Climate Storm
So, in my first post as an in-house critic from the right at TNR, I took on what I thought was a pretty alarmist piece in the magazine on global warming by Al Gore.
A lot of bloggers have responded. Inside TNR you can see Bradford Plumer, then me, then Plumer, then me.
Ezra Klein responded, and you can see my reply back to him.
Joe Romm responded at length. He used a number of exclamation points. He covered a lot of the same ground that we did in a very detailed exchange two years ago in which I made a set of claims, he interrogated them, I counter-interrogated and so on. You can read the back-and-forth – me, Romm, me, Romm, me – and decide for yourself if you think I ought to spend my time interacting with him.
Obviously I’m incapable of objectivity on this subject, but it doesn’t seem to me that any of these criticisms have disproven any of my central claims.
UPDATE: I can’t believe I missed a reaction from Rortybomb. (H/T Patrick Appel at The Daily Dish).
Here’s why you aren’t making progress with the believers.
Until you can somehow quantify these things into your cost benefit analysis, the, ah, more intuitive people among us won’t be able to groove with you. We’re too caught up the morality tale, too habituated to ecological release.
— KVS · Jul 16, 01:24 PM · #
Before anybody says anything, I should Bush Doctrine a species of likely responses to my use of the word ‘believers’: hard science supports our theory of global warming more than our theory of the future.
— KVS · Jul 16, 01:35 PM · #
“So what should we do about the real danger of global warming? In my view, we should be funding investments in technology that would provide us with response options in the event that we are currently radically underestimating the impacts of global warming.”
A lot of our biggest technological breakthroughs came when external pressure was put on industry and governemnts. Some examples are emmision controls for factories and cars, the nuclear bomb, and the space race. Necessity is the mother of invention, as they say. We see this happening today with gas mileage in cars. Gas milage is suddenly improving across the board after years of stagnation. I think this is atributible to regulations from the Obama admin and the recent rising cost of oil.
So if we really think that technology is answer to global warming then doesn’t it make sense to start exerting pressure on government and industry via some like a carbon tax?
And one thing I haven’t seen you address in your articles (I may have missed it) is the idea that as the potential cost of the risk grows, so does the need for prevention, even if the probability of that risk is very low. An example is putting babies on their backs to sleep. A tiny percentage of babies die from sudden death syndrome (SIDS), way less than one in a thousand. Putting them on their backs to sleep mostly eliminates SIDS, though it also causes some babies to have weirdly shaped heads and makes sleeping more difficult for lots of babies. We take this relatively extreme action in the face of very low risks becasue the potential cost is so great: the death of your baby.
I think global warming is the same kind of situation. There is a small (how small is debatable) chance of something really really catestrophic happening. Mass extinction, collapse of the food chain, global pandemics, economic collapse, or something we have not even thought of yet. We really don’t know becasue we have never changed the climate in this way before. But you have to admit that there is a risk of insanely huge proportions out there. I think this, and my point above, changes the case for action.
What do you think?
— cw · Jul 16, 02:02 PM · #
Even setting aside global warming, isn’t there still a pretty good argument for a carbon tax? There are a lot of negative externalities associated with carbon: air pollution, oil spills, mountains with their tops blown off, underground fires, toxins leaking into the water supply. War.
And yet, instead of taxing carbon, we currently subsidize it in all kinds of crazy ways.
Wouldn’t a carbon tax be a good way to finance whatever technological investments we want to make to address AGW?
— Andrew · Jul 16, 02:22 PM · #
I like a negative externality fee. Coal plants cause air pollution that leads to increased respiratory problems and death. Price that into the cost of coal first, then add the environmental damage to the water supply from mining, and coal starts getting pretty expensive.
The EPA’s new regs on NOx and SOx and coal ash are going to do as much to eliminate dirty old coal plants as any watered down cap and trade ever would.
