infrared, and various forcings with the caution needed given the accuracy of our knowledge, and interpolate from 1750 on assuming perfect accuracy. That's simply not supportable. What we do know, and have measured, are not absolute TSI's and forcings, but rather time-resolved points of deltas in forcings; when they have changed to some extent. And we can correlate those with multiply-supported temperature changes to determine the dominant forcings and responses over time. Your black-box integration from 1750 on (assuming perfect knowledge) leads to contradictions with deltas, orders of magnitude, and observed responses. You are simply too focused on what you see as absolute values.
  3. Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
    SoundOff@36 & Composer99 @ 37 The main advantage of market solutions such as C&T and carbon tax is that it internalise external costs into the cost of the polluting process. For that reason, this approach for dealing with externalities is preferred by most (neo-classical) economists over the regulatory approach. Businesses on the other hand tend to prefer regulations as they generally have the lobbying power to influence the design and implementation of regulation and make it as "toothless" as possible. Pricing carbon on the other hand (either through a carbon tax or using C & T) means that the cost of polluting has to be met and passed on. This is one of the reason why conservative political parties (eg the opposition in Australia) favour regulation and resist the adoption of a C & T scheme. They prefer calling it a "carbon tax" as this sounds very "evil" when it is actually a market based solution.
  4. The Skeptical Chymist at 15:54 PM on 16 November 2010
    Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    John Harrington 11.42 AM While it is true that genuine areas of scientific debate/disagreement can get heated and divisive, the story you relate seems very outlandish. I would also disagree with her view of "modern science". Getting papers through peer review can be hard and the system doesn't work perfectly, but it's neither a sham nor corrupt.
  5. Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
    Might I add that government/international regulation of pollutants (either a cap and trade on sulphur emissions or the phase-out of CFCs has been succesful in the past. As such, there is no a priori reason why some effort to regulate carbon emissions in a similar manner is destined to fail. Further to SoundOff's comment #36, airport security is as bad as it is because governments perceive the need to be seen doing something immediately. This leads to such wonderful ideas as full-body scans. Personally, I'd prefer that they take steps now, carefully and rationally, to do something about greenhouse gas emissions instead of trying to be seen doing something about them in a panic in 10-15 years.
  6. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    sout: There is a huge amount of 'value added' by meeting people in person and having hundreds of people come together to listen and discuss face to face. Agreed, and I think this is especially true of Q&A segments. That's often the most important part of these events, and it's much harder to connect with audience members — undecided ones, especially - through videoconferencing. It's very important to do presentations like this one in person, IMO (and to make the footage widely available online, during and after).
  7. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    johnd: Phila at 10:51 AM, the point I was making is that perhaps there are other problems that may reach a crisis point well before any climate change realistically impacts to any great extent, and priorities and attention be adjusted accordingly. So I gathered. Regardless, it's a false dichotomy, not least because some of these problems have the same root causes or ideological obstacles, and the same people counseling inaction and complacency (or recommending that we shift our attention to "real" problems, a la Bjorn Lomborg). If people need to feel better being described as "needing to address" Since my comment had nothing to do with how people "need to feel," this reply is puzzling. My suggestion was more for your benefit than anyone else's, and was less about making other people feel better than helping them (possibly) to take your statements a little more seriously.
  8. Miriam O'Brien (Sou) at 14:21 PM on 16 November 2010
    Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    In response to comments about a webcast or similar being preferable to a tour, I have to say the Oreskes is getting a large amount of publicity here that she would not have garnered from a webcast; including on national radio and television. I agree (and promote the use of) video conferencing - eg for meetings of national and international groups - for dealing with ongoing matters. But only if there are also regular (if less frequent, eg annual) face to face meetings. There is a huge amount of 'value added' by meeting people in person and having hundreds of people come together to listen and discuss face to face.
