In the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson reviews two recent ones about global warming, but his review is mostly shaped by his own rather selective vision.
1. Carbon emissions are not a problem because in a few years genetic engineers will develop “carbon-eating trees” that will sequester carbon in soils. Ah, the famed Dyson vision thing, this is what we came for. The seasonal cycle in atmospheric CO2 shows that the lifetime of a CO2 molecule in the air before it is exchanged with another in the land biosphere is about 12 years. Therefore if the trees could simply be persuaded to drop diamonds instead of leaves, repairing the damage to the atmosphere could be fast, I suppose. The problem here, unrecognized by Dyson, is that the business-as-usual he’s defending would release almost as much carbon to the air by the end of the century as the entire reservoir of carbon stored on land, in living things and in soils combined. The land carbon reservoir would have to double in size in order keep up with us. This is too visionary for me to bet the farm on.
2. Economic estimates of the costs of cutting CO2 emissions are huge. In an absolute sense, this is true, it would be a lot of dollars, but it comes down to a few percent of GDP, which, in an economic system that grows by a few percent per year, just puts off the attainment of a given amount of wealth by a few years. And anyway, business-as-usual will always argue that the alternative would be catastrophic to our economic well being. Remember seat belts? Why is it that Dyson’s remarkably creative powers of vision (carbon-eating trees for example) fail to come up with alternatives to the crude and ugly process of burning coal to generate electricity?
3. The costs of climate change are in the distant future, and therefore should be discounted, in contrast to the hysterical Stern Report. I personally can get my head around the concept of discounting if the time span is short enough that it’s the same person on either end of the transaction, but when the time scales start to reach hundreds and thousands of years, the people who pay in the future are not the same as the ones who benefit now. Remember that the lifetime of the elevated CO2 concentration in the air is different from the lifetime of CO2 to exchange with the biosphere. Release a slug of CO2 and you will increase the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands of years. The fundamental tenet of civil society is to protect people from harm inflicted by others. Are we a civilized species, or are we not? The question is analogous to using economics to decide whether to abolish slavery. I’m sure it was very costly for the Antebellum Southern U.S. to forego slave labor, but it simply wasn’t an economic question.
4. Majority scientists are contemptuous of those in the minority who don’t believe in the dangers of climate change. I often find myself contemptuous of efforts to misrepresent science to a lay audience. The target audience of denialism is the lay audience, not scientists. It’s made up to look like science, but it’s PR. We have documented Lindzen’s tortured and twisted representation of the science to non-scientists here and here. If Lindzen had a credible argument to support his gut feeling (and apparently Dyson’s), I can promise that I for one would take it seriously. I’ve got kids at home whose future I worry about. If Lindzen were right, no one would be happier about that than me. But I do get contemptuous of BS.
Re #396 Ray: “Actually, Nick’s psychopath reference is not far off the mark, although I’d say sociopathic. A sociopath has no moral compass.”
Ah, I think we have a transatlantic translation problem here: “psychopath” in the UK means, I think, what “sociopath” means in the USA. I don’t know what “psychopath” means in the USA if it has a meaning distinct from “sociopath”; now I think of it, I would have done better to use “sociopath”, since we have a majority of US commentators here. It was in any case the lack of moral compass, or conscience, that I was pointing to.
I don’t believe the scandinavian concepts for exploiting renewables can be copied easily. There are no mega-cities and the population is rather small consiering the landmass. Norway only has some 300 megawatts of windpower installed but is much better positioned for water anyway. Danmark is in the 3.000 megawatt range but is of course ideal for wind since the country is almost entirely flat and consists of nothing but coast. The largest installed base worldwide is here in Germany where its far beyond 20.000 megawatts and planned to reach 30.000 this decade. (The US come in second with something like 18.000.) This is only part of the story, of course. Due to the fact that wind is not always blowing at the generators’ sweet spots, the overall gain from our installed twenty-something gigawatts was just around 35 terawatt hours over the entire last year. That means it contributed a mere 5% to the overall production. I don’t think solar and wind together will be able to reach more than 30% in the long run and that would have to include a leap in efficiency for solar. We have no deserts around here and the weather isn’t exactly what you’d call sunny. If it was my money, I’d still bet in on solar. The potential for some regions – including the US – is enormous. But if it wants to truely replace nuclear, gas and coal, somebody will have to come up with an efficient way of energy storage.
re #360;365;372 – Nick Gotts
Nick, If you wish to communicate with me in detail about factors affecting fertility rates, perhaps we should do so through private communication as I believe we may be going off topic. My e-mail address is douglas.wise@gmail.com.