— Michael · Jul 16, 10:15 PM · #
KVS:
A lot of this is semi-literary rhetoric (not that there are not real projected effetcs, but listing words allows adovocates to avoid the quantification question of “how bad compared to the costs of avoiding it?”). If you go to the Romm exchange I listed, you can see me address a lot of this.
cw:
It’s a greta question. I address it in summary form in the response to Ezra Klein, and link to my original post in response to the Gore article and a book by Cass Sunstein which both address it in much greater detail.
Andrew / Michael,
I addressed the question of a carbon tax here at TAS about three years ago. I think the analysis and predictions have held up prety well.
— Jim Manzi · Jul 16, 11:37 PM · #
KVS,
You and the rest of the believers need to groove on the fact that aggressive mitigation efforts would also have human and environmental costs that are not captured in estimates of the “financial” costs of mitigation. What price should we put on the human suffering and misery caused by poverty?
— Jerry · Jul 17, 12:55 AM · #
It is my pleasure to read this article,I look forward to reading more.
— cheap mac makeup · Jul 17, 02:25 AM · #
Industrialization and international trade have lifted hundreds of millions of people in developing countries out of abject poverty over the past few decades. But hundreds of millions more remain desperately poor. An aggressive emissions mitigation program is likely to keep a lot of people in poverty who would otherwise escape it. As Manzi has written, the costs of mitigation will disproportionately impact the poor.
— Jerry · Jul 17, 04:07 AM · #
Jim, thanks for your reply. I read the response to Ezra Klien. To summarize my understanding (and paraphrase Donald Rumsfield) you seem to be saying that we can’t logically plan for unknown unknowns, and I see some merit in that. But I don’t think that unforseen catastropy arising out of human actions is really an unknown. We have all kinds of experience where humans did something they thought was benign and it turned out to be quite harmful. Just off the top of my head, how about lead in paint and gasoline. Until recently lead poisoning was big public health problem with all kinds of consequences for behavior and IQ. If we think back on it, industrialized humans had probably been lead poisoned for quite a while. The harm caused by invasive species to trees and fish is another good example. And there are millions of other examples where more or less inocent actions or beliefs had catastrophic effects.
We also know that the environment or the bio-sphere or whatever you want to call it is an intricately connected and fragil web and have plenty of examples of harm being caused to one part of the web by actions in another, seemingly unrelated part.
So we have plenty of experience with unintended consequences and the fragility and interconnectedness of the bio-sphere. And add to this knowledge the vast scope of the changes we are making. I mean we are not just changing a small area, we are changing the climate of the entire planet (and now that I think of it, there is plenty of evidence in geological record of the harm climate change can cause).
Going by this evidence (known knowns) I think gobal warming will definitely have consequences we haven’t forseen (even with all the people working on the problem) and a good chance that these unforseen consequences will be catastrophic, do to the vast nature of the changes we are responsible for.
To put it another way: changes to super complicated systems are very dificult to predict, and when you make vast changes you should probably expect vast effects.
— cw · Jul 17, 04:16 AM · #
cw:
Thanks, I think I take your (sensible) point. At the very high level fo abstraction in which one operates in comboxes, let me just make two points.
1. I think gobal warming will definitely have consequences we haven’t forseen
In effect, I think you are saying that you can foresee such effects, even though “all the people studying them” have not. Seen in its best light, I might put this claim as something like “even though these expectations don’t rise to the level of scientific knowledge, they are still a rational basis for action in the real world”. I guess the problems are that (i) it’s not obvious to me that such things will happen, and (ii) we are all subject to cognitive biases all the time, and that is why it is important to try to rely on structured prediction processes.
2. Unless we (defined as the world) want to literally use a lot less energy – which I think will never be made as a conscious choice and would be a terrible idea – then we have to generate it somehow. Many of the energy systems that seem “externality free” today likely only seem that way becuase we haven’t scaled them up yet. Here’s a simple example. I suspect that the US will move to a system of fully electric personal cars within my lifetime (and I think this is a very good idea). But for this will create enormous demand for certain specialized metals used in the batteries. The number one source? Bolivia. Bolivia will become the Saudi Arabia of batteries, upon which our transportation will be dependent. We will be “sendning $X billion per to regimes that don’t like us” and so on.
