Yes I know that it could be just a blip due to weather but it also could be evidence that the scientific community has overestimate the effect of CO2 on temperature. Nobody really knows.

Prudence requires that policy makers wait and see what happens over the next 5-10 years or so before implementing any radical policy changes. If you are right we should see some rapid warming by 2015 which should still leave lots of time to introduce more aggressive policies. In the meantime, we need to focus on finding technically and economically feasible alternatives to carbon-emitting energy sources.

BTW - If you really think that disaster is coming then why aren’t you calling for limits on the number children that people can have? Adopting a strict one child per couple policy world wide would likely accomplish more than any of your so called wedges. Forget about pricing carbon - we should price the right to have children. We could set up a birth-credit trading market where couples can sell their right to a have a child to others.

Obviously, that would require that governments trample on a number of important individual rights but if the we are talking about ’saving humanity’ after all. Based on the other policies that you advocate you don’t seem to have a problem having governments trample on peoples rights in the name of ’saving humanity’. So I would really like to know why you spend so much time coming up complex and implausible ’solutions’ while you ignore the elephant in the room: too many people.

Your population policy, which I certainly don’t support, wouldn’t do much good even if it were practical which, as you know, it isn’t. China has a one child policy, and most industrialized nations, who have the highest per capita emissions, are keeping population flat or declining.

No, I’m afraid the population ship has largely sailed — that’s why I proposed the wedges I do.

If you think I am wasting my time coming up with solutions you claim are complex and implausible — then you are obviously on the wrong website.

I actually believe most of my wedges are going to happen one way or another, because at the end of the day, I don’t think humanity will destroy itself — unless people like you, who I take it is either a conservative or libertarian stops the rest of us from taking the necessary actions out of some misguided belief that there is a right for everybody to do whatever it is they want even if it ruins things for our children and the next 50 generations.

You write: “Based on the other policies that you advocate you don’t seem to have a problem having governments trample on peoples rights in the name of ’saving humanity’. ”

Please identify any “rights” my proposals trample on — and do be specific about which proposals — or stop making such absurd claims.

I rarely see much mention of social domino effects from climate impacts, but we have plenty of history to show us how chaotic thing may become. We haven’t got time to wait and see. We’re supposed to be using these great brains we’ve evolved to understand that.

I embrace them all!

Many of your proposals involve artificially increasing the cost of energy which will create serious hardships for many people. Prices for everything from food to healthcare to increase even faster than they would otherwise and this will cause poverty will increase and life expectancies will go down. I see policies that are designed to increase poverty as policies that trample on peoples rights. Such costs could be potentially justified if we knew that a catatrophe is a likely outcome. Unfortunately, we don’t. All the science tells us is that more CO2 will mean a warmer world. We don’t know how much warmer nor do we know whether the consequences will be significant enough for us to notice.

Your arguments for not addressing the population issue are reasonable except for immigration. Allowing a person with a small carbon footprint to immigrate to a country like the US causes their carbon footprint to increase dramatically. This has been noted by some environment groups before the controversy forced them to back pedal. Limiting immigration to rich countries would likely result in a significant reduction in carbon footprint too. Why not include that in your solution?

When it comes to your wedges - I think some of them are as plausable as Dubya’s Iraq invasion plans circa 2003. For example, carbon sequestration would required an extensive network of pipelines made of steel - steel that is in short supply and requires a lot of energy to produce. It takes decades to get pipelines built for commodities that have intrinsic value like oil or gas. I can’t see anyone investing the billions required for a pipeline that could end up being worthless if the CO2 scare goes the way of the population bomb.

That said, some of the other wedges will likely happen anyways due to the rising price of oil. This also means that no special policy response is required.

Lastly, the nearly flat recent temperature record is a fact that cannot be denied. I realize that it could be a weather blip - but it might not be. Calling people “deniers” for pointing out the obvious simply undermines your own credibility.

If you really want to convince people who have not already joined the choir you could start by being pragmatic and acknowledging that the science could be completely wrong and that it is possible that a catatrophe will not occur. Unfortunately, this argument will make it impossible for you to push your WW3 meme but it would help getting some reasonable policies adopted. For example, the NIMBY attitude has stalled many alternative energy projects from wind to nuclear. Accomodating the concerns of people living near the projects is important but at some point governments need to make sure these projects get built.

More scientifically, 1998 was a very strong el nino year where the pacific ocean dumped a lot of heat back into the atmosphere. The previous strong el nino year was 1982-1983. If you look peak-to-peak between those years there’s clear uptrend. If you compare the la nina years of 1999-2000 with the current temperature (also affected by la nina) you get a trough-to-trough comparison where there’s still a clear uptrend.

