However, consult an attorney.

http://blogs.nature.com/ climatefeedback/ 2008/ 03/ dangerous_assumptions.html

Paul and Peter G: I don’t have any common ground with Pielke. He is a delayer-1000.

Yes, anybody who read in their piece should come away thinking that strong any action is needed — but that ain’t what they conclude. Unless you define strong immediate action as R&D.

The IPCC’s scenarios use 1-3% GDP/person growth, which they get from various standard economic sources … which seem wrong. [p.180 of IPCC “Mitigation of Climate Change].

I think Hall, Smil, or Ayres&Warr are much closer to the truth, which is that GDP doesn’t have some automagic 1-3% growth assumed by neoclassical econ, but depends strongly on work = energy * efficiency. See page 46 of Robert Ayres’ presentation for 3 scenarios for total US GDP, depending on different efficiency assumptions. Ugly:

http://www.bren.ucsb.edu/ news/ documents/ robert_ayres.PPT

This is what’s truly amazing to me: people arguing to ignore efficiency & conservation are arguing for the faster economic downturn, which means there will be less money for doing the longer-term R&D needed, and if we try to burn a lot of coal to make up for it, there definitely won’t be the money to adapt to the resulting climate changes.

Absolutely. Every time I asked him what he recommended, crickets chirping.

That said, hysteria don’t do much.

Best,

D

They aren’t trying to scare us into despair and inaction. They are trying to ensure we wrestle with the true scale of the problem, and recognize that when we say “we’ve got all the technologies we need, all we lack is the political will,” - we’re actually misleading ourselves. Sure we need the political will (that much is clear!). And sure we need to aggressively deploy every last technology ready to go today from efficiency to wind to solar.

But we need to recognize that a) we should be aiming for 450 or 350 ppm, not 550 or 700 ppm, for 90% by 2040 or 80% by 2020 not 80% by 2050 and b) by assuming spontaneous decarbonization as the world develops, we’re essentially double counting technology development without planning the necessary policies to drive it forward.

If we recognize both of those things, than we’d better get serious about major investments in technology breakthroughs as well as rapidly deploying our existing techs. And relying on cap-and-trade alone to drive R&D fast enough seems pretty foolhardy.

Now the funny thing is, I don’t think there’s any disagreement here between you or Pielke or Hoffert.

Hoffert himself writes:

“The question isn’t how much time we have; the question is how bad it’s going to be, and whether our civilization will be able to survive it. Some people think it’s already too late. That’s what we have to fight against — that we’ll go from believing this isn’t really a problem to believing it’s a problem to great to do anything about. I think we have a chance to do it and I think we should be fighting for it. The way to do it is to get real about changing basis of our society in terms of energy.”

They aren’t arguing for delaying or distraction. They are calling for us to get serious and real quick. And so are you. So stop rabidly attacking one another… Sheesh!

here’s my two cents: in New Taiwan Dollars today since I am over here:

Your comment about why are we marching in the streets yet … gave me a chilling thought, and I relay it here not as an
advocate of what I am going to say, but just to say it in public, and
not for shock value, but for a new perspective on things:

The situation is such that most people do not understand or feel that
global warming or climate change is a problem now, or ever will be in
the future. Something like 56 percent of the US population is not
convinced. And worldwide, maybe 80 percent of our fellow Earthlings
are not convinced.

So it might take, not only media campaigns like Al Gore’s
recently-announced advertising platform, but also maybe, and I say
this with a heavy heart, but maybe, it might also take things similar
to what we witnessed during Vietnam War era in the USA, when one
routinely saw photos in the newspapers and on TV and in Time and
Newsweek magazines about Buddhist monks in Vietnam setting themselves
on fire in protest on the streets of Vietnam. Remember those startling
images? And of course, most of those monks later died in hospital from
the burns, if they didn’t die right then and there on the street.

http://vietnamresearch.com/media/anti/index.html

http://www.modestolan.com/xwred1/burning-monk.jpg

So I wonder if one day in the future, and I hope not, but it might
happen, so get ready, I wonder if someday some climate protesters,
young people or older people, Buddhist monks or Christian activists,
might create a public protest whereby they set themselves on fire with
gasoline in Washington or New York, in front of the UN building, or in
Paris or London or anywhere, and use these self-immolation protests to
say to the world community: “We must stop killing the Earth now!”

