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Steve Koonin is an incredibly smart guy with a huge amount of experience in climate and energy issues, and is saying things in this article that any competent c

Steve Koonin is an incredibly smart guy with a huge amount of experience in climate and energy issues, and is saying things in this article that any competent computational physicist who has looked into climate modelling believes. Compare for example my own short take on the same issues, written two years ago: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=886 http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=886 You'll see basically similar concerns raised. If you're seriously wedded to the idea that consensus is important to the science, you should dig up the independent opinions of a few other computational physicists (not climate scientists, who are not computational physicists). Having done so, you might find that there is a consensus amongst computational physicists that climate models are problematic in ways that make them questionable guides to policy, although most of us will also say that we should be concerned about the amount of garbage we are dumping into the atmosphere (and there are reasons to want to get off fossil fuels that go beyond the climate change argument.) Denialists have poisoned the public discourse on climate change, but Warmists have unfortunately responded by digging in their heels in a particularly anti-scientific way. I hope Koonin's piece will help bring the scientific discussion back to fundamentals, and perhaps decouple the policy discussion from models a bit. For example: we know that carbon taxes work pretty well in reducing CO2 emissions (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-insidious-truth-about-bcs-carbon-tax-it-works/article19512237/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-insidious-tr...) and we know that carbon taxes can be used to reduce corporate and income taxes. So anyone who is opposed to carbon taxes is necessarily in favour of higher corporate and income taxes. This is a policy discussion that can and should be had independently of any detailed climate model results, and I invite everyone who is in favour of higher corporate and income taxes to chime in here in support of their position, and explain why those taxes are so much better than the carbon taxes that could partially replace them.

