Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
John Tierney, demoted from the NYT op-ed page and now continuing his libertarian propagandizing in the guise of "science writing," points out that flying around to climate-change conferences creates a large carbon footprint for high-profile environmental activists. That allows Tierney to claim the sort of faux-populist gotcha! so beloved among glibertarians and greedhead conservatives. (The theocrat, nativist, and imperialist wings of conservatism prefer their faux-populist gotcha!s on different topics.)
If you travel frequently by air, even on commercial flights, you can't escape having a huge carbon footprint. Yet many of the most vocal advocates of cutting emissions -- politicians, environmentalists, journalists, scientists -- are continually jetting off to campaign events and conferences and workshops. Are they going to change the way they operate? If not, how are they going to persuade anyone else to cut back emissions? (My advice to the peripatetic preachers: Do not try explaining why your work is more important than everyone else's.)
Where to start?
The point of environmental management isn't to denounce sin, it's to get prices right. ...
Rich people use more goods and services than poor people. That's what "rich" means. ...
A large gross carbon footprint doesn't imply a large net carbon footprint. That's what offsets are about. ...
Tierney's admirer and fellow faux-populist glibertarian Glenn Reynolds thinks that this is no better than "buying indulgences." The difference, of course, is that the purchase of an indulgence didn't offset the damage done by the underlying sin (and certainly didn't make reparation to the other people injured by it), while GHG offsets actually undo the original damage. ...
Politics
Environment
Comments
This point needs to be emphasized.
Posted by: bi -- Intl. J. Inact. | May 13, 2008 3:06 PM
Posted by: hibob | May 13, 2008 3:13 PM
Offsets...[are] about making a buck
Wow. Someone's trying to make a profit in a capitalist economy. Stop the presses.
If carbon offsets aren't perfect, they must be evil, right?
Anti-carbon-market cynics are so boring. You're not doing the environment any favors, you're just doing your best to look holy. Guess what, there's going to be a carbon market, and you'd better get on that bus.
Instead of sitting around bitching about carbon offsets, think about advocating carbon offsets that ARE monitored. Go look up "certification" and "additionality."
Posted by: theo | May 13, 2008 4:05 PM
..and if someone lives the lifestyle of carbon piety, they call 'em dirty hippies and write 'em off as kooks. It's a no-win situation with the denier-pundits.
Posted by: Winnebago | May 13, 2008 5:19 PM
Surely free enterprise could never lead to anything good. What a naive idea!
A carbon market will never be perfect. Inevitably, there will be fraud and people trying to game the system. But representing that as a fatal argument against carbon offsets is a bit like arguing that the subprime mortgage crisis means that we should all give up on the idea of owning houses and go live in the woods.
Posted by: trrll | May 13, 2008 5:48 PM
Anti-carbon-market cynics are so boring. You're not doing the environment any favors, you're just doing your best to look holy. Posted by: theo | May 13, 2008 4:05 PM . Sorry, how does that describe the anti crowd and not the pro ? How does pointing out that carbon offset schemes being unregulated, unproven, unadopted and unattractive shell games operating on nowhere near the scale necessary to offset industrial emissions... amount to him being concerned only with appearances and not you ?
Even just on appearances that shit falls flat. Where'd the forrest get planted to offset last week's new coal power plant in China, let alone this week's and next weeks ? Where's that appeared ?
Where's the offset scheme that's gonna make up for the fact that the world's largest emitters won't be participating ?
Where's your explanation for how that amounts to anything other than an excercise in managing appearances ?
Posted by: Kilo | May 13, 2008 7:36 PM
It's a no-win situation with the denier-pundits.
Right. Doing something makes you a hypocrite or wanting to drive everyone back to the Middle Ages or a taxing socialist. Doing nothing makes you a hypocrite or...
You get the idea.
Best,
D
Posted by: Dano | May 13, 2008 8:01 PM
That was nicely demonstrated by someone in some comments on some blog. It was a fallacy with some name even that boiled down to this: "But they're using oil to drill oil!" It's about return on investment.
Posted by: mz | May 13, 2008 8:14 PM
Their goal is paralysis.
Hey, a question - the NY Times now has an "ask the editors" feature; has anyone gotten a chance yet to ask the editors
a) on what basis they view Mr. Tierney as a competent science journalist;
b) why Naomi Oreskes's wedding was news fit to print, but her global warming "consensus" and "denial" research is not;
and c) which PR agency sparked William Broad's March 2007 "Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film" article, "From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype"
?
