The New York Times reports that as climate alarmist catastrophists have painted the threat from global warming in increasingly extreme terms a more scientific middle ground school of thought has developed in reaction to the catastrophists.
They agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging.
“Climate change presents a very real risk,” said Carl Wunsch, a climate and oceans expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It seems worth a very large premium to insure ourselves against the most catastrophic scenarios. Denying the risk seems utterly stupid. Claiming we can calculate the probabilities with any degree of skill seems equally stupid.”
I agree with this insurance premium argument. We can't prove either disaster or minimal impact. The amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) increase is large and, with rapidly industrialziing China set to surpass the United States in CO2 emissions by 2009, the massive change in atmospheric CO2 content accelerating. It seems unwise to me to take a passive stance in response to this thread. I've been arguing that it is simply imprudent to do nothing.
My own argument for what to do: A massive research effort to develop cheaper non-fossil fuel energy sources. This approach holds several advantages, not least of which is that it will accelerate rather than decelerate economic growth in the medium to long term
Prometheus web log author Roger A. Pielke Jr. (who writes great stuff btw) says this middle group are not so much climate skeptics as they are heretics on what to do about it.
There are enough experts holding such views that Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist and blogger at the University of Colorado, Boulder, came up with a name for them (and himself): “nonskeptical heretics.”
“A lot of people have independently come to the same sort of conclusion,” Dr. Pielke said. “We do have a problem, we do need to act, but what actions are practical and pragmatic?”
One practical and pragmatic thing to do is to decrease methane emissions. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas and the costs of lowering methane emissions are lower than the costs of lowering CO2 emissions.
Mike Hulme, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research says as environmental political activists have adopted a more catastrophist approach he finds himself getting criticised by catatstrophist believers as well as by warming skeptics.
It seems that mere "climate change" was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be "catastrophic" to be worthy of attention.
The increasing use of this pejorative term - and its bedfellow qualifiers "chaotic", "irreversible", "rapid" - has altered the public discourse around climate change.
This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as "climate change is worse than we thought", that we are approaching "irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate", and that we are "at the point of no return".
I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric.
It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns.
Catastrophe movies are exciting and the prospects of catastrophe in real life even more exciting. Plus, lots of people want to think they are fighting in a moral crusade for a great good against evil and ignorance. They think they need to paint an extremely disastrous picture of the future in order to motivate people. So the prospect of global warming has a lot to offer. Plus, Mother Gaia is morally superior to us human enviro-sinners. Never mind that we are the products or creations of Mother Gaia. We fell out of Eden somehow or other when Mother Gaia's natural selection made us too intelligent.
The biggest problem with the catastrophe scenarios is that they involve projections of trends that will not continue even if governments around the world do little to alter current trends. While fossil fuel consumption will likely rise for a decade or two the march of technology looks set to obsolesce fossil fuel even without government intervention. Nuclear, photovoltaics, batteries, and wind will all get cheaper and eventually their costs will fall below the costs of fossil fuels.
But we have several quite compelling reasons to take steps to bring the fossil fuel era to an earlier end. For example fossil fuel usage produces conventional pollutants such as particulates, mercury, and oxides of sulfur and nitrogen. Why expose ourselves to pollutants? Why let the neurotoxin mercury accumulate in the food chains for fish? Why breathe carcinogens and stuff that makes our eyes sting and our throats hurt?
The deep skeptic school on global warming is also making an economic mistake. They correctly point out that restraints on CO2 emissions will raise the price of energy and therefore slow economic growth and lower living standards. But when they fail to push instead for a huge acceleration of nuclear, solar, wind, and other non-fossil fuel technology development they miss the opportunity to help create technologies that lower energy costs and clean up environments at the same time.
Additional advantages of a big R&D push comes from the effects on trade. First off, the need for expensive energy imports will vanish along with the need for oil. US trade deficits will get smaller. Also, my grandmother always used to say "Idle hands are the devil's workshop". That certainly holds true for Wahhabi Middle Eastern oil emirates where oil allows plenty of Muslims to live the life of Riley (or his Arab equivalent). Fewer people would become terrorists if more had to get up each day and go to work. The cut-off of money for Saudi Arabia would also cut off money now used to spread Wahhibi Islam around the globe.
We have the real potential for large technological steps forward (e.g. nanodevice replicators to produce incredibly cheap photovoltaics) to make oil obsolete and to make clean energy sources very cheap. The late Richard Smalley, nanomaterials researcher and 1996 Nobel Prize winner for his work on fullerenes ("buckeyballs"), argued for a $10 billion a year research effort on a wide range of energy technologies and believed such an effort would lead to big breakthroughs in cost and cleanliness of energy technologies. This effort is worth doing even if the global warming skeptics are correct. Lower energy costs, reduced flow of money to the Middle East, and a cleaner environment each by themselves will pay back the money spent.