quink 12y ago
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.... http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jul/21/realistic-climate-models-accurately-predicted-global-warming http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-... And can you please stop with the 'Warmist' label? It's stupid, about as much as 'denialist' is narrow for the veritable zoo of opinions - educated or uneducated - that's sprung up in the public discourse. I've also read your post and 1-2 W/m2 does sound like very little. However, and I quote from Wikipedia: > Of the ~340 W/m2 of solar radiation received by the Earth, an average of ~77 W/m2 is reflected back to space by clouds and the atmosphere, and ~23 W/m2 is reflected by the surface albedo, leaving about 240 W/m2 of solar energy input to the Earth's energy budget. That's a change of 0.5%. Doesn't sound like much, does it, but at 273 K that corresponds to about 1.5 degrees already. At the upper end of that and 300 K it's 2.5 degrees. Sure, it's simplistic and it's how to keep it quite that straightforward, but to see that number and be ignorant enough of the context to trivialise it and call it not a big deal is pretty disingenuous. Sure, a 2.5 K (or something like it) rise isn't going to bring the downfall of civilisation per se. But there's more to it than that. And, mind you, 2.5 K is at the lower end of IPCC projections, so there's evidently a lot more ground to cover than the simplistic numbers mentioned here.
- trhway 12y ago
  >Sure, a 2.5 K (or something like it) rise isn't going to bring the downfall of civilisation per se. well, it did it for Roman Empire - the Mediterranean climate became unsuitable for grain production while Europe north of Alps became drier and comfortable. Height of the Caliphates ( at 969) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age coincides with the height of the temperature during middle ages. The caliphates were result of conquest by Arabs from Arabian Peninsula and the caliphates folded back with temperature dropping as the Little Ice Age was coming. Add to that Vikings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Age) whose reach was maximized during about the same time as Caliphates as North Atlantic was more comfortable for sailing in the small open drakars. They reached Greenland and established colony there (which disappeared with Little Ice Age). Vikings are the "Normans" as in Normandy - and we know the key role they played in the history of Western Europe. Vikings founded the Kievana Rus which because of their leadership was pretty strong expanding and aggressive state for hundreds of years, almost until Mongols. Thus the warmth of 1000+ years ago and resulting Vikings outreach were defining factors in shaping the foundation of Western Europe and Russia as we know it. Getting back to our days - one can only speculate how political landscape of USA for example would change in the next decades when growing corn in Iowa and cattle in Texas would become economically impossible.
- Retric 12y ago
  None of those graphs correspond with what the sun actually did over that time period. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation The percentages don't change as the sun's output increases. 273K is slightly below freezing. ~290K is closer to the average earth temperature. Look up black body radiation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation Radiation is T^4. If incoming energy increases by x temperature increase by x^(1/4). (1.001)^(1/4) = 1.00025. So 1.00025 * 290K = 290.0725K. PS: This is of course a ridiculously simplified model but a 2.5k rise would take an increase of around ((290+2.5)/290) ^4 - 1 = 3.5%. The sun is no where near that unstable.
  - quink 12y ago
scarmig 12y ago
This hits home for me. Although I suspect I probably fall into the "warmist" camp from your perspective and would support steep carbon taxes even without offsetting cuts in corporate/income taxes, I'm plenty comfortable with the statement that even the better climate models have at best a rough correspondence with reality: they're just a sketch to help us get closer to understanding how things really work. I'm pretty sure most climate scientists agree with that as well, FWIW. But swapping all corporate taxes for a carbon tax? That really is a no brainer, and most policy experts not in the pay of the fossil fuel industry would leap at it. I don't know why we don't see it happen. Maybe because the American political system does not reward risk taking, even if it can substantially improve economic outcomes.
iaw 12y ago
I am not a computational physicist but I had the privilege of being lectured to by one who worked on multiple environmental models. The key takeaway was that the models aren't truly predictive, they had to do a substantial amount of tweaking to get the model to line with historic in sample data but could never expand the model to out sample data. A larger point that was raised by a different lecturer is that solar output has increased drastically over the last 100 years and that the global warming trends we see correlate perfectly with this increase in output. He actually believed that the industrial revolution lining up with this increase in solar output was entirely coincidental. So to confound the issue further, we may not be responsible for global warming but our production of greenhouse gasses undoubtedly has an impact on our environment/climate that seems unlikely to be positive. Climate science is a nasty beast.
- quink 12y ago
  http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-advanced.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-glob... In a nutshell, CO2 is near enough on the path to increasing by 50% and it's pretty important for the greenhouse effect. Solar variation over millenia is, peak-to-peak, 0.1%.
  - iaw 12y ago
    That lambda value in the equation under Figure 2 is their 'fudge factor'. How do you quantify that value when we only have one complex system with multiple inputs to study?
- a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
  Do you know much about the models they use? It all seems kind of silly to me because as I understand it they use neither monte-carlo simulation nor stochastic calculus. The models don't spit out anything about probabilities. They only describe the one outcome your starting assumptions produce. It's a glorified excel spreadsheet.
  - quink 12y ago
bcoates 12y ago
I was with you until "Cap-and-trade is a sound market-based solution". It's goofy market cargo-culting of something that isn't a market. If you want a policy intervention to burn less coal, end policies that are de-facto mandates to burn coal. If you want a policy intervention to build more nuclear plants, end policies that are a de-facto ban on nuclear power plants (and switch to policies that are a mandate to build nuclear power plants, unless you have some actual plan to move from a mandate-driven energy infrastructure to a free-market one). You can't expect policies to lower co2 emissions in general in the face of policies that mandate emissions in the specific because the specific always beats the general.
- joe_the_user 12y ago
  I don't know why this comment deserves down-votes. As far as I know, Cap-and-trade has essentially failed as a policy to reduce carbon emissions and has stimulated a wide variety of dubious speculative enterprises. It is entirely plausible that policies to encourage or discourage the use of different energy types should be as direct as possible - it neither makes that paying for someone else to save resources would work nor has it been proven in practice.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Nothing is a market until you make it a market. All markets are artificial: they require the government to recognize and legitimate property rights in a particular good and therefore allow the market in that good to be governed by the rule of law. I was a promoter of cap-and-trade for a long time, but the data, which I cited in my original post, suggest that straight carbon taxes work better. They are simpler to implement and demonstrably effective, and allow the reduction of income taxes and corporate taxes. Am I correct in assuming you are in favour of higher income taxes and corporate taxes? This seems odd to me: I think it makes more sense to tax things we don't want (dumping gigatonnes of garbage into the atmosphere) and lower taxes on things we do want (people making oodles of money.) The claim that you can't expect emissions reductions from carbon taxes is simply false, on the data. I believe in the data. Why should I believe an unsubstantiated claim to the contrary?
jjoonathan 12y ago
> I hope Koonin's piece will help bring the scientific discussion back to fundamentals, and perhaps decouple the policy discussion from models a bit. What world do you live in? You know exactly what Koonin's piece will do.
- cema 12y ago
  You know exactly what Koonin's piece will do Which is what?
  - jeremyjh 12y ago
    Provide talking points to denialists. That is its purpose.
    - jjoonathan 12y ago
      Yep. If you read closely, he's not taking an extreme position at all (he actually reaffirms CC and AGW), but he knows that this opinion wouldn't get him any recognition (or $$) on its own so he loaded it up with a linkbaity, unrepresentative title and hook that are guaranteed to get him attention by virtue of being politically "useful." He's trying to get the best of both worlds: * Maintain standing in the scientific community by presenting a very reasonable, even understated argument that is impossible to refute * Win political glory, perhaps even funding, by deliberately making himself easy to "misrepresent" We have to figure out a way to punish people for this kind of bait-and-switch.
      - ende 12y ago
        Yep. If you're not with us 100%, you're against us 100%.
        jjoonathan 12y ago
        His "small print": 80% with us, 20% against us His title + soundbytes: 100% against us Only one of these will matter in the eyes of the public.

