After WWII, movies made in the US and UK that involved strange phenomena had scientists explicate the possible reason and suggest experiments or solutions. Most importantly they were listened too. Any person engaging in denials was treated as comedic moment. By the time of the 1975 movie "Jaws", the denier (the Amity Island mayor) was clearly motivated by commercial interests. This seems to be almost coincident of the fossil fuel industry hiding their scientists' reports on teh consequences of fossil fuel burning. This went into top gear, especially after Hansen's Congressional statement. The useful idiots were paid to create doubt, as well documented by Naomi Orestes.
I find it of little value to listen to pundits, rather than domain experts, douubly so is they have little knowledge. I vaguely still recall a rant by Limbaugh about some science topic (energy I think) that was so ignorant of facts that it made me wonder if any of his claimed knowledge was accurate.
Hansen has proved remarkably prescient, including his claim of rapid loss of sea ice that was far less conservative than the consnsus of his peers.
Apart from Fred Singer, almost every climate denier is clueless about climate modeling and the science behind it. What I find interesting is that the deniers fixate on one detail - global temperatures - trying to find "gotchas" like creationists denying evolution. But as you showed with the Janaese tracking of the onset of the cherry blossom blooms, there is a host of orthoganal data supporting climate change, for example species changes and movements in response to warming - the global "canaries in the coal mine".
Any measured "technological dividend" isn't going to be worth much is the planet looks like the landscape depicted in Blade Runner 2049, or worse, Soylent Green, or any scifi books of the eco or cli-fi genre. As a culture, we pay far too litle regard to the state of the biosphere. It cannot be kept pristine, but there is no good reason to accept allowing it to degrade as we treat it as an exploitable resource. Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" (1970) has the 2 lines that we should remember:
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
Here is an excellent article from the New Yorker featuring a scientist who is a climate realistic. His analysis shows we will probably come up short in our attempts to stop global warming, and we'll have to learn to cope with a warmer climate. Ironically, he's a professor at the Univesity in Winnipeg, so his city will be one of the few places on earth that might benefit. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/vaclav-smil-and-the-value-of-doubt
What I believe Brad, and especially Noah, don't understand when they push growth and criticize the non-growth or "degrowthers" is the scientific S curve. Here's a quote from the article: "...Smil writes that most growth processes—“of organisms, artifacts, or complex systems”—can be plotted on a so-called S-shaped, or sigmoid, growth curve, meaning that the rate of change increases slowly at first, then increases rapidly, then levels off. An error that humans make with similarly predictable regularity is to assume that the nearly vertical middle segment of an S-shaped curve can continue at that angle indefinitely (the price of Dutch tulips in the seventeenth century, the price of bitcoin in the twenty-first). One of his conclusions is that the steady, unceasing economic expansion that economists and politicians dream of is not sustainable, and that the relentless pursuit of growth is environmentally disastrous..."
I have suggested that Brad write a column on growth since economists seem to always be in favor of it. But as you and Smil point out, growth can't go on forever so at some point we're going to have to figure out how to manage de-growth or non-growth.
Brad and Noah Smith have pushed the idea that new technologies will rescue humanity and the climate. (This would be building on ever-new S curves., so that the result is an "ever-increasing exponential curve.) The problems are the unintended consequences (and sometimes intended ones by those in power). I pointed out in one of Brad's recent Briefly Noted posts that: "...the invention of the Haber-Bosch process that helped feed people in the twentieth century has unintentionally wreaked havoc on the world’s healthy soil supply and the oceanic coastal zone. https://animistsramblings.substack.com/p/agriculture-diminishing-returns
Because of that and a global economy that runs on ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels that have fueled climate change, it seems that we may be reaching a point of diminishing returns that could make life miserable for all (or most) of earth’s inhabitants. We are at a point of exponentially increasing environmental decay and exponential technological “progress” (in quotes because we don’t know all the potential negatives). Only time will tell which will win out."
Well, yes, the big-bad Oil corps and not-so-thoughtful thought "leaders" are easy targets. But at the end of the day, they were just the pimps, we ourselves the Johns. To this day, a rising cost of gasoline results in everyone voted out ASAP.
I'm not as worried at you, but I wish that everyone who DOES understand that CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere has significant costs would get serious about lighting a fire under politicians to adopt least cost solutions.
Poor Roger Pielke! He is still so traumatized by over-the top criticism, he can't bring himself to go beyond refuting Climate Change exaggeration, for whihc there is still a lively market.
"How expensive will the costs of changing our energy system so that in fifty years global warming will stop be?"
It depends. If addressed with a global tax on net emissions of CO2, not much in deadweight loss, certainly less that years of failure to execute FAIT a la Bernanke-Yellen. If addressed through NIMBY-McKibbenism, impeding random fossil fuel production or transpiration projects in Western democracies, the cost will be so much that in 50 years CO2 concentration will still be rising.
I hope not, because optimizing the CO2 content of the atmosphere ought to be just a lot of investment projects being executed along with gradual shifts in consumer baskets. If it IS a big story it will because we are NOT optimizing the CO2 content of the atmosphere.
How does one "optimize" the CO2 partial pressure of teh atmosphere. Do you value lives lost for the inability to breathe proerly vs the profits/GDP growth? Whose lives can be lost. What about the loss of land from sea level rise? Can you pay a country for its loss. If our gulf coast states become flooded, is some compensation paid? If CO2 increases ocean acidity to the point where organisms that need to deposit calcium carbonate for skeletons and shells cannot do so, do we just say, "Well the jellyfish are OK, learn to eat them instead". We already have found we cannot optimize NOx in cities. The mortality rate rises as part of the price of allowing those emissions from ICE powered vehicles.
