The Stern Review finally closes a chasm that has existed for 15 years between the precautionary concerns of scientists, and the cost-benefit views of many economists.
Stern concludes that the problem is indeed massive and urgent – but that it can be solved. (Michael Grubb, Imperial College, Cambridge University)
When the history of the world’s response to climate change is written, the Stern Review will be recognized as a turning point. ( Cameron Hepburn, Oxford University )
On the other hand, if the apocalyptic scenario envisaged by James Lovelock comes to be, Stern will be forgotten by the surviving breeding pairs who regenerate the human race in Antarctica, while the planet takes 100,000 years to repair itself. Stern’s comprehensive review of the scientific literature on global warming demonstrates that the Lovelock scenario is all too possible.
We have been digging up carbon and burning it at a furious rate and depositing the waste in the atmosphere, with plenty more to come. At the same time the temperature has been heading north. If we carry on as we are it will not just bite us on the bum, it will smack us on the mouth.
Stern says this amounts to the biggest market failure ever and the time has come to internalise the costs of what we assumed was free.
The message of the Stern Review report is clear. We need a large scale international effort to mitigate global warming by reducing atmospheric carbon emissions and to develop adaptation strategies to cope with the effects of warming.
Such action need not be unduly expensive. Stern has calculated the cost at 1% of GDP. So we can indeed have growth and combat global warming at the same time. In fact if we adopt the business-as-usual (BAU) stance the cost is calculated at from 5% to 20% of GDP with the likely outcome towards the upper end of that scale.
Significant action needs to be taken in the next 10 to 20 years. A failure to take such action could be drastic for the planet from 2050 to 2100 and beyond. Carbon levels need to peak and begin to turn down within the next 10 to 20 years or more drastic and economically painful action will need to be taken later to stabilise the situation.
Throughout the document Stern uses the concept of CO2 equivalent (CO2e). This incorporates CO2 plus the equivalent warming effect of other five Kyoto greenhouse gases (GHGs). By this measure we have progressed from the pre-industrial level of 280ppm to 430ppm now (rather than 380ppm of CO2). The level is increasing by 2.7ppm of CO2e each year.
Stern says:
If annual emissions continued at today’s levels, greenhouse gas levels would be close to double pre-industrial levels by the middle of the century. If this concentration were sustained temperatures are projected to eventually rise by 2-5C or even higher.
But emissions not staying the same, they are increasing and are likely to be 4.5ppm CO2e by 2035.
If we take into account “changes in land use and the growth in population and energy consumption around the world� the IPCC projects:
that without intervention greenhouse gas levels will rise to 550 – 700 ppm CO2e by 2050 and 600 – 1200 ppm CO2e by 2100.
Stern concludes that it is likely to be at the upper end of these ranges. Hence greenhouse gas levels could more than treble pre-industrial levels, meaning that
the Earth would be committed to around a 3 – 10C of warming, even without the risk of positive feedbacks. (Emphasis mine – more on positive feedbacks later.)
At this point we need to introduce the concept of ‘climate sensitivity’. I understood that with every doubling of CO2e the temperature increases by 3C plus or minus 1.5C. The relationship is logarithmic rather than linear. Stern puts climate sensitivity at 2C to 5C. He charts eleven studies and concludes that we have �only between 0% and 2% chance that the climate sensitivity is less than 1C, but between 2% and 20% chance that climate sensitivity is greater than 5C.�
Stern points out that at 2-3C above today we would reach temperatures not seen since the middle Pliocene around 3 million years ago. At 4-5C above pre-industrial levels we would be entering an environment totally strange to human experience and our civilization. Stern points out that the difference between now and the last ice age is only 5C. (Actually, I think it is 3C from the end of the last ice age, and 5C from the glacial maximum 20,000 years ago.)
We need now to introduce the concept of dangerous anthropogenic interference (DAI). I understand that to be the point where the character of the planet’s environment changes substantially and we are likely to trigger ‘tipping points’ or positive feedback mechanisms that will result in runaway warming over and above what I have mentioned up till now.
James Hansen suggests (pdf file) that DAI cuts in at 2C above pre-industrial levels. Bearing in mind that we have about 0.7 in the bag and are committed to about another 0.75C in the pipeline (ie. from the carbon up there right now) we don’t have much room to move.
There is a new book out Schellnhuber, H.J. (ed.) (2006): ‘Avoiding dangerous climate change’. Stern cites it, I haven’t read it but there is an interesting summary of Schellnhuber’s 12 tipping points and the relationships between them in a recent Mother Jones article. Here they are:
1. Drying out of the Amazon
2. Interruption of the thermohaline circulation (THC)
3. Melting of Greenland
4. The ozone hole (especially it’s impact on phytoplankton)
5. The Antarctic circumpolar current
6. Shrinking of the Sahara
7. Tibet and the jet stream
8. Changes to the monsoons
9. Methane burps
10. Salinity valves
11. El Nino
12. Melting of West Antarctica.
Some of these left me scratching my head, but they are real (not sure about the shrinking Sahara), serious and for the most part interconnected. And they are insufficiently understood to take into account in forward projections of climate models.
Stern clearly understands this. But following the most recent scientific papers he has included a number of these as cutting in at 2C to 5C warming. (See Table 3.1 in Chapter 3 of the Stern Review or Figure 2 in the full executive summary.)
As I said, the situation is serious. If we do nothing there is virtually no chance of avoiding the danger zone. We could hit 550 ppmCO2e as early as 2035 and there is a 77 to 99% chance of going above 2C and into the danger zone at that level. And Stern says there is a better than 50% chance of hitting 5C plus thereafter.
So doing nothing is a high risk strategy, with tipping points aplenty to look forward to.
Stern has adopted a graph from Meinshausen (see Figure 3 in Stern’s executive summary which illustrates the advantages of acting early. If we can get CO2e to peak in 2015 we need a 1.5% annual reduction thereafter to achieve our target for 2100. If we peak at 2022 the annual reduction will need to be 2.5% thereafter and more expensive.