I gather that the Wikipedia biography relating to Dr Abernethy prejudiced you against her, primarily I suspect, because she has conservative views. You appear to damn her for opposing food aid but fail to acknowledge that she promotes the idea of giving small grants to individual (usually)women in third world countries to allow them to create their own businesses. This is hardly even handed. But running your own business, in your eyes, appears to equate to free market capitalism which you appear to abhor. I doubt you would be quite so parnoid as to be talking of business people as psychopaths if you had had the opportunity to be a net contributer to the tax that is paid to keep you in your academic post (and me, an ex academic, supplied with my inflation proof salary).
I thought it had become accepted wisdom that food aid (other than in an emergency) was more likely to result in population growth than in an alleviation of poverty. However, perhaps I am merely displaying a right wing prejudice. You might also be shocked to learn that I share the majority view of the UK population by being concerned about the level of immigration. I’m just hoping that the rest of the EU will spare us a few scaps of food when more serious shortages take hold and we are trying to survive in England on half an acre per person of which less than half will be available for agriculture. How hypocritical of me – I’ve just opposed food aid for the Third World in the previous sentence.
Nick, ‘sociopath’ is the current term; ‘psychopath’ is the older term, less well defined by specific behavior.
The US court system made corporations “legal people” but it makes their behavior conform to very limited notions of what’s proper (“shareholder value”); if people acted like corporations, they’d behave as sociopaths do, or as “rational actors” in the old economic models.
We’ve learned a lot about brain, behavior, echo neurons, empathy, and community since we defined corporations under US law. Perhaps they can be humanized before they become artificial intelligences.
In 379 Geoff Sherrington Says:
“The calculations are country specific, because of the present generation mix, but in Australia the estimate is: To avoid a tonne of CO2 into the air using wind power is $1180.”
Wow. According to this, in 1999 US coal fired generators emitted 1778 million metric tons of CO2 while generating 1882 billion kWhrs. Doing the math gives ~1053 kWhrs/ton CO2. Dividing 1180 $/ton CO2 by 1053 kWhrs/ton CO2 gives us $1.12 per kWhr
A quick Google search turned up an estimate that US wind generation costs 4 to 6 cents per kWhr. So GS is either wrong by nearly two orders of magnitude, or Australia has really poor electrical engineers.
Geoff Sherrington,
It is pretty clear at this point that you are not an expert on climate. At this point, I would point out that this site is a wonderful resource to come to a better understanding of climate science as the vast majority of scientists understand it. People here are usually more amenable to sincere questions from those who want to learn than they are to pontification. No obligation to become a believer, but at least your opposition would be better informed.
For the reccord, the real line and the imaginary line intersect at one point:
zero.
:-)
Dyson’s an enigma to me as far as climate change is concerned. He clearly is a very smart guy. As I understand it, it’s not that he doesn’t think AGW is occurring, but he thinks that the global climate models have too much uncertainty. Then again, I don’t know in how much detail he understands the modeling; my guess is that not much (I don’t either, btw)
Gavin says in response to Denmark being a one-off when it comes to wind generation:
“Response: This makes no logical sense. Instead the conclusion is that wind and solar can be a large part of the mix if you have well-connected grids that allow you to allocate power efficiently. The Scandanavian countries show that this is possible, therefore instead of always claiming that wind and solar can’t help, you should be advocating for improved grid mechanisms. There is no reason why this couldn’t be done in North America, China/Japan/Korea, India or South America – where there are already regional-scale grids (and energy transfers) in place. – gavin]”
You may understand climate physics but you don’t understand the power industry. Denmark only works for high %s of wind power because it is interconnected to places that can quickly ramp up or down their own generation to accomodate wind’s precocious generation patterns. Hydro can do this as can simple cycle gas turbines. Coal can’t, combined cycle gas can’t, nuclear can’t and biomass can’t. There are precious few places in the world where there’s enough hydro to absorb the vagaries of large amounts of wind power.
It’s as wrong headed to think wind can be a significant player in modern economies as it is, perhaps, to assume GHGs will be reduced by carbon-eating flora. On second thought, Dyson’s plan is a lot more probable than a wind power solution. Sorry, but those are the facts.
Tim McDermott Says:
“A quick Google search turned up an estimate that US wind generation costs 4 to 6 cents per kWhr. So GS is either wrong by nearly two orders of magnitude, or Australia has really poor electrical engineers.”
Google is good for a lot of things, but apparently not for energy pricing. In the US a wind farm needs to be able to get about $.13 to .$14 per KWhr in order to get built. Since there is no market that pays anything close to this wind only gets built if there are Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) and Production Tax Credits (PTCs) to subsidize it. RECs are subsidized by local consumers, PTCs by tax payers.
