The most dangerous aspect of the great debate over global warming and what is now called "climate change", is not the questioning of science or computer models; it is the world-wide economic cost of trying to control "carbon emissions". Putting science, and politics aside, for a moment, we should take a cold hard look at the economics behind the movement to control global warming. The Czech President is an economist, author, and experienced political leader. Here is his educated opinion.
Peter
Climate concern ripped as 'religion'
Czech leader condemns it
David R. Sands THE WASHINGTON TIMES Friday, May 30, 2008
source
Environmentalism, says Czech President Vaclav Klaus, is the new communism, a system of elite command-and-control that kills prosperity and should similarly be condemned to the ash heap of history.
The provocative Mr. Klaus, an economist by training and former prime minister, said in an interview that today's global warming activists are the direct descendants of the old Marxists who trampled on individual freedoms and undermined free markets in pursuit of a greater good.
"I understand that global warming is a religion conceived to suppress human freedom," he told editors and reporters at The Washington Times. "It is used to justify an enormous scope for government intervention vis-a-vis the markets and personal freedom."
The 66-year-old Mr. Klaus was in Washington this week for talks with senior U.S. officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, and to tout his new book, "Blue Planet in Green Shackles," about the dangers to life, liberty and prosperity posed by the modern environmental movement. His Washington meetings included discussions on a pact to situate key parts of a U.S. missile defense shield in the Czech Republic. A top Bush administration priority, the system is designed to defend against attacks from rogue states such as Iran.
Mr. Klaus said he expected the Czech parliament to ratify the pact by the end of the year, but acknowledged it "won't be an easy debate." Russia has fiercely opposed the system, something the Czech president said may actually build public support for the plan back home. "The stronger the Russian position opposing the system, the easier it is in the Czech Republic to get support," he said.
Having experienced decades of Soviet domination during the Cold War, Czechs are "extremely sensitive to any patronizing from that part of the world," he said. Mr. Klaus was a leading figure in the first Prague governments after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and was prime minister when the former Czechoslovakia broke into two countries in the "Velvet Divorce" of 1993.
He barely won a second five-year term as president in February amid divisions in the rival Social Democratic Party. An admirer of conservative former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he has emerged as a leading voice in Europe for free markets and individual rights.
He opposed the first drive for a European Union constitution, which collapsed when French and Dutch voters rejected it. The Czech parliament is expected to ratify an amended EU constitution by the end of the year.
The outspoken Mr. Klaus does not appear to mind being out of step with his government at times. He criticized the Czech Republic's decision last week to recognize the independence of Kosovo from Serbia, over the fierce objections of Belgrade.
Czech President Vaclav Klaus thinks global-warming activists are elitists who threaten freedoms and free markets. Mr. Klaus said his experience with the breakup of Czechoslovakia convinced him that any separation had to come from within and accepted by all parties. "If we had had U.S. or EU commissioners coming into Czechoslovakia telling us how to divide the country, there would have been shooting," he said. "I'm sorry that in [the United States], the substance of this argument was not appreciated."
That formative experience growing up under communism, said Mr. Klaus, has led him to his own strong views on the modern environmental movement, which he charged has failed to do a basic cost-benefit analysis in its drive to force people to obey its dictates. While saying he was not a "total libertarian," Mr. Klaus observed, "For most of my life, I lived under a regime where the public debate was manipulated. That is why I feel so strongly about this."
Former Vice President Al Gore - whom Mr. Klaus has challenged to a public debate - won the Nobel Peace Prize and the Czech Republic ratified the Kyoto climate treaty seven years ago, but Mr. Klaus insisted he had the world's "silent majority" behind him in the green debate.
"I don't feel alone," he insisted.
He rejected the "fashionable" idea of a cap-and-trade pollution control system, endorsed by Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain and his two Democratic rivals, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Under cap-and-trade, the government would set a ceiling under which companies could trade "credits" on how much carbon they produce. "It's a scheme to play the market and I refuse to accept that concept," he said. "Please don't try to play the market."
More practically, he said, government bureaucrats will be so afraid of setting the cap too low - stifling all economic activity - that they will set the ceiling too high, making it "meaningless."