Thios is not an optimizing problem. This is a moral one. We should be eliminating as much pollution from our human activities as possible. That mostly means setting very low "acceptable" limits on using the environment as a sink for our wastes, and forcing changes in our methods of production and banning some materials if we cannot stop the pollution.
I note that we did so for chlorofluorocarbons to stop the ozone hole from expanding. Industries did change their practices to accomodate this. [However it has been discovered that illegal manufacture has been going on in Asia, detected by satellite monitoring.]
We are inventive species. It cannot be beyond our collective intelligence to create a global economy that ensures a decent standard of living for everyone without the need to continue extract non-renewable resources because they are the cheapest way to solve a need, rather than the most long-term sustainable method.
The SETI folks have a term L for teh longevity of transmitting intelligent civilizations. Our civilization is rapidly ensuring a short lifetime, somewhere less that a millennium. That is a possible Great Filter in front of us. I would like to think that we, as post-humans will last at least as long a typical species. To do that will take some rethink of how we organize our global civilization to achieve that.
"It cannot be beyond our collective intelligence to create a global economy that ensures a decent standard of living for everyone." I don't think it's a question of intelligence. It's a question of competing self interests. The human race has always consisted of tribal societies, (now called nation states and ethnic groups.) Throughout history cooperation in the face of limited resources has always been very rare.
Absolutely the main problem today now that we have pretty economic wind and solar power is the inaction by governments despite promises made at every COP meeting.
However, what I was suggesting, obviously poorly, that technological developments do not come on demand and take time and funding to develop. For example - better battery technologies for frid storage, lower cost solar PV (using perovskites?), and better materials to insulate homes and replacements for energy hungry cement manufacture. These all require R&D and maybe we will even get breakthrough technologies. [I would particularly like a better way to capture renewable solar energy than large areas of PV panels on the ground (or floating). A fusion breakthrough that works at a smaller scale than the tokamak or laser fusion designs. Inexpensive geothermal would be a nice option too. If we can get the costs down with enabling technologies, space-based solar energy beamed to teh surface would solve our energy needs for a long time to come.
"If our gulf coast states become flooded, is some compensation paid?" An excellent question. IMO this is the problem with the "loss and damage fund" dreamed up at COP 27. It is quite likely that first world nations with relatively temperate climates will suffer from climate change too. Paradise, CA, Lahaina HI, tornados in the Midwest, droughts and heat waves in Europe. All are reasons why developed nations might renege on giving money to poor countries who are also dealing with global warming.
They already have, effectively. I believe only a fraction of the already inadequate $100bn amount has been coughed up. IMO, there is a problem that India is a recipient even as it is one of the worst coal burning countries. Any aid should be used to shut down these powerplants and replace them with renewables.
If major US coastal cities become flooded, e.g. Miami, Charleston, even New York, the cost of protection or just "relocation" will dwarf any possible economic mitigation costs. This is the cost of business as usual and kicking the can down the road to avoid doiing the right actions today. Then you have countries like Britain and teh petro-states intent on extracting and burning "every last drop" in defiance of the need to leave fossil fuels untapped. This is gamesmanship rather than understanding the need to collectively agree, and DO, the right thing. Foot dragging, lying, and cheating, because profits, is going to prove a major problem for humanity before the end of this century, and will get worse thereafter.
Why do you suppose that lives lost have no cost? All the things you mention are costs of ultimate CO2 concentrations? The greater value we place on these losses, the higher the tax on the net emissions. And do you think that there are not lives implied by the deadweight losses of the tax?
Eliminate as much CO2 emissions as possible? What constrains the possible?
"What constrains the possible?" Technology, and willingness to act against vested interests. Recall how the Bush Administraion GOP in Congress tried to gut any NASA research into CO2 levels using new satellites. [Reminiscent of the earlier denial of any government funding of firearms research.] Recall teh pushback on the Obama adminsitration's funding of clean energy development, while maintaining direct fossil fuel subsidences and indirect subsidies like military actions {"Why is our oil under their sand?" - commonly expressed sentiment.] Then there is the privileged pushback of NIMBYism - no windfarms near my property, or offshore even if below the horizon. The national competitions also caused inaction - "Why should we phase our fossil fuels at a cost to our economy if China does not do the same?" - a common refrain in teh 1990s and still heard today, and obviously national interests still trump global community needs.
As they say about looking for ET intelligence, and why haven't we been visited. The answer is ET detects no real intelligence in our global civilization, so no need to visit. Klaatu is not going to help save us with a warning and ultimatum. We seem to be on a self-destructive path, with the corporations acting as AIs intent on turning all reduced carbon to CO2 and $$$$. That is our "paperclip problem" that seems really hard to prevent.
Yes, producer play a role, but I think the real problem is that the public is not yet behind taxing net emissions and "activist are not helping persuade them.
Which public and which activists? I would also note that the reports on teh recent oil meeting shows that the oil and gas companies are actively pursuing more extraction and have no intention of curbing production or emissions. I expect this nonsense from nations dependent on oil revenues, but not the comapnies based in the West. Mu understanding is that the banks continue to fund exploration and extraction despite previous claims they would reduce that funding. Greed rules. Activism has basically failed, to teh point where more extreme activism is annoying the public (I certainly do not condone destroying works of art as publicity stunts.) But clearly, there is no reason why governments could change the rules to make oil and gas more expensive, force windfall taxes on companies benefitting from supply shortages, and subsidizing energy conservation and renewables. But only a few countries in Europe seem to be taking this seriously. The reality is that business as usual and not upsetting powerful industries remains the problem. The USA has very low taxes on gasoline compared to Europe, but Americans seem to believe they have a God-given-right to drive gas guzzling vehicles, an attitude promulgated by the auto companies that prefer to sell big, profitable vehicles.