quink 12y ago

http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.... http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/jul/21/realistic-climate-models-accurately-predicted-global-warming http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-... And can you please stop with the 'Warmist' label? It's stupid, about as much as 'denialist' is narrow for the veritable zoo of opinions - educated or uneducated - that's sprung up in the public discourse. I've also read your post and 1-2 W/m2 does sound like very little. However, and I quote from Wikipedia: > Of the ~340 W/m2 of solar radiation received by the Earth, an average of ~77 W/m2 is reflected back to space by clouds and the atmosphere, and ~23 W/m2 is reflected by the surface albedo, leaving about 240 W/m2 of solar energy input to the Earth's energy budget. That's a change of 0.5%. Doesn't sound like much, does it, but at 273 K that corresponds to about 1.5 degrees already. At the upper end of that and 300 K it's 2.5 degrees. Sure, it's simplistic and it's how to keep it quite that straightforward, but to see that number and be ignorant enough of the context to trivialise it and call it not a big deal is pretty disingenuous. Sure, a 2.5 K (or something like it) rise isn't going to bring the downfall of civilisation per se. But there's more to it than that. And, mind you, 2.5 K is at the lower end of IPCC projections, so there's evidently a lot more ground to cover than the simplistic numbers mentioned here.

trhway 12y ago
>Sure, a 2.5 K (or something like it) rise isn't going to bring the downfall of civilisation per se. well, it did it for Roman Empire - the Mediterranean climate became unsuitable for grain production while Europe north of Alps became drier and comfortable. Height of the Caliphates ( at 969) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age coincides with the height of the temperature during middle ages. The caliphates were result of conquest by Arabs from Arabian Peninsula and the caliphates folded back with temperature dropping as the Little Ice Age was coming. Add to that Vikings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_Age) whose reach was maximized during about the same time as Caliphates as North Atlantic was more comfortable for sailing in the small open drakars. They reached Greenland and established colony there (which disappeared with Little Ice Age). Vikings are the "Normans" as in Normandy - and we know the key role they played in the history of Western Europe. Vikings founded the Kievana Rus which because of their leadership was pretty strong expanding and aggressive state for hundreds of years, almost until Mongols. Thus the warmth of 1000+ years ago and resulting Vikings outreach were defining factors in shaping the foundation of Western Europe and Russia as we know it. Getting back to our days - one can only speculate how political landscape of USA for example would change in the next decades when growing corn in Iowa and cattle in Texas would become economically impossible.
Retric 12y ago
None of those graphs correspond with what the sun actually did over that time period. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation The percentages don't change as the sun's output increases. 273K is slightly below freezing. ~290K is closer to the average earth temperature. Look up black body radiation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation Radiation is T^4. If incoming energy increases by x temperature increase by x^(1/4). (1.001)^(1/4) = 1.00025. So 1.00025 * 290K = 290.0725K. PS: This is of course a ridiculously simplified model but a 2.5k rise would take an increase of around ((290+2.5)/290) ^4 - 1 = 3.5%. The sun is no where near that unstable.
- quink 12y ago

scarmig 12y ago

This hits home for me. Although I suspect I probably fall into the "warmist" camp from your perspective and would support steep carbon taxes even without offsetting cuts in corporate/income taxes, I'm plenty comfortable with the statement that even the better climate models have at best a rough correspondence with reality: they're just a sketch to help us get closer to understanding how things really work. I'm pretty sure most climate scientists agree with that as well, FWIW. But swapping all corporate taxes for a carbon tax? That really is a no brainer, and most policy experts not in the pay of the fossil fuel industry would leap at it. I don't know why we don't see it happen. Maybe because the American political system does not reward risk taking, even if it can substantially improve economic outcomes.