Comparing a year where a massive el nino was warming the atmosphere with a year where a moderately big la nina was cooling the atmosphere is comparing apples-to-oranges — unless you believe that the ENSO is being radically changed somehow and we’re not going to ever get another el nino year again or something — but there’s absolutely no evidence of that (at least not in the direction which helps).

In a restaurant, we think about whether each guest adds to or subtracts from the atmosphere, the purpose of the place - to have a pleasant meal. In a blog, the purpose is discussion, exchange of ideas and advancement of understanding. So you have to consider whether the presence of the person adds to or subtracts from or distracts from the discussion you want to have.

Once you’ve accepted that silencing some would improve the discussion, you have to decide whether to err on the side of letting their comments through, or on the side of stopping them. That’s up to your judgment, but the guideline I use is: “have they said anything new?” Typically all they have to say is in their first post, you can let that through and bin the rest without losing any actual content.

On topic, I am not hopeful about your wedges. Each seems to require global agreement and action. I’m more hopeful about measures which individual countries can take despite others’ inaction. Obviously things work better when everyone works together. But waiting for everyone to be ready to work together will definitely take us past 2012 before anything is actually done…

I think it’s probably better for an individual country to just step on up and do things, and then to make a treaty with just one or two other countries to continue doing it, then others can sign on. Machiavelli said that while a large group will never be able to come up with a definite decision, if one’s presented to them then they’ll see the good ense of it and follow along. He was talking about constitutions, but treaties are much the same.

I said the last 7 years - since 2001 which happens to be the baseline for the 4AR projections. I am not including the 1998 El Nino. Temperatures have been flat or declining depending on which dataset you use. I have repeatedly said that 7 years could be a blip due to weather, however, it is long enough to raise some questions about the reliability of the IPCC predictions. We can afford to wait another 5 years or so to see what happens.

The argument that temperatures are “flat or falling” looks very weak when you look at the graph in this realclimate.com piece. The blue lines are 8-year averages plotted for every year for the last 30 years or so. You have to go back to the 1980’s to find a year when the gradient was negative. In all recent years the 8-year averages have stongly positive gradients.

http://www.realclimate.org/ index.php/ archives/ 2008/ 01/ uncertainty-noise-and-the-art-of-model-data-comparison/

However, I do agree with your comments about population. Every day another 200,000 people beam down to the planet, a growth rate of 1.8%. This means that we have to reduce per-capita CO2 by 1.8% just to stand still, ignoring all the other factors which are pulling in the opposite direction. I have no time for people that argue that the planet can support more and more people. The reality is that the industrial revolution has expanded the number of people living in extreme poverty from 700 million (200 years ago) to over 3 billion today. If it was any other species we would just have done the decent thing and organised a cull! A one-child-per family policy would be infinitely preferable to the default methods that nature reserves for species that over-populate: http://dieoff.org/page80.htm

The seven-year trend is due to a beginning strong El Nino and an ending strong La Nina - the long-term trend is AGW.

I enjoy the discussions - especially AGW solutions.

http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/10yave.jpg

and then this one, on emissions:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_glob.htm

and then this, a quick analysis:

http://www.leif.org/research/DAleo.pdf

Your link to the document by Dr. Svalgaard is amusing because Dr. Svalgaard intended it as a satirical comment on how alarmists see patterns when there is none. Here is his comment on CA: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2984#comment-237145

He also indicated on Tamino’s blog that he felt the relationship between CO2 and temperatures in the last 50 years is being overstated.

As you well know, the climate science and empirical data, which increases by the day, do not support you. You toss out distractions - and why?

I’ve also been looking at the sea ice images that show the lack thereof at this time of year.

I’m not a scientist. I’m a well read elder who has a real uncanny knack for “feeling” that what I’m reading is being played out in the very nature that I am living in.

Call me a pessimist but I am convinced now that we are already past the point that the feedbacks have now taken over from the forcings and we are headed towards a very bad end.

I am doing all I can to cut back more and more and more but unless the big kids start making better choices, well……….you get my drift.

I have looked carefully at the empirical data and have discovered that it simply does not support the predictions of catastrophe circulated by many. If it did I would not be a skeptic.

New science is appearing everyday that does fit the empirical data and it suggests that the role of CO2 has been overstated. For example, Roy Spencer’s work on the role of clouds: http://www.weatherquestions.com/ Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm#research-update

We simply do not know enough about climate today to know whether CO2 really plays the dominant role claimed by the IPCC. For that reason, prudence is justified as long as the climate fails to follow the trends predicted by the IPCC.

