Have you heard of coal?

…a large study lead by Oxford trained economist Sir Nicholas Stern on the economic costs and benefits of global warming action. The study concluded that large expenditures to combat global warming were more than paid for by the economic benefits of avoiding potentially extreme global warming costs to the world.

One of the criticisms, though, was that Stern’s team applied too low a discount rate to future economic benefits of decreased global warming. And some of these benefits are far in the future. For example, the report has forecasts of GDP in the year 2100.

If you look at the Wikipedia entry on the Stern study. You see several counters to the low discount rate criticism. Nobel Prize winning economist Kenneth Arrow says that the large investment in global warming action may be justified even with a discount rate up to around 8%. And in the face of somber new evidence, Stern in June doubled his estimate of the justified amount of spending on global warming (the original study was in 2006).

You also see a lot of discussion of things like pure time preference rates, not favoring the current generation over future ones, and comparison to market rates of return. But what I did not see, at least not explicitly and clearly, is the risk-return tradeoff. And this is something I have rarely seen in global warming articles and discussion. But it’s crucial (an outstanding exception is a 2007 article in the Economists’ Voice by Nobel Prize winning economist Thomas Schelling, “Climate Change: The Uncertainties, the Certainties and What They Imply About Action”).

The risk-return tradeoff says that the higher the risk of an investment, the higher an average rate of return you will, or should, require. But it also says, conversely, that the lower the risk of an investment – or the more risk decreasing an investment – the lower an average rate of return you will happily accept.

What average rate of return do people happily accept for fire insurance for their home? A negative one, not just a low one, a very negative one. People even accept a very negative return for insurance on their car.

So what return would you accept for fire insurance on the planet you, and your children, and your grandchildren will live on? Scientists aren’t that sure what exactly will happen with global warming. The feedback effects could get out of control and devastate the planet.

Stern’s study justifies large spending on global warming even using positive rates of return (or discount rates). But when you use a negative, insurance like, rate of return, then clearly it becomes far more than worth it to spend at least moderate sums combating global warming, sums much greater than anything that’s currently being discussed.

at: http://richardhserlin.blogspot.com/2009/10/blog-action-day-post-risk-return.html

What’s really weird is that creationists aren’t even this bold. They never say its all a big conspiracy paid for by wealthy Darwinist donors, or scientists knowing Darwinist research will get them grant money. No, that would be too retarded even for them.

Instead, they ignore the 99.9% of evidence FOR Darwinism, and focus on the “gaps” – trying their best to spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt – see Wikipedia). This is much of what the AGW denialists are doing with climategate, but taking it to a whole new level by attacking the scientists, not the science.

Of course, we all know what creationists’ real problem is: Darwinism doesn’t fit their dogma. And this is exactly what’s wrong for AGW denialists: it doesn’t fit their dogma. It is no coincidence they are all people who are fundamentally opposed to any regulation of business by government. They need to take a serious look in the mirror and ask themselves if any evidence would EVER be convincing enough. This is certainly the case with creationists. Evidence stopped being relevant a long time ago.

I fear AGW denialists have joined their ethereal ranks.

For anyone who really wants to understand what happened to nuclear power in the USA, I
highly recommend picking a few reactors off the comprehensive list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_reactors#Power_station_reactors_18
and reading their histories. There were some good reactors; there were also
an uncomfortably large number of lemons that had short lifetimes, shutdowns
for technical or safety reasons, and low load factor.

Aren’t you assuming that emu meat would be as desirable to anyone’s palate as beef is? Never having partaken of emu meat,(although I’m not averse to trying it), I’d observe that you can get a beef steak almost anywhere in the world, but I know of nowhere, including where emu are indigenous, that one can find it on the menu.
Doesn’t this rather important detail knock your cattleman conspiracy theory right into a cocked hat?

“Since the production and fuel cost related to nuclear power is so much less than that of coal-fired plants (it is), then it is necessary to cause an insurmountable capital expense to prevent the conversion from coal to nuclear, which was what happened in the US in the 1970s and early 1980s. This did NOT happen in France, for example.”

Again, you seem to conveniently overlook the fact that the US is literally sitting on a bed of coal, while France is not. Humans exploit resources which are cheap and plentiful and available to them.

If the US would take a page from the French nuclear effort and build reactors of only one or two sound and thoroughly tested designs, rather than “one-off” custom jobs for each station, we’d likely see the costs decline sharply.
(Oddly enough, the French probably got the idea of mass standardization from us in the first place, via our Liberty and Victory ship designs of World War II. If you learned the steam triple-expansion engine room of one Liberty, you had pretty much learned them all).

You seem to favor the deus ex machina of conspiratorial “hidden hands” generally, rather than simple and straightforward explanations.

“Why is it that we create so much waste, and would rather put it in a landfill than re-use the natural resources? ”

Why do you think that putting waste in a landfill is an irretrievable waste? Think of landfills as future resource mines for alloys,(among other things).

“Who cares whether it’s cheaper or more expensive?”

As long as you alone are paying the costs, I DON’T. But when you want me to help pay the tab, I DO.

“What’s the RIGHT thing to do?”

Pray for the humility of wisdom…or the wisdom of humility.