Energy systems are not digital or virtual. They are a replacement for muscle, and must move real atoms real distances. Any energy system operating at scale is going to present real externalities to us, and by your logic of complex systems, foring a change form system X to system Y will itslef have unforeseen consequences. This doesn;t mean that X or Y can never be better, but I think we ought to be pretty humble about predicting this centuries into the future.
— Jim Manzi · Jul 17, 08:23 AM · #
Mitigating climate change is a better deal for the poor.
Not likely. The left would never allow it to happen. It will never allow any reform that doesn’t make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Just look at what happened with the banking reform this week, which will drive all the smaller entities out of business and give more power to the richer, better connected ones. Not until the left has been overthrown and cast into utter darkness will there be a chance of it happening.
— The Reticulator · Jul 17, 05:20 PM · #
Jim, thanks for taking the time to reply.
About issue 1. I am saying that history tells us that—even with our best knowledge—unforseen cosnequences often occure as the result of our actions. It is logical to consider this and include it in our planning. Especially when you add the complexity of the system whe are messing with, the size of the system we are messing with, and the severity of the worst case scenario.
Again, I understand that this is a very well studied field, but the Challenger space shuttle (for instance) was an increadibly well thought out evdevor, and the unexpected happened with catastrophic results.
2. Your second point is a good one, turning my concern about unextended consequences back on me. But if that argument if valid for your point it valid for mine. I will grant you that mitigating GW is likely to have unforseen consequences if you will grant me that GW is likely to have unforeseen cosnequences. I don’t know were that leaves us. I really do appreciate your point though. We are in a very dificult situation and there are going to be costs to whatever we do or don’t do.
In the end, I feel like all these discussions are moot. I think human nature and economics and poilitics mean that we aren’t going to do anything meaningful at all about GW and that our children or grandchildren will have to live with whatever consequences there are, catatrophic or not. But who knows, maybe I will be surprised.
— cw · Jul 17, 06:52 PM · #
A lack of understanding of an incredibly complex system (in this case, we’re talking about the whole and entire actual world) is not a legitimate argument against prudent action. In fact, it is precisely the opposite— an urgent call to action. You talk about “what a reasonable and informed person would believe to be a legitimate danger;” I counter, while you may be reasonable, you are not informed. Like it or not, climate change is not a social issue. The welfare of the world’s poor does not enter into the question. It is a physical issue, and the tools we use to understand the physical world are scientific tools.
The modern economy depends on ultraspecialization of knowledge, and the vast array of intelligent people critically studying climate have converged on what is essentially an unassailable consensus. Media-savvy crackpots notwithstanding, the people who have dedicated their lives to understanding biogeochemistry don’t have a doubt in their minds. CO2 Emissions now exceed the IPCC’s 2001 worst-case scenario; ocean pH is measurably falling; and entire ecosystems depend on the integrity of coral reefs. These are not projections, they are facts.
We are effecting change on a massive scale and CANNOT predict its effect. The only responsible answer is to change our behavior. To pretend to hem and haw over the “economic costs” of changing our behavior is asinine. It adds hubris to irresponsibility. Moreover, to sugarcoat rationalizations about doing nothing with talk of the world’s poor (which don’t figure into any economic calculation by any fossil fuel user in the developed world) is as disingenuous as it is self-serving. It’s worth mentioning that SOx emissions were cut at a fraction of the projected costs; and anyway economic models are far more uncertain than physical models. So why let the economic models call the shots?
In a free world, the only way to effect change while preserving liberty is with economic force. This is a market problem with a market solution: a price on carbon. Why is that so hard to understand?
