Are these fines owed by Japan, Spain, and Italy for not meeting their Kyoto Treaty Emissions goals actually going to be paid? I can not imagine it. They have not only not met their treaty obligations, their emissions have actually increased. Is this all some global joke, or what?
Peter
source:
“L'hôpital se moque de la charité” [French saying]
Every day one contemplates ‘global warming’ and the Kyoto Protocol, the more the hypocrisy hits you. I am increasingly angry at the political nonsense we have to witness, year in, year out, especially from the countries of the E.U. The forthcoming Bali Conference (see: ‘Bali Hoo Is Calling’, November 25) will be yet another depressing spectacle. I must ask: “Is ‘global warming’ the ultimate example of a faith without works?” Here are two new reports which would indicate precisely so.
First, from Bloomberg (‘Japan, Spain, Italy Face $33 Billion Kyoto Payments (Update1) ’, November 30; quotes from original version):
“Japan, Italy and Spain face fines of as much as $33 billion combined for failing to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions as promised under the Kyoto treaty.
The three countries are the worst performers among 36 nations that agreed to curb carbon dioxide gases that cause climate change.”
[May I remind you that this is the Japan after which the Kyoto Protocol is named, and the Italy which recently threatened India with trade sanctions if if didn’t accept European Kyoto-style emission targets. The arrogance is outrageous.] And the reason for the failures:
“’They’re looking at a huge bill now,’ said Mike Rosenberg, management professor at the University of Navarra’s IESE Business School in Barcelona. ‘That is because none would pay to reconvert factories, power plants and paper mills’ to trim gases blamed for the planet-warming ‘greenhouse effect.’”
The figures stack up as follows:
“Spain vowed to cap emissions growth at 15 percent above the 1990 level, and its government forecasts 37 percent growth. Italy agreed to a 6.5 percent cut and may increase by 11 percent. Japan promised a 6 percent drop and estimates a 1.6 percent gain.”
Accordingly, “Spain faces a $7.8 billion cost, and Italy and Japan each may owe about $13 billion, based on estimates by their governments and the current price for permits.”
But who will pay for such follies? In Italy, taxpayers will foot 75 per cent of the bill; Japanese taxpayers will pay for two-thirds; Spain will pass 40 percent of the cost on to businesses, while the rest will come from taxes. Wonderful!
I hope the good folk of these countries will now understand the sheer fatuousness of ‘global warming’ politics/economics and begin to cry “Enough is enough!”
But then, secondly, there is evergreen Ireland (‘Taxpayer to foot bill if Kyoto target not reached’, Independent.ie, November 28):
“Ireland is set to overshoot its Kyoto targets by almost 100pc as things stand, according to the latest figures from the European Commission.”
“CO2 emissions in Ireland, by 2012, will be more than 22.5pc above 1990 levels.” “This is almost twice the Kyoto target of 13pc.”
[Note, en passant, that Ireland (the poor old Celtic Tiger that it is) was actually permitted an increase in emissions under the Protocol]
So, again, the cost to the Irish tax payer? “Tax payers face having to fork out more than €270m so that Ireland can ‘buy its way’ into meeting the Kyoto agreement on greenhouse gas emissions.”
All I ask is this: please bear these political and economic realities in mind when the hot air starts to circle around the globe from the Bali Conference [and these are but four examples - try Canada next, if you have a moment]. Just watch the Coriolis effect bend the warm words and bring them firmly down-to-earth. Above all, beware naive and ever-optimistic blather from BBC correspondents, and their ilk, over what is going on at Bali.
And, of course, the developing world should remain ever wary of the ‘good intentions’ of the developed world!
Ultimately, it will all end in tears.
As the French say: “L'hôpital se moque de la charité.”
Showing posts with label Kyoto Treaty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kyoto Treaty. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Saturday, June 30, 2007
An Economist's Perspective on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol (Part 1)
This is a long article and unfortunately I was unable to copy the graphs used. Still I think it is possible to follow his line of thought.