The wind in Denmark costs about .23 Euros per KWhr, or about $.35 US.
Douglas Wise,
I did not say business people were psychopaths, I do not consider running your own business to free market capitalism, I do not hold an academic post. I have absolutely no interest in private communication with you.
Nick Gotts:
I called the corporations psychopaths, not those running them, and for a very good reason: they are legally bound to consider only maximising shareholder value. Damage to the environment? No. Deaths among employees, customers or third parties? No. So long as such deaths or damage do not break the criminal law, and will increase profit, that’s what they are legally bound to do. That’s why I said capitalism created these psychopaths
[groaning] Nick this is nonsense that you can’t possibly believe. One could make the case that corporations *emphasize* profit as they should, but it is typical to factor in a variety of environmental and social factors in the interest of the greater good, the good of employees, and the prevailing cultural and ethical standards. In the USA these factors generally make big businesses a great place to work. Yahoo, for example, has extensive ‘green’ initiatives. Google not only pays a small fortune in stock and salaries but pays for all the meals and does the laundry…free. You’ll say these are the exceptions but good stewardship is the corporate rule which is why the west enjoys such high living standards. That prosperity sure didn’t come from the bureacracy – it came in spite of it. This is why your rules are better applied to enterprises run by those who generally despise US style multinational corporations.
I suppose the discussion of corporations is off-topic (for a thread that addresses the subject of genetically-engineered carbon-eating diamond-bearing trees).
Having said that, while I myself object to the “legal personhood” of corporations and the pernicious effects of the wealth and power that they have accumulated and too often misuse to the detriment of actual sentient beings, I feel obligated to point out that photovoltaic panels, solar thermal power plants, wind turbines, geothermal heat pumps, super-insulated passive solar houses, and super-efficient appliances and other things that are very important and useful in phasing out fossil fuels, are all manufactured and sold by profit-seeking corporations.
A corporation itself may not have a conscience, but at least some of the human beings who own, run and direct corporations, do.
By the way, if you research the origin of the legal personhood of corporations you will find that the US Supreme Court decision which supposedly established that corporations are persons under the law, with all of the rights of actual human beings, actually established no such thing, and indeed specifically stated that the Court did not even address that question in its opinion. The legal personhood of corporations is a bogus doctrine with no basis in law.
The low end of the IPCC estimate for atmospheric CO2 level in the year 2100 is ~400 ppmv. The high end is ~900 ppmv, with the “Business as Usual” (BAU) estimate being about ~700 ppmv.
Each ppmv represents ~ 2.13 Gtonnes of carbon. Thus, the BAU estimate shows the increase over the current (385 ppmv) level of about 670 Gtonnes of excess carbon in the atmosphere by 2100, waiting for Mr. Dyson’s miracle trees.
While large, this is less than a third of the ~2,200 Gtonnes of carbon in the soil and the plants that Mr. Archer claims Mr Dyson’s trees will have to sequester. Mr. Archer is conflating the total emissions from now to 2100 (about 2,000 Gtonnes or so) with the additional amount remaining at the end of the century for Dyson’s trees to sequester.
It is also worth noting that since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the amount of anthropogenic carbon sequestered by natural processes is on the order of 300 Gtonnes, of which scientists estimate that about a third of the amount (~100 Gtonnes) has been sequestered on land.
Like David Archer, I would not “bet the farm” on the ability of Mr. Dyson’s miracle trees to absorb 2,200 Gtonnes of C. However, they would not have to, Mr. Archer’s number is out by a factor of three. And the land has already absorbed about a sixth of the amount that Mr. Dyson’s miracle trees would have to sequester, with no apparent ill effects.
Please be very clear that I am not agreeing with Mr. Dyson’s proposal, I find it very speculative. I am disagreeing with Mr. Archer’s estimate of the amount of additional carbon that Dyson’s trees must sequester.
[Response: Among other things, you are ignoring the necessity of keeping CO2 out of the oceans, so the oceans don’t acidify. Dyson’s trees have to pre-empt that as well. Keep it simple for yourself: There are about 6000 GT of fossil fuel carbon, mostly in the form of coal. Economists tend to think all of that will be burned eventually, if nothing special is done to make fossil fuel energy uneconomical. So there you have three times the total soil carbon you need to sequester. So suppose you only burn a third of that before people see the light? There you’ve got your 2000 Gt. Simple, isn’t it? –raypierre]
Yeah, Ray, but to say captains of capitalism are sociopaths without a moral compass is equivalent to saying physicsts forget and can’t zip up their pants. It’s just feel-good nonsense.