Mr. Klaus pointed to the sharp rise in global energy prices as a sign the market is a far better engine for social change than politicians or bureaucrats.
The recent price increase "is so much more than any government would dare to do," he said. "Can you imagine if the U.S. Congress tried to introduce such a tax to cut consumption? The Congress would disappear tomorrow morning."
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label economics. Show all posts
Friday, May 30, 2008
Monday, October 22, 2007
Economics and Global Warming
Here is another essay from Dr. Roy Spencer where he points out some of what he sees as the real-world economics of trying to control global warming. Just how realistic is it to think we can control climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions a little? It doesn't add up.
Peter
A Little Eco-Nomics Never Hurt
By Roy Spencer : BIO 31 Jul 2006
Technological advancements have elevated mankind to its healthiest and wealthiest level in history. Our lives are longer, our health is greater, our food is more plentiful, and modern conveniences are now so affordable that even the poor among us own what only the rich could afford 50 years ago.
It is against this backdrop that we now find ourselves debating the merits of many of these conveniences and advancements. From the chemical scares of the 1960's and 1970's (e.g., DDT, dioxin, food preservatives), to the fear of runaway population growth and rapidly dwindling petroleum supplies, the very people that have been blessed with the prosperity that unbridled human ingenuity brings are increasingly anxious about the world we have created for ourselves.
Fear of the ultimate environmental threat, global warming, is now striking at the very heart of modern life, casting doubt upon the future availability of inexpensive energy that is necessary to keep society running. Al Gore's movie 'An Inconvenient Truth', Discovery's recent special 'Global Warming: What You Need to Know with Tom Brokaw', and a deluge of media stories and editorials are all dedicated to convincing you that we need to be saved from ourselves.
And while it is true that there are potential negative side effects of our use of fossil fuels (as well as most other natural resources), little attention is ever paid to the practical question: what should be done about it? It is much easier to point out a problem than it is to actually fix it....and 'fixing problems' too often leads to unintended negative consequences.
A century ago people would be too busy working -- trying to stay fed, clothed, and sheltered -- to worry about any ill effects from the industrial revolution. Today, though, we have enough wealth to not only support ourselves and clean up most of our messes in the process, but to donate to causes that claim to be 'making things better' by lobbying for ever-increasing levels of cleanliness and safety in our environment.
What reasonable person could be against 'clean water', 'clean air', and 'clean renewable sources of energy'? Who dares argue with politicians, scientists, and other pundits who lead the fight against global warming?
The dangerous illusion underpinning many environmental efforts is that it is both possible and preferable to keep pushing toward a 100 percent clean and safe existence. Those of us who try to point out that there are practical limits to cleanliness and safety are immediately branded as shills for big business. Meanwhile, environmentalists and politicians get to hold the high ground of altruism and concern for the public's interest.
P.J. O'Rourke once said, "Some people will do anything to save the Earth...except take a science course." To that I would add, "...or a basic economics course". If for a reasonable cost we can remove 98 percent of the contaminants in our drinking water and make it quite safe, is it then a good idea to spend ten times as much to push that purity from 98 percent to 99 percent?
In the real world, there are only limited resources to accomplish everything we want to do, and resources diverted to wasteful ends are no longer available to tackle more pressing problems. Only in the imaginary world of the environmental lobbyist, pandering politician, or concerned journalist is it a public service to keep pushing toward 100 percent purity.
Occasionally, the light bulb will go on, and someone realizes the practical limits that (thankfully) keep "Earth saving" goals from rarely being achieved. This happened to '20/20' consumer advocate John Stossel in 1994, with his special "Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?". For me, it was about 1985, when I started reading about -- and understanding -- basic economics.
While most people are out making the system work, others are devising ever more alarmist ways to make it look like the latest drought, flood, or hurricane is mankind's fault. The implication is that, if only enough of us can agree that something bad is happening, we will then be motivated into action. And we indeed should do those things that make the most economic and scientific sense -- for instance national investments in energy research.
But when the pundits push for solutions that will not work (the Kyoto Protocol, or the rapidly failing EU carbon trading scheme), one begins to wonder about either their intelligence or their motives. In the end, these efforts do little more than redistribute wealth and let their proponents feel good about themselves.