Peter
An Economist’s Perspective on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol
By Ross McKitrick
Associate Professor
Department of Economics,
The University of Guelph
rmckitri@uoguelph.ca
and Visiting Associate Professor
School of Economics and Business
Wilfrid Laurier University
Presentation to the Department of Economics Annual Fall Workshop
The University of Manitoba
November 7, 2003
An Economist’s Perspective on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol
Ross McKitrick
0. Introduction
I have spent many years trying to figure out what is the optimal climate change policy for Canada. I believe the answer is, roughly, "keep studying the basics, don’t try to stop it and learn to adapt." But one does not come to this view with reference to economics alone. So in my discussion today I will try to give a snapshot of some of the range of technical issues that I have tried to think through in pursuit of an optimal climate policy.
There are no intellectual shortcuts on this issue. Even a simple question like "what is the cost of Kyoto" turns out to be maddeningly difficult to answer. Kyoto is, at best, a target: the costs are attached to the specific policies that will be used to reach that target, and to date no one knows what those policies will be for Canada. Broadening the issue to ask "what is the cost of climate change for Canada?" only piles up the ambiguity.
There is no formal definition of "climate," only traditional rules based on rather ad hoc averages of geophysical data, the sampling of which is often very unsystematic. There is even less agreement on what constitutes "change," which is why every time a forest burns or an iceberg calves someone asks: "Is this a sign of global warming?" Witness the apocalyptic thrill as seers and sages scan the skies for signs, omens and portents of global warming; but climate change is an elusive concept, and no one is sure what the thing would look like, even if it was already happening.
This ambiguity is reflected in the two key documents that govern much of the thinking on this issue. The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) defined "climate change" as follows:
"Climate change" means a change of climate which is
attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that
alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which
is in addition to natural climate variability observed
over comparable time periods.
(http://unfccc.int/index.html)
The recent Third Assessment Report (TAR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defined it differently (http://www.ipcc.ch/):
This is a very important difference: The IPCC is looking for signs of any change, whereas the policy instruments prescribed by the UNFCCC are not triggered unless it is a particular kind of change: that attributable to human activity. When IPCC officials declare that "climate change" is for real, this is about as informative as announcing that the passage of time is for real. Of course the climate changes: if it didn’t Winnipeg would still be under a glacier. But the fact that the last ice age ended doesn’t imply that the policy mechanisms of the UNFCCC should kick in.
That’s the problem with the ambiguity over the term "climate change"—and it seems to trip up a lot of people—accepting the reality of "climate change"does not mean accepting the need for policy interventions. And denying that global warming is a problem requiring costly policy measures is not the same as denying "climate change."
This purported link between two fundamentally different concepts was written into those pamphlets Environment Canada sent out two years ago. They began, ominously, "Our Climate is Changing" and concluded with the stuff on the back about the importance of turning down your thermostat and doing the laundry in cold water. It’s always comforting when big, complicated issues turn out to have such simple solutions, so perhaps we should take our cue from this line of thinking.
Therefore, rather than start with one of the complicated, ambiguous questions posed above I will organize my presentation around the practical question, "Does the possibility of climate change imply that I should wash my socks in cold water?" The affirmative answer offered by the Government of Canada arises from a long chain of assertions like this:
1. The "climate" is a well-defined thing, the mean state of which is measured with precision.
2. The equations of motion of the climate are sufficiently-well understood that the full range of natural variability is quantified and future climate states can be predicted.
3. By adding to the stock of atmospheric CO2 humans have an affect on the climate which necessarily involves a general warming of the Earth’s surface.