If we fail to do anything to accelerate the development of new energy technologies and the projections of the global warming catastrophists turn out correct then we will not suffer ruin by any means. The nanotechnology advances we gain in the next 50 years will make movement of equipment into space much cheaper. Nanotech beanstalk space elevators will lower costs by orders of magnitude. We'll be able to move up massive amounts of materials to build big deflector satellites to cool off the poles to stop and reverse ice melts. Climate engineering technologies will save us from catastrophe. But we can become wealthier and healthier sooner by accelerating the development of clean and cheap energy technologies.
By Randall Parker at 2007 January 07 03:34 PM Policy Climate | TrackBackI'm from central Iowa so I have a lot of friends and relatives in the insurance business. Unsolicited I hear that the insurance industry is being decimated by the changing weather patterns.
Reinsurance networks _should_ be doing something about this if they were rational.
They're not.
Fix the market failure and you fix global warming.
Roger Pielke Jr. is an associate professor of environmental studies. You may wish to flag the quote that he is a "political scientist" and note a correction.
There is some aspects of global warming and fossil fuel energy that are controversial.
What I think should not be controversial
1. Coal and fossil fuel pollution kills hundreds of thousands if not a million people per year
from premature lung disease etc... 27000 in the USA according to the American lung assoc.
Sick and dieing people have a cost burden on medical systems.
2. When you mountain top removal mine, you often remove old growth forest and then replace decades later
with younger trees.
3. Coal mining moves material and is more dangerous. Moving the billions of tons. More miners die.
Statistically more accidents moving millions of freight cars and trucks of coal.
4. Mercury from coal is building up in fish.
5. Arsenic from coal also causes health problems
6. 20,000 tons of uranium and thorium are put into the air every year from coal energy use
Somewhat controversial for political but not factual reasons
7. Wars are fought over oil
So we do need insure against our current global climate experiment. (We are currently
tossing billions of tons of coal waster into the air each year and seeing what will happen)
Plus we need to weigh the costs in lives and environmental damage that we know for sure is being made.
The cost is not small. For the USA, 27000 premature dead per year is more than 25 times the 1000 US dead each year in Iraq.
It could also be calculated in terms of numbers of Hiroshima deaths (how many times 100,000 per year.) For the US alone,
every 4 years coal is Hiroshimaing the US population
RP -
Although I would classify myself as a global warming skeptic, I agree with your approach. The US needs to begin phasing out its dependence on fossil fuels even if burning them contributes little or nothing towards global warming. Take coal, for example. Burning it emits not only CO2 but also mercury and particulates, which are undeniably harmful. Plus, coal mining is a dangerous business, and a number of miners die every year. Nuclear power is an excellent alternative. With regard to petroleum, a reasonable short-term goal (say, 10-15 years) is to eliminate imports from politically unstable areas, such as the Middle East, Venezuela and Nigeria (Canada and Mexico would still be OK). This could be achieved by a combination of modest conservation, maximum development of existing sources (Alaska, near-shore and outer continental shelf) plus oil sands/shale. It might necessitate a tax to maintain the price of oil in the $70-80/barrel range, but so what. Longer term goals (maybe 20-30 years) should include phasing out the internal combustion engine with a new technology such as fuel cells, improved batteries or something else. With such a broad area of agreement between global warming proponents and skeptics, it should be relatively easy to do this, but don't count on it. When the Democrats try to block new Alaska and offshore drilling, I'm sure they will find that our good friends Hugo Chavez and the Iranian mullahs agree with them.
As to whether human activity contributes much to global warming, I remain deeply skeptical. Yes, there are experts who swear it's so, but other experts totally disagree with them. Too many promoters seem like Al Gore, who warns us about all the bad things we're doing to the planet while he lives in an 11,000 square foot home and flies around the country in a private jet. Just recently, I read an article about one of Al's favorite topics, the shrinking Arctic ice cap. This was in a respected publication, "Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute" (unfortunately not available online). It points out that, as the ice cap shrinks, summertime navigation of the Arctic Ocean will be possible, knocking off about 4,000 miles of the trip between Europe and Asia. It also mentions that the last time the ice cap shrank to this extent was about 1 million years ago, during a period of intense global warming. Guess it was all those cavemen driving their SUV's.
I see that Roger Pielke Jr. does hold a doctorate in political science, so I should not have looked askance at that characterization.
In Cambridge MA there wasn't a hard frost this year until the first week of December. I can still work the ground in my community garden plot in January. Last Saturday I saw petunias blooming on Mass Ave, petunias which had survived all the way into January (so maybe that frost wasn't all that hard). Seems to me that something's definitely different from other years.
Fact is, if I had a magic wand and could end all human-generated greenhouse gas releases from this moment forward - poof! - it would take a century or more to come back to "equilibrium," whatever that is, and the thermal inertia already present in the oceans would probably cause possibly dire changes.
Add to those facts that it seems we're a year past world oil peak (December 2005 seems to be when we hit peak) and we have trouble, right here in River City.
The international reinsurance industry has been discussing and warning us about climate change since the 1990s, thanks to Greenpeace's lobbying. It took about 20 years for those discussions to filter down to the insurance commissioners in the 50 US states who just began their study of the issue a year or so ago. We don't have 20 years left to make the necessary changes. We may not have one year left. We should have made the changes when Jimmy Carter suggested we get 20% of our energy from renewables by the year 2000. But Reagan put the kibosh on that, thank you very much.