Agreed. One big danger of nuclear is that we plan for, say, $500B of investment
in non-fossil generation capacity; we put a large chunk into nuclear; and then
the nuclear plants suffer long construction delays and large cost overruns -
two problems which have occurred regularly on nuclear projects in the past – and
we find ourselves 20 years from now having achieved very little.

The other problem with scaling up nuclear is that supplies of cheap high-quality
uranium ores are not plentiful. There might be various ways around that, but it
isn’t a slam dunk.

Well, I support disbanding the Air Force, but not eliminating the use of air power. That probably isn’t what you meant though.

But as far as nuclear goes, maybe in some cases. However, to take myself as an example, I don’t oppose nuclear power in principle, but because it seems hopelessly uneconomic. However, if a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system is put in place and that makes it economic because of the carbon benefits, or if we get better at reducing the costs associated with such plants, I personally don’t have a problem with that. Nuclear waste is much less of a problem than global warming, but that doesn’t mean wasting money is a good idea.

As for the idea that fossil fuel production will decline soon, I’m open to that
possibility. But the appropriate policy response to that would be to implement
taxes and subsidies to encourage and accelerate the transition to an economy
with lower carbon-intensity. Which are the EXACT SAME POLICIES that we need
to mitigate global climate change. A “soft landing” transition would be a heck
of a lot better in every way than a “hard landing” of rapidly rising prices
causing us to scrap huge investments in fossil-fuel-based infrastructure.

Brett, you’re either arguing disingenuously or without being fully informed. There is no relevance, except for confusing people, in comparing things like weathering rates and the annual growth and decay of leaves to what we’re doing to the air. The sobering thing is that ultimately we do need to put the carbon back into the rocks, and the natural timescale for that is a thousand years or more. I would have thought that “conservatives” would want to think a bit before they bequeath such a gift to their descendants fifty generations down the road. I guess I underestimate the depths of shortsightedness involved.

But you can’t release ALL that carbon back into the atmosphere, because ALL of it didn’t end up as fossil fuels. Very little of it did, as a matter of fact. Most of it was consumed by weathering reactions, or tied up in chalk and limestone deposits. And not all of what was converted to fossil fuels is actually accessible.

Severe climate change unlikely before we run out of fossil fuel

Speaking of weathering reactions, some of them are quite exothermic, and proceed at a respectable rate at elevated temperatures. I imagine we might actually exploit them as a source of energy in the future. Or at the least, get enough energy out of them to make carbon sequestration an economic wash.

Just wrong. Badly wrong. The total of fossil fuels represent carbon that was taken out of
the atmosphere over hundreds of millions of years. Releasing all that carbon back into
the atmosphere over roughly a 300 year period 1900-2200 is a huge dangerous disruption,
of which the earlier effects are already visible (from a warming of about 0.7C), and the
later effects have been studied and predicted by a variety of sophisticated models.

And in talking precisely about Peak Oil and Peak Gas, I was careful to avoid saying
Peak Coal: because there’s still a *lot* of coal, which is the *worst* fuel in terms
of carbon emissions. But having nothing but coal would screw up the economy, because -
in case you hadn’t noticed – our economy these days is heavily reliant on internal-
combustion engines. Do you really want to spend the money for a big transition, and
choose to transition back to coal-fuelled steam engines ?

You’d think that at some point this would have been factored into the projections. We’re not going to overheat the planet because we’re going to run out of carbon to burn before we’ve put that much CO2 into the atmosphere.

For those unfamiliar with the story, in 2004 a study was published in the Lancet whose authors used mortality information collected at about 30 locations, compared it to information from before the war, and estimated about 100,000 extra people had died in the first year of the war in Iraq, with a 95% confidence interval of 8,000 to 194,000 extra people. When the study’s authors were randomly selecting sites at which to collect data, one happened to be Fallujah, which had been the site of a prolonged and vicious pitched battle. Because Fallujah was unusual in this respect, resulting in a mortality rate dramatically higher than any the authors encountered elsewhere and an obvious outlier, the study’s authors did not include the Fallujah data in their calculations. So Kane reanalyzed the data including the numbers from Fallujah, and because there had been so much more violence in Fallujah the result was a somewhat higher estimate for total extra mortalities in Iraq, but also what Kane wanted: a much broader distribution, and thus a much larger 95% confidence interval, part of which extended well below zero. There were mathematical reasons that this confidence interval was wrongly calculated, which you can find if you follow my first link for long enough – but the memorable part is that Kane’s blitherings literally had the online right, and their friends in talk radio, claiming that the Iraq war brought the dead to life.

Well, I guess a lot of winger Iraq war supporters were alleged to be motivated by Christian Zionist visions of bringing about Armageddon …

Good. Glad we agree on that.

Now we’ll move on to the complete incoherence of your argument, which is
that if we stopped spending money on all government efforts relating to
climate change, we could solve the problem by bribing people to stop
deforestation. And you further suggest that could be done by “some
individual” paying “a few billion dollars a year”. Huh? Maybe, just
maybe, Bill Gates or Warren Buffett might be able to pay out “a few billion
dollars a year”. But nobody else can. Action on that scale requires
government. And if government is involved, then yes, there’s going to
be some overhead of meetings and debates and lobbying. But it’s really
implausible that “a few billion” a year will suffice: this is an enormous
global problem, it’s probably going to take $100B/year or more to make a
dent in it – way beyond the resources of any “individual”.