Gee, Jim (398), while not necessarily agreeing, I was impressed with your retorts/rebuttals to Geoff. Then you just had to go jump in the “and you run around with bad people and your mother is ugly” [edit–folks, lets keep it civil, on **both** sides ok!]
Nick, “tommyrot” not rational enough for you? Then thanks for letting me clear it up with your “claptrap” in 399 — claptrap being just a tad below tommyrot. Corporations, not people are psychopaths you say???? Wow! Legally bound to only maximize shareholder value??? Where in heavens did you get that? Can you find me any State statute that says such a thing? (I’ll help: No.) Your description of corporate mentality and ethos shows you read far too many comic books, in all due respect.
Recall that US corporations at the behest of the govt saved Britain’s butt with equipment and supplies. (Though I am not diminishing the efforts of Britain’s corporation and especially their people in the least.) …in a time that the population of the US overwhelmingly wanted no part of it — even talked of impeaching FDR for the lend-lease program.
You have a valid point with the comparison with AGW. But the time scale makes all the difference in what one should rationally expect out of people. (This was discussed earlier in RC.) There was no marshalling and suiting up by the Brits in 1938, save a few voices crying in the wilderness.
Getting further from the beaten path, but we need to get all of our facts straight — maintaining crooked prejudices O.K. Corporations are legal entities that people can establish such that the legal liability of the corporation does not extend to the individual(s). That’s it. And they are not people. They were adjudicated to have similar Constitutional rights as people after, as I recall, some States and Municipalities tried to glom some corporate assets without any due process. A corporation can have no more ethos than your average rock.
Joseph Hunkins wrote:
“…but it is typical to factor in a variety of environmental and social factors in the interest of the greater good, the good of employees, and the prevailing cultural and ethical standards.”
Erm, so Exxon, Enron, Monsanto, GM, Blackwater, Carlyle Group, etc., etc, are typical ? Or not ?
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=do-all-companies-have-to-be-evil
http://wideeyecinema.com/?p=105
http://earthfirst.com/axis-of-corporate-evil-taco-bell-wal-mart-and-the-nra-hired-black-ops-private-security-team-to-spy-on-green-activists/
(A disclaimer,I am not endorsing the host sites)
Re #410 Joseph Hunkins
As I said, corporations are legally bound to consider only shareholder value. Of course they can argue that looking after their employees and reputation promote that in the long term, and I agree with SecularAnimist that people in responsible positions within them can indeed act well, but you only have to see how many corporations behave when they think they can get away with it (Union Carbide after Bhopal, the corporations that collaborated with apartheid, those running sweatshops in poor countries, tobacco manufacturers, the firms that carried on exposing their employees to asbestos long after it was known to be potentially lethal, Nestle undermining breastfeeding with their “free samples”, Exxon and other liars about climate science etc. etc.) to see that they often behave sociopathically as a result. Actually, western prosperity does come in part from bureaucracy: the bureaucracy that keeps roads, schools, police, publicly funded research etc. going, ensures that disputes can be settled peacefully, and limits the extent to which corporations can pollute. It also comes, in large part, from exploiting the rest of the world.
To bolster the messager on 373 from piglet: if you want to use nuclear power to remove CO2 generation from energy generation, you’ll need electric cars, trucks, trains, boats and planes FIRST.
After all, it does no good to spend 1ton of petrol to dig out and refine nuclear fuel, create the reactors, make the infrastructure when that effort is based on burning petrol to releast 2t of CO2, does it?
But AGW denialists believe that green transport is much less important than creating the New Wave of nuclear plants. Maybe because this is a big new revenue stream for them to tap into rather than a replacement of the old revenue stream that changing transport is.
411: corporate personhood in the US wasn’t (as far as I’ve read) created by the courts. It was a court administrator that decided.
And oddly enough, although they are persons in the US legal eyes, they don’t get jailed like persons…
“Ken Milne Says:
5 June 2008 at 4:36 PM
In the US a wind farm needs to be able to get about $.13 to .$14 per KWhr in order to get built. Since there is no market that pays anything close to this wind only gets built if there are Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) and Production Tax Credits (PTCs) to subsidize it. RECs are subsidized by local consumers, PTCs by tax payers.”
Hmm, I remember when the US government mused about removing the tax credits for nuclear power development. The companies who had said that nuclear was cheap enough to be viable then told everyone that without these tax breaks and perks the creation of nuclear power generators would not be undertaken because it was not financially viable.
Looks like wind isn’t the only power generation scheme that doesn’t go without subsidy.