  9. Climate cherry pickers: cooling oceans
    BP #26 Some knockout points BP. I am indebted to you for opening my eyes to the OHC story and the impossible jumps and bumps in the von Schukmann graph and the critical point that OHC increase must be the integral of the TOA forcing imbalance wrt time to be consistent with the first law. The impossible jumps OHC in the 2003-04 period can only be explained by dud Argo measurements OR as an offset - an artifact of the transition. My contention is that Argo is also not perfect and the 'gold standard' is a tethered buoy system measuring the same tile of ocean at the same referenced time T1 and again at T2 all over the planet as the only accurate way of measuring OHC differences over the T2 - T1 period. How close Argo comes to that 'gold standard' no-one seems to know. The SLR graphs showing TOPEX spliced to Jason also are candidates for offsets at the transition where the SLR slope has reduced with Jason compared with TOPEX. Strenuous effort has been made by AGW protagonists to claim that these transitions are calibrated to be seamless, however the point is made that the latest satellite instruments must be more accurate and repeatable than earlier instruments with diferent gains and inferior technology. Also no-one is seeming to splice TSI measuring satellites together into a continuous record probably due to a -4.5W/sq.m unresolved difference in the latest SORCE TIMS satellites and prior measurements by earlier satellites. That is one helluva offset.
  10. Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
    Some believe any government intervention puts us on slippery slope to world socialism. If they admit climate change or warming is occurring and has human causes, then they also admit the need for government intervention. They won’t do that. The irony is that the more they delay political and economic action to correct this problem, the greater the crisis will become and eventually much more radical government interference will be needed than if we had started addressing the problem earlier. Imagine, perhaps, CO2 rationing. We only need to look at airport security today to understand how much governments will spend when they perceive a matter to be urgent, and the freedom we will lose in the process.
  11. Ice-Free Arctic
    #73: "doesn't tell much about the causality between the two." Hopper et al 1994 reiterate my point in #71 ... hourly black carbon data exhibited considerable episodic behaviour over periods of a few days to a week. These elevated concentrations of black carbon were most often correlated with increases in carbon dioxide and methane concentrations. Such correlations can arise from several causes, but transport of a polluted air mass from industrialized regions to the high Arctic would account for the simultaneous increases in numerous monitored constituents, and is consistent with previous studies of Arctic Haze. Black carbon is apparently a valid 'tracer' for carbon dioxide. BP in his considerable wisdom now strengthens the link between Arctic melt and atmospheric CO2. To take this one step further, black carbon transport is apparently affected by ocean oscillations. From Sharma et al 2006: The results revealed that EBC concentrations were 40% higher during the positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation than during the negative phase. The source contributions at the two sites were determined by using trajectory analysis techniques, which revealed that Alert came under the influence of Siberia/Europe transport while Barrow showed influence from Siberian and Pacific/Asian transport. This suggests the end of the 'its all because of ocean oscillations' tripe. The varying wind and weather associated with ocean oscillations are merely the agents that modify the transport of GHGs from anthropogenic sources to the Arctic.
  12. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Phila at 10:51 AM, the point I was making is that perhaps there are other problems that may reach a crisis point well before any climate change realistically impacts to any great extent, and priorities and attention be adjusted accordingly. If people need to feel better being described as "needing to address" rather than agonising over many of the issues whilst little is being achieved, or wringing of their hands, then perhaps that is the most telling point of all with regards to being able to set priorities.
  13. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    JohnHarrington. That sounds less like "how science works" than how any workplace can go wrong. How many people do you hear grumbling about dopey or biased or bullying management in any activity? Quite often there's something in it. Two things to consider. One, it may be true, but not nearly as often as unsuccessful people blaming others for their own failures. Two, the fact that one person / manager / senior scientist is a pain in the neck or any other part of the anatomy says more about that person than it does about the field of endeavour. What this woman said might, possibly, be true about the person she was dealing with or about that particular sub-specialty. It says nothing about the larger field of science generally and it certainly does not lead to conclusions about greed or Nazism or Lysenkoism or corruption or any of the other general criticisms of science. (My personal view is that anyone who plays the Nazi card automatically deals themselves out of the game.)