I'm glad I have my solar LED lights and modified a solar/dynamo or two so I can charge AA batteries. Never too late to start saving yourself but it is way too late to save "the American way of life" no matter how many nuclear power plants or advanced battery R and D projects you start. Anybody who tells you you can keep all your toys and make the changes without pain and sacrifice is lying.
James Bowery,
The intensity of hurricances runs in multi-decade cycles. We've entered the more intense part of the cycle. Yet this last season has been pretty mild on hurricanes. Hurricane researchers (e.g. Chris Landsea) think the argument that global warming is responsible for increased hurricane activity is premature. There's a lot of natural variability with hurricanes.
gmoke,
A warm winter in Massachusetts is not proof of global warming. It is the result of a shift of a weather pattern over the Atlantic that is analogous to the Los Ninos/La Nina (sp?) cycle over the Pacific. I just read an article about this. Researchers think it is due to changes in the lower stratosphere. They do not understand it as well as they understand the Pacific pattern which is chiefly driven by ocean temperature fluctuations.
R&D: Yes, technological advances can let us have very high living standards and high energy use societies.
Brian Wang,
I agree with all your points. Yes, coal kills people. So does oil. They make us less healthy. We can afford a cleaner environment.
Also, war is a lot more expensive than research that'll make oil obsolete. Plus, the wars do not even help. Whoever controls the oil is going to sell it.
Ned,
The majority are going to vote against high oil taxes. I'm curious, do you live in an urban, suburban, or rural environment? The further you go away from high density living and the longer the average trip to work the greater the opposition to oil taxes.
I have a few issues with the Carl’s statement below that you quote.
“Climate change presents a very real risk,” said Carl Wunsch, a climate and oceans expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It seems worth a very large premium to insure ourselves against the most catastrophic scenarios. Denying the risk seems utterly stupid. Claiming we can calculate the probabilities with any degree of skill seems equally stupid.”
Let me start with the assertion that “climate change presents a very real risk” made by Carl. Yes, it does if it is extreme. What data do we have for the assertion? I will say very little. First, we are seeing warming since the last ice age. The temperature change is in no way very significant. We know this from the historical record. We also see that the natural changes we have experienced have been minimal. This leaves us only with forecasted changes. On this front we have very little solid data to suggest material problems. The models used to forecast temperature change are very weak. Both from a forecast error perspective and an in sample forecasting perspective. The models predict temperature ranges that are huge. In addition, we have not seen any material change in ocean levels despite model predictions.
Now we can only insure when we have know probabilities that are rare. Carl's assertion that we cannot calculate cats is partially true. To the extent to which it is true is the extent to which we really cannot insure. Likewise if the probability is near one we will not be able to insure the event.
What are insurance companies paying out to cats - a lot. Is this s real problem? No. The market has reacted well to date. Please remember that Insurance companies made out very well this year. It is important for them to justify their premiums. Whether or not insurance companies are paying out large sums is not the material question. The more material question is are they willing to continue and are people willing to pay the price asked by insurance companies. Please remember that car companies pay out ~95 cents of very dollar in premium they take in every year in the car business.
The skeptics are correct on the economic front as well. The least sophisticated will argue that green 'creates more jobs' which is incorrect. Politicians always talk about job creation to bolster some point. "Anti abortion legislation will create more jobs in the day care industry."
But Randall's ecoomic point also doesn't follow from experience. There are already billions of dollars being invested in numerous alternative energy projects around the world. Recently, solar seems to be satuturated due to a recent influx of investment in 2005 and 2006. And steadily decreasing costs in solar shows a steady decrease in costs over decades, independent of government spending. This is most naotable when the Reagan Administation cut investment in solar as progress marched on.
Perhaps it is possible that a very high amount of investment could nudge progress, yet that is toward the range well beyond what the public is willing to pay for likely small gains.
As an anology, had the U.S. government poured in $100 billion a year into chip making, would we have had a Pentuim IV quality chip in 1985 or 1990? Almost certainly not.
RP -
I think your statement about taxes is correct. What is really needed is some sort of elastic tax to keep the price of oil high enough to make alternative fuels economically feasible. Most alternative fuels have high up-front capital costs that discourage investors if the future price of oil is likely to plummet, as has happened in the past. I think what you are really saying is that the political class lacks the will to anything about these problems, in spite of the obvious need to end our dependence on petroleum imports from hostile/unstable nations and the rather compelling case to start moving away from burning fossil fuels. Bush has talked about our addiction to oil but characteristically didn't do anything about it, and the Donkeycrats are at least as bad, if not worse. But why should any of us be surprised? This is the same gang that keeps piling on Medicare benefits and refuses to do anything about Social Security, even though both programs are clearly headed toward financial catastrophe. But the crash won't occur during their terms in office, so they will let someone else worry about it.
By the way, I live in a semirural area of the Upper Midwest.
An engineered solution to de facto warming might also be very cheap.