Rod B wrote:
“Recall that US corporations at the behest of the govt saved Britain’s butt with equipment and supplies. (Though I am not diminishing the efforts of Britain’s corporation and especially their people in the least.) …in a time that the population of the US overwhelmingly wanted no part of it..”
I’m astonished that anyone would put forward an argument like this onto a respectable adult forum. It’s the level of kindergarten kids saying ‘my dad’s bigger than your dad’. Isn’t WW2 ancient history yet ? Obviously Rod B is still holding a grudge about something. Perhaps Europeans and Russians should hold a grudge against the USA for Henry Ford’s assistance to Hitler ?
The point is, that there seems to be a very real possibility of ecological meltdown, the collapse of the biosphere upon which we all rely for our survival and our children’s future. It doesn’t matter what happened in the historical past, it’s utterly irrelevant. We are all in the same boat, on this little planet. What we require is intelligent well-considered proposals to mitigate damage, not [edit]
Re Ken Milne @409: “In the US a wind farm needs to be able to get about $.13 to .$14 per KWhr in order to get built. Since there is no market that pays anything close to this …
[snip] “The wind in Denmark costs about .23 Euros per KWhr, or about $.35 US.”
In Ontario I believe the rate set for wind and solar is CAN$.42 per KWhr. As a result several new wind farms have been or are being built along Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, and in the southern Ontario highlands west of the Niagara escarpment. With the addition of ‘smart meters’ to measure what flows into the grid, residential solar installations are also growing.
BTW, 75% of electricity generated in Ontario comes from non-fossil fuel sources. I believe the mix is 49% nuclear, 25% hydroelectric, 1% wind/solar. The latter is growing, but clearly it will still be a long time before it becomes a significant portion. The Province plans to add more nukes, and possibly undertake a new hydroelectric scheme in the James Bay water shed, then make good on its promise to shut down the 2-3 remaining coal plants.
In the news today:
World must spend trillions to cut emissions: IEA
Gavin #391: long-distance power transport is key to making intermittent distributed energy sources like solar and wind useful. Look up High Voltage Direct Current, with quoted loss figures of 3%/1000km even over the sea floor.
Every point on Earth is within 10000 km of sunlight, and most population centres within 5000 km of sunny deserts.
Let’s hope Nordhaus’ and Dyson’s carbon-sequestering trees become a reality, as solar shading isn’t looking so bright:
New Scientist
May 31, 2008
ANYONE clinging to the notion that we can wipe the slate clean of all our climate mistakes by deflecting the sun’s rays with space mirrors is in for a disappointment.
Dan Lunt of the University of Bristol, UK, and colleagues carried out the most detailed climate-modelling study to date on the impact of a sunshade. They simulated Earth’s climate under three scenarios: pre-industrial times; a future climate with atmospheric carbon dioxide at an extreme level of four times pre-industrial values; and a sunshaded geo-engineered climate with the same high CO2 levels but solar radiation reduced by 4 per cent – similar to Cambrian times, 500 million years ago.
They found that Earth under a sunshade would not simply revert to its pre-industrial climate. Instead the tropics would be cooler than pre-industrial times by 1.5 °C, while high latitudes would be warmer by 1.5 °C, leading to less sea ice – bad news for animals that fish from the ice. Average precipitation would also drop by 5 per cent, according to the model. The work will appear in Geophysical Research Letters.
The findings could be the final straw, as there are other drawbacks to building a sunshade. “It would be expensive, disastrous if the mirrors ever failed and leaves other issues un-addressed such as ocean acidification,” Lunt says.
Re: 419:
Wind Energy Myths from the US Department of Energy says
“Rates for electricity from wind plants being installed today are comparable to wholesale electric power prices of 2.5¢ to 3.5¢/kWh.”
and
“2. Wind energy requires a production tax credit (PTC) to achieve these economics. True, but every energy source receives significant federal subsidies; it is disingenuous to expect wind energy to compete in the marketplace without the incentives enjoyed
by established technologies.”
I don’t think you can compare these on a price/kWh level. There is a significant difference between conventional powerplants (including nuclear) and renewables when looked at from a public perspective. Conventional plants are the basis for providing enough power at any time, which is vital for society and therefore in the public interest. I think that nowhere on the globe, the decision of whether to build a nuclear power plant, where to build it, how to run it, how to distribute its output and what to do with the waste is made just by a company alone. Its always a joined effort of local and regional or even national politics and a number of companies together. Whether the public donates via the price for energy itself or via tax cuts or direct subvention is probably different from country to country – but it always does carry its share. I like the tax or subvention variant much better than the alternative, which would be even higher prices for energy, because of the social aspect.