  14. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Excuse me if this is too off the topic. I really don't know where else I might post this. I was debating someone at a party recently who opined that "science is about dominant factions of science bullying those who disagree". The person saying this claimed to have a PhD in archeology and to have escaped the field in part because a rival scientist got her in trouble with a foreign government, which caused passport trouble, simply because she disagreed with this scientist's hypothesis about horse domestication. She went on to compare "modern science" to science done in Nazi Germany and to suggest that peer review was a sham, made venal by government monies in science. I'm not a scientist, as I was forced to admit, and this made her seem like the authority who was giving me the truth about how "science really works". I wonder if any practicing scientists posting here could comment on this view of "modern science".
  15. Are ice sheet losses overestimated?
    One thing is clear from this excellent summary. Ice loss in polar regions is occurring and getting faster. No surprise to anyone. It also focuses attention to the fact that we need (and presumably will get) more information, particularly on the extent to which ice loss is now and will in the future contribute to the most dangerous aspect of global warming – rising sea levels.
  16. How significance tests are misused in climate science
    Dikran (@37), Perhaps I just need to see an example of Bayesian significance testing done right to understand the way you and Dr Anbaum think this should be done. "one of the most important benefits of the Bayesian approach is that it gives mechanism to properly incorporate the fact that you know you don't know something, by assigning a non- or minimally-informative prior on it and marginalising it out of the analysis" Does a Bayesian analysis with a minimally informative prior often lead to a different result than a frequentist approach? I must confess that my knowledge of Bayesian statistics comes entirely from studying data mining/machine learning, so there may be a side to this I'm missing from not having studied more stats. In that class one thing we were taught is that if you don't really know the prior the most common thing to do is assume it's 50/50. Is that the sort of thing you mean by minimally informative prior? "Bayesian conclusions are only as strong as the priors used, if you could show the priors were unreasonable then you could reject the result of the test (and the paper). If you can't question the prior, you are logically forced to accept the result of the test." It still seems to me to be a question of what the point of the work you're doing is and what you can add to the body of knowledge. Let's assume I am an expert in dendrochronology, and I core a few trees in my backyard. Now I need to calculate a prior probability for observing warming in that data set. One way I might do that is by looking at the evidence from atmospheric physics and other areas outside my expertise and decide how likely this should be, but why would I be the one to do this when that really isn't my field and I'm likely to screw it up, I just know all there is to know about tree rings? Or are you suggesting I use a non-informative prior? Let's say I did the full analysis and found that with 99% confidence given changes in various forcings and our range of sensitivity estimates the data should show an upward trend of .15 degree/decade or more. And then I did some calculations on my little data set that any frequentist would sneer at and calculated a posterior probability of 99% for my hypothesis. Have I used my knowledge as a dendrochronologist to contribute anything to the state of our knowledge about climate? My result comes from my prior calculation, the part of my work I'm least qualified to do, meanwhile the actual data I've collected is superfluous (and I should have collected more of it, as a frequentist statistical significance test would have told me). I do think a Bayesian analysis by someone who was an expert in such things that combined varous lines of evidence from many subfields of climate research and tried to establish probabilities for various climate related hypothesis would be an interesting work, but it's not reasonable or useful to expect every researcher to do this in the process of establishing their result, and indeed Dr. Anbaum's research shows pretty conclusively that most would not be competent to do it. If on the other hand you want most scientists to replace frequentist significance tests with Bayesian tests with non-informative priors to show they've learned at least that much about stats and know what their confidence values mean, I guess I'm okay with that, but I doubt it would change anyone's results much beyond changing the confidence values by a small amount. I do think scientists should not put their confidence values front and center as if they are the results, better to focus on estimating the magnitudes of effects, but do some kind of confidence calculation just to keep yourself honest and make yourself less likely to publish garbage. But if you think that's the main value that comes from confidence calculations in science (and I do) rather than determining whether we should be 96% certain or 99.3%, then a frequentist approach will generally work okay and if the result is your paper leads people to believe that climate sensitivity is 3.2 when you really do have good reason to believe it is 3.2, then your paper isn't particularly misleading just because there may be a better way you could have done your confidence calculation.
