Speaking of cost/risk factors. let's assume the alarmists are mostly right, they have pointed out all the negatives. They have not pointed out the tremendous costs nor did they point out the benefits to a warming world either. Even assuming warming will cause all sorts of harm, there are plenty of areas that would of course benefit as well, to disregard them is foolhardy, any cost/risk assessment weighs all the factors why do we hear only the negatives not the costs or EVER the benefits?

Overall bad ...maybe?
Ignoring such things only makes me more suspicious however.

Tom,

Stern's book is covering that and I'll try to nutshell his position.

First, the IPCC did cover the projected costs to countries in the 2007 report. Specifically Chapter 11. Had the U.S. gone with the reductions called for in the Kyoto Protocol our GDP would have shrunk by an estimated .2 to 1.2%..

But Kyoto is in the past and the modelers offer different equations and projections throughout Chapter 11 (which my link above points to. You have to dig for the answers...but they are in there.

Short answers (and this is my take after one read and my listening to Stern's book):
- How much it will cost depends on too many factors for an easy calculation. What sectors in the country will be targeted (transportation, energy, agriculture...)? To what degree? What policies will be enacted to help/hinder the reduction of emissions (incentives, disincentives, taxes, carbon trading)? The answers to all of these can change the final price tag dramatically so the scientists are reluctant to put hard numbers out there...they just don't know.
- Much will also depend on the price that gets put on carbon. All the price models estimate a price per ton of CO2 of $20-up (most put the near-term price at $25/ton). This is the "carbon tax" that will be put on emitters. Every model has this markup.
- Why does every model have a carbon tax? Well...hydrocarbons are just too darn cheap right now (especially coal) to create the kind of urgency that's needed to motivate consumers and manufacturers to change the status quo. But if you make it more economically sound to switch to cleaner living...people will sign up and innovation and technologies will explode and get cheaper.
- Won't that innovation come anyway when coal and oil deposits peter out? Yes...and it's happening already...but it needs to happen faster. Every ounce of CO2 that gets flung into the atmosphere will come back to haunt us eventually. The sooner we start, the cheaper and better it will be for us in the long run.

Sterns is an economist and makes what I consider to be two good economic arguments. First, he says that CO2 emissions will eventually cause very expensive mass disruptions and the fact that we aren't paying for those costs now represents a broken economic system. I'll go along with the premise that future revenue streams, positive and negative, should be reflected in the price of an asset.

Secondly, and more convincingly from my standpoint, he argues that by not taking action now, what we are saying is that our kids and their kids etc are worth less than we are. The rights, he maintains, of legions of unborn children should not be ignored or discarded just because they aren't here right now. (Now this is an argument I can really get behind but I somehow doubt it can be used to great effect on this side of the pond. The main cheerleaders for AGW and its solutions are the Left and talking about the rights of unborn children amongst them usually has the same effect as tossing a clove of garlic into a room full of vampires.)

Each cost model that I've seen has one other component, that of a burst of technology that will make low carbon energy solutions cheaper overall and of great benefit to whatever country adopts them. Indeed, some models show that countries/industries will MAKE money after the expensive initial outlays to retool their systems. Stern's book (which I'm sorry I can't link) even allows for hiccups, missteps, fraud and abuse in its calculations. But, so the argument goes, low-carbon energy solutions will pay for themselves and more in the form of greater efficiency, profits to the innovators, and increased revenues to the government through taxes and carbon charges.

Now...I'll admit things like this have happened before. Flat-screen TVs are much cheaper than when they were first introduced. And you can't buy leaded gas anywhere anymore despite how the car companies howled when those restrictions were put on. Technology and production improved. Better unleaded engines were developed and the car companies made money.

But the growth rates and financial rewards the IPCC and Stern predict are so stunning and so big...that I have to wonder why it hasn't already happened. I suspect the technologies are a little more difficult that switching an engine from leaded to unleaded... The Scandinavian countries, Germany, and, to a lesser extent, the UK have adopted many of these emissions-reducing policies and technologies...but the anemic economic payoffs and absent explosion of related technologies have proven to be less of a bonanza than the IPCC models and Stern would lead us to expect.

Stern touches, very briefly, on the other cost associated with fighting climate change which is wealthier countries paying for the energy retooling of poorer countries. He argues that those who have polluted in the past should pay the price going forward (see above uncollected CO2 costs). But, once again, the notional huge upsurge in our own economy as we green it will pay for huge capital outflows to the poorer countries too.

Yeah...but what if that resultant upswing in growth and profitability doesn't happen? Are we still on the hook for improving the roads/factories/farms of Country B?

From a game theory perspective, if there are such palpable economic rewards to be had, rather than pay out money to less developed countries, the U.S. should green itself first, reap the economic benefits and then hand out largesse from our even loftier economic perch.

GMTom wrote:Speaking of cost/risk factors. let's assume the alarmists are mostly right, they have pointed out all the negatives. They have not pointed out the tremendous costs nor did they point out the benefits to a warming world either. Even assuming warming will cause all sorts of harm, there are plenty of areas that would of course benefit as well, to disregard them is foolhardy, any cost/risk assessment weighs all the factors why do we hear only the negatives not the costs or EVER the benefits?