Such protest-suicides, like the Vietnam War era suicides of monks
aflame, might have such visual power as to make people who are not
convinced do a re-think of the situation — and not only individual
people, but policy makers and government leaders.

Again, I hope to never see such a public suicide protest of setting
oneself afire and dying for this cause. But your comment above about
India and China building more and more, and the USA still being in
denial about climate change realities, put this
Buddhist-monk-in-orange-clothes-aflame image in my mind on this
tranquil Thursday morning…

EDVARD MUNCH, 1893, THE SCREAM:
http://northwardho.blogspot.com

The final para i:

“The IPCC plays a risky game in assuming that
spontaneous advances in technological innovation
will carry most of the burden of achieving
future emissions reductions, rather than
focusing on creating the conditions for such
innovations to occur.”

I would entirely concur with this. The problem is essentially political. Technology and decarbonisation through efficiecy will not occur unless the global political landscape changes radically first. Even then it may not make much difference and it may just come down to old fashioned tightening of belts in terms of the energy we use.

1. Set a hard limit on the amount of fossil fuel extracted each year
2. Set a year-on-year reduction in 1.
3. Ban any further encroachment into wilderness land (i.e. rainforest etc)

Then I would devote the rest of the book to figuring out how on earth these could be achieved politically! If that could be done all the market would find the best technology and how to make the most of it within the energy diet available.

Pielke is a “new technology” and “adapt” guy. I’m a “desperately deploy as much existing technology as is humanly possible because ‘adaptation’ is mostly a cruel hoax” guy.

Bud — thanks. Fixed.

Also looks like we are also lining up for a recession/depression in the next couple of years.

Life as we know it is going to be brutal in the next 10-30yrs. I can see democracy stepping aside - it wont survive GW much longer. Hopefully we will be able to come full circle.

It’s the height of irony for skeptics to argue that the IPCC wasn’t alarmist enough on global warming. And it’s the depth of perversity for them to even imply that because global warming is so bad, we shouldn’t bother with the efficiency and decarbonization measures we can actually take now.

Precisely. What also bugs me is that they’re saying the problem is tougher than the IPCC says, but then recommending long-term R&D.

In and of itself the politically acceptable carbon prices will not do the trick fast enough, so we need feed-in tariffs that temporarily raise the premium paid for clean electricity ABOVE the carbon price. This will yield manufacturing economies of scale for these technologies.

Tariff should also be raised for clean storage technologies that will help renewables replace fossil generation sooner. Temporarily raising these tariffs will help these emerging technologies through “the Valley of Death”.

Why does a long term R&D investment have to be at odds with an aggressive deployment of existing technologies? I don’t see how Pielke is advocating for a delay of action. He is simply stating the full scale of the problem.

John, you and Joe hit it right on. I’ve seen plenty of these conversions, where climate deniers suddenly switch to climate alarmists, without any admission of being wrong.

All of you would enjoy Thomas Homer-Dixon’s latest speech, which basically says the IPCC report is out-dated, by more recent science. He describes a cabal of scientists so worried, that geo-engineering is back on the table - again, we go straight to re-polluting the sky, like the Chinese, but this time to save the Arctic Ice. Pielke is right in on that, too, I think.

Homer-Dixon’s speech, plus an interview with ocean climate modeler Andreas Schmittner, is in the Radio Ecoshock Show for April 4th.

http://www.ecoshock.net/eshock08/ES_080404_Show.mp3

That program is one hour long, 56 megabytes to download.

We live in exciting times - I personally expect changes this century beyond the comprehension of all past human history.

Alex Smith
host
Radio Ecoshock
www.ecoshock.org

Thank you so much for taking the time to deconstruct Pielke’s essay. Reading this has given me the motivation to continue with my own deconstruction of Bush’s “speech.”

Tenney Naumer