With renewables, it is the other way round. The direct cost and impact from renewables such as wind power (water would be the exception) is rather low but it has to rely on the existence of a maintained and probably even adjusted distribution network and it has to rely on backup in case the wind doesn’t blow strong enough or too strong. If you count in the cost for these alone, it can’t possibly compete on its own and will therefore require almost the same level of public, financial support as nuclear. This sounds like an argument against renewables but I think it isn’t. Its just a fact that you can never really compare energy prices from different sources because the “real” price is always obscured by politics and how it handles primary and secondary costs and judges the public interest. The good news is, that apart from overcoming the technical difficulties, it only takes political decisions to swing the energy market from one side to the other. And once these decisions are made, it can swing really fast. Today our “Bundestag” decided on yet another “Klimaschutzgesetz” (climate protection law) which restructures energy politics in taxes and subvention to achieve a 40% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to the 1990 level by 2020. The cost for society is high, obviously, but so is the gain and apart from the usual complains on behalf of the opposition (“its too expensive” or “its too little too late”, depending on the party it comes from), this law is being widely regarded as a good thing.
“Recall that US corporations at the behest of the govt saved Britain’s butt with equipment and supplies.”
For which they were paid up intil after the turn of the century. Fifty years of paying for it. And that only ended so soon because the dollar went south. I think the UK have paid enough and owe no thanks when there’s been so much payment. Do you owe thanks to your butcher for carving your sunday roast and selling it to you? Or do you just agree that the butcher was needed but they’re getting paid for it and so it’s all even stevens?
Also note that the payment above is just the cash payment. The UK had been the international currency. They could print money and people would buy it so they could pay for commodities. Like oil. Food. And so on. The US demanded that the dollar become the international currency and they got it.
That was what allowed a large country with no world power to become a superpower. [edit–the remaining socioeconomic discourse is off topic, and not appropriate for RC]
Mark (#417) states
“AGW denialists believe that green transport is much less important than creating the New Wave of nuclear plants”
A salient counterexample is Lawrence Solomon. He has campaigned for decades, as one of Canada’s leading environmentalists, against nuclear energy. A few months ago, as a result of a bet with a colleague two years ago, he published “The Deniers”, interviewing around thirty scientists “of great eminence” who question AGW orthodoxy in significant ways. (In differing ways, of course, as well, depending on their areas of expertise.) One of those eminent scientists is veteran physicist and humanitarian Freeman Dyson.
Is Solomon himself a denier? Or a denialist? Or even worse, an organizer of denialists? Is there a difference between the two terms? Is the fact that he is Jewish relevant to the answer?
That last question may sound flip but it is not. The term, if originally intended to make comparison, and thus contamination, with Holocaust denial, is a disgrace. But it is also, like much demonisation of enemies, self-deluding, allowing such obviously wrong banalities as “all denialists want nuclear” to pass as fact. A reason to clean up the language as much as the energy, guys?
Today is June 6th. In 1944 my uncle was an infantry battalion officer – field promotion to battalion commander just days after landing. His battalion landed in reserve at Omaha Beach. He was severely wounded in the during an assault of Hill 192. Many of his command staff were killed by the explosion. Despite his severe wounds, he continued in action until he passed out from loss of blood. He is the recipient of a medal for gallantry in action.
Many many Europeans thanked him, and he always accepted it graciously. There is no debt.
Probably getting too far off topic with the corporate stuff, but it is relevant to a world view question like this post. My challenge to corporate critics is to randomly pick 10 companies from S&P 500. Assign either “mostly psychopathic activity” or “mostly morally acceptable activity” to each and also do that on the “mostly exploits those in developing world” or “mostly helps those in developing world”. In most cases 9 of those 10 will pass both tests if you answer these rationally and reasonably without cherry picking from the companies or company histories as CL has done above.
Back on Topic: Here is the link to the Nordhaus Paper under (non-peer!) review here: http://nordhaus.econ.yale.edu/dice_mss_072407_all.pdf
CL (422), It’s probably getting off topic, but… you brought the Britain thing up. I just filled in the historical blanks in your comprehension — sounds reasonably adult to me.
Mark (429), yes, if I was about to starve to death and a guy came along and agreed to sell me some meat when no one else could or would, and when his investors were creaming him for it, even if I had to pay for it later, I would be extremely thankful — as Churchill was, since he told FDR that Britain was toast without it. I’m still in no way denigrating the efforts of England in responding to a global crises (which is kinda what we’re supposed to be talking about).