What we need to do is easily stated:
Three elements of policy are required for an effective global response. The first is the pricing of carbon, implemented through tax, trading or regulation. The second is policy to support innovation and the deployment of low-carbon technologies. And the third is action to remove barriers to energy efficiency, and to inform, educate and persuade individuals about what they can do to respond to climate change. (Emphasis added)
On the international level we need an emissions trading system, technology cooperation, action to reduce deforestation (energy is only 63% of emissions), and action on adaptation, especially in assisting poor countries. (See the end of the short executive summary for a paragraph on each of these.)
Australia is only active in technology development (not in its deployment) and then only through the old-fashioned method of picking winners rather than setting up markets and incentives.
On an international level I think the likes of China and the current US administration will continue to put short term national interest before the long term interest of the planet. Possibly the Europeans and a future Democrat US administration will see that national and planetary interests, short and long term, are really the same. Otherwise we’ll fry for sure.
The one big international initiative we need is an international emissions trading system, with the ability to impose tariffs and trade sanctions on non-complying nations. We are more likely to achieve this by developing national and regional systems, and then stitching all these together, than by waiting for an all-singing, all-dancing, bright shiny new one.
Thanks, Brian.
I believe this to be the first comprehensive post on Stern in the Australian blogosphere!
Excellent post, because it puts the focus on the tipping point.
Watching Peter Costello on Insiders last Sunday, telling us that global warming is gradual – a smooth line over 40-50 years of just a few degrees temperature rise, and we have plenty of time to cook up technological solutions, made me realise how little politicians (and journos) understand about steady-state physics and positive feedback.
If we are reaching the tipping point in a normally steady-state climate system, then we are really in trouble – the consequences could all come together at once in a massive collision of forces, much sooner than we think.
Can’t blame the pollies for being stupid really, but they are in charge of our destiny and its about time they opened their ears and listened properly.
Excellent post Brian. Thank you.
It was depressing watching Howard on the news last night shrugging off climate change by saying, “This is not something that is going to happen tomorrow or in the next few weeks. We shouldn’t be alarmist about this.”
I realise that a week is a long time in politics, but for goodness sake!
Thanks folks.
Stern has been accused of using the language of catastrophe, but all he does is review the science and draw out reasonable conclusions from it. In fact sometimes he understates the problem by referring to the lower end of a range of probabilities and using the term “at least…”
While the Review did commission some papers, he doesn’t make anything up. It is a major achievement, I think, to collate the findings science on so many topics and draw out the implications.
Thanks for this Brian.
If anyone’s stumped for Xmas presents, buy carbon offset for cars/houses/flights etc.
Nice review Brian.
One thing about the report I was pleased to see included was the third required action. Its important that people buying houses, appliances and vehicles need to have a good idea of what the long term additional costs of inefficiency are likely to be by energy efficiency labelling etc. Without labeling its difficult to calculate the trade off between cheaper up front costs and long term ongoing costs. Its all very well to get the carbon price right, but if it can be hidden at time of purchase, people can lock themselves into paying more than they really think they are.
There has been some progress in Australia on this with State governments introducing this sort of rating for housing, to make the trade offs and market more efficent, but certainly an area where more work needs to be done.
This morning when I turned on the radio the first thing I heard was that Howard had established a task force with business to examine an emissions trading system for Australia. His commitment has rightfully been questioned. It’s a fair bet that he is responding to pressure from business, who know what’s happening elsewhere and want an orderly world.
He has actually taken one other initiative. Geoffrey Barker reported in the AFR on 9 October 2006 the Howard had commissioned the ONA to report on the securiy implications of climate change. It’s a fair bet that he is worried about climate change refugees from the Pacific, but also perhaps from Bangla Desh, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia.
It will be interesting to see what the spooks make of it all, because it is by no means clear that they have the requisite knowledge/skills.
Sorry Steve, I didn’t see your post.
Nice work Brian!
Interesting to see Howard in flip-flop mode as he sniffs the winds of change. (But you dont know whats happening, do you, Mr Jones). Last week the man was adamant!
Costello made a good point: China’s desired entree to world financial markets and bodies can be made contingent on reductions and carbon trading progress. But thats a form of pressure that can be only be applied by participants in carbon trading markets.
We can expect FA from Howard on this, but its good to see his “no, on grounds of national economic detriment” line is dying in the arse.
It’s occurred to me that, while we should make the merely unpleasant scenarios the main focus of our actions (ie carbon trading, etc), we ought also to hedge our bets by putting a little money and thought into preparing drastic measures. This is just in case it becomes evident that the less likely, but truly species-threatening, scenarios are happening.
These would have to be technological, rather than economic, fixes – just reducing the rate of increase in emissions aint gonna suffice. Say, something like a deliberate nuclear winter in the upper atmosphere. Sure, such a fix would carry heavy risks (both economic and ecological), but if those positive-feedback loops come to pass it’d be better than the alternative. We need to start modelling some options to try and reduce those risks a little.
Just as a parlour game, has anyone got any really imaginative schemes for this?
Yeah, DD, check out this page for some scientific speculation. Includes “seeding the oceans with chalk and /or iron), and screening out sunlight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitigation_of_global_warming
All very contentious compared with the reductions approach, but worth reading.
Shadows in spaaaace. It would be relatively cheap to block sunlight by putting up sunlight-blocking material in orbit for a few years.
dd, what we are into is managing the planet’s climate with imperfect tools and knowledge over time scales that are very short in geological time but are super long term for us puny humans who are but fireflies in the twilight. Lovelock says it is pure hubris, that we need to back off, sustainable development is a hopeless project that needs to be abondoned, and we should give the planet the capacity to heal itself.
He says we do this in part by manufacturing food from the constituent elements with nanotechnology – not a short term fix. Get rid of the farting sheep, the burping cows and the vast monocultures.
Lovelock is also against doing anything to get rid of global dimming.
What you say makes sense. If we are going to run the show we should also sequester CO2, perhaps, because the time might come when we overshoot and need to get a bit of it up there quickly in 150 years time.
Other potential schemes might involve covering large areas of earth (presumably deserts and oceans).