Could redistributing wealth be the true motive? Disdain for 'wealth' and 'big business' arises when people neglect the fact that these conditions only occur when someone figures out a better way to provide more desirable goods and services, at a lower cost, that people want. Economic transactions benefit the seller and the buyer, otherwise they would not occur.
But instead, our language belies persistent beliefs in economic myths: 'workers' versus 'management' (as if managers have no economic value), or 'price gouging' (when gasoline supply is disrupted, or has a threatened disruption, and prices rise, we somehow expect the laws of supply and demand to be repealed). We may be envious of those that have more than us, but it is misguided to believe that if they had less, that we would have more.
Everyone benefits from the promise of profits that motivates investors to risk their money on better ways to provide what people want. You say you don't like the disparities in wealth that a free market generates? I would be glad to have my wealth increase by only 40 percent as the rich see a 200 percent increase in their wealth. The alternative is for all of us to be equally poor and miserable. If you must, think of profits as a necessary evil...but for the good of all of us, profits (as well as the risk of losses) are a necessary part of our high standard of living.
As long as the media continues to portray the global warming issue (as well as other environmental threats) as an ideological battle between politicians and scientists who are trying to save humanity on the one hand, and evil petroleum-pushers bent on maintaining our 'addiction to oil' on the other, we will be no closer to solutions to our energy problems.
Journalists have the power to frame the debate, and so far that power has been, at best, misused. At worst, it has been abused.
Dr. Roy Spencer is a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite.
Peter
A Little Eco-Nomics Never Hurt
By Roy Spencer : BIO 31 Jul 2006
Technological advancements have elevated mankind to its healthiest and wealthiest level in history. Our lives are longer, our health is greater, our food is more plentiful, and modern conveniences are now so affordable that even the poor among us own what only the rich could afford 50 years ago.
It is against this backdrop that we now find ourselves debating the merits of many of these conveniences and advancements. From the chemical scares of the 1960's and 1970's (e.g., DDT, dioxin, food preservatives), to the fear of runaway population growth and rapidly dwindling petroleum supplies, the very people that have been blessed with the prosperity that unbridled human ingenuity brings are increasingly anxious about the world we have created for ourselves.
Fear of the ultimate environmental threat, global warming, is now striking at the very heart of modern life, casting doubt upon the future availability of inexpensive energy that is necessary to keep society running. Al Gore's movie 'An Inconvenient Truth', Discovery's recent special 'Global Warming: What You Need to Know with Tom Brokaw', and a deluge of media stories and editorials are all dedicated to convincing you that we need to be saved from ourselves.
And while it is true that there are potential negative side effects of our use of fossil fuels (as well as most other natural resources), little attention is ever paid to the practical question: what should be done about it? It is much easier to point out a problem than it is to actually fix it....and 'fixing problems' too often leads to unintended negative consequences.
A century ago people would be too busy working -- trying to stay fed, clothed, and sheltered -- to worry about any ill effects from the industrial revolution. Today, though, we have enough wealth to not only support ourselves and clean up most of our messes in the process, but to donate to causes that claim to be 'making things better' by lobbying for ever-increasing levels of cleanliness and safety in our environment.
What reasonable person could be against 'clean water', 'clean air', and 'clean renewable sources of energy'? Who dares argue with politicians, scientists, and other pundits who lead the fight against global warming?
The dangerous illusion underpinning many environmental efforts is that it is both possible and preferable to keep pushing toward a 100 percent clean and safe existence. Those of us who try to point out that there are practical limits to cleanliness and safety are immediately branded as shills for big business. Meanwhile, environmentalists and politicians get to hold the high ground of altruism and concern for the public's interest.
P.J. O'Rourke once said, "Some people will do anything to save the Earth...except take a science course." To that I would add, "...or a basic economics course". If for a reasonable cost we can remove 98 percent of the contaminants in our drinking water and make it quite safe, is it then a good idea to spend ten times as much to push that purity from 98 percent to 99 percent?
In the real world, there are only limited resources to accomplish everything we want to do, and resources diverted to wasteful ends are no longer available to tackle more pressing problems. Only in the imaginary world of the environmental lobbyist, pandering politician, or concerned journalist is it a public service to keep pushing toward 100 percent purity.