4. The present state of the climate can only be explained by invoking this mechanism.
5. Continued use of fossil fuels, by adding CO2 to the air, will cause unprecedented changes to the future climate.
6. These changes will be generally deleterious.
7. We ought to reduce emissions of CO2.
8. The best mechanism to accomplish this is through the Kyoto Protocol.
9. The best way for Canada to comply with Kyoto is to pursue a package of measures as outlined in the Canadian Climate Change Plan, which includes encouraging Canadians to do their laundry in cold water.
To the extent time permits I will grapple with each of these assertions. Notwithstanding the simplicity of the solution proffered in #9 I find the chain of thinking problematic at each step.
1. The "climate" is a well-defined thing, the mean state of which is measured with precision.
"It’s sunny out" is a statement about the weather. "Palm trees do not grow in Winnipeg" is a statement about the climate. Climate is a rather abstract concept that stands behind the weather. Dictionaries define it with phrases like "prevailing conditions" and "averages over some period of time" and so forth. Linacre (1992) surveyed 16 published definitions and reduced them to the following:
"Climate is the synthesis of atmospheric conditions characteristic of a particular place in the long-term. It is expressed by means of averages of the various elements of weather, and also by the probabilities of other conditions, including extreme values."
Note the ambiguities: Does ‘long-term’ in a geophysical setting mean 5 years? 30 years? 300 years? What are the ‘various elements’ and how do they average together? For example how would one average warm and wet, then compare it to the average of cold and dry?
Very well, it’s vague: so is ‘the economy.’ We don’t need to have a precise definition of ‘economy’ to study it, so we shouldn’t impose undue burdens on other fields. We can work with averages and aggregates in economics without doing too much violence to theoretical consistency (usually). But in the case of thermodynamic phenomena there is a catch, which as far as I know has not been discussed in the context of climate change before Chris Essex and I wrote Taken By Storm.
The catch does not involve a novel, contentious or obscure theory; it involves an old, standard, well-known definition from introductory thermodynamics. Indeed it seems to have been overlooked precisely because it is so elementary. The main problem in the debate over what the Global Temperature is doing is that there is no such thing as a Global Temperature.
Temperature is a continuous field, not a scalar, and there is no physics to guide reducing this field to a scalar, by averaging or any other method. Consequently the common practice of climate measurement is an ad hoc approximation of a non-existent quantity. Figure 1 shows NASA’s version of this simulacrum.
Figure 1. The "Global Temperature" from http://www.giss.nasa.gov/data/update/gistemp/graphs/.
Even if climate scientists were willing to use one arbitrary average and call it the "Global Temperature," they also face the acute problem of sampling. Meteorological services use a 30-year interval to define "normals" for temperature. These are not "normal" temperatures, the name notwithstanding, they are just averages. On a geological scale the "normal" for Winnipeg would be that of the interior of a glacier. Why don’t we use, say, 300 years? The answer is the data do not exist. But this does not provide scientific justification for defining ‘climate’ as a 30-year average.
Equally problematic is the collapse that occurred around 1990 in the number of climate monitoring stations around the world. Figure 2 (Peterson and Vose 1997) shows the numbers for the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN), graphed in terms of the number of stations with at least 10 years of reliable data (a) and the corresponding geographical coverage (b). In the early 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the budget cuts in many OECD economies led to a sudden sharp drop in the number of active weather stations.
Figure 2: From Peterson and Vose (1997).
Figure 3 shows the total number of stations in the GHCN and the raw (arithmetic) average of temperatures for those stations. Notice that at the same time as the number of stations takes a dive (around 1990) the average temperature (red bars) jumps. This is due, at least in part, to the disproportionate loss of stations in remote and rural locations, as opposed to places like airports and urban areas where it gets warmer over time because of the build-up of the urban environment.
This poses a problem for users of the data. Someone has to come up with an algorithm for deciding how much of the change in average temperature post-1990 is due to an actual change in the climate and how much is due to the change in the sample. When we hear over and over about records being set after 1990 in observed "global temperatures" this might mean the climate has changed, or it means an inadequate adjustment is being used, and there is no formal way to decide between these.