Often mortality "cost" is just given as a statistic. "cost of the action was X lives.". However, monetization of social costs has been done for global warming, and as we know, the values for carbon emissions (not CO2 levels) vary widely. Obviously we value some lives more than others based on age, income, longevity, country, etc. As we shrug our shoulders as Pacific islands drwon with sea level rise, clearly some lives are of low importance.
The estimation of the social cost cost of carbon is not well understood. From the first ref below:
"The social cost of carbon (SCC) is arguably the single most important concept in the economics of climate change1. It represents the marginal social damage from emitting one metric ton of carbon dioxide-equivalent at a certain point in time2. According to standard economic theory, it represents the price that should be put on carbon dioxide to reduce emissions to socially optimal levels along the optimal emissions trajectory3. The SCC has been highly influential in informing climate policy. For example, regulations with benefits totaling over $1 trillion in the United States have used the SCC in their economic analysis1. The SCC is commonly estimated using climate-economy integrated assessment models (IAMs), which synthesize the state of scientific knowledge to inform policy4,5. Climate-economy IAMs that produce an SCC also project the optimal path of future emissions by comparing climate damages with the cost of reducing emissions.
Despite the theoretical and policy importance of the SCC, many commentaries have argued that current estimates of the SCC remain inadequate5–12. One major line of criticism is that IAMs do not represent the latest scientific understanding of climate impacts. Although substantial advances in climate impact research have been made in recent years, IAMs are still omitting a significant portion of likely damages13,14. Another major line of criticism is that a wide variety of climate damages—sea level rise, extreme weather, the direct effects of heat on productivity, agricultural impacts, and many more—must be monetized and summarized into a single number, and the relative contribution of these damages is often unclear11,13,15. In addition, the magnitude of climate damages is sensitive to subjective choices around the monetization of non-market damages, and, since damages occur over long timescales, the discount rate at which future damage is converted into present value5,10,11,15.
One source of climate damages not updated to the latest scientific understanding in IAMs is the effect of climate change on human mortality. A 2017 National Academy of Sciences report specifically mentioned mortality as a damage source that could be immediately updated in IAMs5. A large body of literature suggests that climate change is likely to have a significant effect on temperature-related mortality16–56. A Lancet report concluded that “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”16. Yet, climate-mortality damages are currently limited in the most widely used IAMs."
The article suggests total excess mortality to 2100 due to global warming of over 2C is 80+ million. This seems like a huge underestimate. It also doesn;t account for morbidity.
This second reference notes that estimates of mortality cost can be calculated in a widely different ways. In th US, the invidual value on a life is over $10m, yet actualy payouts in cases of accidendents, and even civil fines for PD caused unnecessary homicides is far less.
In 1943, a British government caused famine in Bengal resulted in teh deaths of betweem 0.8 to 3.8m million people. The higher end would represent nearly 10% of the British population at the time. This for one small part of teh world. Imagine teh scale when "warming" causes mass crop failures, let alone the likely nth order effects of viiolence, war, disease, etc.
Example of famine mortality in Bengal by UK government decsion to send the crops to Bitain during WWII.
All the SCC estimates are really for relatively low temperature increases, with relatively small environmental declines and a "nusiness as usual" scenarios. But as we know from history, civilizations collapse under a few coincident shocks. Unless we believe "this time it is really different", then the effects og heating the planet will cause a number of shocks - rising cost of food (as with Covid), famines, water shortages, increased violence over lack of water (as seen in the Middle east), tropical diseases affecting the temperate zones, morbidity and mortality impacting businesses damaging the economy, food chain collapses, especially in the ocean, and so on. The total death toll could be in the billions, and that excludes morbidity, just as long-Covid has affected a fraction of the population causing disability. There is even a link between heat and Alzheimers.
TL;DR, the real social cost cost of CO2 may be far higher than current estimates. If the cost is civilization collapse, then is any price not worth paying to mitigate the problem by removing CO2 emissions and even reversing the emissions we have generated since the industrial revolution? IOW, thinking we can otimize for CO2 levels, even if enforcement was possible (and history says not), we are fooling ourselves.
Powerful vested interests in the US, China, India, and Russia continue to deny global warming, if not in word, then in deed. Future generations will hate us, and they will have every right to.
How much of 2023-4 is an El Nino outlier, and how much is the start of a vicious cycle caused by arctic heat that is melting the reflective ice, thawing methane, and altering atmospheric and ocean circulation? Once we enter disequilibrium, can we stop at any point? Or are there stretches of global temperature where long-term equilibrium is now impossible? I fear we cannot stop at 2 or 3 degrees regardless of what we do now.
I no longer take the bait. This is a loser's game and highly unproductive: "For every (tut-tut) 'fact' you can find supporting your silly position I can find TWO facts supporting mine. So there." A winner's game is from Teddy R et. al.: do what you can where you are with what. you have". (There's no oh shut up in there but it comes close.) Anyway, baring hubris and megalomania and thermodynamics that are flat-out wrong, Mr. Entrepreneur (ahem) has figured out cooling, renewable water, and air- and plastic-pollution (not all THAT difficult) such that it has a favorable LCOE (that was nasssty, nasssty, nassty). (I'm saving efficiency over unity for next week.) The upshot, "Code Red for Humanity!" or no, is we don't have the tools. The same was true pre- cotton gin, Wright brothers, Henry Ford, and so on. I can't say that I invent snarky apothegms. They pop in there. An applicable one here is, "The volume of blame is inversely proportional to the availability of workable, shared solutions." This -- where the antecedent of mud-slinging is, to be delicate, not mud -- too shall pass.
