The Telegraph in the U. K. is running an opinion piece that sums up much of the case against the "warmists", titled A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC; The emerging errors of the IPCC's 2007 report are not incidental but fundamental, says Christopher Booker.
I am not going to quote from it but will rather go in a different direction.
There is little question that cap-and-trade is a gift to special interests such as the financial industry, for which a fully implemented cap/trade regime would probably be the largest business line in history-- profits which would be paid by you and me.
Let us go back to fundamentals and not pretend to know the extent to which global warming is occurring and if so whether it is due to human industrial activities.
It's easier to come to a practical solution without trying to know the unknowable but rather to stick with basic principles.
Basic principles are that resources are finite, that in most systems of government, financial accounts need to balance, and that first and foremost, economic systems need to meet the basic human needs of food, shelter, etc.
Another basic principle of economic thought is that Adam Smith's capitalism does not give weight to externalities such as pollution caused by, say, a manufacturer's pollution of a lake used for pleasure fishing but for which the fishermen do not pay dock fees or the like.
A simple way to account for loss of value of a public good such as a pristine lake or a mountaintop that would be destroyed by coal mining is to assess a value to those losses and have the business treat such costs as an input to costs just as much as labor and raw material costs are counted.
Thus, whether fossil fuels, potash or many other nonrenewables are produced, they can be taxed according to the replacement value (which rises over time as the easiest deposits are depleted first) of the resource plus an estimate of environmental damage, or some other similar scheme.
Climate considerations aside, it is difficult to see how an electricity-intensive advanced world and an automobile-poor emerging world are going to find more and more fossil fuels near today's prices to fuel the growth. Price will ration these resources better than any regulatory scheme. It may be better for, say, government to force resource-depleting companies to price in tomorrow's market price today as tax. Paradoxically, doing so will keep market prices lower than they would be in the future, by discouraging consumption of nonrenewable resources in favor or renewable goods, such as those derived principally from human imagination such as the performing arts, medical services, education, etc.
If such an idea occurs, look for resource-based companies to lose value. It would be better for governments to take advantage of the slack in the global economy and avoid taxes on useful things such as work effort or medical devices and instead obtain an increased share of government's revenues from industrial activities that are underpriced to the extent that resource depletion and environmental damage (including non-economic damage) are not considered as input costs by the companies involved.
Copyright (C) Long Lake LLC 2010
Showing posts with label Climate change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Climate change. Show all posts
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Sunday, February 7, 2010
IPCC Imploding
The highly influential and by charter non-advocacy research group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is imploding. Here are two more articles out of Britain from today alone with new information. First, from the (London) Times Online:
Top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility:
A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.
Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.
The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.
This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035.
The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report.
This report is the IPCC’s most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers. Its lead authors include Pachauri himself .
Next, from the Telegraph (UK), New errors in IPCC climate change report:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report is supposed to be the world’s most authoritative scientific account of the scale of global warming.
But this paper has discovered a series of new flaws in it including:
The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company.
Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.
New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.
More claims which were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups.
They are the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the IPCC’s most recent report, published in 2007.
Last month, the panel was forced to issue a humiliating retraction after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate.
There are more and more articles in the mainstream press than the above today alone. Thus there are more and more plumes of smoke. Are there simply multiple smudge pots obscuring the clear truth that the billionaire-in-the-balance Al Gore wants us to believe? Are is there now so much smoke that there is an increased likelihood, and perhaps even the probability, of fire? In other words, is important global warming now really simply an interesting hypothesis, but one that cannot justify massive shifts in tax systems, ways of transportation and heating/cooling of homes, etc?
The simple solution is for the globe to use fewer fossil fuels because they are getting used up. It's that simple.
Forget the cap and trade scam. Just tax fossil fuel use more and we will get less usage of it.
An even simpler solution is to substitute animal protein with vegetable protein. The health and environmental benefits will be major.
The global warmists are falling on their faces. Their cause is important and reasonable, and may or may not be correct, but the sight of them flying in their private jets all over the place to tell the rest of us to conserve is of a piece with the latest revelations. They are not credible advocates for change we can believe in.
If they had kept the narrative simple (using fewer resources is better on multiple and provable counts) they could have had a win for common sense and Mother Earth. Now they are hoisted with their own petards; this is blowing up in their faces.
Let them advocate by phone, not by private jet. That would be a start. And if the IPCC deserves to survive at all, it needs entirely new leadership.
Copyright (C) Long Lake LLC 2010
Top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility:
A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.
Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.
The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.
This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035.
The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report.
This report is the IPCC’s most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers. Its lead authors include Pachauri himself .
Next, from the Telegraph (UK), New errors in IPCC climate change report:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report is supposed to be the world’s most authoritative scientific account of the scale of global warming.
But this paper has discovered a series of new flaws in it including:
The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company.
Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.
New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.
More claims which were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups.
They are the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the IPCC’s most recent report, published in 2007.
Last month, the panel was forced to issue a humiliating retraction after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate.
There are more and more articles in the mainstream press than the above today alone. Thus there are more and more plumes of smoke. Are there simply multiple smudge pots obscuring the clear truth that the billionaire-in-the-balance Al Gore wants us to believe? Are is there now so much smoke that there is an increased likelihood, and perhaps even the probability, of fire? In other words, is important global warming now really simply an interesting hypothesis, but one that cannot justify massive shifts in tax systems, ways of transportation and heating/cooling of homes, etc?
The simple solution is for the globe to use fewer fossil fuels because they are getting used up. It's that simple.
Forget the cap and trade scam. Just tax fossil fuel use more and we will get less usage of it.
An even simpler solution is to substitute animal protein with vegetable protein. The health and environmental benefits will be major.
The global warmists are falling on their faces. Their cause is important and reasonable, and may or may not be correct, but the sight of them flying in their private jets all over the place to tell the rest of us to conserve is of a piece with the latest revelations. They are not credible advocates for change we can believe in.
If they had kept the narrative simple (using fewer resources is better on multiple and provable counts) they could have had a win for common sense and Mother Earth. Now they are hoisted with their own petards; this is blowing up in their faces.
Let them advocate by phone, not by private jet. That would be a start. And if the IPCC deserves to survive at all, it needs entirely new leadership.
Copyright (C) Long Lake LLC 2010
Friday, December 18, 2009
Empty Agreement on Climate Change and Relevance to Health Insurance Legislation
What I found most relevant to my life in Bloomberg's Obama Snubbed by Chinese Premier at Climate Meeting was not the snub--which is of no importance to me-- but the following quote from it:
“Coming back with an empty agreement, I think, would be far worse than coming back empty-handed,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday in Washington.
Given what the healthcare "reform" effort has devolved into in the Senate, why does the White House principle on climate change not apply to health insurance?
Let's focus on health first, and insurance second. I once again call upon the smoker-in-chief to break the habit.
Copyright (C) Long Lake LLC 2009
“Coming back with an empty agreement, I think, would be far worse than coming back empty-handed,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday in Washington.
Given what the healthcare "reform" effort has devolved into in the Senate, why does the White House principle on climate change not apply to health insurance?
Let's focus on health first, and insurance second. I once again call upon the smoker-in-chief to break the habit.
Copyright (C) Long Lake LLC 2009
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