Look, there are plenty of Hail Mary efforts we could go to if needs be. But it will be so much easier to start fixing the problem now rather than later – and it would have been much easier again if the US and Australia had signed up to Kyoto back in the 1990s.
Thanks Brian. I actually am quite alarmed by all this, and I don’t think being called an alarmist is the worst thing ever. It’s scary. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but it coule be very very bad indeed.
There’s an interesting review essay in the NYRB, covering Lovelock among others, which examines how alarmed exactly we should be. I’d recommend a read:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19596
A good article, thanks Mark.
I don’t want to strenuously defend Lovelock. He can be a bit weird at times. He said in interview that what fired him up to write the whole book was the intrusion of wind farms into his beloved Devon countryside. He hates them with a passion.
He has also said he’d be happy to have nuclear waste literally in his backyard.
But McKibben doesn’t get him quite right, I think.
McKibben says that Lovelock sees the earth as
Lovelock makes clear that Gaia is first, last and always a metaphor. But he says you’ll get further and understand it better if you think of Gaia not as a metaphor, but as a living being with a will.
I suspect McKibben is also wrong, I think, to say that the theory of Gaia is not fully accepted by other scientists. Lovelock’s view of the earth system is pretty standard fare, I would have thought. Lovelock quotes a definition of the earth system that some scientists in Amsterdam came up with that Lovelock says captures it exactly. The idea of the organic and the inorganic combining as one self-regulating, evolving system that acts as though it favours life is not too wild, I think. (Lovelock points out that Gaia doesn’t give a stuff about human beings.)
Finally Lovelock does give some reasoning to support his gloomy prognosis. He frequently points out that the closest analogy to the present situation is what happened 55 million years ago when large amounts of carbon (from methane clathrates under the sea, it is thought) were released into the atmosphere. The amounts were similar to what we are doing today, except that, as James Zachos has pointed out, we are doing it 30 times faster.
At that time the earth warmed 5C near the equator and 8C in the temperate zones and it took 200,000 years to recover from the episode, according to Lovelock.
Also Lovelock is not just following the warming curve but is aware of positive feedback mechanisms and tipping points. There is one that deserves further investigation. He says that when CO2 hit 500ppm the algal ecosystem in the ocean died and the temperature jags up 6C. OK it only happened in a computer model, although he thinks it happened 55m years ago. I’d like to know a bit more about it. 500ppm seems to be contemplated with equanimity in many places, although James Hansen, from memory, is shooting for 485ppm. (I’m assuming that’s CO2 rather than CO2e.)
Alert but not alarmed, I think, is the officially approved postion, Kate.
Real Aussies are far too laconic, bronzed and wiry to ever get alarmed.
Sorry, the US simply will not give us trillions of dollars in economic progress based on “possibilities” espoused by wild eye lefties, especially when it will have absolutely no positive effect due to China, India, etc., not being signatories to the Kyoto Treaty.
Of course, that doesn’t mean other countries can’t do double the effort. Go for it. Let’s all go back to 1970 levels of CO2 production.
Actually, I meant “the US will not give up trillions of dollar of economic progress”. I blame Bush for my mistake.
Yo wronnie, I hope your energy, economic and climate prognostications are not based on the same clear-eyed analysis you brought to bear on defining Dubya as one of the five greatest US presidents in history.
But if they are, then we’re all ‘rooned. ‘Rooned I tells you.
On the other hand though, wronnie’s predictions do exhibit the deft touch of King Midas in reverse.
OK, folks! We’re not ‘rooned after all! Happy happy joy joy!
Look wronnie, your occasional little forays into the dark side are so pathetic you even make poor old “gollum” joe cambria look like he’s got some neuticles. Even JF Beck has a pair that clanks when he barges around here.
But you wronnie really are a capon. Unable to argue your corner with any conviction, facts, energy or style. But hark? What’s that sound? Not Dubya unbuckling his belt? It’s salad tossing time again wronnie. Don’t mind me, I see your tongue is the compass once more.
Let me put it another way. No combination of words has yet been invented to capture how deeply I despise people like you that unquestionally suck up to your leaders. If you’d been born in Mesopotamia, you’d have made a great Baathist dead ender. As it is, you are an utter insult to the great freethinking, party hearty, just fucking invent it already, freebooting, yahooing and “fuck our pollies, they work for us” spirit that made the US the great country of infinite possibilities that it still is today.
Or to quote a Dutch immigrant filmmaker to the US who made one of the best American movies ever – “Robocop”.
“Buddy, I think you’re scum.”
Do you know we use about 1/4 less water per capita in the U.S. than we did in 1980. Tell me now that you feel life has gotten worse, in general, for the U.S. in that time.
We CAN do something about the problem other than pretending that there isn’t a problem. And it can be win-win. The hundreds of billions and perhaps trillions of dollars that have already been wasted in Iraq could have gone toward energy independence. Let’s do that now with renewables that do not socialize the problem (spew CO2 into the air) and catch up with the rest of the world so that we can take the lead.
Yes, but. Yes but other leftists are arguing that those billions, trillions, or bazillions (hey, it could be) should go to “shoring up the port entry defense system”. And of course, “legal enforcement” which apparently is the only proposal that the left of center has for combatting jihadi terrorism.
But before we get to that point, once again here’s what we need to answer:
1. Does global warming exist?
2. If yes, is it harmful, after all factors are considered and weighed?
3. Is it generated by manmade activities in a material fashion?
4. Can anything meaningful and realistic be done to combat it, in an affordable cost effective manner?
People we are WAY OFF from answering those questions in a scientifically verifiable manner. Until we do, I will continue cranking out CO2 from my 1970 Chevrolet Monte Carlo with its 400 cubic inch engine, 4 barrel carborator, mag tires, chrome wheels.
Of course, you are more than entitled to walk around in ecologically sensible canvas shoes.
Nice Report Brian! Well done, I love Tim Tam.
Stern looked at these questions, all the research he could find with many 2006 references cited, commissioned some papers where there were gaps that could usefully be filled and wrote 700 pages about what he found.