These observations miss a key point which has been pointed out by Jared Diamond. It is not necessarily the number of people on the planet, it is the amount of resources being used. An average U.S. resident uses 33 times the resources as the average Kenyan. The U.S.uses twice the resources of the average European Union resident and ten to fifteen times the amount of non-developed world. This means that 300 million people in this country use up the resources of 3 billion people on the rest of the planet. If the U.S. could reduce it’s population by 100 million then it would be saving the equivalent of the resources used by 1 billion people on the rest of the planet.

The ethanol fiasco is a good illustration of unintended consequences. We can expect a lot worse if the alarmists succeed in their push to make energy artificially expensive through carbon caps or taxation.

In other words, stopping immigration from the 3rd world to the US or Europe would have a positive effect on emssions. Perhaps the countries should get carbon credits for restricting their population growth?

Per capita numbers are misleading because no one is the US or Europe is interested in living the lifestyle of a Kenyan. Furthermore, the difference between the US and Europe is partially explained by population density which makes mass transit economical and partially explained by outsourcing CO2 producing industries to China and elsewhere. The European standard of living would go down the tubes very quickly if they were denied access to cheap imported goods.

We simply do not have the technology that would allow significant reductions in CO2 without triggering an increase in poverty around the world. The recent food price increases is pretty string evidence of the link between energy prices and poverty.

Or Romanou, et al’s work on the role of clouds and aerosols:

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/ abstracts/ 2007/ Romanou_etal.html

(New science is appearing everyday that does fit the empirical data and it suggests that the role of CO2 has been overstated. For example, Roy Spencer’s work on the role of clouds: http://www.weatherquestions.com/ Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm#research-update)

I looked up Roy Spencer to see what he is about. Obviously he is connected with the consevative delayers who have a history of distorting science for their own purpose. He has also been named Rush Limbaugh’s
official climatologist. Admittedly I don’t know enough yet to argue against Roy Spencer’s points on climate warming. But my red flags are up about what his purpose is in his brand of science. It wouldn’t surprise me to see it fall apart.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer

(Spencer is listed as a member of the Heartland Institute and a contributor to the George C. Marshall Institute)

Romanou claims that aerosols can explain the effect.

Neither claim can be proven at this point. However, the Romanou theory presumes that CO2 will eventually overpower the effect of aerosols. Spencer’s theory says that CO2 induced warming will always be limited by the cloud feedback.

Only time will tell us who is closer to the truth.

In the old equation that

Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology,

we have first a strange assumption - that “affluence” automatically means “lots of resource use and waste”. That aside, let’s take it as read. In the equation the variables are neutral. Here in the West we have 15% the population and use 50% the resources of the world; we say, “population is the problem!” The rest of the world has 85% the population and 50% the resources, and says, “obviously, affluence is the problem.”

The truth is that both affluence and population are problems. You needn’t be very affluent to ruin the environment - Haiti is starving because they cut down all their forests to grow food and for charcoal to cook the food, but without forests they lost their topsoil and now have neither food nor charcoal - yet Haiti is neither affluent nor did it have a large population - it just seems too large now because they produce not enough food. But fifty years ago it was fine.

So both affluence - high and wasteful resource use - and population are problems. However, resource use is easier to change than population. Each Western country could drop their resource use and emissions by 45% within a decade without any significant discomfort, added expense or new technology compared to today, just by changing to mass transit, renewable energy, less meat-eating and so on. But population isn’t going to drop 45% in a decade without one of the bloodiest wars in human history.

The way to reduce population growth is to educate and make more prosperous the women in the poorest countries. Illiterate poor women have a lot of children; well-educated and well-off women have less. But when Westerners talk about “population control”, they typically do not mean “let’s educate the women and help them start businesses.” They don’t mean projects like microloans.

When we reduce our “affluence” - our wasteful resource use - then perhaps we can lecture the Third World about population. Until then, we’re just making excuses.

The world’s climate is not changing because some illiterate Ghanan woman is having her sixth child, it’s changing because of things like idiots driving their SUV half a mile to the burger drivethru.

It starts with Americans who at 4% of the worlds population and having selfishly consumed 25% of the worlds resources, making a committment to steward and conserve and yes, sacrifice to achieve a more equitable balance of the use of resources in all its forms so that all may participate in a more sustainable way a standard of living by allocating the basic dignities of life.

If you don’t choose to do so, and very soon, Mother Nature is a harsh mistress. She will not stand by and continue to be abused and exploited. This isn’t like man’s dominion over others. She will exact her just amount of due. And it is coming due.

A P.S. for you.