Overall bad ...maybe?
Ignoring such things only makes me more suspicious however.

So i suddenly live in the desert and lose 100% of my income and you live in Eden and increase yours by 110%. Net benefical change, are you willing to cover my loss and split the gain ?

No, and things will not change overnight, people are mobile and can move. We always have, we always will. And should your house be hit by a tornado, am I supposed to pay for that as well? What about farmers who lose their crops while farmers in another area reap rewards thanks to that loss of yours? If oranges freeze in Florida causing prices to rise so the California orange farmers make a killing, should the California farmers pay the Florida farmers? Should I cover your losses if you invest in a company that goes belly up? Should I send you a portion of my profits if I invest wisely? Sh*% happens, always has, always will. Such a socialistic comment!? The key here is we really can't do anything about it, even the most intense changes would alter things much in the least.

GMTom wrote:No, and things will not change overnight, people are mobile and can move. We always have, we always will. And should your house be hit by a tornado, am I supposed to pay for that as well? What about farmers who lose their crops while farmers in another area reap rewards thanks to that loss of yours? If oranges freeze in Florida causing prices to rise so the California orange farmers make a killing, should the California farmers pay the Florida farmers? Should I cover your losses if you invest in a company that goes belly up? Should I send you a portion of my profits if I invest wisely? Sh*% happens, always has, always will. Such a socialistic comment!? The key here is we really can't do anything about it, even the most intense changes would alter things much in the least.

I see a difference between getting shafted by nature or getting shafted by nature due to anthropogenic factors. Seems hardly fair that you aren't willing to spend to reduce the climate impact of our economies and don't want to pay people that suffer because of that.
I mean seriously if your neighbor ruins your garden you sue and get payed, if we ruin whole regions we flip 'em off ?

and as I said, how is anything you do that is proposed going to help?

Yeah but if you say it's not worth spending money on trying to prevent it then you kinda have to fork over the money to help the people that get shafted, don't you.

where does that "logic" come from?
the shafted people move, over a long period of time, some cities will grow, some will shrink. It's not like a mass exodus will happen on a certain day.

GMTom wrote:where does that "logic" come from?

Looks more to me like morality than logic. You cause a mess that you could have prevented, but don't help deal with the consequences?

the shafted people move, over a long period of time, some cities will grow, some will shrink. It's not like a mass exodus will happen on a certain day.

[/quote]maybe not overnight, but an increased pressure for immigration into the USA may cause problems of it's own. It's not like people are happy with the current immigration situation out there, surely?

GMTom wrote:where does that "logic" come from?
the shafted people move, over a long period of time, some cities will grow, some will shrink. It's not like a mass exodus will happen on a certain day.

And were do you think all those people will go ?

Tom

No, and things will not change overnight, people are mobile and can move.

People in the Third World are not all that mobile. When they are beset by drought or flood, they can't move very far. And many are already being affected by climactic change. The Turkana people or northwest Kenya have seen year after year of drought . The area of the Horn of Africa. Eritrea, Djibouti and Eritrea are essentially seeing their climate create famine and exodus.
When people do attempt to move confrontations occur as they meet people already there. War ensues. Its why the CIA believes that a major threat of climate change is war caused by dislocation.
The more we can mitigate the dislocation the fewer conflicts...
If your coastal city is hit by a rogue wave of 150 feet, how quickly do you have to move? If your city is hit by category 5 hurricanes every 4 or 5 years what's the cost of rebuilding constantly?
The current methods (models) of assessing risk/ return are as imperfect as the climate models. But generally, change is easier to accommodate if it is slow.... And the problem with the current climate change is that many of the effects created by increasing energy in our ecosystem won't be slow, but will occur over a few years (long drought, repeated annual flooding) and sometimes suddenly. (Rogue waves, hurricanes.)
Frankly a lot of the slow changes (warming of the arctic, are already being seen and so far other than coastal erosion and building succumbing to permafrost (now former permafrost) the changes aren't that bad....
Its the ones that affect where most of our population lives, the coasts, that will be very difficult to comfortably accommodate.

Well, I finished Stern's book and I'm afraid it fell apart for me at the end though much of the economic theory in it was sound.
I'll explain my reasons in a future post.

So...it took a while but we've finally got the 'or else'. Stop AGW or face population dislocations. The heat/hurricanes/rogue waves/droughts and what have you will drive people to abandon their homes and flee for better climes over the course of weeks instead of decades.

This is a pretty good argument. I don't think anyone has ever done a study of how many Americans died in the mass migration out of the Dust Bowl in the 1930's...but I'm sure it was bad. The Dust Bowl got Canada too if I recall...Toronto probably wouldn't be Toronto without it.

It was a bad time for the Okies...no doubt about it.

Now Tom/Steve/Mach, I know your first reaction will be like mine, "Yeah, but they adapted and so did America." Verily. But their suffering paved the way for some of FDR's biggest New Deal excesses. We certainly don't want another New Deal...do we?