Do us a favour. Read, at a minimum, the full Ececutive summary of the Stern Review report, read Chapter 1 The science of climate change, read Chapter 3 How climate change will affect people around the world, read the post above (for the first time?) and then make a contribution to the discussion. Otherwise you are wasting everyone’s time.
Brian
the full Ececutive summary ? should be the full executive summary.
tim tam is a honey still
Until we do, I will continue cranking out CO2 from my 1970 Chevrolet Monte Carlo with its 400 cubic inch engine, 4 barrel carborator, mag tires, chrome wheels.
You’ve got magnesium tyres? I’m impressed.
1.618, just another ’senior moment’. I have them more frequently these days.
Great roundup Brian.
People who find themselves inertly prone before the science can ignore the inforamtion storm and simply take action. This thing is only going to be fixed by action in the end. Nobody needs to prove anything scientifically to help us with this. The beauty of GW is it is something that every single person can directly and easily address. We cause it directly as individuals. We can therefore fix it.
We can’t stop invasions or terrorism but we can stop global warming.
It matters not a jot if wronny drives his guzzler around his block day and night if others take action.
There’s a list as long as your arm of simple practical things we can do which will help reduce climate change. Different people will have different lists depending on their situation. But everybody can do a lot of things.
Just start with one thing – tick it off and move on to the next. There’s a large synergy effect when more and more people take action. Possibilities and opportunities for further action open up.
We can’t stop invasions or terrorism but we can stop global warming.
Modern lefty morality: surrender to Al Qaeda but recycle your milk cartons.
Fuck you’re a spaz, CL.
He’s saying that individual action can’t do much about preventing invasions or terrorism, whereas individual action is strictly NECESSARY to affect global warming.
Hobby horse is getting creaky under the strain, dude. Go out and throw the frisbee, listen to some Bon Jovi and try to forget.
If recycling milk cartons bothers you so much, concentrate on doing your bit to end terrorism. They’re both worthy goals. I don’t know if hanging around here sniping at strawmen counts, though.
“…whereas individual action is strictly NECESSARY to affect global warming.”
Individual action will have no effect whatsoever on global warming.
As the facts get increasingly divorced from CL’s rhetoric, he’s becoming increasingly hysterical.
I thought he was hysterical during the trial separation, but the lad’s reached new heights now that the papers have come through.
It’d be funny to watch if it weren’t so sad.
Adrian and FDB are obviously pairing off for a future together in Antarctica. Get a room, you two. Actually, get an igloo!
FDB, ’spaz’ wasn’t funny when Lleyton Hewitt used it, and it’s not that funny here.
</whiney hypocritical eye bawling-out>
Alright, retard then.
Yeah, read it. Not that impressed. The basic assumptions seem to reflect an economist’s view of possible impacts of the worst-case imaginings of the gerbil worming nutters.
Building a public policy of enormous expenditures on a foundation this shaky is simply not going to happen, of course. But it’ll keep Mr Stern on the gerbil worming gravy train for the rest of his natural. This report will make him a wealthy man on the pagan gaia worshippers lecture circuit alone.
Funny, that.
Nice to see little nabbikins is still the same boring old one trick pony. Mr ad hominem himself. At least you admit you have no arguments with everything you post, boy.
MarkL
Canberra
Thanks Brian. You’re my hero sluuurrrpp
Quiggin has decided that there is no longer any point in denying the denialists. In future he’s going to concentrate on the politics and economics of our response.
Accordingly he has a post up on Stern and the cost of climate stabilisation. Quiggin thinks that Stern’s estimate of 1% of GDP, plus or minus 3%, is in the ball park, perhaps a bit optimistic.
I can’t make much of a comment on this. So accepting Stern’s position (just as he has accepted the findings of science) even at the outer limit of 4% it is heaps better than his estimate of a cost to GDP of 5% to 20% if we do nothing.
But no matter how much it costs, I think it is clear that we must do it and make the best of it. The dangers of runaway effects are just too high. Even without runaway effects, such effects as rendering up to half of all species extinct, worsening access to fresh water etc. etc. are not acceptable when we have the means to mitigate.
yep – no time to waste on the denialists now – it’s like discussing the Holocaust with that bloke whose name now escapes me.
Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t the US contribute nearly half of CO2 production? So does that mean the agreeables will ignore America as you do China, India, and the other developing countries (hence the charges of Kyoto being a prohibitively costly boondoggle and a farce)?
For once I agree with Quiggins. He still needs to trim his beard though.
Australias production of GHG on a global scale is minute and any efforts to vary production will have no measurable effect on climate.
The US produced ~25% global GHG with CO2 being ~84% of GHG ftp://ftp.eia.doe.gov/pub/oiaf/1605/cdrom/pdf/ggrpt/057305.pdf
On curent trends world energy demands are set to grow by more than 50% in the next 25 years making any arbitrary “cap” on emissions impossible to meet. http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=116462&version=1&template_id=48&parent_id=28
Leaked UN report puts cost of IPCC targets at 5% GDP – consider that to be the end of the debate. http://www.thebusinessonline.com/Document.aspx?id=83497085-CFCF-4763-AF81-687746BE6F0A
You need to consider that China is building coal fired power stations at a rate of one every 3 – 4 days and its emissions of CO2 will surpass those of the US by 2010 to put the situation into some perspective.
rog, how does arguing for putting our own greenhouse in order mean that we’re overlooking China’s greenhouse?
As LeftyE said way upthread:
The holdouts arguing that this is a steady-state model rather than a tipping point situation where human intervention may be crucial are now the major problem to addresss.
“Costello made a good point: China’s desired entree to world financial markets and bodies can be made contingent on reductions and carbon trading progress. But thats a form of pressure that can be only be applied by participants in carbon trading markets”
I think some caution needs to be exercised with such an approach.
Do we propose for our politicians and diplomats to engage with the Chinese central government with this attitude ?
Recently a chinese envoy described the FTA between Australia and China in a manner which might be indicative of their general attitude- we don’t need this agreement ,we are 1.3 billion people and you are just 20 million- we do it as a gesture of friendship with Australia.