  17. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    quokka... This is exactly my point as well. We would all love it if we could jump on a jet airplane that was burning algae based bio-fuel that was being produced at a cost comparable to current jet fuel. I'm sure Al Gore would be the first to book limousine service from a company who had an all electric fleet. We are not there. (We don't have the vegetables for our veggie diet.) We need people like Oreskes flying around doing these tours to promote her book. We need politicians flying to Copenhagen for such events. To stop - or even slow this process down - is to stop the process of addressing this issue.
  18. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    johnd: That is the real problem coming that people should be wringing their hands over. This seems like a false dichotomy. Acknowledging the problems you mention does not require us to see AGW, or any other problem, as less than "real." Also, "wringing their hands" has a rather contemptuous sound. Saying something like "a problem people also need to address" might be a bit more constructive.
  19. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    #16 KeenOn350 There is a carbon cost on just about any activity - from eating your lunch to building wind turbines or nuclear power stations. The point surely is to spend that carbon wisely. As far as I am concerned, the trivial carbon costs associated with Oreskes tour is a very wise expenditure of carbon indeed. If Oreskes, Hansen and other outstanding individuals want to fly around the world 100 times a year in the political fight against AGW deniers and that activity can bring forward an organized collective effort to reduce emissions by even a tiny amount, then that carbon cost would be repaid by orders of magnitude. Youtube videos are no substitute for physical presence. Why do people like live music? Why do we still have teachers in classrooms?
  20. Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
    Eric (34), if you are a "skeptic" about government spending, then you should equally advocate a cap-and-trade bill or a carbon tax while demanding tax cuts, not just scrapping economic action against climate change altogether. "Government wastes money" is a poor excuse and just amounts to a simplist libertarian pirouette against taking action against global warming just because the Gov't is involved. Reasonable libertarian-leaning economists support cap-and-trade (for example, Tyler Cowen). There are even some cap-and-dividend proposals which involve directly handing over the money to the citizens, therefore deflecting your critique. One small remark: "> The IGEM model is an outlier because it assumes when the price of energy (and other goods and services) rises, people will respond by choosing to work less than they otherwise would (EDF 2008). This is a counter-intuitive and illogical assumption, since increasing costs generally result in people working more to increase income correspondingly" Actually, this is a bit more complex. Economic theory says that price changes have _both_ a "substitution effect" (if working is less useful, people work less) and an "income effect" (if work "pays less", people will try to work more in order to "offset" its effects). Both effects do exist in the real world, and which effect is stronger depends on a lot of things and it is an empirical question rather than a theoretical one. AFAIK some economists find a significant substitution effect in the economy as a whole (Prescott) while others report a smaller one. I don't know in depth what does the literature say, but I wouldn't go so far as to declare substitution effects "illogical" or "counter-intuitive". They're just as real as income effects, the real question is whether they are big or small. This is relevant for a number of reasons beyond climate change (tax policy, for example).
  21. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Argus wrote : "Is there any follow-up report available yet?" Well, to stop going further off-topic, I can start you off and you can then find out further information for yourself hopefully : Brick Kilns
  22. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Re: CBDunkerson (8:05 am) I like to think that there will be a future civilization, when global population has been stabilized at around 1.5 - 2 billion, and most energy is green, and lifestyles are equitable globally (i.e. most residents of future Africa, India, etc., have a lifestyle comparable to most residents of the future USA), and that those lifestyles for all will be, in many ways, similar to those of today. I like to think that in the very near future, we will take some control of our destiny in a more rational fashion, to deal realistically with the crises we face (of which climate disruption is only one). I like to think that we may have a rough landing, but it won't be a crash. But meantime - planet Earth, we have a problem. The scale is greater than that of WW II, the threat may be greater than (or may include) WW III. In WW II, people accepted the need to constrain their lifestyles and consumption habits to address their problem. (They also accepted a lot of government controls - voluntarily, understanding the need.) I see no way that we can address our multiple problems effectively without accepting similar constraints for the near future, given that we have wasted 40 years or so. Had we started to address the two major problems of clean energy and population growth effectively in the early 1970's ( when both problems were already in evidence), then I would be more inclined to agree with you. Given where we are today, and what seems to be in the international plans for the near future (not much!), lifestyle changes will be coming. As John Holdren has said - "We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation and suffering. We're going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be." Right now we seem to be opting for the suffering - i.e., a serious and forced change in lifestyles, which will, before long, affect those of us in the USA and Canada, as it is now affecting many in other parts of the world.