Nevertheless, confident assertions are routinely made about ‘changes in the global temperature’ on the order of tenths of a degree C per decade. The confidence masks pervasive uncertainty in the underlying concepts and data quality.
This discussion only looked at temperature. If we look at precipitation, humidity, air pressure and so forth the situation only gets worse. Ad hoc averaging rules, inconsistent sampling and a lack of theoretical guidance as to how to define and interpret the basic quantities pervade the topic and consequently I am very skeptical about our ability to define and measure "climate" of the Earth with the sort of precision we expect in a medical thermometer.
2. The equations of motion of the climate are sufficiently-well understood that the full range of natural variability is quantified and future climate states can be predicted.
There is no theory of climate. This is an overlooked but elementary point Chris Essex and I tried to reinsert into the climate discussion. By ‘theory’ I mean a set of known equations representing laws of nature. There is a theory of how atoms and molecules behave: that is, there are differential equations that can be written down and used for predicting things.
Average up from them to the everyday level we experience and you find a theory also exists for describing the behaviour of fluids (it’s called Navier-Stokes theory). The theory can be derived by the averaging-up process, but conveniently it was already known before this approach was undertaken, so the path was well-marked. Also, experimental data are available to guide the theorizing. So this aspect of the scientific work went ahead with the intellectual odds in its favour, and nonetheless it was very hard.
Now think about the next step: averaging up to a theory that describes air and water motions on the scale of climate—time scales of decades or centuries and spatial scales of regions and continents. We are used to seeing numbers like "annual average temperature." But remember, we compute these things, we do not observe them. Nature does not work with annual averages. Nature integrates temperature over time, but in different ways in different materials, over different time scales. The growth and decline of glaciers represents a local "averaging" of temperature and precipitation, as does the migration of the northern tree line in a particular region. The appropriate time scale, be it annual, decadal or some other, is up to nature herself, and is not determined by what we find convenient for organizing our data.
(Continued)
Peter
An Economist’s Perspective on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol
By Ross McKitrick
Associate Professor
Department of Economics,
The University of Guelph
rmckitri@uoguelph.ca
and Visiting Associate Professor
School of Economics and Business
Wilfrid Laurier University
Presentation to the Department of Economics Annual Fall Workshop
The University of Manitoba
November 7, 2003
An Economist’s Perspective on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol
Ross McKitrick
0. Introduction
I have spent many years trying to figure out what is the optimal climate change policy for Canada. I believe the answer is, roughly, "keep studying the basics, don’t try to stop it and learn to adapt." But one does not come to this view with reference to economics alone. So in my discussion today I will try to give a snapshot of some of the range of technical issues that I have tried to think through in pursuit of an optimal climate policy.
There are no intellectual shortcuts on this issue. Even a simple question like "what is the cost of Kyoto" turns out to be maddeningly difficult to answer. Kyoto is, at best, a target: the costs are attached to the specific policies that will be used to reach that target, and to date no one knows what those policies will be for Canada. Broadening the issue to ask "what is the cost of climate change for Canada?" only piles up the ambiguity.
There is no formal definition of "climate," only traditional rules based on rather ad hoc averages of geophysical data, the sampling of which is often very unsystematic. There is even less agreement on what constitutes "change," which is why every time a forest burns or an iceberg calves someone asks: "Is this a sign of global warming?" Witness the apocalyptic thrill as seers and sages scan the skies for signs, omens and portents of global warming; but climate change is an elusive concept, and no one is sure what the thing would look like, even if it was already happening.
This ambiguity is reflected in the two key documents that govern much of the thinking on this issue. The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) defined "climate change" as follows:
"Climate change" means a change of climate which is
attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that
alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which
is in addition to natural climate variability observed
over comparable time periods.
(http://unfccc.int/index.html)
The recent Third Assessment Report (TAR) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defined it differently (http://www.ipcc.ch/):
1
"Climate change in IPCC usage refers to any climate change over time,
whether due to natural variability or as a result of human activity."