Roy Spencer espouses a “biblically balanced stewardship” of earth resources along with such luminaries as Dr. Charles Colson, Dr. James Dobson, Rabbi Jacob Neusner, Dr. R.C. Sproul, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, and Rev. Dr. D. James Kennedy (all of whom we know are climate experts) who preach their non profit status as said experts as follows:

—-environmental policies should harness human creative potential by expanding political and economic freedom (emphasis political and economic)

—-we should respond first to firmly established risks in ways that are cost-effective and have proven benefit. (emphasis profit and more profit)

Their call to action follows the money. The Holy Grail for all things earthly. And hey, if that doesn’t work then surely they will be among the saved when the Rapture happens.

Roy Spencer………Ha.

However, that CO2 is a global warming (so-called) greenhouse gas is well established physics. Starting with John Tyndall in the 1850s.

As for ‘poverty without CO2′, go learn something about bio-energy. There is plenty of potential available.

Also, if you (Paul K) think McCain will not back continued ethanol support in the upcoming election and be a champion for renewable energy - check out his recent Congressional record with LCV and the states he must win. McCain wants to be president and that doesn’t incude cutting ethanol support programs in the corn belt or being too green on renewable energy.

http://www.reuters.com/ article/ environmentNews/ idUSN2541737720080

entitled “Human warming hobbles ancient climate cycle”, although it isn’t human warming, directly, but rather the excess CO2. Still, well done for a MSM article.

We have been well-served by having peer-reviewed science inform public policy debate e.g., health. The Bush Administation/corporate interests (and their hired guns - most of which are not peer reviewed-science grounded) want to distract the AGW policy discussion for their own self-interests and even disallow agency scientist to speak on the peer-reviewed science when contrary to stated Bush policy. Most of what you put forward is not in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.

Have you considered where all the EAL money would go?

It would go straight into the public sector, which would then spend it as if emissions didn’t matter (because the extra tax would come straight back to them).

So…more air miles for public servants. More lights and computers left on all night in public buildings. More empty trains and buses going round in circles.

Over to you.

Biochr from pyrolysis, torrified woody materials, or biocoal from hydrothermal carbonization should all work, with the last named process being the most permanent.

As to your specific issues. The EAL was constructed so that government revenues stay constant. What part of that did you miss? OTOH government itself will have to adopt to the higher costs of carbon fuels integrated into flying, car travel, etc. Please comment on what was proposed.

Up to a couple of years ago I was in favour of a carbon tax. After all, it is the obvious way to internalise the externalities. The problem is that the public sector would not heed the price signal, because the tax recycles directly back into the public purse. It could only work if the public sector was capable of making tough decisions about what they use the tax for, and traditionally hypothecation of tax just never happens (there is only one example of a hypotecated tax in the UK, and that’s the BBC license fee).

The way I figure it, the only system that is guaranteed to work is a global treaty to limit and then steadily reduce the amount of fossil fuel we extract, eventually leaving most of it in the ground. We would also need an agreement to halt any further incursion into wilderness/rainforest areas.

Whatever is done needs to be very simple, transparent, global in its scope and easy to monitor. Complex financial instruments are none of these and, even if they were implemented, would not stop us mining all available oil, coal and gas reserves.

My principle reason for favoring a tax is that it is technology neutral and less subject to gaming than targets/carbon markets

Where a carbon tax might help is in things like domestic fuel which taxed at just 5% (VAT) in the UK instead of the usual 17.5%. People would figure it made sense to spend a bit more on insulation and a bit less on fuel.

The real problem though is that absolutely everything we do is based somewhere along the line on fossil fuel use. A tax in one country would tend to squeeze the carbon emissions over to some other country with no tax. Even things like PV panels and wind turbines require highly carbon intensive manufacturing, deployment, maintenance and decommissioning processes.

The only way a carbon tax could work at all would be if it was applied at a global level on all primary fuel sources. But then you still have the problem of what to do with the revenue to ensure it doesn’t generate yet more carbon.

No. The more I think about the more I think the world needs to set limits on extraction and reduce these each year. This issue needs to be addressed head-on, not by time wasting complex financial instruments that achieve nothing.

You said:

[The older dirtier power plants will become increasingly obsolete over time.]

Sure. But, when?

I compared 2003 kwhrs and CO2 emissions from all fossil fired plants against 2007 data….more than 3300 units.

I sorted by increased kwhrs and the top 250 units running harder in 2007 were all coal fired and had an average age of 34 years. Their on line factor was above 70%. These are old base loads running harder to keep up with increased demand and cost of NG.

Their costs come down to fuel and O&M.

I have more precise data if you are interested.

Why would management want to shoot their cash cows?

We’ve got a very serious problem here and no remedy.

John McCormick