  23. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    JMurphy (#23): "To ensure the conference will be climate neutral, the Danish Government, ..." That is good news, thank you, I did not know about those plans. I hope they went through with the programme, and that it worked out as it was planned a year ago. Is there any follow-up report available yet?
  24. Ice-Free Arctic
    Berényi Péter comparing summer ice extend to visibility in Hong Kong doesn't tell much about the causality between the two. Probably there's not. More relevant could be meaurements BC concentration in ice cores. It's in Central Greenland, not over the arctic ocean, but it clearly shows (fig 2a) that BC deposition there went through a quite large peak around 1910 and then declined. In the last decades, though, it's slowly increasing again, but still well below the peak.
  25. Are ice sheet losses overestimated?
    Stephen@5. I doubt we can 'protect' science, scientists or their individual publications from misuse or attack. I'm afraid it's really for us and the scientific community to support wherever possible. When we're stuck walking in the rain, we share the umbrellas, we keep trudging on and we make maximum use of every little bit of dry shelter with gratitude. And we keep each other's spirits up.
  26. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    CBDunkerson at 08:05 AM, whilst some may feel content to continue existing lifestyles if energy production changes to low CO2 alternatives, what goes hand in hand with energy usage in lifestyles is that other form of energy, namely food. This is perhaps the real problem that should be addressed as so far, unlike the nuclear option for power generation, there is no alternative for the essential nutrients that are stripped from the soil to produce the food, be it meat or vegetables. So there should be no thought of being able to continue an existing lifestyle by phasing out fossil fuels if half the food that leaves the farm gate is going to be continued to be wasted by an indulgent lifestyle that is partly reflected by increasing obesity in the developed, mainly western world. That is the real problem coming that people should be wringing their hands over.
  27. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    KeenOn350 wrote: "This is precisely the question - who will begin to implement and to demonstrate the lifestyle changes we need? And when?" You are proceeding from a first assumption, that we must make significant lifestyle changes, which I do not agree with. In reality that is only one theoretical option, and in my opinion not a very plausible one. It seems far more likely that we will convert most of our energy production to low carbon emitting alternatives and continue with our current lifestyle largely unchanged.
  28. Are ice sheet losses overestimated?
    Great post, Robert. This is a really handy summary of where things stand right now.
  29. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Argus wrote : "Another example of mixed messages was the Copenhagen meeting a year ago." It isn't perfect, and shouldn't be used as an excuse by anyone to do nothing at all (a la "Gore flies everywhere and burns loads of electricity in his mansion(s), so why should I do anything ?" - um, why should we judge anything by what he, or any other individual, does ?), especially because of the following : An initial estimate of overall emissions result in a figure of 40,500 tonnes of carbon dioxide. To ensure the conference will be climate neutral, the Danish Government, in partnership with Bangladesh and the World Bank, has decided to replace outdated brick kilns in Dhaka. It will see the heavily polluting, existing kilns replaced by 20 new energy efficient ones, which the Danish Energy Agency calculates will cut more than 50,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year and improve air quality in one of the world’s most polluted cities. The Danish government has set aside 0.7 million euro as part of this year’s state budget for this purpose. Fact sheet: Minimising the Copenhagen carbon footprint
  30. forensicscience at 07:12 AM on 16 November 2010
    Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Re #18, I cant see what that has to do with ACC. We burn 30 billion barrels of oil per annum (4.5 billion tonnes) so its hardly an issue now is it?