Adding to the argument, over here [ https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-wm-aem/global/pb/en/insights/eye-on-the-market/Vaclav.pdf ] Vaclav Smil finds that there's no feasible path for an energy transition that would get us to net zero by 2050 or close to that (or, to put it in another way, that the cost of doing so would be so big that there's no politically feasible way to make it happen). He's not arguing that we shouldn't do it as fast as possible, but that "as fast as possible" still leaves as with a lot of damage to deal with along the way.
One of my fears is that as things deteriorate the "we don't need to do anything" side will switch to misrepresenting "we can't do this cheaply and avoiding all damage" to "there's nothing that can be done" --- there are severe collective actions problems here, so if you dedicate all resources to mitigation and adaptation (and/or sociopolitical control, border patrols, and so on) instead of decarbonification, we might get to even higher emissions than we're accounting for.
For the record I don't think it's the most likely outcome in this extreme way; there's probably enough money in the energy transition, and the cultural shift is relatively strong enough, that it won't be stopped, but I don't see a surfeit of strategic maturity and long-term planning going around across the biggest countries and/or most influential uber-rich.
(Side question: I almost typed "oligarch"; would it make sense to stop using it mainly for the ones in Russia and include Musk et al? They have much more power and independence that their financial peers in Russia --- or just less of a tendency to fall out of windows.)
I could not tell from the Simil piece what the policy framework was that would not be enough.
But he may be right. We need a higher tax on net emissions than Nordhaus estimates. But it's quite irrelevant from a policy perspective. The optimal tax is a trajectory of rates in any scenario and the models will need to be re-run every year or so to recalculate the trajectory. We just need to keep our hand on the steering wheel and adjust to changing estimates of costs and changing estimates of cost of avoidance/removal.
We should be treating global heating as if it was a war. But we have a lot of foot-dragging as politics, supposedly the art of the possible, cannot seem to be used in the interests of humanity rather than the powerful.
There is also the issue of technological development. In teh 1970s, solar panels were thermal panels, not photovoltaic (except for high value, or niche applications). The cost has only declined precipitously in the 21st century, and arguably due to Chinese production. Wind turbines have fared well, but again, offshore wind farms are mainly a 21st century phenomenon. (Just look at how primitive those small turbines in California's Altamont Pass look in comparison.) Back in the early1970s I believed fusion was the future for clean, centralized electricity production. It may still be, but 50 years later, I am still waiting... [The cold fusion excitement was rather a "Back to the Future", Mr. Fusion-like fantasy that reasonably quickly was debunked.] 2050, and what was a 1.4C target maximum increase will palmost certainly not happen. (I won't be around to see that date anyway.) But that doesn't mean we should be as aggressive as possible in stimulating technological development on a number of fronts, just as happens in wartime. The aim should be to limit the damage, rather than trying to preserve the value of damaging industries. I have every confidence that the economy wouldn't collapse if we make a rapid transition. No doubt the new technologies will also generate new problems, but that has always been the case. Global heating will cause crop failures, water shortages, diseases, and changes to ways of life, but also stimualte new crop development, healthcare treatments, and new ways to live and work. What we must avoid at all costs is desperate nations or non-state actors causing a nuclear conflagration in response to these stresses. That really will set back whatever little remains of humanity.
I understand your meaning, but actually we need to treat ACC as a cost benefit problem, not a war. In war you are not looking for an optimal amount of defeat of the opponent. :)
I disagree. Cost/benefit analyses are fine when you can decide not to do anything with a negative net benefit. However, both war and global heating are existential risks. There is no option but to fight this enemy/"enemy". Cost/benefit analyses can only hope to indicate the best way to fight, even if teh analyses just show teh least negative benefit. In war you decide which armaments and manpower to develop and fund to maximize the probability of a win. The US however, just spends almost as much as it likes to maintain the post-WWII Pax Americana, despite the cost of not funding necessary infrastructure and social systems at home. Both the US and UK accumulated a great deal of debt by the end of WWII, but that was worth it to defeat the Axis powers that would have darkened Europe for a long time (100-year Reich?) and even the US would have had to live with Nazi domination in Europe and possibly the US mainland, while Japan would have controlled the Pacific and Asia. The cost in lives and treasure was worth it to preserve democracy. Britain went into decline after WWII, and has continued its relative decline to this day. Despite this, I don't belive anyone in Britain would have preferred domination by Nazi Germany for the last 3/4 century.
The problem we face is that it is a global problem, not a national one. Global heating has to be fought as if it was a war against an alien invasion, not a game to "win" against other nations, an approach that is often the reason for inaction.
This seems worthy of wide(r) distribution, in which case I suggest you first get some friendly editor to remove the FT’s T&C nattering about your fair-use quotation and some ragged sentences
After WWII, movies made in the US and UK that involved strange phenomena had scientists explicate the possible reason and suggest experiments or solutions. Most importantly they were listened too. Any person engaging in denials was treated as comedic moment. By the time of the 1975 movie "Jaws", the denier (the Amity Island mayor) was clearly motivated by commercial interests. This seems to be almost coincident of the fossil fuel industry hiding their scientists' reports on teh consequences of fossil fuel burning. This went into top gear, especially after Hansen's Congressional statement. The useful idiots were paid to create doubt, as well documented by Naomi Orestes.
