The IPCC consensus is phoney: According to Mike Hulme

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Pastiche

Geo-engineering is definitely on the table for remediation measures but it is not a panacea and is rife with many dangers. But as your article said and how I've pointed to. We are likely incapable of making the tough decisions to actually reduce GHG emissions. The cheapest options is probably mass charcoalification growing high yield grasses at the equator, turning it in charcoal and burying it. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

There are very large problems with geo-engineering. First, once it becomes so readily obvious that we need to stop warming, it will probably be too late. We've all heard of positive feedback loops. Only extremely aggressive geo-engineering would likely help once the permafrost starts exponentially melting. That brings up the second point, playing mother nature at a mass scale is beyond our comprehensive and is likely to produce many unseen and possibly disastrous consequences. We don't know what lining our clouds with sulphates will do in the medium-long term. We don't know how we will alter our ecosystems if we geo-engineer. Once again we really on our panache and hubris which are exactly the traits that have got us into this mess.

To me, waiting to do nothing until it is a really bad problem and then engage in geo-engineering, something we've never done, is reckless and conceited.

The solutions to me right now are obvious, stop burning so many fossil fuels. Cap and trade or carbon tax (essentially the same policy) are not as riven with rent seeking opportunities and many people want to believe. It's funny how we rely on markets for the provision of almost all of our goods and services (some here even advocate for markets in health care delivery) but the idea of using markets for environmental protection is a non-starter. To me that's just another method to deflect, obfuscate and pass-the-buck. We have no problems with people enriching themselves in other types of markets why the aversion to the environment? Oh yeah because that's actually not the issue, the issue is that we don't want to do anything and use that as another excuse to not face up to the problem.

Using the market to regulate the enviroment would be fine if we didn't give away all the Carbon to indusrty for free. Every single implementation of Carbon trading I have seen starts by giving the polluters a whack of credits based on the amount they are poluting. Essentially giving away all of this capital for nothing to the worst offenders. Instead each person should get their Carbon allotment each year based on that years targeted polution amount and each indivdual would be free to sell it or use it as they decided.

Secondly I don't see much difference between the uncertainty in geo-engineering to the uncertainty in the models used to predict AGW. So it is worth beginning to experiment now.

The problem with cutting green house gases is that it can't be done. a 95% cut is required by 2050 to stop a two degree rise (From George Monbiot's Heat) That means even doubling the fuel efficiency in cars you can only drive 2000km per year. You can only eat meat once a month. You can't fly, We can barely heat our homes.

Even if we start building nuke plants as fast as we can and implement Steam heating in all homes and reverse grid all our houses I just don't see how we get to 95% in 40 years. This means we need to implement geo-engineering solutions now as one of the primary methods to stop the feed back loops from starting.

If I was a billionaire or evil genious I would do it myself.

[SebC]

Originally Posted by GGG

If I was a billionaire or evil genious I would do it myself.

You and your evil plan to save the world...

[amorak]

I thought your people were supposed to be smart...

[SebC]

Originally Posted by amorak

I thought your people were supposed to be smart...

Whose people?

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by amorak

I thought your people were supposed to be smart...

Is it still racism if it contains a hidden compliment?

[HOZ]

Originally Posted by octothorp

Does the credibility of an organization like the IPCC not depend on it's science? If you think that the science here is fine (which the paper supports), but you say that the reputation of the IPCC is in tatters, I'm puzzled as to what you see in this paper as the smoking gun.

Do I REALLY need to repeat this talk again? Or should I link to the Climategate thread? Honestly, IPCC credibility depends on it being credible. It is NOT.

The IPCC's biggest, oldest, AND LAST bugbear is that their was unanimity amongst climate researchers. Now we have it from the horses mouth that is simply untrue.

[Pastiche]

Using the market to regulate the enviroment would be fine if we didn't give away all the Carbon to indusrty for free. Every single implementation of Carbon trading I have seen starts by giving the polluters a whack of credits based on the amount they are poluting. Essentially giving away all of this capital for nothing to the worst offenders. Instead each person should get their Carbon allotment each year based on that years targeted polution amount and each indivdual would be free to sell it or use it as they decided.