Posted by: Anna Haynes | May 13, 2008 9:44 PM
Tierney is a hack and his argument is either stupid or hypocritical. That said, Kleiman's three points are the wrong ones. He already grants (in his third footnote) that offsets, as they are available now, may be disfunctional. That in itself shows that his points do not justify extra emissions by some people until a better offset mechanism is in place. I will, however, follow his lead and focus on the theoretical situation in which somehow carbon emissions are effectively monitored.
The problem with Kleiman's argument is that it is based on the premise that just because in our society the rich currently have various advantages, the non-wealthy should accept that the rich should also have the right to emit more, because they could afford the offsets.
Why should we accept that? I find this offensive, and would be disinclined to go along with such a system. Why shouldn't we insist on a personally-assigned emissions quota system?
Posted by: Sortition | May 13, 2008 11:19 PM
Think of it as taxes on emissions.
Which, by the way, is also how the wackos at WSJ tried to frame it, in an effort to denounce it as a socialist scheme or something. Carbon offsets is probably something like the "wave-particle duality of light" thing, in that it doesn't fit into neat ideological categories...
Posted by: bi -- Intl. J. Inact. | May 14, 2008 12:15 AM
Personally, I find all forms of non-income taxation unreasonable. But that is beside the point - the point is that in our society there are some things you can buy (e.g., the right to exclude other people from a piece of land) and others you can't (e.g., the right to dump toxins into a river, or the right to vote multiple times in an election). I don't see any reason why the non-rich should simply accept that the rich can buy the right to emit GHG.
Again, I think a personal quota is the fair way to go, and that people should insist on that system.
Posted by: Sortition | May 14, 2008 1:23 AM
Sorry Sortition, I'm not following. A personal quota seems fine to me, but why shouldn't it be tradeable?
Posted by: Tim Lambert | May 14, 2008 2:23 AM
While agreeing with Kleiman, it still makes sense for those concerned about the issue to look into ways of reducing their footprint, for example through videoconferencing. There's some big informational externalities here. That is, the more people learn about videoconferencing the more its advantages (compared to flying places for physical meetings - so C20!) will become evident, and the lower the transactions costs will be.
Posted by: John Quiggin | May 14, 2008 2:46 AM
Carbon trading - Are We Fooling Ourselves?
Surely the imperative is to pollute less, not someone who is poor to sell his or her carbon allowance to a rich person to pollute more, while allowing the dreadful inheritance of emitted Fossil Carbon to cascade down the generations for hundreds or thousands of years.
Off-Setting or Off-Ripping?
I think as currently presented that carbon offsetting is a confidence trick. Planting trees to permit someone else to emit? This depends upon the relative lifetimes of trees and CO2 in the atmosphere. How long does a tree last? Well it would need to last at least as long as atmospheric CO2, or be replaced sequentially. If there is a significant mismatch, then all offsetting does, is to delay the inevitable. We know that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for a long time. Estimates vary but one study (Ref. 1) suggests that 33% remains after 100 years, 20 percent after 1000 years, with a long tail. Another study (Ref. 2) suggests that persistence of CO2 is 75 percent for 300 years and 25 percent for 30,000 years. In-fact, it is this 'long tail' in both cases that is responsible for much of the warming.
Limitations and Practicalities
Let's think about this, don't these huge time-scales make continued human action rather unlikely, or even impossible? Perhaps I have missed something [quite possible], but wouldn't it be better not to put the fossil CO2 in the atmosphere in the first place? Presumably the calculations have been done, but is there is even enough suitable land to continue indefinitely offsetting the current annual release of ~7.5 gigatonnes of carbon released each year, without the imaginable futility of cutting down forests for new offsetting schemes? If there isn't sufficient suitable land available [there are many constraints and caveats], then offsetting would seem to be purely a greenwashed money-making scam.
Could Offsetting work?
Just how many generations of trees [and farmers] would be needed to lock-up the carbon for 1000 years, or 30,000 years in order to permit natural sequestration of the carbon? I don't know, it depends upon the species. Eucalyptus regnans with maximum average life-span of 400 years, in a forest, with genetically diverse individuals grown naturally from seed. This is not a true average life-span, it is the average maximum life-span of mature 'standards', the largest examples of the species! This ignores all the thousands or tens of thousands of genetically less suited trees lost through disease and other mortality.
