Well, there's every reason to think that this is completely falling apart. A great example of this is a recent public lecture by the University of Colorado's Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr. Note that he is convinced that anthropogenic warming is happening, so can't be described as one of those filthy deniers like me. The slides of his lecture are posted, and are pretty interesting:
Pielke's point is that if you want to address anthropogenic warming, the only policy lever that can actually be effective is de-carbonizing our energy supply: it's politically impossibly to reduce standards of living in the democratic societies, and so every policy aimed at reducing GDP will fail spectacularly. His recommendation - which is not a bad one at all - is that any Carbon Tax should be small (so as not to impact GDP) and the money raised focused on research into better generation technologies. Clearly solar and wind are a failure, and so other alternatives are needed, and more aggressive policies intended to push economies away from oil and gas will simply collapse in the absence of different alternatives.
Long time readers know that I'm pretty skeptical of the whole warming issue, due to what seem to be really bad quality control issues in the historical temperature databases. My take is that we've clearly warmed over the last two centuries, that we may have warmed over the last century (but the data is a mess and so that's not at all clear), and that we likely have not warmed at all over the last millennium. I find the null hypothesis - change is dominated by natural variation - much stronger than anthropogenic causes. However, this slide show is worth your time if you are a climate geek like me.
I'm against any new taxes being instituted with the "promise" that they'll remain small. NO tax ever remains "small," and NO "temporary" tax ever remains temporary.
ReplyDeleteGood point, Bob. But Pielke's argument is a refreshing upgrade from the sort we've been hearing.
ReplyDeleteYea that's right, even a tiny tax is the thin edge of the wedge, eventually it would be expanded and abused. If we really want to invest in research into better energy generation, there is plenty of tax revenue available already. No new taxes are needed. The reality is the proposed carbon tax is not to improve energy generation, its ideologically driven.
ReplyDeletePielke is refreshing in his honesty, but it's still hard to understand how he can really think there is evidence for anthropogenic warming in the face of all the dishonesty and sloppy thinking he describes. Somewhere, there must be a dataset that he believes above all others.
ReplyDeleteThe essential argument is whether or not this post-ice age warming period is different from all others in ways that are anthropogenic. I just don't see how there's enough evidence to conclude there is - simply because the data isn't available on a (virtually) day by day basis from ice ages hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Even more important is the set of three questions proposed either by Bjorn Lomberg or Lord Monkton:
1) Is it really warming?
2) Can we affect it at all?
3) What are the most cost effective things we can do?
The AGW crowd seems to conflate these all into one big mess, but adapting to the changes comes out the cheapest and least destructive approach. Of course, many of them want to destroy our way of life.
Kurzweil believes solar is going to follow Moore's Law, and will be cost competitive in another couple of generations. Say 2016 to 2020. I don't really see that myself (photovoltaics work on area phenomenon, not like gate size in a FET switch), but I respect Kurzweil enough to say let's see.
I was going to say the last paragraph of graybeard...but he already did.
ReplyDeleteAs to Greybeard's questions...I have a list of questions that's longer than 3:
http://aretae.blogspot.com/2011/10/agw.html