People move, people have moved, people will move in the future.

Let me get this straight, we suddenly care about poor people when it comes to global warming and how can we take care of them, but when they are starving we don't care? When they have other disasters, we don't care? Why does it change in this situation?

Tom's question is also one of mine. There are so many disconnects in the current popular approaches to the world's poor that it makes my head spin.

To wit:

We need to prevent future climate-based dislocations of the world's poor --- but those that are being dislocated today by violence are just SOL.

Climate change will cause great disease and suffering amongst the world's poor --- that the great suffering caused by malaria today could be alleviated by some smart (read:not overuse like we used to do) use of DDT is immaterial because DDT is eeeeevil!

Basically...the woes that the AGW proponents want us to prevent are extant today! Well...let's go! There are displaced people in the millions in Congo, Sudan, and Columbia.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33026764/UNHC ... stics-2010

One of Stern's conclusions is that deforestation needs to be stopped now. Today. How do we do it? By the rich countries of the world paying the poorer countries where deforestation is happening to stop of course. And what is to keep them from pocketing the money AND chopping down the forests? Well...erm...the weight of international condemnation.

Uh huh.

Look, if you want to save some of those forests now...today...you're going to have to send in guys with guns to throw the loggers out and keep them out. Ditto if you want to solve some of these existing displacement problems.

Considering what might happen to the world's poor if temp increases a few degrees, and how that compares to all the ills and woes they do and would suffer even if the temp remained unchanged, is an interesting and relevant exercise. Just don't think, please, that it can lead you to meaningful conclusions about AGW overall. Ditto for polar bears or coral reefs; Laplanders or Equadorians. If you accept that the world is very likely to warm by a few degrees over the course of this century, as the IPCC predicts, and you want to understand what that really means, it can be very misleading to focus on any one effect or region, or a limited number. It can be misleading to break things down and separate the problem in manageable bits. That's the classical western/scientific way of proceeding and it certainly serves its purposes; it's how the IPCC approaches things and I wouldn't suggest they change that.

But it's not how the real world works. I mean the real world - the globe - the planet. It operates as a complex system and I think that if you consider AGW from the standpoint of systems theory you'll gain a better feel for what's really at stake. There's nothing very complicated about this when you look at it at the largest scale; you just have to understand that the system lives or dies as a system. The system reacts to change as a system; a fluctuation in some key characteristic (like temperature) will set off a chain of responses, reactions, effects, feedbacks. Obviously that can get very complicated but for now just think simple. If the system was running in some sort of equilibrium with some degree of stability a small perturbation is likely to cause a ripple of minor changes that don't last very long; a more significant perturbation might cause larger cause-effect ripples and the system might take longer to return to equilibrium, or adopt a slightly altered set of "standard operating conditions"; a really large perturbation might throw the system so out of whack that either it doesn't return to any sort of stability or, when it does, conditions are grossly different than before - a new set of equilibrium values is in place.

What sort of system is the planet earth? How sensitive is it to perturbations? How stable are current conditions (meaning how easy would it be to kick the system into some different set of stable values)?

We can theorize about this, or rely on theological assurances, but we have only two actual examples we can look at if we wish to be empirical. We have our own planet's history, as revealed by innumerable clues from many fields of research, and we have the example of the planet Mars, which is the only other one we can say for sure has experienced a major change in conditions. (There are some moons of other planets that can be studied in this way, but I'm going to ignore them. Saturn's rotation has been slowed by its thick atmosphere but that's about all we can surmise.) What hints can we glean from these examples of planetary systems dynamics?

Simple: earth has shown three important characteristics, Mars has so far shown just one. On the earth, we have had a single unchanging trend of extremely slow temperature fall due to the cessation of major asteroid hits once the neighborhood of our orbit got cleaned up by gravity, and the slow exhaustion of the nuclear furnace in our orb's interior. We've also had, overlaid on that super-slow trend, a number of different eras, each of very long duration, each characterized by a different set of atmospheric, climatic, and ecological conditions. We can explain why some eras ended, but not all. Finally, on even a shorter time scale, we can detect a cycle of hot-cold periods; there have been seven glacial periods in the last 650,000 years. The cycling is indicative of underlying stability, with variations being caused either by naturally cyclical variations of an astronomical nature or by the fact that systems often find stability through cycles. Staying simple, click HERE for an example of a system that has no changes in basic characteristics or external inputs, shows great cyclical fluctuations, but is essentially stable.

That's what we can learn from earth history. Mars gives us much less info. All we know is that it once had a lot of liquid surface water but now has essentially none, was warmer but is now cold, once had a thick atmosphere but now has a thin one, once had a magnetic field that periodically changed polarity but now has none. We have identified three major and eight total geological eras for Mars, their differences being caused largely by the fact that volcanism, tectonism, and meteorite bombardment have generally decreased through Mars' history. Earth has gone through some major changes, but not as major as Mars!

Repeating my questions from above: What sort of system is the planet earth? How sensitive is it to perturbations? How stable are current conditions? The answers...

To be continued...