Problems with Off-Setting in Practice
Eucalyptus is apparently very popular with offsetting schemes [e.g. Tist] and for reason of economy, these are NOT typically propagated from seed, but are GROWN FROM CUTTINGS, which means that they are all CLONES. Eucalyptus are disease-prone at the best of times and genetically identical disease-prone trees being grown in plantations, is hardly a recipe for long-term success - in-fact it's a recipe for eventual disaster. Surely, the limiting factor is surely not how long exceptional trees can grow for in the wild! It's how long REAL trees last in such a plantation in practice. In-practice this means survival in a plantation of identical individuals, where any disease will affect all the trees and if it can kill one, it will be able to kill them all rapidly! After-all, these plantations or forests will need to be with us for centuries or even millennia, so the probability of affliction with some pathogen or other will continue, so these forests must be robust and not disease-prone. Surely, trees for offsetting should be grown from seed, slower and more expensive, yes. But the trees need to be genetically diverse and preferably mixed species, making the plantation like a natural forest.
Conclusion
Doesn't this make offsetting a great deal more expensive in real terms than it is currently? Which makes me believe that offsetting schemes are really making the polluters feel better, but are never going to achieve the results promised, apart from making a few individuals rich for promises they can never deliver.
References
1 The fraction of CO2 remaining in the air, after emission by fossil fuel burning, declines rapidly at first, but 1/3 remains in the air after a century and 1/5 after a millennium (Atmos. Chem. Phys. 7, 2287-2312, 2007). 2 The fate of fossil fuel CO2 in geologic time - David Archer http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2005.fate_co2.pdf
BBC World Service OnePlanet: Carbon Offsetting
More and more people are trying to offset their carbon footprint. Individuals and companies alike are using a range of offsetting schemes to try to cancel out the greenhouse gases they emit. But serious questions have been raised about how effectively these schemes work. If someone clicks on a mouse and pays a small price, will their carbon emissions really be cancelled out somewhere else in the world? And is there a case for this industry to be more regulated? For One Planet, Becky Milligan has travelled to Tamil Nadu in South India to talk to local farmers working in an international carbon offsetting programme.
Summary of OnePlanet: Carbon Offsetting Programme
The journalist looked at the experiences of local farmers involved in one of tist.org's offsetting schemes. It seems in practice that Tists's offsetting schemes were not well supported. Sample trees were taken to a tree specialist. The problems listed above, i.e. all the trees in the area were Eucalyptus trees propagated [clones] from cuttings. One farmers trees were all dead. Other farmers had a bad disease problem. The impression was that Tist's management left much to be desired. When interviewed, Tist's representative was very bullish & dismissive, sounded more like a hard-nosed sales & marketing man or a politician, presented it as not a systematic problem, but a little local difficulty. A local problem, but nothing to do with Tist. I've come across his type before. If he was the caring type, he certainly concealed it well. Of course it was perfectly clear that he couldn't care less.
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May 14, 2008 3:28 AM
The euphoria about carbon offsetting ignores a few salient points; such as proportionality, equivalence and social equity. Gore is rich, he can pay; but a large nursing home, which over a year produces an equivalent amount of CO2 (well, maybe 1/2 dozen nursing homes), will have far less ability to pay; why shouldn't Gore pay more than 100% for his carbon offset; why not 150 or 200%, and the nursing home(s) less than 100% to reflect the social equity disparity? Is there a disparity? Some people would say Gore is contributing to social equity and responsibility and should have a similar dispensation; who is to decide?
Any new system of taxation and wealth redistribution needs to be as impervious to scams as possible. How can any CO2 offsetting structure be scam-proof? Consider; you are engaged in a physical wealth creating activity, and cease it and outsource to a developing country where CO2 emmissions are unregulated (and which is likely to be a recipient of IPCC penalty redistribution because its emmissions are low). Having received a carbon credit for closing down your production, you then leverage it on the carbon futures market. You then securitise your gains through a collateralised carbon obligation (CCO) issue and convert your projected future yields into a carbon debt swap, all guaranteed by AAA rated monoline carbon bond insurance agencies. You borrow against this, or sell the rights, and reestablish and expand your physical business in the undeveloped country. Net result; the same or more CO2 and a sizeable wealth redistribution.
Posted by: cohenite | May 14, 2008 4:34 AM
Cohenite, well first let's take note that the actual cost of carbon offsets are far lower than right-wing hysterics like to suggest.
US per capita GHG emissions are around 20 tonnes of CO2 emissiosn per capita. Let's assume a a per tonne cost of US$20 for offsets. So the average US cost would be ca. $400 per year, $8 per week or slightly over a dollar a day - obviously a vast amount that only the fabulously wealthy could afford.