Carbon trading has been attracting some comment up here though. Commentators expect that China will be granted lots of carbon trading credits and they will be cheap compared to the cost of the same credit in Europe.
This is viewed as a great opportunity to make a tremendous profit selling these credits to other countries and leaves the question of how China will be accounting for it’s own carbon waste.
One further area for concern is the area of enforcement and regulation.Provincial level governments have for years been difficult for the authorities in Beijing to control and corruption will retard their best efforts.
Generally the attitude here is that this is a significant problem, it’s time to respond but the devil will be in the detail. Pollution on a local level is now so bad in so many areas that denial just isn’t feasible.
“The holdouts arguing that this is a steady-state model rather than a tipping point situation where human intervention may be crucial are now the major problem to addresss.”
Look. Tigtog.
Snap out of it.
You other zombies snap out of it too.
There is just no evidence for catastrophic global warming. So stop this. Just stop it. Its wrong to be lending your own efforts to the continuance of this rolling sick joke of scientific quakery and generalised stupidity.
Where is the evidence for any of this shit?
We have a giant iceberg of the coast of New Zealand. We have the coldest November weather in a century.
We have no evidence for a catastrophe on the warming side. Its fucking as close to IMPOSSIBLE as these things could be.
All of you have just got to stop this stupidity.
Fucking own up to yourselves.
“Thanks Brian. I actually am quite alarmed by all this, and I don’t think being called an alarmist is the worst thing ever. It’s scary. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but it coule be very very bad indeed.”
Well don’t be scared Kate.
Because there is no evidence for catastrophic warming at all. None.
This planet is hard-wired for catastrophic COOLING.
Worry about that. And worry about all these zombies out to destroy our coal industry (just for starters).
So, if my first year philosophy serves me correctly, we’ve moved from denialism to a variant of the drug dealers defense: Individual action can have a great impact on XYZ. Something as culturally and naturally unstoppable as addiction, on the other hand, well my contribution as a supplier of heroin/coke/speed/pills has zero net effect on this problem. Therefore I am morally justified in supplying said substance.
Bird says:
I know that you are aware that we have been in a long-term cooling trend for at least the last 65 million years (see the third graph in this Paul Monk piece) even though the sun is warming. I’d love to hear a theory as to why this is so. But James Hansen assures us that the only way we’ll get increased glaciation now is if Homo Sapiens goes extinct. We’re stoking the fires.
As for cold days and icebergs near New Zealand, Grace Pettigrew has a nice comment over at Quiggin’s. The system is out of whack.
We had snow on the Granite Belt for the first time in November since 1941 and a blistering westerly here in Brisvegas today. That is definitely not normal. But we’ve had blistering heat also and I’m sure the average for the year will be on the high side.
It is good that you Tellurians are seriously tampering with the gases and liquids of your planet. Massive systems failure is a great impetus for moving offworld and meeting face with face of the race that massively dominating the spiral arm of nearest galaxies.
But you are still in baby step foot mode now right. All you can do so far is alternate snap freezing and microwaving with your globe. Not very advanced if we say so myself. We will give you a stubble clue. Follow the Bird. Irrational thinking is good shake and bake solution finally leading to mass planetry exodus. Then, as you flee for the stars, Boskone will welcome you with open doors into a very special service slot.
Bird – you’re a pointless waste of valuable bandwidth who’s been tolerated in far too many places for far too long.
Jason may have found you amusing at one point, which has been the utter wreck of Catallaxy as a space for intelligent discussion. Almost every thread at Catallaxy is deformed by your refusal to engage, your propensity to personally abuse anyone who departs from your insane orthodoxy, and your endless and childish repetition of concepts that you clearly only vaguely understand.
In short, you’re a bully.
If you’re worried about your intellectual inadequacy, you should try to start learning. Please note that a fundamental requirement of any learning is an ability to open yourself to views that you don’t intuitively agree with.
If your self-image and self-esteem can’t deal with that, then you should look to those factors.
Or you should seek help for your total lack of any ability to engage with others in the world.
Your idiotic, misinformed and abusive commenting practice should be called for what it is.
If your self-esteem depends entirely on bullying people in the blogosphere with your ill-informed, repetitious and idiotic views, that should be your problem. It shouldn’t be ours.
You’re incapable of intelligently engaging with any views that differ from your own eccentric and misinformed ones, and your response to anyone who bothers (why, I have no idea) to engage with you is just vulgar abuse of the most pathetic, stereotypical and fundamentally cowardly kind.
The fact that you cannot defend your position without the most pathetic abuse of your interlocutors ought to signal to anyone who values interchange and debate that you have nothing worthwhile to say, and not the slightest ability to justify what you do want to say.
The occasional amusement you might offer people, and that’s the only reason why you’re tolerated anywhere, is no excuse for your deliberate ignorance and unwarranted, habitual and self-serving abuse of others.
If you in fact had any confidence in your own ability to debate and engage, you wouldn’t need to do this. The degree to which you do – which is beyond any reasonableness – speaks to a deep lack of confidence in your own ability to understand the world. Anyone who engages in controversy or polemic with any certainty that their opinion can be justified has no need to hurl abuse at their opponents because they have some justified degree of confidence that their argument can speak for itself.
The absurd hyperbole of the abuse that you hurl exposes nothing but the fact that you know that you are incapable of contesting opposing arguments at the level that they are made.
If you were, there’d be no need for the hyperbolic abuse that all your interventions are accompanied by.
You’re an idiot, and a pernicious plague on the blogosphere.
You should confine yourself to drinking too much beer in Surry Hills pubs.
Your cowardly abuse of others would not be tolerated for a second in a face to face situation.
You should fuck off and not come back.
Just sayin… what everyone else is thinkin…
Our long range screens show Mr Banish is revolting about the BirdBeater.
Good excellent 3 for 1 sale. Our plans are coming to fruitarian. Sowing dissension, confusion, stock grazing byproducts and denominaters of the lowest common are all part of our stealth boogie plan to sap intelligent fisticuffs from Tellus.