This is a very important difference: The IPCC is looking for signs of any change, whereas the policy instruments prescribed by the UNFCCC are not triggered unless it is a particular kind of change: that attributable to human activity. When IPCC officials declare that "climate change" is for real, this is about as informative as announcing that the passage of time is for real. Of course the climate changes: if it didn’t Winnipeg would still be under a glacier. But the fact that the last ice age ended doesn’t imply that the policy mechanisms of the UNFCCC should kick in.
That’s the problem with the ambiguity over the term "climate change"—and it seems to trip up a lot of people—accepting the reality of "climate change"does not mean accepting the need for policy interventions. And denying that global warming is a problem requiring costly policy measures is not the same as denying "climate change."
This purported link between two fundamentally different concepts was written into those pamphlets Environment Canada sent out two years ago. They began, ominously, "Our Climate is Changing" and concluded with the stuff on the back about the importance of turning down your thermostat and doing the laundry in cold water. It’s always comforting when big, complicated issues turn out to have such simple solutions, so perhaps we should take our cue from this line of thinking.
Therefore, rather than start with one of the complicated, ambiguous questions posed above I will organize my presentation around the practical question, "Does the possibility of climate change imply that I should wash my socks in cold water?" The affirmative answer offered by the Government of Canada arises from a long chain of assertions like this:
1. The "climate" is a well-defined thing, the mean state of which is measured with precision.
2. The equations of motion of the climate are sufficiently-well understood that the full range of natural variability is quantified and future climate states can be predicted.
3. By adding to the stock of atmospheric CO2 humans have an affect on the climate which necessarily involves a general warming of the Earth’s surface.
4. The present state of the climate can only be explained by invoking this mechanism.
5. Continued use of fossil fuels, by adding CO2 to the air, will cause unprecedented changes to the future climate.
6. These changes will be generally deleterious.
7. We ought to reduce emissions of CO2.
8. The best mechanism to accomplish this is through the Kyoto Protocol.
9. The best way for Canada to comply with Kyoto is to pursue a package of measures as outlined in the Canadian Climate Change Plan, which includes encouraging Canadians to do their laundry in cold water.
To the extent time permits I will grapple with each of these assertions. Notwithstanding the simplicity of the solution proffered in #9 I find the chain of thinking problematic at each step.
1. The "climate" is a well-defined thing, the mean state of which is measured with precision.
"It’s sunny out" is a statement about the weather. "Palm trees do not grow in Winnipeg" is a statement about the climate. Climate is a rather abstract concept that stands behind the weather. Dictionaries define it with phrases like "prevailing conditions" and "averages over some period of time" and so forth. Linacre (1992) surveyed 16 published definitions and reduced them to the following:
"Climate is the synthesis of atmospheric conditions characteristic of a particular place in the long-term. It is expressed by means of averages of the various elements of weather, and also by the probabilities of other conditions, including extreme values."
Note the ambiguities: Does ‘long-term’ in a geophysical setting mean 5 years? 30 years? 300 years? What are the ‘various elements’ and how do they average together? For example how would one average warm and wet, then compare it to the average of cold and dry?
Very well, it’s vague: so is ‘the economy.’ We don’t need to have a precise definition of ‘economy’ to study it, so we shouldn’t impose undue burdens on other fields. We can work with averages and aggregates in economics without doing too much violence to theoretical consistency (usually). But in the case of thermodynamic phenomena there is a catch, which as far as I know has not been discussed in the context of climate change before Chris Essex and I wrote Taken By Storm.
The catch does not involve a novel, contentious or obscure theory; it involves an old, standard, well-known definition from introductory thermodynamics. Indeed it seems to have been overlooked precisely because it is so elementary. The main problem in the debate over what the Global Temperature is doing is that there is no such thing as a Global Temperature.