Then we have the fact that Gore does pay for significantly more carbon mitigation than his actual emissions.
Oh and then there's the fact that current carbon offset programs are voluntary volitional contributions ot the common good- you know the stuff the US right keeps telling us would expand to fill the void if only the US government would stop wasting money trying ot help the poor.
So far as I know no-one is suggesting that offsets be made be made mandatory - I'll have to raise that at the next meeting of the International Socialist Global Warming Hoax Conspiracy. I've been kind of busy plotting to murder more African babies by banning DDT so I may have missed that part of our master plan for tyranny and genocide.
Posted by: Ian Gould | May 14, 2008 4:55 AM
Isn't the main problem with 'offset' that the carbon you emit isn't directly equivalent to that offset, either because it is just locked up in a relatively short term pool e.g. by reforestation, or increasingly because it is used to fund scarcely audited 'green' projects that often are no such thing. I suspect that were the volume of offsetting to approach a significant proportion of GDP then we'd again hit a bottleneck of having to reduce overall energy consumption but not wanting to do so. Contraction and convergence anybody?
http://www.gci.org.uk/
Jody
Posted by: jodyaberdein | May 14, 2008 5:34 AM
Ian; once you sign up Kyoto is not voluntary. I also suspect your cost figures are a tad undernourished, as this would indicate;
http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/03/19/in-kyotos-home-japan-tallies-the-costs/
Otherwise very droll, especially the bit about a 'masterplan'.
Posted by: cohenite | May 14, 2008 6:05 AM
"Ian; once you sign up Kyoto is not voluntary. "
Feel free to quote the relevant section of the Protocol which makes in mandatory.
As for your link:
"Japanese households and businesses could end up paying more than $500 billion to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 11 percent over the next decade..."
Let's see $500 billion divided by 10 years divides 120 million Japanese. works out to approximately $400 per person per year per person.
You are are of course free to believe the figures arrived at by the Japanese government rather than figures based on current market prices since we know that governments in general are vastly superior to markets in setting prices and minimising costs and that Japan's government in particular is known for its honesty and competent economic management.
Posted by: Ian Gould | May 14, 2008 7:54 AM
Tradeable or not is secondary to me. The crucial distinction is between a tax system and a quota system.
Posted by: Sortition | May 14, 2008 9:56 AM
This doesn't really work with a market-driven strategy. Could you imagine having to submit a financial statement to find out how much you'll have to pay for a car? Would you want people refusing to sell their carbon offsets to middle class people because they get a better price from the wealthy?
Besides, as it happens, we already have a system for charging the wealthy more. It's known as the graduated income tax. So why reinvent the wheel? If we want the wealthy to pay more than their share, we could simply devote a portion of the Federal budget to carbon mitigation strategies and fund it from the income tax.
Posted by: trrll | May 14, 2008 11:28 AM
But that'll provide no incentive for wealthy people to actually reduce their emissions when they can.
Posted by: bi -- Intl. J. Inact. | May 14, 2008 2:48 PM
Carbon offsets are pure fraud. Fossil carbon is removed from the planetary crust, converted to gas by burning and released where it becomes a greenhouse gas.
To actually offset a pound of coal burned you need to bury a pound of charcoal in the same quarter that the coal is burned. If you leave the GHG in the atmosphere for a while it contributes to global warming. That warming has knock-on effects such as permafrost melt and methane release. These effects can cascade in ways we don't truly understand since things keep warming "faster than expected." It's like compouding interest where you borrow some money and then try to pay back only the principle; the debt keeps growing.
Since there isn't a single carbon offset program that buries charcoal in the soil in the same month the offset is purchased I can guarantee you that they are frauds. All the "Free Market" hand-waving is just so much misdirection of the sort that led us to the world monetary crisis, and the energy crisis, and the food crisis, the health care crisis, the ocean fisheries crisis, the drug-resistant pathogens crisis........
Once somebody starts using "free market" as a reason to take a particular path be assured you are talking to the big bad wolf who is going to beat you to grammy's house and then eat you up.
Posted by: Pangolin | May 14, 2008 4:49 PM
From what I understand of climate models, global warming is a consequence of changes in the earth's energetic budget that follow atmospheric CO2 levels pretty closely. The problem is that natural processes remove CO2 from the atmosphere fairly slowly, but I don't think that there is any scientific evidence for the idea that CO2 produces some kind of long-term momentum effect that would persist long after the CO2 is gone. So the notion that the CO2 must be sequestered "in the same quarter" doesn't really make a lot of sense.