iaw 12y ago

I am not a computational physicist but I had the privilege of being lectured to by one who worked on multiple environmental models. The key takeaway was that the models aren't truly predictive, they had to do a substantial amount of tweaking to get the model to line with historic in sample data but could never expand the model to out sample data. A larger point that was raised by a different lecturer is that solar output has increased drastically over the last 100 years and that the global warming trends we see correlate perfectly with this increase in output. He actually believed that the industrial revolution lining up with this increase in solar output was entirely coincidental. So to confound the issue further, we may not be responsible for global warming but our production of greenhouse gasses undoubtedly has an impact on our environment/climate that seems unlikely to be positive. Climate science is a nasty beast.

quink 12y ago
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-advanced.htm http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-glob... In a nutshell, CO2 is near enough on the path to increasing by 50% and it's pretty important for the greenhouse effect. Solar variation over millenia is, peak-to-peak, 0.1%.
- iaw 12y ago
  That lambda value in the equation under Figure 2 is their 'fudge factor'. How do you quantify that value when we only have one complex system with multiple inputs to study?
a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
Do you know much about the models they use? It all seems kind of silly to me because as I understand it they use neither monte-carlo simulation nor stochastic calculus. The models don't spit out anything about probabilities. They only describe the one outcome your starting assumptions produce. It's a glorified excel spreadsheet.
- quink 12y ago

bcoates 12y ago

I was with you until "Cap-and-trade is a sound market-based solution". It's goofy market cargo-culting of something that isn't a market. If you want a policy intervention to burn less coal, end policies that are de-facto mandates to burn coal. If you want a policy intervention to build more nuclear plants, end policies that are a de-facto ban on nuclear power plants (and switch to policies that are a mandate to build nuclear power plants, unless you have some actual plan to move from a mandate-driven energy infrastructure to a free-market one). You can't expect policies to lower co2 emissions in general in the face of policies that mandate emissions in the specific because the specific always beats the general.

joe_the_user 12y ago
I don't know why this comment deserves down-votes. As far as I know, Cap-and-trade has essentially failed as a policy to reduce carbon emissions and has stimulated a wide variety of dubious speculative enterprises. It is entirely plausible that policies to encourage or discourage the use of different energy types should be as direct as possible - it neither makes that paying for someone else to save resources would work nor has it been proven in practice.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
Nothing is a market until you make it a market. All markets are artificial: they require the government to recognize and legitimate property rights in a particular good and therefore allow the market in that good to be governed by the rule of law. I was a promoter of cap-and-trade for a long time, but the data, which I cited in my original post, suggest that straight carbon taxes work better. They are simpler to implement and demonstrably effective, and allow the reduction of income taxes and corporate taxes. Am I correct in assuming you are in favour of higher income taxes and corporate taxes? This seems odd to me: I think it makes more sense to tax things we don't want (dumping gigatonnes of garbage into the atmosphere) and lower taxes on things we do want (people making oodles of money.) The claim that you can't expect emissions reductions from carbon taxes is simply false, on the data. I believe in the data. Why should I believe an unsubstantiated claim to the contrary?

jjoonathan 12y ago

> I hope Koonin's piece will help bring the scientific discussion back to fundamentals, and perhaps decouple the policy discussion from models a bit. What world do you live in? You know exactly what Koonin's piece will do.

cema 12y ago
You know exactly what Koonin's piece will do Which is what?
- jeremyjh 12y ago
  Provide talking points to denialists. That is its purpose.
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    Yep. If you read closely, he's not taking an extreme position at all (he actually reaffirms CC and AGW), but he knows that this opinion wouldn't get him any recognition (or $$) on its own so he loaded it up with a linkbaity, unrepresentative title and hook that are guaranteed to get him attention by virtue of being politically "useful." He's trying to get the best of both worlds: * Maintain standing in the scientific community by presenting a very reasonable, even understated argument that is impossible to refute * Win political glory, perhaps even funding, by deliberately making himself easy to "misrepresent" We have to figure out a way to punish people for this kind of bait-and-switch.
    - ende 12y ago
      Yep. If you're not with us 100%, you're against us 100%.
      - jjoonathan 12y ago
        His "small print": 80% with us, 20% against us His title + soundbytes: 100% against us Only one of these will matter in the eyes of the public.