I find it of little value to listen to pundits, rather than domain experts, douubly so is they have little knowledge. I vaguely still recall a rant by Limbaugh about some science topic (energy I think) that was so ignorant of facts that it made me wonder if any of his claimed knowledge was accurate.
Hansen has proved remarkably prescient, including his claim of rapid loss of sea ice that was far less conservative than the consnsus of his peers.
Apart from Fred Singer, almost every climate denier is clueless about climate modeling and the science behind it. What I find interesting is that the deniers fixate on one detail - global temperatures - trying to find "gotchas" like creationists denying evolution. But as you showed with the Janaese tracking of the onset of the cherry blossom blooms, there is a host of orthoganal data supporting climate change, for example species changes and movements in response to warming - the global "canaries in the coal mine".
Any measured "technological dividend" isn't going to be worth much is the planet looks like the landscape depicted in Blade Runner 2049, or worse, Soylent Green, or any scifi books of the eco or cli-fi genre. As a culture, we pay far too litle regard to the state of the biosphere. It cannot be kept pristine, but there is no good reason to accept allowing it to degrade as we treat it as an exploitable resource. Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" (1970) has the 2 lines that we should remember:
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
Here is an excellent article from the New Yorker featuring a scientist who is a climate realistic. His analysis shows we will probably come up short in our attempts to stop global warming, and we'll have to learn to cope with a warmer climate. Ironically, he's a professor at the Univesity in Winnipeg, so his city will be one of the few places on earth that might benefit. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/vaclav-smil-and-the-value-of-doubt
What I believe Brad, and especially Noah, don't understand when they push growth and criticize the non-growth or "degrowthers" is the scientific S curve. Here's a quote from the article: "...Smil writes that most growth processes—“of organisms, artifacts, or complex systems”—can be plotted on a so-called S-shaped, or sigmoid, growth curve, meaning that the rate of change increases slowly at first, then increases rapidly, then levels off. An error that humans make with similarly predictable regularity is to assume that the nearly vertical middle segment of an S-shaped curve can continue at that angle indefinitely (the price of Dutch tulips in the seventeenth century, the price of bitcoin in the twenty-first). One of his conclusions is that the steady, unceasing economic expansion that economists and politicians dream of is not sustainable, and that the relentless pursuit of growth is environmentally disastrous..."
I have suggested that Brad write a column on growth since economists seem to always be in favor of it. But as you and Smil point out, growth can't go on forever so at some point we're going to have to figure out how to manage de-growth or non-growth.
Brad and Noah Smith have pushed the idea that new technologies will rescue humanity and the climate. (This would be building on ever-new S curves., so that the result is an "ever-increasing exponential curve.) The problems are the unintended consequences (and sometimes intended ones by those in power). I pointed out in one of Brad's recent Briefly Noted posts that: "...the invention of the Haber-Bosch process that helped feed people in the twentieth century has unintentionally wreaked havoc on the world’s healthy soil supply and the oceanic coastal zone. https://animistsramblings.substack.com/p/agriculture-diminishing-returns
Because of that and a global economy that runs on ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels that have fueled climate change, it seems that we may be reaching a point of diminishing returns that could make life miserable for all (or most) of earth’s inhabitants. We are at a point of exponentially increasing environmental decay and exponential technological “progress” (in quotes because we don’t know all the potential negatives). Only time will tell which will win out."
I never got a reply.
One advantage of being a busy professor is that you can pick and choose which questions to answer :)
for certain, finding a path to full sustainability is critical.
Well, yes, the big-bad Oil corps and not-so-thoughtful thought "leaders" are easy targets. But at the end of the day, they were just the pimps, we ourselves the Johns. To this day, a rising cost of gasoline results in everyone voted out ASAP.
I'm not as worried at you, but I wish that everyone who DOES understand that CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere has significant costs would get serious about lighting a fire under politicians to adopt least cost solutions.
In jest: Would this be the rare case where lighting a fire might actually lower CO2 levels?
Poor Roger Pielke! He is still so traumatized by over-the top criticism, he can't bring himself to go beyond refuting Climate Change exaggeration, for whihc there is still a lively market.
"How expensive will the costs of changing our energy system so that in fifty years global warming will stop be?"
It depends. If addressed with a global tax on net emissions of CO2, not much in deadweight loss, certainly less that years of failure to execute FAIT a la Bernanke-Yellen. If addressed through NIMBY-McKibbenism, impeding random fossil fuel production or transpiration projects in Western democracies, the cost will be so much that in 50 years CO2 concentration will still be rising.
See:
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/cop-28-and-counting
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/why-not-lng-exports
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/legal-remedies-for-climate-change
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/legal-remedies-for-climate-change-e7d
And not the AI effect on work and productivity and/or AI prodded changes in biology/materials science? [Plagiarizing Mindscape, here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1qxJI9nc2g&list=PLrxfgDEc2NxY_fRExpDXr87tzRbPCaA5x&index=1 ]
I hope not, because optimizing the CO2 content of the atmosphere ought to be just a lot of investment projects being executed along with gradual shifts in consumer baskets. If it IS a big story it will because we are NOT optimizing the CO2 content of the atmosphere.
How does one "optimize" the CO2 partial pressure of teh atmosphere. Do you value lives lost for the inability to breathe proerly vs the profits/GDP growth? Whose lives can be lost. What about the loss of land from sea level rise? Can you pay a country for its loss. If our gulf coast states become flooded, is some compensation paid? If CO2 increases ocean acidity to the point where organisms that need to deposit calcium carbonate for skeletons and shells cannot do so, do we just say, "Well the jellyfish are OK, learn to eat them instead". We already have found we cannot optimize NOx in cities. The mortality rate rises as part of the price of allowing those emissions from ICE powered vehicles.