Posted by: trrll | May 14, 2008 5:23 PM
"Once somebody starts using "free market" as a reason to take a particular path be assured you are talking to the big bad wolf who is going to beat you to grammy's house and then eat you up."
This is pure irrationality as bad as anything the denialists trot out.
Tell me, do you think, for example, the food supply would be improved if farming, processing and distribution were government monopolies?
Posted by: Ian Gould | May 14, 2008 7:48 PM
Isn't it just a trifle irrational to make the false dichtomy of either "free market" OR "government monopoly"? You can't even imagine a market with good oversight and regulation. Adam Smith certainly could, with the idea that a free market needed transparency, which the market by itself never seems to achieve, for rather obvious reasons.
Posted by: QrazyQat | May 14, 2008 8:53 PM
Ian, OTOH you could hardly say that food is provided by a "free" market. It is very carefully regulated, farmers receive considerable government assistance, and food is distributed largely courtesy of government-built infrastructure. FWIW, there are areas that surely need more government control (e.g. regulation over humane treatment of animals) and others less (subsidies to farmers).
Posted by: NPOV | May 14, 2008 9:08 PM
Longer answer: "Free market"is indeed an essentially meaningless slogan.
Ask a typical libertarian to define the term and watch them flounder.
But ask a typical knee-jerk leftwinger to define the term and he'll be equally lost.
Neither side knows what it is they're ranting about but they're absolutely convinced free markets are either the source of all evil or the panacea for all social and economic problems.
As most people here are probably aware, I'm definitely on the left of the political spectrum. However I'm also a former environmental economist.
Emissions trading and carbon offsets are not examples of the mythical free market - they are examples of government intervention to create property rights which can then be traded to produce the desired environmental outcomes at the lowest economic cost.
I do not base this view on any ideological support for "free markets" I base it on approximately twenty years of empirical evidence from emissions trading in such markets as air pollution permits in Southern California; the American national Sulphur Dioxide trading scheme and the Hunter Valley Salinity Trading Scheme in New South Wales.
I tend to despise professionalism and arguments from authority. It is unreasonable to say that every person who has an opinion about an economic issue needs to have undertaken formal Economics studies - especially since economics affects nearly every aspect of human life.
However, if you are - like Pangolin - going to make assertions which directly contradict the entire basis of economic theory, you should have at least soem idea of what you're talking about.
Otherwise, you are indeed in the same position as the typical AGW denialist carping on about sunspots and the logarithmic decline in IR absoprtion with increasing CO2 levels.
In this specific case, I'd be interested to hear Pangolin's reasons for objecting to the use of emissions trading to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions from power plants (including an explanation of alternate regulatory frameworks which would have produced equivalent or greater reductions at the same cost) or a detailed explanation of the differences between the Sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide emission markets which mean that a market mechanism which has worked effectively for one is not applicable to the other.
Posted by: Ian Gould | May 14, 2008 10:46 PM
Ian,
Here is my tentative view. Feel free to inform me:
A cap and trade system is a corrupt version of the tax system (corrupt because existing polluters somehow get credit for their current level of pollution). It therefore has the drawback of the tax system (i.e., it allows the rich to pollute more) and some additional ones. (By the way, I don't find the reductions produced by the SO2 system [3x over 3 decades] that impressive - we definitely need more dramatic reductions in CO2 emissions.)
In addition, there are significant differences between sulfur emissions and carbon emissions. First, the sources of SO2 emissions are much more concentrated. Secondly, technology-based mitigation of CO2 is much more problematic than that of SO2. It therefore seems likely that much of the mitigation would have to be the result of reduced consumption. With a cap and trade system this could only happen if energy prices are raised significantly - opening the door for windfall profits for the producers and for serious hardship for the poorer among consumers.
As I wrote above: a personal consumption quota system seems a better way to go.
Posted by: Sortition | May 15, 2008 1:17 AM
Ian; Kyoto provides for compliance and substantive, time-linked commitments ; this is a reasonable exposition of the regime;
http://www.hwcn.org/link/mkg/issueno.19.html
You may be confusing the compliance and enforcement provisions which are slightly more problematic. The substantial penalties apply to the developed countries, which impost should be considered along with the energy transition costs which my previous link provided. The issue of the developed/undeveloped dichotomy raises the real problem with any carbon offsetting and emmissions scheme; that is, what mechanism can be used to gain compliance from India and China?