For example: an array of mirrors on the ground to reflect sunlight. 4 questions to answer:
How much energy would you need to remove in order to get a significant change?
What is the corresponding area of ground reflectors?
What is the current cost in materials and assembly of such an array?
What will that cost be with robotics/early nano-tech?
My order of magnitude guess is that in 15 years, spending 1B on a mirror array would be enough to counter the greenhouse gases produced in the entire US. Add a solar-heat based generation system that also offsets non-green electricity generation, and it becomes even more obvious.
This isn't very troubling. I agree with all the energy policy recommendations in the post.
Do you think it is a coincidence that the people that complain loudest about global warming also, historically, have complained loudly about the engines of production and capitalism for decades?
I am pro-production and capitalism.
I think the climate mediation methods (creating an artificial cooling effect like Mt Pinatubo by tossing a million tons of sulfur into the air) will have some effect to counter warming. However, as I noted that does not address the other coal or oil effects.
I think that energy costs can be made cheaper and more clean.
In the near term that is to start up-powering current nuclear reactors (can be boosted 50% with more safety based on MIT research) and mass producing nuclear fission reactors. Simultaneously we develop Thorium reactors which can process the long lived waste. We also push wind and solar and conservation and biofuels. Biofuels needs to get boosted with genetic modification. Wind added 12GW of power in 2005 and is growing at 20-40% per year. Large kite wind systems look interesting since a single system could generate multi-GW of power.
Solar should target more highly scalable approaches. Some promising ones are in development. Scalable means being able lay out thousands of square miles of solar in the deserts. 3 to 9 kWh/m²/day in the USA possible. Using 20% conversion rate, then 0.6 to 1.8 kWh/m²/day. Electricity 3,656,000,000,000 kWh for the USA and 15,405,656,120,000 kWh for the world. 10,000,000,000 m² of solar needed for USA current electrical needs. 100km by 100km. 60 miles by 60 miles. Pentium production did end up needing many billion dollar plants. Ask AMD whether Intels higher budget for plants if that helped Intel get each generation of chips out a couple of years sooner. How about the various government assistance programs to the big computer component manufacturers around the world. Would South Korea or Taiwan or Japan have had the various dominant market shares of particular computer components without gov't help ?
The money needs to be spread around based on the readiness of each technology.
"...to help create technologies that lower energy costs and clean up environments at the same time."
Idealistic utopian nonese.
There ain't such things in the real world.
Oil (or coal) extraction is cheap (even when the selling price is high) 3-15$/barrel. Oil may be running out, but there will never be another energy source that cheap. Alternate energy sources may be found but they will not be cheap, neither will they "clean up the environment" - they will also pollute to some degree or other. There is no free lunch, no cheap, pollution free, energy.
As to a research effort into alternate energy sources: it is beeing done by the market forces. Every scientist, enterpreneur or venture capitalist would just love to come up with some new energy source. Research is being done.
What you mean perhaps is that Government isn't sinking enough dollars of money taxed away from people into your favotite projects. Well, it won't help. Government taxation only makes us poorer, and poor people aren't good at scientific breakthroughs.
Global warming might be a problem (and it might not), people, acting in the free maqrket, will produce all the solutions needed.
The possibility that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are having a significant effect on the climate, while not as firm as the AGW warming theorists would have us believe, is significant enough that at the very least, we should look at "dual-use" countermeasures. That is, if a means of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions also has other substantial benefits -- including, as noted above, reducing the trade deficit; stopping enriching hostile or quasi-hostile oil suppliers and reducing our dependence on same; reducing harmful "classical" air pollution; hedging against future fossil-fuel sources -- then it should be adopted enthusiastically. That way, even if AGW proves not to be as substantial a problem as some are speculating, we still get at least some return on our investment.
On the other hand, a strictly regulatory or tax-based approach will simply impose costs for the sole purpose of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions -- with the result that if AGW proves less significant, the investment (actually, the opportunity costs) inherent in a regulatory or tax-based scheme will be sunk without being offset by any peripheral returns. In addition, we will have grafted another stultifying layer of bureaucracy onto the government, which will (like most bureaucracies) take on a constituency of its own, and be hard to get rid of even after it's shown to be pointless.
The deep skeptic school on global warming is also making an economic mistake. They correctly point out that restraints on CO2 emissions will raise the price of energy and therefore slow economic growth and lower living standards. But when they fail to push instead for a huge acceleration of nuclear, solar, wind, and other non-fossil fuel technology development they miss the opportunity to help create technologies that lower energy costs and clean up environments at the same time.
For all the talk about so-called "renewable energy" (there is no such thing) some basic structural problems remain which no amount of research can fix. All are intermittent. I, for one, prefer my refrigerator to run 24 hours a day, every day. If power is interrupted for too long, I've just lost hundreds of dollars of food and the kids milk.
Solar power, besides being more expensive, is available only 12 hours a day maximum, and it's much less in winter in N America. In that time when the surface is exposed to the sun, the sun is often blocked. When there is heavy cloud cover, the power hitting the ground is significantly less than for an unobstructed sun.