Occasionally, the light bulb will go on, and someone realizes the practical limits that (thankfully) keep "Earth saving" goals from rarely being achieved. This happened to '20/20' consumer advocate John Stossel in 1994, with his special "Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?". For me, it was about 1985, when I started reading about -- and understanding -- basic economics.
While most people are out making the system work, others are devising ever more alarmist ways to make it look like the latest drought, flood, or hurricane is mankind's fault. The implication is that, if only enough of us can agree that something bad is happening, we will then be motivated into action. And we indeed should do those things that make the most economic and scientific sense -- for instance national investments in energy research.
But when the pundits push for solutions that will not work (the Kyoto Protocol, or the rapidly failing EU carbon trading scheme), one begins to wonder about either their intelligence or their motives. In the end, these efforts do little more than redistribute wealth and let their proponents feel good about themselves.
Could redistributing wealth be the true motive? Disdain for 'wealth' and 'big business' arises when people neglect the fact that these conditions only occur when someone figures out a better way to provide more desirable goods and services, at a lower cost, that people want. Economic transactions benefit the seller and the buyer, otherwise they would not occur.
But instead, our language belies persistent beliefs in economic myths: 'workers' versus 'management' (as if managers have no economic value), or 'price gouging' (when gasoline supply is disrupted, or has a threatened disruption, and prices rise, we somehow expect the laws of supply and demand to be repealed). We may be envious of those that have more than us, but it is misguided to believe that if they had less, that we would have more.
Everyone benefits from the promise of profits that motivates investors to risk their money on better ways to provide what people want. You say you don't like the disparities in wealth that a free market generates? I would be glad to have my wealth increase by only 40 percent as the rich see a 200 percent increase in their wealth. The alternative is for all of us to be equally poor and miserable. If you must, think of profits as a necessary evil...but for the good of all of us, profits (as well as the risk of losses) are a necessary part of our high standard of living.
As long as the media continues to portray the global warming issue (as well as other environmental threats) as an ideological battle between politicians and scientists who are trying to save humanity on the one hand, and evil petroleum-pushers bent on maintaining our 'addiction to oil' on the other, we will be no closer to solutions to our energy problems.
Journalists have the power to frame the debate, and so far that power has been, at best, misused. At worst, it has been abused.
Dr. Roy Spencer is a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Cap-and Trade System To Control Greenhouse Gases A (Very) Bad Idea
A well-known economist, (Arthur Laffer) says a cap-and-trade system for controlling greenhouse gas emissions would harm the U.S. economy. Not only would the economy suffer, but I am sure any such efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions would have no effect on global warming or climate change. Read what Mr. Laffer has to say about the economics of the plan.
Peter
The Adverse Economic Impacts of Cap-and-Trade Regulations
Arthur Laffer and Wayne Winegarden
September 2007
The Adverse Economic Impacts of Cap-and-Trade Regulations
A cap-and-trade scheme for controlling greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) would impose significant economic costs on the U.S. economy and, consequently, are an inappropriate policy response to current concerns about global warming. Our analysis of cap-and-trade’s economic impacts reveals the following impacts:
• In economic terminology, cap-and-trade operates is a “quantity constraint” as the scheme establishes (or constrains) the GHGs that can be produced. As a quantity constraint, cap-and-trade regulations inherently create more price volatility in the GHG allowance market, as has already been observed in Europe. The Congressional Budget Office has also raised the price volatility issue, concluding that cap-and-trade regulations are not sound policies for addressing global warming.
• Cap-and-trade regulations would likely impose a large cost on the U.S. economy. The U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates that overall economic growth could decline by up to 4.2 percent if a cap-and-trade system were implemented to achieve the Kyoto Protocol targets (7% below 1990 GHGs by 2008-2012). The costs to reach the ultimate goal of some GHG control proponents (e.g., reducing GHGs to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050) would be significantly greater. However, these estimates assume that the government will auction off the rights to emit greenhouse gases as opposed to simply giving these rights away, which is the
approach often discussed in the U.S. and what has actually been implemented in Europe.