Thios is not an optimizing problem. This is a moral one. We should be eliminating as much pollution from our human activities as possible. That mostly means setting very low "acceptable" limits on using the environment as a sink for our wastes, and forcing changes in our methods of production and banning some materials if we cannot stop the pollution.
I note that we did so for chlorofluorocarbons to stop the ozone hole from expanding. Industries did change their practices to accomodate this. [However it has been discovered that illegal manufacture has been going on in Asia, detected by satellite monitoring.]
We are inventive species. It cannot be beyond our collective intelligence to create a global economy that ensures a decent standard of living for everyone without the need to continue extract non-renewable resources because they are the cheapest way to solve a need, rather than the most long-term sustainable method.
The SETI folks have a term L for teh longevity of transmitting intelligent civilizations. Our civilization is rapidly ensuring a short lifetime, somewhere less that a millennium. That is a possible Great Filter in front of us. I would like to think that we, as post-humans will last at least as long a typical species. To do that will take some rethink of how we organize our global civilization to achieve that.
"It cannot be beyond our collective intelligence to create a global economy that ensures a decent standard of living for everyone." I don't think it's a question of intelligence. It's a question of competing self interests. The human race has always consisted of tribal societies, (now called nation states and ethnic groups.) Throughout history cooperation in the face of limited resources has always been very rare.
Absolutely the main problem today now that we have pretty economic wind and solar power is the inaction by governments despite promises made at every COP meeting.
However, what I was suggesting, obviously poorly, that technological developments do not come on demand and take time and funding to develop. For example - better battery technologies for frid storage, lower cost solar PV (using perovskites?), and better materials to insulate homes and replacements for energy hungry cement manufacture. These all require R&D and maybe we will even get breakthrough technologies. [I would particularly like a better way to capture renewable solar energy than large areas of PV panels on the ground (or floating). A fusion breakthrough that works at a smaller scale than the tokamak or laser fusion designs. Inexpensive geothermal would be a nice option too. If we can get the costs down with enabling technologies, space-based solar energy beamed to teh surface would solve our energy needs for a long time to come.
"If our gulf coast states become flooded, is some compensation paid?" An excellent question. IMO this is the problem with the "loss and damage fund" dreamed up at COP 27. It is quite likely that first world nations with relatively temperate climates will suffer from climate change too. Paradise, CA, Lahaina HI, tornados in the Midwest, droughts and heat waves in Europe. All are reasons why developed nations might renege on giving money to poor countries who are also dealing with global warming.
They already have, effectively. I believe only a fraction of the already inadequate $100bn amount has been coughed up. IMO, there is a problem that India is a recipient even as it is one of the worst coal burning countries. Any aid should be used to shut down these powerplants and replace them with renewables.
If major US coastal cities become flooded, e.g. Miami, Charleston, even New York, the cost of protection or just "relocation" will dwarf any possible economic mitigation costs. This is the cost of business as usual and kicking the can down the road to avoid doiing the right actions today. Then you have countries like Britain and teh petro-states intent on extracting and burning "every last drop" in defiance of the need to leave fossil fuels untapped. This is gamesmanship rather than understanding the need to collectively agree, and DO, the right thing. Foot dragging, lying, and cheating, because profits, is going to prove a major problem for humanity before the end of this century, and will get worse thereafter.
Why do you suppose that lives lost have no cost? All the things you mention are costs of ultimate CO2 concentrations? The greater value we place on these losses, the higher the tax on the net emissions. And do you think that there are not lives implied by the deadweight losses of the tax?
Eliminate as much CO2 emissions as possible? What constrains the possible?
"What constrains the possible?" Technology, and willingness to act against vested interests. Recall how the Bush Administraion GOP in Congress tried to gut any NASA research into CO2 levels using new satellites. [Reminiscent of the earlier denial of any government funding of firearms research.] Recall teh pushback on the Obama adminsitration's funding of clean energy development, while maintaining direct fossil fuel subsidences and indirect subsidies like military actions {"Why is our oil under their sand?" - commonly expressed sentiment.] Then there is the privileged pushback of NIMBYism - no windfarms near my property, or offshore even if below the horizon. The national competitions also caused inaction - "Why should we phase our fossil fuels at a cost to our economy if China does not do the same?" - a common refrain in teh 1990s and still heard today, and obviously national interests still trump global community needs.
As they say about looking for ET intelligence, and why haven't we been visited. The answer is ET detects no real intelligence in our global civilization, so no need to visit. Klaatu is not going to help save us with a warning and ultimatum. We seem to be on a self-destructive path, with the corporations acting as AIs intent on turning all reduced carbon to CO2 and $$$$. That is our "paperclip problem" that seems really hard to prevent.
Yes, producer play a role, but I think the real problem is that the public is not yet behind taxing net emissions and "activist are not helping persuade them.
Which public and which activists? I would also note that the reports on teh recent oil meeting shows that the oil and gas companies are actively pursuing more extraction and have no intention of curbing production or emissions. I expect this nonsense from nations dependent on oil revenues, but not the comapnies based in the West. Mu understanding is that the banks continue to fund exploration and extraction despite previous claims they would reduce that funding. Greed rules. Activism has basically failed, to teh point where more extreme activism is annoying the public (I certainly do not condone destroying works of art as publicity stunts.) But clearly, there is no reason why governments could change the rules to make oil and gas more expensive, force windfall taxes on companies benefitting from supply shortages, and subsidizing energy conservation and renewables. But only a few countries in Europe seem to be taking this seriously. The reality is that business as usual and not upsetting powerful industries remains the problem. The USA has very low taxes on gasoline compared to Europe, but Americans seem to believe they have a God-given-right to drive gas guzzling vehicles, an attitude promulgated by the auto companies that prefer to sell big, profitable vehicles.