Completely agree. Auctioning the credits is the optimal method from a public good perspective. The right to pollute has intrinsic value and that value should be realized by the public not given away through a huge transfer of wealth to industry. Unfortunately, unless its globally coordinated, auctioning credits is not feasible because it makes industries uncompetitive with other industries who receive a free initial allocation of credits. You also create some inefficiencies when you give credits away for free as the allocation of credits is sub-optimal between different companies. Under an auction the companies with the highest GHG abatement costs will pay the most to get the credits. Dynamic efficiency as we say in economics. That is why a carbon tax, is seen to be optimal to a cap and trade because a carbon tax is essentially auctioning all of the permits.

I must stress that both policies are essentially the same thing. In one case you're restricting supply which puts an effective price on carbon in the other case you put a price on carbon which effectively restricts the supply.

However, to say that cap and trade won't help abate emissions is wrong. Once you cap the total number of emissions, that's it, they're capped. There's no way around (businesses could always emit more than the permits that they hold but most cap and trade designs have very steep penalties for that type of behaviour).

The problem with cutting green house gases is that it can't be done. a 95% cut is required by 2050 to stop a two degree rise (From George Monbiot's Heat) That means even doubling the fuel efficiency in cars you can only drive 2000km per year. You can only eat meat once a month. You can't fly, We can barely heat our homes.

I don't necessarily believe this to be true. I think we have all of the technology now to make deep emissions cuts (>80% reductions). Many technologies are not commercial simply because there is no business case for them yet, no incentive for business to invest in them when energy is cheap and carbon pollution is free. CCS is a good example of that. Once we put on dear prices of fossil energy CCS will become viable. In many modelling runs, it has shown that deep emissions cuts are possible in the next 50 years. The only problem is that if we want to make those cuts we need to start investing and actiong NOW.

For example, the average life of a building is 30-50 years. If we want to be able to reduce our emissions by 80-90% then all new buidlings being built need to be close to net-zero. Technically that is possible. The building construction industry would go through significant restructuring to retrain builders and designers but we've mobilized similar efforts before (post-war reconstruction).

We'd have to build alot more damns, alot mroe nuclear power plants and build and invest in CCS and carbon transfer pipelines.

Personal transport is another sticky issue but not insurmountable. First hybrid technology would be widespread (more than 50% of market share and over 80% for freight). Cars would be run on a fossil fuel and second generation ethanol (cellulosic) blend, and our communities would have to be designed to minimize automobile modes.

Some industries yes are invariably hurt, like aviation however there are interesting new developments on syn-fuels for aviation that are net zero.

Eitherway, if we are serious and see this problem as serious then we can do it. All of the technology is available to us. Moreover, once we price carbon to levels that requires, the magic of the market should bring us some incredible innovations.

So I think it's dangerous to say that the problem is so large that we shouldn't do anything about it. That's defeatist and another example of passing the buck.

[GGG]

Originally Posted by Pastiche

So I think it's dangerous to say that the problem is so large that we shouldn't do anything about it. That's defeatist and another example of passing the buck.

I would agree with that but what you post above won't happen in the current political climate. Politicians aren't even talking about the real cuts needed or on any time frame to get it done. So to me that means we need the backup plans proven and implemented immediately. I still think that reducing emmissions and more importantly perserving resources is important but it would be much more efficient to implement these cuts over say the next 100 to 200 years rather than over the next 40. If geo-engineering can give us the breething room to painlessly implement the solutions then it should be persued.

[Devils'Advocate]

Here is why I am defeatist. This battle is lost.

Mr. Hulme makes a mis-worded statement.... what he meant was that not all 2,500 scientists sign off on each and every line in the IPCC reports. He has subsequently clarified his statement here:
http://www.probeinternational.org/Co...per%5B1%5D.pdf

So what he says in his clarification is that certain sections of the IPCC publications are written and reviewed by small groups of experts. His example was that meridional overturning circulation (MOC) of the ocean are crafted by experts in ocean science. Asking meteorologists or physical geologists to sign off on agreeing with this is impossible.

So one guy mis-states his position on his blog and it automatically goes viral. The deniers grab hold of a miswording posted on a blog and it gets spread around the world quicker than news of Michael Jackson's death. I'm willing to bet that Hulme's clarification isn't going to be posted on the same sites. Did HOZ post that retraction? I didn't see a new thread. Or maybe HOZ changed the title and I can't see it?

It's stuff like this that make me throw up my hands and say it ain't worth fighting. It's lost. The deniers win. I'm sick and tired of rolling the rock up the hill.