Wind power is available only when the wind is blowing. And it's usefulness for power generation probably requires some minimum wind speed, which I suspect depends on the type of wind turbine. Notably, in heat waves, the root cause is normally a stationary high. No wind, no wind power.
That is, there are going to be times when you'll have neither wind nor solar energy available. For these times you need traditional power sources. That's right, wind and solar can't replace traditional power, they are an expensive supplement to traditional power. Wind and solar increase energy prices (you pay for it whether you use it or not, it gets factored into your power bill) without in any way lessening our need for traditional power sources.
They may make sense for individual homes or businesses, if you have the money and space. For most of us they make no economic sense except for small unimportant tasks like those solar edge lights.
Nuclear is the only energy source that will provide what we need, and many are quite opposed to nuclear. And apparently despite 3rd generation nuclear being on the drawing board, the new plants that are being built are all of 30 year old designs, which limits the available fuel supply by quite a bit.
I should have said that more precisely. Instead of clean up the environment. Less polluting and deadly than coal. Lower energy costs should be competitive and affordable energy costs and ultimately lower energy costs.
Oil extraction is cheap:
Who cares what the extraction price is. All in costs are what matters.
There is no free lunch.
Apparently there has been some free lunch for the oil and coal companies.
Coal companies have not had to pay for the environmental damage or deaths that they have caused.
Idealistic Utopian nonsense:
Jacob you have an idealistic utopian market economy view. I support in general markets that are more free, but you are choosing to ignore the imperfections in the current system.
Who pays for the 27,000 deaths from lung cancer and asthma and other diseases that are caused by coal? Not the coal companies except for their own employees.
This is cost that society pay with higher medical costs and health coverage costs. All other aspects of the economy are being taxed to fund coal and oil.
The medical care funding crisis is something that is made worse by the pollution being generated by coal.
Nothing will be as cheap as oil.
I would be happy to just see less bureaucracy being loaded onto nuclear power. In China, companies can make a new nuclear plant in 4 years just like the US could in the 1950's and 1960's before the bureaucracy. Nuclear killed 50 with the Chernobyl even and up to 4000 may die in the future. The full 4000 deaths is about 2-4 days of coal deaths.
Governments are distorting the markets. If the distortions were more balanced, then things would be better.
Although since the governments do spend money on projects then I think better rational choices should be made. Instead of flushing a trillion dollars on something that does not buy us any security, they should mass produce nuclear reactors so that no oil or coal would be needed. A few thousand reactors (France gets 75% of its power fro nuclear.). Then the middle east can be like Africa. A place where they kill each other and no one cares. Research that is currently ongoing to detect nuclear weapons and material remotely can be used as means to surgically first strike the marginal powers if need be.
Ultimately solar power space satellites would provide energy that does not pollute the earth's biosphere. In the medium term (2-3 decades), Thorium liquid flouride reactors can have pollution that is easily contained and not as long lived. If you need to be convinced then read the information that is here
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/
It is quite a bit of info and involves nuclear fuel cycles. I doubt Jacob will look it with an open mind, but I reference it anyway
"gmoke,
A warm winter in Massachusetts is not proof of global warming."
That's not what I wrote and it is not something I would ever write or say. Seems to me you are building a strawman and pinning my name to it. I don't appreciate that. I believe you owe me an apology.
What fascinating article. We get one side painted as "environmental campaigners, former Vice President Al Gore and some scientists" being discussed alongside, "Conservative politicians and a few scientists, many with ties to energy companies." Of course, there is no legitimate counter-argument or opposition to anthropogenic global climate change, only biased politicians and scientists tied to those evil energy companies. Why does the NYT traffic in such idiotic contrasts?
Nonetheless, the middle ground, according to the NYT, focuses on, "a policy of reducing vulnerability to all climate extremes while building public support for a sustained shift to nonpolluting energy sources." That's interesting. Reduce vulnerability to all climate extremes? What does this mean? This priority seems to rest on the vastly arrogant proposition that nearly wiped out several species in Yellowstone Park, i.e., that humans have any clue how to "manage" the earth's climate.
Oh and it was surprising to see James hansen spring up in this article. Is this the same James Hansen that allegedly had been muzzled by the administration? And here is asserting that scientists have been too quiet for too long. That is the height of hilarity. Too quiet? That's incredible.
Beyond these minor complaints...isn't the real middle ground always firmly rested on the position that the climate is in constant change and that whatever the human impact, we simply do not understand that impact nor have the ability to mitigate that impact? That seems to be a middle ground between the alarmists and those completely denying human impacts.
The climate change argument is one that people like John M wants to say is unknown.
John. Do you think there is a case to be made that temperatures a warmer now in the past two decades?
Do you think putting 6 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year makes things warmer or colder or unknown ?
Do you think that putting that much carbon into the air is a good experiment to keep running if we do not know the impact? What do you think the risk is for continuing to run this experiment.
Impact that can be clearly understood, as I indicated.
Pollution deaths. Mining deaths. Transportation of coal deaths.
Is there any doubt John that coal pollution can kill and cause health problems.
Are you feeding your infants and small children fish like Tuna?
Mercury in your fish? Where do you think that came from?