Often mortality "cost" is just given as a statistic. "cost of the action was X lives.". However, monetization of social costs has been done for global warming, and as we know, the values for carbon emissions (not CO2 levels) vary widely. Obviously we value some lives more than others based on age, income, longevity, country, etc. As we shrug our shoulders as Pacific islands drwon with sea level rise, clearly some lives are of low importance.
The estimation of the social cost cost of carbon is not well understood. From the first ref below:
"The social cost of carbon (SCC) is arguably the single most important concept in the economics of climate change1. It represents the marginal social damage from emitting one metric ton of carbon dioxide-equivalent at a certain point in time2. According to standard economic theory, it represents the price that should be put on carbon dioxide to reduce emissions to socially optimal levels along the optimal emissions trajectory3. The SCC has been highly influential in informing climate policy. For example, regulations with benefits totaling over $1 trillion in the United States have used the SCC in their economic analysis1. The SCC is commonly estimated using climate-economy integrated assessment models (IAMs), which synthesize the state of scientific knowledge to inform policy4,5. Climate-economy IAMs that produce an SCC also project the optimal path of future emissions by comparing climate damages with the cost of reducing emissions.
Despite the theoretical and policy importance of the SCC, many commentaries have argued that current estimates of the SCC remain inadequate5–12. One major line of criticism is that IAMs do not represent the latest scientific understanding of climate impacts. Although substantial advances in climate impact research have been made in recent years, IAMs are still omitting a significant portion of likely damages13,14. Another major line of criticism is that a wide variety of climate damages—sea level rise, extreme weather, the direct effects of heat on productivity, agricultural impacts, and many more—must be monetized and summarized into a single number, and the relative contribution of these damages is often unclear11,13,15. In addition, the magnitude of climate damages is sensitive to subjective choices around the monetization of non-market damages, and, since damages occur over long timescales, the discount rate at which future damage is converted into present value5,10,11,15.
One source of climate damages not updated to the latest scientific understanding in IAMs is the effect of climate change on human mortality. A 2017 National Academy of Sciences report specifically mentioned mortality as a damage source that could be immediately updated in IAMs5. A large body of literature suggests that climate change is likely to have a significant effect on temperature-related mortality16–56. A Lancet report concluded that “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century”16. Yet, climate-mortality damages are currently limited in the most widely used IAMs."
The article suggests total excess mortality to 2100 due to global warming of over 2C is 80+ million. This seems like a huge underestimate. It also doesn;t account for morbidity.
Mortality costs for CO2 emissions
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8322393/
This second reference notes that estimates of mortality cost can be calculated in a widely different ways. In th US, the invidual value on a life is over $10m, yet actualy payouts in cases of accidendents, and even civil fines for PD caused unnecessary homicides is far less.
Different mortality cost methods for Covid-19
https://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284273
In 1943, a British government caused famine in Bengal resulted in teh deaths of betweem 0.8 to 3.8m million people. The higher end would represent nearly 10% of the British population at the time. This for one small part of teh world. Imagine teh scale when "warming" causes mass crop failures, let alone the likely nth order effects of viiolence, war, disease, etc.
Example of famine mortality in Bengal by UK government decsion to send the crops to Bitain during WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
All the SCC estimates are really for relatively low temperature increases, with relatively small environmental declines and a "nusiness as usual" scenarios. But as we know from history, civilizations collapse under a few coincident shocks. Unless we believe "this time it is really different", then the effects og heating the planet will cause a number of shocks - rising cost of food (as with Covid), famines, water shortages, increased violence over lack of water (as seen in the Middle east), tropical diseases affecting the temperate zones, morbidity and mortality impacting businesses damaging the economy, food chain collapses, especially in the ocean, and so on. The total death toll could be in the billions, and that excludes morbidity, just as long-Covid has affected a fraction of the population causing disability. There is even a link between heat and Alzheimers.
TL;DR, the real social cost cost of CO2 may be far higher than current estimates. If the cost is civilization collapse, then is any price not worth paying to mitigate the problem by removing CO2 emissions and even reversing the emissions we have generated since the industrial revolution? IOW, thinking we can otimize for CO2 levels, even if enforcement was possible (and history says not), we are fooling ourselves.
So what is the alternative? Use less effective measures to reduce CO2 emissions?
Powerful vested interests in the US, China, India, and Russia continue to deny global warming, if not in word, then in deed. Future generations will hate us, and they will have every right to.
How much of 2023-4 is an El Nino outlier, and how much is the start of a vicious cycle caused by arctic heat that is melting the reflective ice, thawing methane, and altering atmospheric and ocean circulation? Once we enter disequilibrium, can we stop at any point? Or are there stretches of global temperature where long-term equilibrium is now impossible? I fear we cannot stop at 2 or 3 degrees regardless of what we do now.
The people I talk to who might actually understand this think it is predominantly an El Niño outlier...