  31. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Re: DBailey (18) There is some merit in what you say about networking, physical presence, etc. given our current lifestyles and expectations . This is precisely the question - who will begin to implement and to demonstrate the lifestyle changes we need? And when? A tour such as this would have been improbable 50 years ago, and virtually impossible 75 years ago. (I expect that sometime in the not-too-distant future, it will again become very unusual, unless we find much greener air transport.) A book would still sell (or not), based on recommendations by friends, local advertising, intrinsic worth of the contents, etc. People would not expect personal meetings/glad-handing - this is Madison Avenue creating the norm in our current (unthinking) world. Inter-continental networking in the past was done by snail-mail. People networked based on their ideas, on paper. Today we have e-mail and Skype - much more accessible. The expectation of personal presence for networking is in large part a consequence of easy air travel. We have to revise our "normal" expectations in this "post-normal" world. Live tele-presenting is still somewhat unusual. It could be advertised positively, as low-impact communication with the author. Emphasis on the Skype Q&A...pose your own questions live! As to the question of how many converts Dr. Oreskes' personal presence will bring on board, I wonder to what extent she will be preaching to, and meeting with, the "converted", as opposed to the doubters, or the deniers. Entrance and exit polling at the presentations might be an interesting study. Re: RHoneycutt (20) Right now, there are lots of vegetables available. The shortage of vegetables (and flights to Oz) are in the future. I am just trying to suggest that we can start to demonstrate that people can live quite happily and healthily while eating a lot less meat.
  32. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    All the comments of "walk the walk" in relation to people using carbon emitting forms of transportation is a bit like telling someone they should become a vegetarian at a time where there are few vegetables available. Yes. Let's move toward solutions. Yes, use reasonable low carbon options where available as they become available. But let's not kid ourselves that it's currently possible to be productive in the quest to reduce CO2 by eschewing all carbon based transportation.
  33. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    #10 @humanityrules What's your problem with "AGW isn't true because I like Oreos ... AGW is true because (a large list of real causes behind an AGW that is true)"? Why your "There seems to be no logic in this comment. What have clouds got to do with DDT? Guilt by association???" looks like it works with an "is" in the assertion you criticize instead of the "isn't" that is indeed written? Why don't you explain it again -including the original "isn't"-?
  34. Solving Global Warming - Not Easy, But Not Too Hard
    actually thoughtfull: "How many of us are using renewable energy right now?" I use a green electricity tariff (i'm all electric). I have managed to reduce my energy consumption by about 60% by just doing a few simple things which haven't had a big impact to the quality of life. I would have solar heating panels if it weren't for the big tree in the neighbours garden that blocks the Sun, also cost is an issue for me right now. actually thoughtfull: "Electricity is 20% of the energy consumed. Because of the coal in the mix, it accounts for 1/3 of the carbon emissions." Yeah but in the UK, coal is 30% of the electricity mix which equates to 60% of the electricity emissions. In the US coal is something like 70% of generation capacity so must be something like 90% of electricity emissions. The other point is that electricity is likely to be the main source and means of conveying energy, so it may not be the majority chunk now, but it certainly will be in the future.
  35. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Another example of mixed messages was the Copenhagen meeting a year ago. 1200 limousines (a negligible number of them electric or hybrid) were used. The prominent guests used 140 private jet planes to get there, in addition to all the regular airplanes that transported the 15000 guests and journalists. We can only dream about the buffés with caviar and lobster and so on. Of course the top guys want to live in their usual luxury even if it is a climate meeting.
  36. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Re: KeenOn350 (17) Appreciate the perspectives and the personal experiences with green telepresenting. But do not underestimate the power of networking and physical presence that in-person tours such as Dr. Oreskes is performing now have. Much interaction goes on behind the scenes that also has value, interaction that would not occur in a green tour. If a physical tour, such as is being undertaken, gets the job done then I'm OK with that. For there are many who would not attend such a program without a live speaker present. And if the glad-handing at a book-signing is what it takes to convince someone, then I'm OK with that, too. The Yooper
  37. Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
    "When a price is put on carbon emissions [government sells allowances], it creates a revenue stream." True. "The funds which are generated from the carbon price can be distributed in any number of ways – usually through reductions in other taxes, investment in research and development of 'green' technologies, funding of energy efficiency programs, etc." Not necessarily. The money can also be wasted, here is a libertarian response http://townhall.com/columnists/RobertMurphy/2009/05/02/the_cost_of_cap_and_trade/page/full/