Is a coal company paying to clean that up? No? Maybe that is a free ride.
1952 London Fog. 14,000 people keeled over dead over 2 weeks from coal pollution.
Now Western Europe and US coal plants are about 50-80% cleaner than back then.
So instead of keeling over in the streets, most people end up dieing in hospitals.
So 50-80% cleaner means that we have the ability to mitigate when we decide to spend the time and effort.
20-50% of a big problem remaining means that the job is not done.
The time factor:
1000-3000 people are dieing early deaths every day from coal pollution
70-80 people are dieing early death every day in the USA from coal pollution
The coal companies are not paying for these costs.
Also, why are deciding to let this continue?
Because we have been using coal and doing it for a hundred years.
Suppose we equate what coal industry is doing to a foreign power. Say WW2 Germany had started in 1860. If they slowed down or moved their killing would that have been good enough?
OK, WW2 Germany if you only kill 27,000 americans in 2006 instead of 100,000-200,000 in 1950 and instead kill 400,000-1,000,000 in China you can keep doing it. (Not doing the calculation for other countries but thousands also die in Canada, UK, Germany and elsewhere) People no longer really think we can stop or mitigate what you are doing and we no longer really think about the deaths because you are using a slower acting gassing and poisoning. Plus gee you are supplying more inexpensive power. Our economies really needs that cheap power. Your costs are low cause you only pay for extraction and building the plants plus your margin. We will get everyone to pay for the gassing and poisoning. So we really are paying you to kill us, but let us continue that because if we made you pay then we would be destroying the free market you are operating under. Plus we let you destroy 7% of our forests in Appalachia. But we do make you pay to replant them in a few decades. You do so many things it is sometimes difficult for people to believe it. Poisoning and killing animals, fish, trees etc... But maybe we should try to stop you because we have not convinced everyone that you are also making or contributing to making the earth warmer. Until we know whether life as we know it on the earth is doomed, we better not mess with the free market.
My questions are as follows:
1. What part does the sun and sunspots play in global warming?
2. What part does the ocean play in global warming?
3. What part does Volcanoes play in global warming?
4. How do you stop China from producing more emissions into the air?
And also, what part does life stock play in global warming?
I am sure there are other questions, but will leave it at that.
There are a lot of "watermelons" out there. We need to be able to separate them from this discussion.
Point 4 - China
From the past discussion on China.
Note: Just because China will catch up to the USA in 2009 does not mean that the USA should not clean up.
Also, US companies like Walmart have significant influence on Chinese supplier companies.
30,000 very ill from arsenic poisoning in China
http://phys4.harvard.edu/~wilson/arsenic/references/Sun2004.pdf
Arrests of polluters
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Arrests_After_China_River_Polluted_By_Arsenic_Compound_999.html
Environmental pollution cost China 511.8 billion yuan (64 billion dollars) in economic losses in 2004, amounting to 3.1 percent of total economic output that year, according to a previous report by Xinhua.
World Bank, Asia Development Bank study - connecting Asia
178000 premature deaths in major cities every year from coal (Rural areas would increase this to 400,000)
China will spend $30B each year on environmental protection and cleanup each year.
include estimates of 6.4 million work years lost annually in China to air pollution
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/06/business/wbchina.php
In over 20 major cities, the population in China coughs up black. They know they have a problem.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/09/DDGM9NDP0T1.DTL
A PBS show upcoming: China From the Inside: Documentary. Directed by Jonathan Lewis, co-produced by KQED and Granada Television. Parts 1 and 2 at 9 p.m. Wednesday; Parts 3 and 4 at 9 p.m. Jan. 17, KQED.
While there are fleeting glances at the larger cities here and there, most of the filming took place in the provinces, in parts of the country few have ever heard of: the virtual dust bowl in the middle of China, where the Gobi Desert is encroaching rapidly now because the trees along the Yellow River have all been cut down; the little village of Hisai, where townspeople dared to expel a gang of corrupt local officials; various locales along the Huai River, a waterway so thick with pollution it is called "the river of death" and communities along its shores are labeled "cancer villages."
More on China's rivers
http://www.msu.edu/course/aec/923/river_nyt_9_12_04.pdf
It will make economic and political sense for China to clean up its energy. The Chinese leaders know that this can lead to an uprising, which is what they fear.
Coal is part of the mix because Chinese leaders also must deliver growth to prevent too many people from being unemployed (again a bunch of unhappy unemployed uprising). Problem for Chinese leaders that in past uprising old leaders got killed.
China is at least completing two nuclear reactors every year (as noted by Ned).
China is spending a lot on nuclear and alternative power.
Mass transit and better cars will be introduced for economic efficiency and cost effectiveness.
Big subway expansions in Chinese cities because of gridlock.
Questions 1, 2, 3
Why put 6 billion tons of carbon per year into the air? Again you are saying until this part of the equation can be proved to be a cause of warming then you do not want to stop?
How about the particulates? Is it not contributing to worse health and deaths from lung cancer, asthma, lung disease ?