I no longer take the bait. This is a loser's game and highly unproductive: "For every (tut-tut) 'fact' you can find supporting your silly position I can find TWO facts supporting mine. So there." A winner's game is from Teddy R et. al.: do what you can where you are with what. you have". (There's no oh shut up in there but it comes close.) Anyway, baring hubris and megalomania and thermodynamics that are flat-out wrong, Mr. Entrepreneur (ahem) has figured out cooling, renewable water, and air- and plastic-pollution (not all THAT difficult) such that it has a favorable LCOE (that was nasssty, nasssty, nassty). (I'm saving efficiency over unity for next week.) The upshot, "Code Red for Humanity!" or no, is we don't have the tools. The same was true pre- cotton gin, Wright brothers, Henry Ford, and so on. I can't say that I invent snarky apothegms. They pop in there. An applicable one here is, "The volume of blame is inversely proportional to the availability of workable, shared solutions." This -- where the antecedent of mud-slinging is, to be delicate, not mud -- too shall pass.
Adding to the argument, over here [ https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-wm-aem/global/pb/en/insights/eye-on-the-market/Vaclav.pdf ] Vaclav Smil finds that there's no feasible path for an energy transition that would get us to net zero by 2050 or close to that (or, to put it in another way, that the cost of doing so would be so big that there's no politically feasible way to make it happen). He's not arguing that we shouldn't do it as fast as possible, but that "as fast as possible" still leaves as with a lot of damage to deal with along the way.
One of my fears is that as things deteriorate the "we don't need to do anything" side will switch to misrepresenting "we can't do this cheaply and avoiding all damage" to "there's nothing that can be done" --- there are severe collective actions problems here, so if you dedicate all resources to mitigation and adaptation (and/or sociopolitical control, border patrols, and so on) instead of decarbonification, we might get to even higher emissions than we're accounting for.
For the record I don't think it's the most likely outcome in this extreme way; there's probably enough money in the energy transition, and the cultural shift is relatively strong enough, that it won't be stopped, but I don't see a surfeit of strategic maturity and long-term planning going around across the biggest countries and/or most influential uber-rich.
(Side question: I almost typed "oligarch"; would it make sense to stop using it mainly for the ones in Russia and include Musk et al? They have much more power and independence that their financial peers in Russia --- or just less of a tendency to fall out of windows.)
Yes on the US oligarchs.
I could not tell from the Simil piece what the policy framework was that would not be enough.
But he may be right. We need a higher tax on net emissions than Nordhaus estimates. But it's quite irrelevant from a policy perspective. The optimal tax is a trajectory of rates in any scenario and the models will need to be re-run every year or so to recalculate the trajectory. We just need to keep our hand on the steering wheel and adjust to changing estimates of costs and changing estimates of cost of avoidance/removal.
We should be treating global heating as if it was a war. But we have a lot of foot-dragging as politics, supposedly the art of the possible, cannot seem to be used in the interests of humanity rather than the powerful.
There is also the issue of technological development. In teh 1970s, solar panels were thermal panels, not photovoltaic (except for high value, or niche applications). The cost has only declined precipitously in the 21st century, and arguably due to Chinese production. Wind turbines have fared well, but again, offshore wind farms are mainly a 21st century phenomenon. (Just look at how primitive those small turbines in California's Altamont Pass look in comparison.) Back in the early1970s I believed fusion was the future for clean, centralized electricity production. It may still be, but 50 years later, I am still waiting... [The cold fusion excitement was rather a "Back to the Future", Mr. Fusion-like fantasy that reasonably quickly was debunked.] 2050, and what was a 1.4C target maximum increase will palmost certainly not happen. (I won't be around to see that date anyway.) But that doesn't mean we should be as aggressive as possible in stimulating technological development on a number of fronts, just as happens in wartime. The aim should be to limit the damage, rather than trying to preserve the value of damaging industries. I have every confidence that the economy wouldn't collapse if we make a rapid transition. No doubt the new technologies will also generate new problems, but that has always been the case. Global heating will cause crop failures, water shortages, diseases, and changes to ways of life, but also stimualte new crop development, healthcare treatments, and new ways to live and work. What we must avoid at all costs is desperate nations or non-state actors causing a nuclear conflagration in response to these stresses. That really will set back whatever little remains of humanity.
I understand your meaning, but actually we need to treat ACC as a cost benefit problem, not a war. In war you are not looking for an optimal amount of defeat of the opponent. :)
I disagree. Cost/benefit analyses are fine when you can decide not to do anything with a negative net benefit. However, both war and global heating are existential risks. There is no option but to fight this enemy/"enemy". Cost/benefit analyses can only hope to indicate the best way to fight, even if teh analyses just show teh least negative benefit. In war you decide which armaments and manpower to develop and fund to maximize the probability of a win. The US however, just spends almost as much as it likes to maintain the post-WWII Pax Americana, despite the cost of not funding necessary infrastructure and social systems at home. Both the US and UK accumulated a great deal of debt by the end of WWII, but that was worth it to defeat the Axis powers that would have darkened Europe for a long time (100-year Reich?) and even the US would have had to live with Nazi domination in Europe and possibly the US mainland, while Japan would have controlled the Pacific and Asia. The cost in lives and treasure was worth it to preserve democracy. Britain went into decline after WWII, and has continued its relative decline to this day. Despite this, I don't belive anyone in Britain would have preferred domination by Nazi Germany for the last 3/4 century.
The problem we face is that it is a global problem, not a national one. Global heating has to be fought as if it was a war against an alien invasion, not a game to "win" against other nations, an approach that is often the reason for inaction.
I do not see any substantive difference in our view except from my aversion to the "war" analogy.
If that is the case, then I am happy we have common ground on this issue. ;-)
This seems worthy of wide(r) distribution, in which case I suggest you first get some friendly editor to remove the FT’s T&C nattering about your fair-use quotation and some ragged sentences