— Brandon Kuczenski · Jul 17, 09:28 PM · #
A lack of understanding of an incredibly complex system (in this case, we’re talking about the whole and entire actual world) is not a legitimate argument against prudent action. In fact, it is precisely the opposite— an urgent call to action.
Prove it. Issue an urgent call to fund space expeditions to colonize the moon.
— The Reticulator · Jul 17, 09:46 PM · #
Brandon K’s comment is nigh indistinguishable from this.
— KVS · Jul 17, 10:18 PM · #
Reticulator, why are libertarians so attracted to space? I’m assuming you are a libertarian here, maybe you are not.
— cw · Jul 18, 04:34 AM · #
KVS, there is [at least] one important distinction: mine was prose; your similie was video. Your failure to respond in kind is telling.
Reticulator, you are an undiscovered comic. There is no apparent logical similarity between a call to do something absurd and a call to stop doing something absurd.
— Brandon Kuczenski · Jul 18, 08:54 AM · #
Reticulator, why are libertarians so attracted to space? I’m assuming you are a libertarian here, maybe you are not.
No, I’m definitely not a libertarian even though I’ve voted for the libertarian in each of the last three presidential elections, as well as in several other elections. I’m a conservative liberal or liberal conservative, I’m not sure which. Either way I have some libertarian tendencies, but I most assuredly am not a libertarian.
As to why libertarians are attracted to space, I don’t know. I never noticed that. I was just trying to come up with some stupid action example since Brandon didn’t seem too fussy as to details about what the problem is and what effect any actions might have. If action is what’s needed, colonizing the moon should fit his criteria.
If there is some Freudian explanation as to why I picked that example, I don’t know what it is.
— The Reticulator · Jul 18, 03:33 PM · #
Sorry Brandon, I never even imagined a response was necessary. Your position is that massive uncertainty, by virtue of its massive uncertaintyness, amplifies the urgent ur-urgency of the global call to action. I guess my rebuttal would be . . . wha?
CWs point number one don’t make no sense, neither. Because unforeseen consequences are often worse than we expected, we should expect and foresee even worse unforeseen consequences than those which we at present foresee? That’s just pure nonsense, not least because unforeseen consequences must, by logic and reality, be incorporated into present calculations as noise, as an overall neutral variable. Some are worse than expected, some are better than expected, some are the same but different. Emphasizing the negative is an irrational, faulty heuristic.
Remember, gents, information is distinguishability, and the opposite of information is uncertainty. Get those two things right and your weltanschauung is, and will be, alright.
— KVS · Jul 18, 05:03 PM · #
standing up for a system that, at every level, privileges the rich.
You might have noticed that in my comment I wasn’t standing up for a system. I was describing a system that needs to be overthrown.
— The Reticulator · Jul 19, 12:05 AM · #
Reticulator: it has been my experience that libertarians are very attracted to space exploration. Any libertarians out there know why?
KVS, you are right that unforseen events can be both positive and negative. But when you are considering the unforseen, you plan for the negative scenario. Then you are covered IF it happens. You don’t plan for something positive happening, that is called wishful thinking.
So thinking about global warming… we decide that things are just too complicated and large-scale for us to know with acceptable certainty what is going to happen. Things might turn out great or things might go horribly wrong. If we base our actions on the idea that good things might happen and do nothing and then something horrible happens, we are screwed. But, if we base our actions on the idea that bad things might happen and do what we need to mitigate GW, then the bad things don’t happen. Get it? We are covered.
Jim’s point is that something bad will also happen out of our efforts to reduce GW. He believes that we will suffer economic hardship for sure, and then there is the unforseen again.
— cw · Jul 19, 12:45 AM · #
Jim,
I think you should have a follow-up post here, where you address Romm’s points about Weitzman. I know for sure that Romm is wrong on some of what he says, but his stuff about 6C warming (versus your claims of off-the-charts warming) aren’t self-evidently absurd, so I’d love to see your response.
— Bob Murphy · Jul 22, 05:06 AM · #