Why is the equivalent in deaths of over 15 Hiroshima's over the last 60 years to the US's own population not enough to motivate more energy infrastructure change? Oh look China is killing its own people at a rate of 5-10 Hiroshima's per year. Well if they are not going to stop then we should not either.
What about the mercury, arsenic, thorium and uranium ?
The 27,000 people who die each year usually are spending time in the hospital before they go, plus they are taking more medicine during their lifetime.
The annual direct health care cost of asthma is approximately $11.5 billion; indirect costs (e.g. lost productivity) add another $4.6 billion, for a total of $16.1 billion dollars. Prescription drugs represented the largest single indirect cost, at $5 billion. The value of lost productivity due to death represented the largest single indirect cost at $1.7 billion. Air pollution is a significant part of that one aspect of lung disease.
Freight transportation costs California $200billion over the next 15 years in this pdf.
http://www.pacinst.org/reports/freight_transport/PayingWithOurHealth_Web.pdf
Note: Coal is a big part of that. The US is moving about 2 billion tons of coal each year.
40% of the pollution that hits the US comes from other countries but the US still produces the most pollution so the US is returning the favor to those other countries.
An estimate of costs from air pollution
http://www.flcv.com/cap.html
three quarters of the way down the above linked page
It estimates US air pollution costs at $145 to 530 billion. Extract the $18 to $140 billion estimate for greenhouse gases. Still $127 billion to $390 billion.
Sulfur Dioxide ** 52 to 122 billion
visability/
airline delays 12
health/work
productivity 30 to 100
lakes/recreation 10
Nitrogen Oxide ** 25 to 55 billion
health/work loss 10 to 40
lake/bay/
eutrophication 5
lakes/rivers/rec 5
ozone layer damage/
nitrous oxide(N2O) 5
Materials Damage 10 to 35 billion
Probably reduced life of vehicles etc... from acid rain
Do you buy used cars from New York? Detroit? Toronto?
Did the coal or oil companies reimburse you for the shortened life of
your car if you are in one of places with more acid rain?
Toxic Metals ** 10 to 60 billion
Particulates/Health 5.6 to 48 billion
More on acid rain
http://www.sciencemaster.com/jump/earth/acid_rain.php
Electric utility plants account or about 70 percent of annual SO2 emissions and 30 percent of NOx emissions in the United States. Mobile sources (tranportation) also contribute significantly to NOx emissions. Overall, over 20 million tons of SO2 and NOx are emitted into the atmosphere each year.
To reduce damage to automotive paint caused by acid rain and acidic dry deposition, some manufacturers use acid-resistant paints, at an average cost of $5 for each new vehicle (or a total of $61 million per year for all new cars and trucks sold in the U.S.)
Clean air act target is to reduce SO2 emissions by 10 million-ton reduction in SO2 emissions should significantly decrease or slow down the acidification of water bodies and will reduce stress to forests.
Again a big effort for half of part of the problem. Get rid of coal plants with nuclear and alternatives and the coal problem goes away entirely.
Because that still leaves half of the SO2 after full implementation, that still leaves NOX, toxic metals, radioactive material, and particulates and the carbon experiment. Plus if we increase coal usage as is currently planned all the pollution goes back up again. Piecemeal attacks at this problem do not cut it and have not cut enough over the past few decades.
Coals impact on you
$200-1000/year in higher health insurance premiums
higher prices on goods and products. Companies are passing on the higher health premiums that they pay for their workers, plus the lost productivity for workers that are out sick because of pollution.
Higher costs for acid resistant paint for cars, houses
Extra costs for public buildings that need more repair to the outside because of pollution damage
Toxic waste, superfund cleanups
Less fish, higher prices for fish
Less resale value on cars in places with acid rain (more rust and corrosion). New Jersey, Detroit etc...
Any flight delays in or out of Los Angeles and other places because of visibility.
Maybe you knew one of the 27,000 people who die each year in the USA.
Grandma, granddad, mom, dad, uncle or aunt, friend dieing a few years earlier from lung disease
How about all the people who you know who have asthma? Don't you notice that there are more and more each year ? No link?
Are you in a city that has "clear the air" days? Why do you think that we have those things. Don't you consider that to be a pathetic bandaid over the underlying problems.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-01-mine_x.htm
Coal mine deaths in the US spiked upward to 47 in 2006. I think there is no confusion about what caused those people to die. Nor the 5,000 to 10,000 coal mining deaths in China. Maybe it was sunspots or Volanoes that killed them before they suffocated.
The 2006 death toll is far below pre-1930 levels, when an average of 2,295 miners were killed each year. But deaths could continue to rise as high oil prices pressure coal companies to produce more of a fuel that provides about half the nation's energy, says Davitt McAteer, former head of MSHA.
"The big push is to get the black stuff out of the ground," McAteer says. "You neglect infrastructure, maintenance, education and (safety-law) compliance. It begins to catch up with you."
Peabody Energy, the nation's largest coal producer, earned $426 million on $3.8 billion sales in the first nine months of 2006, well above its $260 million earnings on $3.3 billion sales a year earlier.
US coal industry 2005-2006
http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/311150
$50+ billion/year industry in sales.