Yep Rod B (#434, #435), Churchill was in turn immensely grateful to FDR, then deeply disappointed in him, as he felt he was cut out in favor of “Uncle Joe” Stalin. It’s still not clear why he refused to attend Roosevelt’s funeral. But he loved the US to the end of his days. As Thatcher once said in another area “You can take Winston either way on that.” You can on a lot of things. And he was of course half-American!
Which brings me to the main point which is to agree, as another Brit coming from a different place from Mark, let’s not go there. The issues here don’t need further, false divisions between English-speakers of any origin, through tendentious history.
Re model_err @430: I think the term ‘denialist’ refers to 1) someone in denial or reality, which is a powerful psychological defense mechanism, or 2) someone who actively denies the reality of something for some motive.
It is the anti-warming side that has made the link to Holocaust denial.
Re #430 model_err
“Denialist”/”denialism” seems a rather good term to me. It characterises the contrived rejection of scientific evidence in favour of some agenda position. Why you should associate the term with the Holocaust defeats me..
I would have thought that a far more appropriate analogy would be with the various ciggie industry representatives who asserted that ciggie smoking wasn’t damaging to health (when they know full-well that it is!).
Denialism isn’t equivalent to “skepticism” of course, although some “denialists” pretend to be “skeptics”! Skepticism (we’re all skeptics I hope!) is a position one takes having made an informed and honest acquaintance with the evidence…
Re 415 [Rod B] “Legally bound to only maximize shareholder value??? Where in heavens did you get that? Can you find me any State statute that says such a thing? (I’ll help: No.) Your description of corporate mentality and ethos shows you read far too many comic books, in all due respect.”
“…the directors and officers of a corporation shall exercise their powers and discharge their duties with a view to the interests of the corporation and of the shareholders..” – from section 716 of Maine’s Business Corportations Act. I got this from “How Corporate Law Inhibits Social Responsibility” by Robert Hinkley, a former corporate securities attorney, published in the January/February 2002 issue of Business Ethics: Corporate Social Responsibility Report, available online at http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0119-04.htm. Hinkley says while the wording differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, the effect does not. I also refer you to the case of Dodge vs Ford motor company, 1916.
Among those who agree that corporations should behave like this, according to Joel Bakan’s “The Corporation” (Free Press 2004) are Milton Friedman, Peter Drucker, and Debora Spar. He also quotes the American Bar Association thus: “While allowing directors to give consideration to the interests of others, [the law] compel[s] them to find some reasonable relationship to the long-term interests of the shareholders when so doing.”
Also Rod, I, not CL, “brought up the Britain thing”, in order to show that there was a precedent for corporations to be subordinated to the general good in emergency. Furthermore, you have more than once claimed or implied that I called business leaders psychopaths, which I never did, and despite correction. May I suggest a remedial reading comprehension course?
Rod B
But after 50 years? After having to give him food & board for all that time?
PS moderators, can you cut both this one and 435 because you’ve already recogised that a socioeconomic history lesson isn’t what RC is about.
model_Err
Freman Dyson. I seem to have read that somewhere recently…
Some of these scientists disagree that GW will increase the number of hurricanes in the US. NOT that GW is not mostly anthropogenic in origin.
I suspect the rest of “The Denialist” list are similar.
JCH.
I’ve lost great uncles to WW2. Millions of others did too. So why should the US get the glory, the money AND the demanded adulation?
Joeduck, I took a quick look at Nordhaus’s tome–in particular the last chapter where he discusses differences with the Stern Report. I certainly agree that Stern was a political rather than an economic document. However, I think that Nordhaus’s discounting approach is fundamentally flawed because failure to act forcefully to reduce ghg emissions will decrease the return we could expect on money spent otherwise. Earth will simply be less productive, less efficient and less able to support a growing human population. And that is under the assumption that the central CO2 sensitivity assumed by the IPCC is correct. If in fact the sensitivity is >4.5, or if there are positive feedbacks that will kick in soon if we don’t reduce emissions, then we are talking about a severely degraded productive capacity if not an outright collapse. As I’ve pointed out, the costs of such an outcome are so high that it probably dominates the risk even if its probability is low (1-5%).
In my view 3 things have to happen:
1)We have to better understand whether the high-end tail is real or merely an artifact of our ignorance.
2)We have to develop technologies and economic and political institutions that will help us limit climate change and mitigate the effects we cannot circumvent.
3)For 1 and 2 to happen, we need time. This means that we need to significantly curtail emissions in the near term.