  38. Are ice sheet losses overestimated?
    This is an excellent article. Not being a glacialogist, it really makes it much clearer to me what is behind all these estimates and explains well the bases of differences. Thanks! It also makes it clear how hard it is to do science in the current atmosphere of hypervigilism (and hyperhypism) we are in. As described in this article, the Wu paper becomes a call for better GPS coverage in central Greenland, which is a good thing if you want to lay out priorities in future efforts. However, the way it has been spun in some blogs (and by some on this site) you'd think it was the nail in the coffin of scientific credibility regarding climate change rather than part of a real debate about how best to quantify what is universally acknowledged to be a decline in ice mass on Greenland. It must be difficult knowing that something you will publish for perfectly good objective scientific reasons might get picked up by the vortex of public debate, stripped of all scientific context and flung back at you with amazing force and some new originally untended political bias. How can we protect scientific debate from this kind of distortion?
  39. Economic Impacts of Carbon Pricing
    Here's a different way of visualizing the costs of cap-and-trade that shows just how small they really are: http://akwag.blogspot.com/2009/09/visualizing-costs-of-cap-and-trade.html
  40. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Let me preface these observations by saying that I have seen several video presentations by Dr. Oreskes on the Web, and admire her work. Nevertheless, I feel there is something to question about this tour. A few months ago, our community green group put on a presentation of the film No Impact Man, followed by a Q & A session with Colin Beavan. The Q & A was done by Skype, and worked very well. We had personal interaction with Colin, we could see him on the big screen, even though he was not physically present. Environmental impact - very low! Results - very satisfactory. Information exchange - just as good as it would have been by personal travel. I fully realize that individual efforts to reduce carbon footprint/climate impact (CFL or LED bulbs, driving a small car, cycling more, etc.) will be insufficient to curb climate disruption. However, I believe that such efforts are necessary, along with more sweeping measures on regional, national, and international scales. Partly it is a question of changing attitudes, and reinforcing that change It is unfortunate that the IPCC reports, and the general community of those addressing the problem of CO2 emissions, refer to the danger of "BAU" (Business as usual). In reality, the danger derives from "LAU" - Living as usual - which more expressly includes the fact that we must change our lifestyle practises, as well as our practises at work. I find it ironic that Naomi Oreskes is flying half way around the world, and then all over Oz, to do something that could just as well be done from her home, with perhaps a minor inconvenience due to time zones. I find it ironic that such organizations as the presenters ( Climate Change Research Centre, The Global Change Institute, The Monash Sustainability Institute, The Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute) have invited her to do this. This is sustainable? This is change? Or is this unthinking BAU/LAU which could easily be changed to a more sustainable format? One factor that we must include in any effort to combat climate disruption is better use of our amazing modern technology. People purporting to be concerned about climate impacts must begin to walk the walk - talk is not enough - and do so in obvious ways which make a public demonstration of the changes we can implement easily. Is it worth the impact to have Dr. Oreskes flying all over, so that a few people can actually shake her hand, and get a personally autographed copy of her book? ------- A small final point - in her all her major video presentations on the web, Dr. Oreskes is drinking bottled water. Another unnecessary modern convenience with disproportionately high impact. Check out The Story of Bottled Water. I do hope the presenters at these sessions will at least provide her with a glass of tap water, or a re-usable water bottle filled with tap water, instead of the pre-bottled stuff, especially if she will be on a video which will then be widely seen. ------ Enjoy the tour - but consider the alternatives....
  41. Ice-Free Arctic
    James Hansen is well known for saying that controlling black carbon is one of the lowest hanging fruits in controlling AGW. For those who claim the IPCC goes only after CO2 this is a clear counter example of scientists trying to identify the cheapest fixes to go after first. That said, even with black carbon controlled, without controlling CO2 the ice will all melt out. We need to control as many sources of warming as possible.