So if they all about as profitable as Peabody looking at 4-6 billion in earnings/year.
Which is far less than the health care costs per year.
Far less than the damage to property.
Plus they are subsidized even to get that measely amount.
Subsidies for various energy forms
http://www.issues.org/22.3/realnumbers.html
Large truck accidents in the USA
http://www.foleyservices.com/t-12_15_2006.aspx
According to preliminary statistics released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 2005 saw a minor decline in the number of fatalities resulting from large-truck crashes, from 5,235 in 2004 to 5,212 in 2005. There were also 2,000 fewer injuries from large-truck related crashes in 2005 than there were in 2004, a significant reduction of 1.7%. The new figures show that the fatal crash rate for large trucks (class 3-8, 10,001 pounds or more) was 2.03 crashes for every 100 million vehicle-miles traveled in 2005.
http://www.lexareampo.org/Freight/Freight.htm
Trucks enabled freight producers and attractors to locate anywhere that a good road existed. For example, in 2003, 4,285,663 tons of coal hauled in Fayette County’s highways. One of the major arterials, US 60, which runs from East to West of Fayette County, carried 1,361,869 tons of coals itself.
http://www.bts.gov/press_releases/2005/bts003_05/html/bts003_05.html
Coal makes up 40% of US rail freight
http://www.utilipoint.com/IssueAlert/article.asp?id=2479
3000 railway crossing accidents
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/national/11RAILS.html?ex=1247198400&en=25adf8e2cb555a6c&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt
40% would statistically be linked to coal bearing freight trains
gmoke,
There was no reason to bring up the temperature in Massachusetts this winter unless you thought it supported a view about global warming. I ow you no apology. You are all too quick to take offense.
Thomas Eastmond gets my argument.
Yes, "dual-use" countermeasures in the form of new energy technologies allow us to enjoy other benefits whether or not global warming is a problem. Development of technologies for cheaper and cleaner energy really has more than dual use. We gain in the form of lower costs, lower trade deficit, lower national security threats, and cleaner air.
The alternative is more government regulation and international regulatory schemes with lots of politics and taxes. We need more regulation of coal burning emissions. We will probably get a bigger international scheme to cut back on CO2 emissions. All that is avoided if we accelerate technological development for clean energy sources.
Brian Wang is pointing out lots of useful info about the costs of coal burning. Those who make libertarian arguments against government-funded energy research should state whether coal burners should be allowed to emit oxides of sulfur, particulates, mercury, and other junk. Do they prefer large taxes to correct these market failures? Or do they prefer outright bans on pollution?
Brian Wang is pointing out lots of useful info about the costs of coal burning.
Much of it is so broadly binned that I don't see an exclusive link to coal.
Nonetheless, what of the costs of *not using* coal?
How many will freeze in winter? How many will die from a heatwave because the AC has no electricity?
I'd say were we to stop using coal tomorrow, the death toll and costs would be immense, dwarfing everything above.
And we have nothing to replace it.
If Brian wants to use no electricity, fine with me. But seeing as he's posting, it looks like even he appreciates the advantages of having power over having no power.
Only an ignorant, self-serving fool would argue that the weather in Massachusetts today proves that "global warming" is real. I would never make that argument. You did make that argument and attribute it to me. That adds dishonesty to foolishness in my book but, obviously, our standards of conduct differ.
I am saying that we need to shift from coal as a source. It is a big problem as I have outlined. It will take at least 20-30 years if we start pushing strongly for other energy sources and conservation. That means first up-powering all of our current nuclear reactors and mass producing nuclear reactors. We have nuclear reactors, more wind, efficiency and conservation which can replace coal over the next 20-30 years. The long lived nuclear waste (10,000 year stuff) can be handled by thorium liquid flouride reactors.
Al Gore and other global warming alarmists have captured the popular media, and the educational establishment. Every young fool is taught the catastrophic climate gospel according to Al Gore in school. You cannot blame gmoke and others who make arguments that appear unsophisticated. That is all they are fed by schools and the media.
I enjoy your blog, Randall. Glad to see that you've discovered Roger Pielke Jr. Roger Pielke Sr. at Colorado State is even more into climatology, naturally. Not a skeptic but definitely a heretic.
I like Brian's idea of using thorium reactors to burn nuclear waste. It's the type of intelligent approach that has been absent in energy planning in the US since the 1960s. As for getting away from coal, I doubt that will happen. The new Democratic chairman overseeing much of energy policy in the House is from West Virginia, and intends to make coal the centerpiece of the new Democratic Energy Plan.
Nuclear reactors will probably not be mass-produced in the sense that automobiles are mass-produced--not until Brian's advanced nanotechnology leaps a few more hurdles. Nuclear power plants will probably be "grown" eventually, from nano-seeds.
gmoke,
Lighten up... I've lived in MA. my whole life, (so far..) Mild winters are not unusual here or on any coastal state.
Even mentioning it is like focusing on one square inch of a "Monet" and thinking you know the whole picture.
The problem with some paintings, is that sometimes there just isn't enough room to stand back and take it all in.