Temperature is a continuous field, not a scalar, and there is no physics to guide reducing this field to a scalar, by averaging or any other method. Consequently the common practice of climate measurement is an ad hoc approximation of a non-existent quantity. Figure 1 shows NASA’s version of this simulacrum.
Figure 1. The "Global Temperature" from http://www.giss.nasa.gov/data/update/gistemp/graphs/.
Even if climate scientists were willing to use one arbitrary average and call it the "Global Temperature," they also face the acute problem of sampling. Meteorological services use a 30-year interval to define "normals" for temperature. These are not "normal" temperatures, the name notwithstanding, they are just averages. On a geological scale the "normal" for Winnipeg would be that of the interior of a glacier. Why don’t we use, say, 300 years? The answer is the data do not exist. But this does not provide scientific justification for defining ‘climate’ as a 30-year average.
Equally problematic is the collapse that occurred around 1990 in the number of climate monitoring stations around the world. Figure 2 (Peterson and Vose 1997) shows the numbers for the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN), graphed in terms of the number of stations with at least 10 years of reliable data (a) and the corresponding geographical coverage (b). In the early 1990s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the budget cuts in many OECD economies led to a sudden sharp drop in the number of active weather stations.
Figure 2: From Peterson and Vose (1997).
Figure 3 shows the total number of stations in the GHCN and the raw (arithmetic) average of temperatures for those stations. Notice that at the same time as the number of stations takes a dive (around 1990) the average temperature (red bars) jumps. This is due, at least in part, to the disproportionate loss of stations in remote and rural locations, as opposed to places like airports and urban areas where it gets warmer over time because of the build-up of the urban environment.
This poses a problem for users of the data. Someone has to come up with an algorithm for deciding how much of the change in average temperature post-1990 is due to an actual change in the climate and how much is due to the change in the sample. When we hear over and over about records being set after 1990 in observed "global temperatures" this might mean the climate has changed, or it means an inadequate adjustment is being used, and there is no formal way to decide between these.
Nevertheless, confident assertions are routinely made about ‘changes in the global temperature’ on the order of tenths of a degree C per decade. The confidence masks pervasive uncertainty in the underlying concepts and data quality.
This discussion only looked at temperature. If we look at precipitation, humidity, air pressure and so forth the situation only gets worse. Ad hoc averaging rules, inconsistent sampling and a lack of theoretical guidance as to how to define and interpret the basic quantities pervade the topic and consequently I am very skeptical about our ability to define and measure "climate" of the Earth with the sort of precision we expect in a medical thermometer.
2. The equations of motion of the climate are sufficiently-well understood that the full range of natural variability is quantified and future climate states can be predicted.
There is no theory of climate. This is an overlooked but elementary point Chris Essex and I tried to reinsert into the climate discussion. By ‘theory’ I mean a set of known equations representing laws of nature. There is a theory of how atoms and molecules behave: that is, there are differential equations that can be written down and used for predicting things.
Average up from them to the everyday level we experience and you find a theory also exists for describing the behaviour of fluids (it’s called Navier-Stokes theory). The theory can be derived by the averaging-up process, but conveniently it was already known before this approach was undertaken, so the path was well-marked. Also, experimental data are available to guide the theorizing. So this aspect of the scientific work went ahead with the intellectual odds in its favour, and nonetheless it was very hard.
Now think about the next step: averaging up to a theory that describes air and water motions on the scale of climate—time scales of decades or centuries and spatial scales of regions and continents. We are used to seeing numbers like "annual average temperature." But remember, we compute these things, we do not observe them. Nature does not work with annual averages. Nature integrates temperature over time, but in different ways in different materials, over different time scales. The growth and decline of glaciers represents a local "averaging" of temperature and precipitation, as does the migration of the northern tree line in a particular region. The appropriate time scale, be it annual, decadal or some other, is up to nature herself, and is not determined by what we find convenient for organizing our data.
(Continued)
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