Nordhaus is not an unreasonable guy. He’s made a good faith effort to map out a strategy that could be realized politically. The problem is that he has taken a series of models that are conservative in a scientific sense rather than an engineering or risk-management sense. The former assume values for sensitivity that are either best-fit or on the low side. The purpose is to establish that the effect is credible. The latter try to bound the risk, and so must assume sensitivity that is at least somewhat on the high side, relaxing the conservatism as the science is better known. By taking IPCC projections as his scenario, Nordhaus is ignoring a good part of the risks of climate change.
Joseph Hunkins (434) wrote:
“..In most cases 9 of those 10 [companies] will pass both tests if you answer these rationally and reasonably without cherry picking from the companies or company histories as CL has done above.”
Ah, yes, the ‘just a few bad apples’ defence, favoured by mendacious politicians to excuse bad behaviour. Well, I’m not going to insist that the whole barrel is rotten. I’m sure there are some benign, enlightened corporations whose conduct is ethical and beneficial.
However, there is a fundamental problem with the conceptual structure, as has been mentioned by others. Corporations are chiefly concerned with the quarterly results, whilst what we *need* is a view that extends to what is sustainable over far longer time periods, (like centuries).
Corporations are concerned with maximizing returns for shareholders, regardless of detriment to everyone else (e.g. ‘externalities’,like using the global commons as a cost-free dumping ground for unwanted waste or byproducts, (like CO2))
And, of course, there are other flaws in the conceptual structure of present day corporations which mean they are poorly suited, as tools, for a sustainable future. It makes perfect economic sense for a corporation to mine resources until they are exhausted, whether it be minerals, fisheries, forests, or any other, and to do it as fast as possible to maximize returns on investment.
IMO, it’s not fruitful to fall into the familiar ‘free markets v. communism’ nonsense which usually follows any criticism of capitalism. The way to look at the problem is in terms of designing systems which are ecologically and socially as benign as can be achieved, which will provide for our basic needs over the long term. That means, a careful consideration of all the inputs and all the outputs. I believe that requires a radical adjustment to the legal model of what a corporation is and what it is for.
Seeing as human minds designed the thing in the first instance, it shouldn’t be beyond the wits of smart people to revise the structure when it has become obvious that it often doing more harm than good.
Responding to Essenbach and Ray (414) — maybe Ray wrote of oceans for this reason or maybe he’s concerned about the oceans’ acidity for the same reason I am — if we find a technological fix to quickly suck the excess CO2 out of the atmosphere, CO2 will come out of the ocean to partially replace it. So the trees need to be able to absorb more than just the excess CO2 in the atmosphere. But Essenbach’s comment raises an interesting question: what will happen to the CO2 sequestered in soils? Is it tucked in there regardless of what happens?
#432 model_err
But the comparison is inevitable, as both are based on the same psychopathology — where the term originated.
The real disgrace is not in the comparison but in the similarity. Self-deception is a general-purpose ability, with sometimes a very high human price tag.
#414 Willis, Raypierre: there is another logical flaw in the presented calculation. You cannot just remove CO2 separately from the atmosphere alone. Once those “Dyson Trees” start successfully drawing down CO2, they become a competing mechanism to the oceanic and biospheric drawdown, which will become less efficient under a lower atmospheric partial pressure.
In the final analysis, the full 2000 Gt will have to be drawn down in order to get 670 Gt out of the atmosphere. No way around it, sorry…
re: #445 ray
As discussed in #24, #49, #90, I’ve taken a good look at Nordhaus & other studies, and started looking at his GAMS code.
Do you buy the strong assumption that these all make that GDP growth over the next 50-100 years:
– essentially continues like it has for the last 50?
– simply ignores Peak Oil+Gas?
I.e., that GDP growth is divorced from energy*efficiency?
I recommend Econ Browser as a relevant site, and especially the thread Crude oil prices. UCSD Professor James Hamilton has published a lot in this turf. If you read his Understanding Crude Oil Prices paper, look at Figure 6. “Changes in U.S. real GDP and oil consumption”.
Then, look at my question of May 25, 2008 07:11PM, which combines the economic projections from the climate studies with peak oil, and hypothesizes that on that chart, somehow the US economy continues to grow at the same rate, despite that line being required to bend over and decline back to 0 (oil = 1949’s) some time during 2050-2100, taking us far outside any ratio we’ve ever seen.
James kindly replies May 26, 2008 12:20pm, but the answer doesn’t give me a lot of comfort. It is clear that the US economy can continue to grow if the US gets a lot more efficient in energy use, like Japan, Europe, or even California. It is not at all clear that we are prepared to get more efficient fast enough, and the US is not particularly good at dealing with shrinking budgets.