List and Andrew
1. Today’s message from Andrew re a 23 June IER climate article is a
continuation of a dialog I started on 14 June about a new climate action
proposal by Prof. Nordhaus. But I think the IER article misses the point
totally.
The short extract provided by Andrew below unfortunately doesn’t
contain the highlighting needed to tell who is saying what. I urge reading the
IER original (cite given below) - but also the full 4 June NYTimes book review
by Prof. Nordhaus which is here quoted extensively - and even better the full
(and free) speech and article cites I gave on the 23rd.
2. I have little knowledge about IER or Dr. Murphy, but I guess that
this article’s support for SRM is probably not widely desired on this list.
See Wiki on IER (includes a quote by Rush Limbaugh).
I am sufficiently impressed by the new Nordhaus proposal - that I wrote
(and seem to have had accepted) the following at the cite Andrew gave below
ronallarson • a few seconds ago
Dr. Murphy has failed to provide the title of Prof. Nordhaus book review (“A
New Solution: The Climate Club”), nor apparently understood its final Section
4. Those final ten paragraphs describe a ”New…Club” and the importance of a
newly proposed tariff. Prof. Nordhaus shows that a (previously missing) tariff
MUST accompany the proposed new Club’s membership carbon fee/tax.
This final Section 4 (and the recent, longer full Nordhaus paper, cited in the
June 4 NY Times review being quoted) should lead most readers to conclude that
there was nothing “unwitting” in this book review. This final (repeat:
unmentioned by Dr. Murphy) Nordhaus Section 4 seems to refute, not support, Dr.
Murphy’s thesis that Prof. Nordhaus is ”unwittingly” on his side. Not only can
the tax (IF accompanied by a tariff) be favorable to the US, it also can be
favored by all Club members (all countries) - because it will help all
countries (and therefore presumably a vast majority of we humans).
If more widely acknowledged to exist, this new “Club/tariff” concept could be
the no-free-rider (perhaps even non-controversial) winner we should all be
looking for. So, I look forward to Dr. Murphy addressing, in a future similar
IER paper, Prof. Nordhaus’ new, but here missing, Club/tax/tariff) proposal.
Ron
On Jun 29, 2015, at 1:04 PM, Andrew Lockley <[email protected]> wrote:
> http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/nordhaus-unwittingly-shows-flaws-in-case-for-carbon-tax/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=nordhaus-unwittingly-shows-flaws-in-case-for-carbon-tax
>
> Extract
>
> There are two ways to slow climate change, and thereby to reduce the
> likelihood of catastrophic damages. One is the hard slog of reducing
> emissions. The other is to use geoengineering that attempts to offset the
> CO2-induced warming.
>
> Wagner and Weitzman provide an illuminating discussion of the dilemmas of
> geoengineering. Geoengineering here means management of solar
> radiation—techniques that reflect sunlight back into space and prevent it
> from warming the earth’s climate. You can think of the process as making the
> earth “whiter” or more reflective, so that less sunlight is absorbed by the
> surface of the earth. This cooling effect will offset the warming that comes
> from the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.
>
> The whitening process is similar to what occurs after large volcanic
> eruptions. After Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines blasted 20 million tons of
> sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere in 1991, global temperatures fell by
> about half a degree centigrade because the particles reflected sunlight away
> from the earth. Geoengineering can be understood as creating artificial
> volcanic eruptions, where several artificial Pinatubo-sized eruptions may be
> needed every year to offset the warming effects of CO2 accumulation.
>
> Many proposals have emerged to whiten the earth. These, along with many of
> the ethical, political, national security, and environmental dimensions of
> such projects, are discussed in a recent report by the National Academy of
> Sciences. The standard approach is to deliver sulfur-bearing compounds,
> presumably specially engineered ones that would act as small mirrors, into
> the lower stratosphere. A number of techniques have been proposed to do this,
> such as using naval guns, aircraft, or rockets. Recent studies indicate that
> such geoengineering can lower global temperatures at very low cost relative
> to other approaches, such as reducing carbon emissions.
>
> Even though the costs are low and the average impacts on temperature are
> clear, the dangers are frightening, as is emphasized by Wagner and Weitzman
> as well as by the National Academy report. The NAS committee concludes that
> climate “modification strategies are limited primarily by considerations of
> risk, not by direct costs.” Among the risks are the facts that geoengineering
> does nothing to reduce the ocean acidification caused by increased CO2; that
> countries would need to keep a program going virtually forever; that there is
> a mismatch between the cooling and heating effects; and that there is a high
> likelihood for redistribution of precipitation in the different regions of
> the world. An effective program would require virtual unanimity in
> international governance so as to reduce political frictions among countries.
> [Nordhaus, bold added]
>
> What is fascinating is that if you go to the actual book review and read the
> full discussion, you will see that people like Weitzman and Nordhaus are
> discussing whether people should even be conducting cursory research into
> geoengineering options.
>
> Why in the world would interventionists who think the fate of humanity hangs
> in the balance not want scientists to broaden the options at our
> grandchildren’s disposal? What they fear is that if the public realizes there
> are techniques “on the shelf” that could very quickly and cheaply bring down
> global temperatures, then it would be hard to get humanity whipped up into a
> frenzy in spending trillions of dollars to merely reduce the probability of a
> future unlikely “fat tail” catastrophe.
>
> Remember, the cutting-edge case for aggressive intervention against emissions
> has stopped trying to claim that a high carbon tax will likely produce large
> net benefits. For example, in this post I use the latest IPCC report to show
> that in the most likely future scenario, the economic costs of limiting
> temperature to 2 degrees Celsius of warming will exceed the benefits of
> avoided climate change damage.
>
> So already the aggressive interventionists have to make the “fat tail”
> argument of Weitzman and others—they have to say a disaster might occur if
> humans keep pumping lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But then in
> that case, it becomes very relevant to know that one of the leading
> geoengineering proposals would cost $250 million total to limit Earth’s
> warming. That’s less than Al Gore’s foundation is spending to “raise
> awareness” on the issue of climate change.
>
>
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