We did not create the BirdBeater but we shore know a hotsy-totsy zwilnik when we scan one. Do not think you are not alone Birdbeater. We will be sampling your DNA during one of your rest periods so we can create many more of you. Then you can be thrown to the nutrient tanks in the happy happy joy joy that your legacy will live on, turning humaniod against humaniod to make a smashed egg out of reason, logic, empathy and all those other repulsive Tellurian traits that make your planet crying in loud for domination by a logical superior species.
That day is coming. Gharlane rules QX!
He’s already a multiplicity, Zwilnik.
No single humanoid could post 100 blog comments a day.
Unless they all said something like “TAXEATER! YOU’RE LYING!” 100 times.
Perhaps he’s a malfunctioning algorithm?
Do let us know the view from Mars…
Mark is quite right.
Bird is a dead parrot.
His requiem should have been chanted some time ago.
Road kill, even…
\”Do let us know the view from Mars…\”
What the *untranslateble* are you trying to communicate here, you foolish foolish Tellurian female generative organ?
Oh yo ho, I see you mean Z904B. Yes, we tried to make it make a hospitable Solarian expansion base several thousand of your life cycles ago. But our senior planetoid engineer in charge of the project expended billions of credit units and millions of work units on a fruitarian theory that melting the ice caps would force plant growth from mucho besame CO2. This did not work and so he got to personally inspect the effectiveness of Z904B\’s first and only radiation chamber. From the inside.
We disposed of his glowing remains on a passing comet which then impacted on Tellus, releasing his DNA into the biosphere which then apparently contaminated the bloodlines of what became the species known to you juicy bags of perambulating fluid as the Galah – an avian genus I believe.
In spect of retro, this could not have worked better out for making your planet more ripe and juicy for assimulation, thank Klono\’s Curving Carballoy Claws.
I am your judge, jury and executioner, Zwilnik, just sayin.
Mark, well said.
Every word absolutely true. Bird does nothing but provide a pervasive miasma of negativity and abuse. He can’t possibly interact this way with people in real life or he’d spend three weeks out of four in hospital traction.
Bird: a bully and coward incapable of rational debate, nothing more.
wronwright, from memory the US is responsible for having emitted about 30% of the carbon that’s the human race has put up there and is currently responsible for 25% of emissions.
rog I’m sure Stern knew about that IEA stuff you linked to – I’ll try to check it out tomorrow.
The Fraser Nelson piece you say ends the debate doesn’t. Stern says the costs of doing something about global warming are 1% of GDP, plus or minus 3%. The costs of doing nothing he says are 5% of GPD up to 20% with the likely figure towards the 20%.
Nelson says that the cost of action could be 5% and doesn’t mention the range on the other side of the ledger. So he stretches the 5% figures to make them meet and then declares game over. This is a dishonest representation of Stern and ignores the issues of risk and whether action is necessary whatever it costs. Even Rupert Murdoch has more sense.
That is typical of the standard of his argument. He cites the OPEC and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) in Washington as though their reaction would automatically blow Stern out of the water. What a joke!
boredinHK, the Chinese worry me. I heard recently that they are having a lot of trouble making the air in Beijing half decent for the Olympics. Apparently they are trialling no car days to see whether they can make the air breathable.
I sometimes think they are building coal power stations while they can, like farmers knocked down trees in Queensland while Beattie was putting his laws through to stop them. But then the Chinese are probably not thinking that way. Individuals and corporations are doing it because they can and it makes money and there is always corruption (in India too) and whether the place is governable.
For 1.20am on a Glenfiddich morning, Mark, that was impressive.
I agree with Mark.
We gave you so many chances – more than we would have given anyone else. You repaid it by getting shit-faced and throwing up on our carpet.
I’m done with you too, Bird.
Agreed. Mostly the problem is that he’s just not funny any more. He’s just an increasingly boring scratched record. But still offensive. Like maybe an LP skipping repeatedly on that bit from G ‘n’ R’s It’s So Easy where Axel goes:
“Why don’t you just…. FUCK OFF!!!!!!!”
You know, it was a giddy thrill the first few times when I was 14, but really I don’t want to hear it that often any more.
It was moderately exciting to hear it from Mark though. Nice guy finally snaps, eh?
Quick question, will Bird be given the opportunity to “fuck off and not come back” voluntarily or have it thrust upon him? I just don’t think I could bear his whiney protests at every other blog on earth if he were banned, not to mention the inevitable Paxton moniker madness that would ensue.
Muuuhahhaaa.
TEH ADVANTAGE IS MINE!!
Well said Mark. That was a long time coming.
Much as I dislike astrology, can’t help asking – are you a scorpio?
Yes, well said, and probably overdue Mark.
My late night efforts of that length always come off a bit ranty, especially with a couple under the belt, so nice work!
Jeez, Mark – that was some slap-down – only trouble is you’ve gone and made me cringe with embarrassment for him. (I’ll get over it, but.)
I’m an Aquarius, adrian.
Loved Mark’s comment about Bird.
Back on the topic of the post, I wouldn’t be surprised if the current US President is seen as an absolute failure for his response to what people think is happening with climate change – a waste of at least 6 years. Hopefully the next US President will be inclined to do something positive. Perhaps Bush is a reincarnation of Calvin Coolidge, who famously proffered, “The business of America is business.”
Europe and Asia are using the UN to try to combat the US as a superpower and introduce global socialism. You have to understand that their economies are behind ours because they have been socialist for so long and because they had to rebuild after WWII and the fall of Communism. Everybody knows that energy is what keeps an economy growing and moving, so they are attempting to slow us down so they can catch up. While it is true that the earth is warming (it has been since the last ice age, when all the ice melted, remember?), it is not necessarily true that we are to blame or that we cannot grow ourselves to a cleaner tomorrow using market forces just like we have always done.
Secondly, CO2 is not some evil pollution gas. We humans breathe it out every day. Nobody mentions the fact that water vapor is a more harmful greenhouse “gas,” and that large corporations put water vapor in the air too. In fact, water vapor is more to blame for global warming than CO2. Even fuel cells put water vapor into the atmosphere. In fact, growing plants for ethanol will also lead to more water vapor in the atmosphere. Growing our fuel from plants could also lead to higher food prices for all of us, and fights over water. Many cities are already having water shortage problems. If you give the UN a way to tax, you are putting us all on the road to one world socialist government.