[photon]

Stop being reasonable, everyone knows the stolen emails said it was all a trick.

[Pastiche]

It's stuff like this that make me throw up my hands and say it ain't worth fighting. It's lost. The deniers win. I sick and tired of rolling the rock up the hill.

I sympathize however I really hope you don't reflect a broader cross-section of people where a campaign of ignorance, deceitfulness, stupidity and venality are all it takes to dissuade people from acting on what could be the most defining issue for our species and for the Earth.

[Devils'Advocate]

Originally Posted by Pastiche

I sympathize however I really hope you don't reflect a broader cross-section of people where a campaign of ignorance, deceitfulness, stupidity and venality are all it takes to dissuade people from acting on what could be the most defining issue for our species and for the Earth.

This campaign of ignorance, deceitfulness, stupidity and venality is winning. When a mis-statement by a scientist goes viral around the net, but the clarification does not, it only leads to a public, already predispositioned not to believe the science, entrenching those held beliefs. How much of those stolen e-mails was mis-interpreted by the deniers for their own gain?

[MelBridgeman]

Climate change: Good for the planet. Bad for the humans.

[Thor]

Not sure if I should post this HOZ style or just post it, either way...

Newspapers Retract 'Climategate' Claims, but Damage Still Done

But not only did British investigators clear the East Anglia scientist at the center of it all, Phil Jones, of scientific impropriety and dishonesty in April, an investigation at Penn State cleared PSU climatologist Michael Mann of “falsifying or suppressing data, intending to delete or conceal e-mails and information, and misusing privileged or confidential information” in February. In perhaps the biggest backpedaling, The Sunday Times of London, which led the media pack in charging that IPCC reports were full of egregious (and probably intentional) errors, retracted its central claim—namely, that the IPCC statement that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rainforest could be vulnerable to climate change was “unsubstantiated.” The Times also admitted that it had totally twisted the remarks of one forest expert to make it sound as if he agreed that the IPCC had screwed up, when he said no such thing.

The article "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim" (News, Jan 31) stated that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had included an “unsubstantiated claim” that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall. The IPCC had referenced the claim to a report prepared for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) by Andrew Rowell and Peter Moore, whom the article described as “green campaigners” with “little scientific expertise.” The article also stated that the authors’ research had been based on a scientific paper that dealt with the impact of human activity rather than climate change.

In fact, the IPCC’s Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence. In the case of the WWF report, the figure . . . was based on research by the respected Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) which did relate to the impact of climate change. We also understand and accept that . . . Dr Moore is an expert in forest management, and apologise for any suggestion to the contrary.

The article also quoted criticism of the IPCC’s use of the WWF report by Dr Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at the University of Leeds and leading specialist in tropical forest ecology. We accept that, in his quoted remarks, Dr Lewis was making the general point that both the IPCC and WWF should have cited the appropriate peer-reviewed scientific research literature. As he made clear to us at the time, including by sending us some of the research literature, Dr Lewis does not dispute the scientific basis for both the IPCC and the WWF reports’ statements on the potential vulnerability of the Amazon rainforest to droughts caused by climate change. . . . A version of our article that had been checked with Dr Lewis underwent significant late editing and so did not give a fair or accurate account of his views on these points. We apologise for this.

http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/the-ga...till-done.html

[mikey_the_redneck]

Meh ...you guys can argue until you're blue in the face, but this is a political agenda and nothing more at this point. When you get politicians and banks in on the action you just know it is dirty....

Of course I don't believe in man-made global warming resulting in catastrophic consequences that will destroy the planet....but the science is not complete by a long shot. There ARE alot of opposing views out there. They don't make the evening news of course....

Global climate has never been constant, and never will be, .....and I don't support making devastating changes to our economic system for some crap that is hardly proven.

Ask Spain how their "green" economy is doing......


My god Pastiche, you have bought it hook, line and sinker..

Have you even considered that man-made gw theory might be false or in-complete?

The greatest threat to our species?! Haha.......seriously you are killing me over here.


BTW....I just want to say something.

I am FAR more concerned about corporations dumping chemicals and other crap into our air, rivers and lakes ......than I am about some theory about how driving cars, breathing and farting is going to ruin the planet. There are far more dangerous things and pollutants out there than CO2..