  42. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Just a comment to HumanityRules #10: (BTW Argus you seem to be falling for the same fallacy with your linking of Nazism and Communism. These are both historically specific movements, both require critiques independant of each other.) What you are referring to here is not my opinion; it is part of a quoted example of a faulty argument, borrowed from: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_by_association
  43. Ice-Free Arctic
    #68: "The particulate load that China adds daily to the Arctic" #70: "The teleconnection between Chinese soot and Arctic melt is undeniable." That this soot largely originates in the burning of coal is proof that anthropogenic input is real and of significant, measurable magnitude. If this soot is moving to the Arctic, so are the exhaust gases which are produced with the soot. To verify this conclusion, look at the significantly higher average annual CO2 concentrations in the Arctic: compare BRW, ALT, ICE, OSM, PAL, MBC, ZEP to MLO. Further verification comes from Fisher et al 2010, who traced combustion gases via CO (monoxide) monitoring using data from both aircraft and the AIRS satellite: We find that Asian anthropogenic emissions are the dominant source of Arctic CO pollution everywhere except in surface air where European anthropogenic emissions are of similar importance. So if soot, then CO and CO2. And that is melting Arctic ice.
  44. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Re: jsam (12) In HR's defense, he did not fire the opening salvo needed to invoke the Godwin rule. He was, however, caught in the resulting firefight. The Yooper
  45. How significance tests are misused in climate science
    Re: HumanityRules (43) We all have bad days; I certainly still have my share. :) Of course, just how bad is a matter of degree; how often, a matter of conjecture (speaking of my bad days, no-one else's). ;) The Yooper
  46. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Argus, #8 This is a case of inductive logic ... X had used standard argument A and standard B in denial of demonstrable scientific propositions several times before. Inductively, X is also wrong about P (global warming) and this has been shown to be the case. The point is that argument A and tactic B are used continuously and repeated ad nauseam in and by the popular media, even after they have been refuted scientifically. In a way, that is part of tactic B. X, in fact, left the realm of science long ago, and entered the realm of the patron saint of marketing, P.T.Barnum. Barnum said "There is a sucker born every minute". In the Barnum world, every unprincipled tactic is justified to gain the desired result. This may be stronger than the way Oreskes puts it, but it is my interpretation. X may even have passed away, but his/ her successors, the Legion of X, are repeating his/ her arguments and tactics. Inductive logic tells us that X (or his/her Legion of Successors) are wrong but will be successful for a while. The point is how long will their tactics of delay postpone the inevitable?
  47. How significance tests are misused in climate science
    32.Daniel Bailey We are discussing n=1 papers here but I accept your criticism, I over-stated the point. We're all capable of mistakes, as Maartens work suggests. Maarten(n=1) I don't suppose you want comment to what extent you agree or disagree with the statements contained in this link?
  48. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    By Godwin's Law HumanityRules has lost the argument. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law. More seriously, the book is worth reading. There are also some very good, if long (60 minute) Youtube clips. Real skeptics have, of course, viewed those before posting. On the other hand when person X tells fibs A and then B it is perfectly reasonable to question whether his statement C is a fib or not. Skeptics note trends.
  49. Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt Australian tour
    Re: HumanityRules (10) Much of what the moderator had to say in this response to Argus above also applies to you as well. I suggest you read the book and then form an opinion of it. That would be the skeptical thing to do. The Yooper
  50. Dikran Marsupial at 00:58 AM on 16 November 2010
    How significance tests are misused in climate science
    Hi Maarten, I fully agree the p-value can't be used to draw a fully objective conclusion; it is a subjective choice to disregard the null hypothesis based on a convention/tradition amongst frequentist statisticians (Occam's razor being a large part of the motivation) - nothing more (I checked with a frequentist colleague before I wrote that ;o). The distinction between rejecting and negating the null hypothesis is the key to the point I was making. Essentially we need to employ a form of words that emphasises the fact that we are chosing (not to) accept the null hypothesis, rather than that we have established that it is (not) true. When I was taught stats, that was the motivation given for saying "we reject the null hypothesis" rather than a positive statement about the alternative hypothesis or claiming that the null hypothesis is false. Essentially rejecting implies a choice, rather than a rational necessity. In short - I agree! BTW, the p-value fallacy doesn't just appear in science, I have seen this error made in statistical methodology papers I have reviewed. It certainly isn't limited to climatology!

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