I call bullshit. Are you paid by the oil industry or the coal industry?
F7, your stuff about the evil socialists and their conspiracy against the US can go through to the keeper as we say here in Oz. The water vapour claims are commaon fare for global warming denialists. But assertions won’t cut the mustard. You need to come up with real scientific arguments that would be accepted by real scientists. Have a look at some articles from RealClimate, starting with this one which deals with the nonsense served up by supposed serious scientists. There is further information here and then you could go back to this one.
It’s a while since I’ve read them myself, but the shorter version goes something like this.
Of course water vapour has a large part to play in making the planet inhabitable through it’s greenhouse action. All serious climate scientists know this. But it is what is happening at the margin the matters. Here the story seems pretty clear. Increases carbon reflects heat producing global warming and climate change. The action of the carbo triggers certain feedbacks which augment the effect. One such feedback mechanism is water vapour.
If you look at the increases in carbon output in say the last 50 years and look ate the corresponding temperature charts the coincidence is stunning. This doesn’t prove causation, of course, but the physics and chemistry that explain the causative link is well-established and not too mysterious.
You’d be brave or foolhardy and worthy of genius status if you can demonstrate that the story is otherwise. That having been said there is much still to know and understand and the future is always open.
It’s not true to say that the earth has been warming since the last ice age. After a few wobbles the temperaturte has been pretty even for 8,000 years (arguments over the size of bumps in the handle of the hockey stick are strictly a red herring), but then has moved sharply upward since we started chucking all that carbon up into the atmosphere in recent times. The pattern is so striking that any child could see it.
I’ll repeat my usual warning about not being a scientist myself, but that is how I have come to understand the matter at hand.
I posted this last week on Harry Clarke’s site Kalimna Blog.
The dilemma is this: if you banish (resisted a pun) Bird, that leaves a funny taste in the mouth. If Bird comes back, all mealymouthed, then we have collectively engaged in dubious social engineering. Hmmmm…
BTW. Derrida Derider is right. Harry Clarke on his blog is a most delightfully good mannered, generous, decent interlocutor and he has all the dry-economic, denyalist, right-wing views anyone could ever wish for. A Bird without tears. It is a rare pleasure to go there and give Harry a decent argument. The range of topics is mind-boggling, something for everyone.
It’s best just to ignore the bird.
Way I read it, collective Larvae refuse to be Panelbeater Bird’s dollies. Social malapropes have the chance to redeem themselves if they decide to abide by the normal conventions. Net trolls are another matter.
Sepside, great reporting sites like ThinkProgress and firedoglake are largely patronised in the comments sections by Bird-brains. What’s the point of feeding jam to pigs? I’ve never got back more than a “way to go” or some some other equivalent of a half-hearted air punching, so I rarely bother to comment there these days, although as a source of news and inside skinny from the site’s posters, they are hard to top.
LP is an entirely different kettle of fish. Great ideas get chewed around. There’s usually someone home who gives a toss. The US and Oz political discussions are informative and great fun.
Sin bin big bad bird till Feb 1. Having fallen off his perch into ankle deep guano, he may take the hint. This is one wingnut who requires wing clipping. Maybe, like Count Vronsky around Anna, or the former Jet Jackson(god rest his adventurous soul) around stray p—y, it’s a snake-brain kind of thing and poor Birdie just can’t help himself. In that case, the cerebrally challenged troll may well have to go find his very own disparate band of misfits and stop wasting our time. This isn’t a Wiemar era Munich beer hall. It’s an excellent Oz web-site on the verge of sabotage.
Brian. I was not able to reply to this before.
“I know that you are aware that we have been in a long-term cooling trend for at least the last 65 million years (see the third graph in this Paul Monk piece) even though the sun is warming. I’d love to hear a theory as to why this is so.”
Here is the reason:
http://graemebird.wordpress.com/2007/01/07/you-heard-it-from-me-first/
You see the continental arrangement has been growing worse in terms of allowing the free circulation of water between oceans and most paricularly between the equatorial and polar regions.
The water still circulates of course but in a less uninhibited way.
When this consideration is matched up with the Stefan-Boltzmann law it means that more energy will be radiated out into space giving us a permanent bias towards catastrophic cooling.
Sacha….. would be just the person to help me show the following: That no amount of greenhouse gasses that we are plausibly likely to release could possibly change this one-way cooling bias to a catastrophic heating bias.
Its just implausible because of the relative joules involved.
But we ought not give up hope that the extra CO2 might not help us retard glaciation as I explain here:
http://graemebird.wordpress.com/2007/01/08/despite-co2-being-a-weak-medium-term-greenhouse-gas-it-might-still-prevent-a-glaciation/
If you read all the climate science pieces I’ve written lately you would notice that I’ve become positively Lovelockian in my outlook and that I reject the former slurs I made against the great scientist.
I also acknowledge that you were right about sea-life exploding during glaciation. Its just white death for terrestrial life.
“But James Hansen assures us that the only way we’ll get increased glaciation now is if Homo Sapiens goes extinct. We’re stoking the fires.”
Hansen is wrong. He does not have the data for such a contention. What he suggests would be impossible. If anything the cooling will get worse unless we at all times work against it.
Right. Sachas nasty comments have inspired me to do a commentary with pictures.
You need to put two browser pages up side by side and cut and paste the links to the pictures of the historical continental layouts of the planet.
Make the left-hand browser as skinny as you can and use that to read my commentary. Then make the right-hand browser medium-skinny because the maps are pretty wide.
This is a nasty kick in the nuts for the alarmists so make sure you link it everywere you go in the interests of international brotherhood and peace.
http://graemebird.wordpress.com/2007/01/27/continental-layout-and-ice-ages/
Graeme,
It is very simple to create a link.