• Fossil fuels (oil, coal and natural gas) provide 86 percent of our current energy needs. It is not currently feasible for the alternative energy sources to significantly expand their energy contribution sufficiently in the near-term to substitute for the demand growth, according to the EIA. Consequently, a GHG cap could effectively become an energy production cap – or an energy supply shock.
• The U.S. economy’s past experience with energy supply shocks supports the conclusions of the EIA study. During the previous oil supply shocks (energy supply shocks) of 1974-75, 1979-81 and 1990-91, the economy declined, unemployment rose, and the stock market declined in value.
• Based on the energy efficiency responses to the energy supply shocks of the 1970s, the U.S. economy could be 5.2 percent smaller in 2020 compared to what would otherwise be expected if cap-and-trade regulations are imposed. This equates to a potential income loss of about $10,800 for a family of four for the initial Kyoto GHG reduction target.
• Technical difficulties in measuring and verifying the validity of traded GHG allowances imply that the global market will be inefficient, and subject to manipulation and fraud. Government regulations that fail to delineate future GHG control levels add more uncertainty. These uncertainties raise further questions regarding the efficacy of the cap-and-trade regulations.
When evaluated as a whole, cap-and-trade regulations are likely to impose significant economic costs on the U.S. economy. These costs argue against implementing cap-and-trade regulations as a response to concerns about the potential contribution of GHGs to global warming.
Peter
The Adverse Economic Impacts of Cap-and-Trade Regulations
Arthur Laffer and Wayne Winegarden
September 2007
The Adverse Economic Impacts of Cap-and-Trade Regulations
A cap-and-trade scheme for controlling greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) would impose significant economic costs on the U.S. economy and, consequently, are an inappropriate policy response to current concerns about global warming. Our analysis of cap-and-trade’s economic impacts reveals the following impacts:
• In economic terminology, cap-and-trade operates is a “quantity constraint” as the scheme establishes (or constrains) the GHGs that can be produced. As a quantity constraint, cap-and-trade regulations inherently create more price volatility in the GHG allowance market, as has already been observed in Europe. The Congressional Budget Office has also raised the price volatility issue, concluding that cap-and-trade regulations are not sound policies for addressing global warming.
• Cap-and-trade regulations would likely impose a large cost on the U.S. economy. The U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates that overall economic growth could decline by up to 4.2 percent if a cap-and-trade system were implemented to achieve the Kyoto Protocol targets (7% below 1990 GHGs by 2008-2012). The costs to reach the ultimate goal of some GHG control proponents (e.g., reducing GHGs to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050) would be significantly greater. However, these estimates assume that the government will auction off the rights to emit greenhouse gases as opposed to simply giving these rights away, which is the
approach often discussed in the U.S. and what has actually been implemented in Europe.
• Fossil fuels (oil, coal and natural gas) provide 86 percent of our current energy needs. It is not currently feasible for the alternative energy sources to significantly expand their energy contribution sufficiently in the near-term to substitute for the demand growth, according to the EIA. Consequently, a GHG cap could effectively become an energy production cap – or an energy supply shock.
• The U.S. economy’s past experience with energy supply shocks supports the conclusions of the EIA study. During the previous oil supply shocks (energy supply shocks) of 1974-75, 1979-81 and 1990-91, the economy declined, unemployment rose, and the stock market declined in value.
• Based on the energy efficiency responses to the energy supply shocks of the 1970s, the U.S. economy could be 5.2 percent smaller in 2020 compared to what would otherwise be expected if cap-and-trade regulations are imposed. This equates to a potential income loss of about $10,800 for a family of four for the initial Kyoto GHG reduction target.
• Technical difficulties in measuring and verifying the validity of traded GHG allowances imply that the global market will be inefficient, and subject to manipulation and fraud. Government regulations that fail to delineate future GHG control levels add more uncertainty. These uncertainties raise further questions regarding the efficacy of the cap-and-trade regulations.
When evaluated as a whole, cap-and-trade regulations are likely to impose significant economic costs on the U.S. economy. These costs argue against implementing cap-and-trade regulations as a response to concerns about the potential contribution of GHGs to global warming.
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)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)