1. In the text where you want the link put in a pointy bracket like this:
6. Now put in a word that you want to use as the click point, ie. click or link
7. Now to tell the machine you have finished linking put in open point bracket
It will then look like this in your preview Like this link
I enjoyed the post Continental Layout and Ice Ages on your site: A Better World: Graeme Bird For High Office. (With regard to the latter, I think you would make a fine cardinal).
Anyhow, about this climate change business. You’re the rocket scientist, I’m merely a humble remittance man living on my estate on what’s left of the family fortune. But as you showed, where it comes to heat, the earth obeys Stefan-Boltzman law, in radiating heat out as a black body.
But gases in the atmosphere – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and halocarbons – absorb much of this heat in the form of infrared radiation. Some of the heat is radiated away from earth, but some of it gets rotated downwards in counter radiation back towards earth. This traps the the earth’s infrared radiation like a greenhouse.
There is an observable trend in the increase in C02, CH4 – about 0.9% per year and about 4% for halocarbons.
The argument by the commie scum is that an increase in these so-called greenhouse gases is having an adverse effect on climate. So note, it is not just warming, but destabilising the climate to such and extent that it may cause flora and fauna to disappear and maybe even us as species.
This would be due to a vastly increased climatic variability leading to a change in frequency of extreme events. This has actually been verified by long-term modelling at the MIT.
The effect on climate is caused by a change in radiation flux caused by the absorption of either solar or infrared radiation and is defined as radiative forcing.
This can happen either when there is direct radiation, or when there is a chemical reaction between the gases introduced into the upper atmosphere by us cooking some bacon or farting. That is lots of us, over a long period of time.
The oceans serve as gigantic heat sinks and literally reflect, after some delay, what happens in the atmosphere. While current circulation around continents plays a huge role in climate, so do the variables in in sea surface temperature (SST).
And SST has been rising steadily over time. This destabilises the climate and as the weather system is essentially chaotic, we could tip the current relationship out of balance, as seems to be borne out by hard evidence of an increase in extreme weather pattern. So, why rock the boat?
While I have you there, Graeme, do you suffer from Tourette’s Syndrome? If this were the case then it would make a lot of people relax a bit on blogs as they would take that into account and take your occasional lapses into calling them naughty names with a bit more forbearance.
Shit, the machine ate the instructions.
Here they are again:
It is very simple to create a link.
1. In the text where you want the link put in a pointy bracket like this:
6. Now put in a word that you want to use as the click point, ie. click or link
7. Now to tell the machine you have finished linking put in open point bracket
It will then look like this in your preview Like this link
Hmmm, very strange. Points 3, 4, 5, 6, 8 and 9 got eaten again. Okay then
pointy bracket open, then a href equals then your url open quote close quote close pointy bracket > then put in word link or click for the punter to use as mouse clickthrough then open pointy bracket put in / followed by letter a and close with point bracket
I wonder if I tricked the beast. Sorry Graeme. In the meantime Larvati fixed your linking anyway. I think I’ll go and have scotch and a cigar.
“But gases in the atmosphere – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and halocarbons – absorb much of this heat in the form of infrared radiation. Some of the heat is radiated away from earth, but some of it gets rotated downwards in counter radiation back towards earth. This traps the the earth’s infrared radiation like a greenhouse.”
Right.
And we can see the effects of this. But other then a small amount of anomylous warming in the last two decades of the twentieth century its not showing up in any serious way in the total scheme off things.
That is to say we can see it locally. Particularly in arid places and particularly in the night-time.
Warming weighted to arid conditions and to the night-time is a clear sign of greenhouse warming.
But it isn’t showing up in the global scheme of things and it is not to be taken for granted that this process creates a net warming effect within the oceans.
Now the data has come in and what we can be very sure of is that the warming effect is not nearly as powerful as was earlier expected on a decadal level.
It was a good theory but it didn’t pan out on the decadal level.
And its most disturbing that people will not face up to that.
If it works much more powerfully on the multi-millenial level that is a great and wonderful thing indeed.
Now the next charge…. The idea that it makes things more unstable. I cannot see why that would be the case. Since the warming is weighted to REDUCING HEAT DIFFERENTIALS we expect the opposite effect.
Now it is true that there is nothing to say that this effect cannot be strong over many hundreds or thousands of years.
But it is not getting out of hand and I’ve shown why.
Actually the CO2 on its own is only growing at less then .4% exponentially.
Bird, thankyou for the effort you put in. If I’d had to guess about the reason behind the long-term cooling trend I probably would have had a stab at the disposition of the continents as having a role.
Yet I recall that under ’snowball earth’ conditions over 500 million years ago, when there were glaciers close to sea level at the equator, apparently the continents were clustered around the equator.
I’m afraid the “Stefan-Boltzmann law” has me stumped at present, being untutored in methematics. Is there a layman’s explanation?
To my unscientific mind the trend as shown on the 65 million year graph in Paul Monk’s piece looks very powerful and I’d accept that Hansen’s call that future ice ages have been cancelled is a brave call. Yet what is happening now is quite exceptional. Tim Flannery points out that we are warming 25 times faster thatn we did coming out of the last ‘ice age’ and it has been calculated that we are putting carbon into the air 30 times faster than happened 55 million years ago, when, according to Lovelock, the temperature rose 5C at the equator and 8C near the poles (from memory). He also tells us that it took 200,000 years for the planet to recover from that methane burp.
But that little event doesn’t show on Monk’s graph because it is a mere moment in geological time.
Similarly I heard a reef specialist talking the other day. He says the coral reefs have been cooked before and have always re-established themselves. It is just that it usually takes about 4 million years – not long as these things go.
So I’m still worried about the next couple of thousand years. It all seems to be happening with lightening speed. There hasn’t been anything like it, except perhaps the big one of 251 million years ago when just about everything died.
I’m a bit pressed for time at present and would like to do some more research. In particular I’d like to see your exposition or at least the ideas it is based on critiqued by people who know more science than I do. Meanwhile I hope Hansen is wrong, as does he btw, but I truly suspect he’s nearer the mark in terms of the near-term unforeseeable future, if that makes sense.