Posted by: cohenite | May 15, 2008 3:35 AM
That would be the Kyoto that wants a fairly measly cut to some 5% below 1990 by 2010? A cut about which there is significant doubt thatcurrent mechanisms will allow even the significantly committed to achieve?
Posted by: jodyaberdein | May 15, 2008 6:20 AM
http://www.ippr.org.uk/uploadedFiles/pressreleases/2005/trafficlights.pdf
Posted by: jodyaberdein | May 15, 2008 6:21 AM
Hi all
I see that GISS Temp has now made March 0.68 from 0.81 deg C. Must be a lower C footprint ah. Why the massive change? What about the cold April, 0.51. Not much GW for 5 years now. (Based on GISS Temp).
Regards Peter Bickle
Posted by: Peter Bickle | May 15, 2008 7:18 AM
Peter, why must you keep embarrassing yourself? How many zillions of times does one have to define the difference between determinism and stochasicity? Your human genes have programmed you to think in time scales that do not equate with the kinds of change that occur over large spatio-temporal scales in nature. Its useless therefore, as you and the contrarians constantly do, to make a big noise about static records over a month or even over a few years when we have to look at trends occurring over a much longer time frame - say 20 years or more - to understand what is happening (and that is a relatively short time frame, too).
Those who engage in the endless repetition of saying stuff like (a) its been a cold week (or season) in my part of the world and that this disproves AGW, or (b) the temperature records show that the rise in the global mean surface temperature has become relatively static over the past few months or even years, or (c) a combination of (a) and (b), DO NOT understand the differences between predictable and unpredictable processes, and the scales over which these processes are generated. The fact that we as a species are evolutionarily programmed to think and act in short time frames (at least short when compared with factors regulating natural cycles) indeed may be our undoing. Many people apparently just cannot understand that a human lifetime, in terms of nature, is but the blink of an eye. The fact that humans now have the capacity to profoundly affect global cycles of water, nitrogen, carbon etc. that operate over stupendously large scales is of great concern, or at least should be. This is because the functioning of natural systems, and the services that emerge from them that permit our species to exist and persist, is strongly correlated with these cycles.
Posted by: Jeff Harvey | May 15, 2008 7:58 AM
Jeff; a reasonant proclaimation; mankind has undergone an apotheosis and has a quasi-god-like ability to effect nature, but most of us are too witless or, insufficiently evolved morally and intellectually, to exercise that power responsibly. It is up to the evolved custodians to curtail this premature power by allowing natural rhythms and processes to reassert themselves. Why do you guys sound like characters from A.E. van Vogt?
Posted by: +cohenite | May 15, 2008 8:32 AM
Cohenite: It is too bad that your attempt at intellectual discourse falls flat, simply because of its accuracy (e.g. there's a bit of Orwellian double-speak in your lame riposte).
What have the writings of van Vogt got to do with it? The problem with 'us guys' is that we conduct research that generates conclusions that don't fit in well with the pre-determined world view of 'you guys', at least those with your political/scientific perspectives. Your 'most of us are too witless etc.' statement is the kind of response I would expect from a contrarian: shoot the messenger by making it look like he/she is making a direct attack on your intelligence. Then follow that up with a witty remark that shows your audience that you are a smart person after all; this being the case, how could I (Jeff Harvey) be right? Again, Orwellian in the extreme.
Sadly, your exceedingly simple comment on 'natural rhythms' is a reflection of your limitations in knowledge and understanding of the importance of natural systems in sustaining civilization. Of course your aim is to assert that it isn't so, and that as an intelligent human being you can say that with some authority. Can you? I'd be interested to find out how much you do really understand about the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, and whether you think this is important. I'd like to know what you think about the link between diversity and nutrient cycling, pest control, the generation and maintenance of soil and renewal of soil fertility, climate control, detoxification and decomposition of terrestrial wastes, flood control, pollination, protection of the Earth's living surface freom the sun's ultraviolet rays etc. I would also be interested in knowing how many technological substitutes you think there are for these services, and if you also think that humanity can survive without them.
I already have a strong indication of what your answers are likely to be. Here's a hint: because you do not understand the relationship between biodiversity and the provisioning of ecosystem services (it's not your fault: you haven't studied it), you dispense with the whole discussion of the field. To defend your views, you claim that anyone who is qualified in the field and who disagrees with you (including those like me with the empirical weight to back up their arguments) is attacking your personal integrity and intelligence (see Orwellian comment above).
This is correct, isn't it? How else can one interpret your response above? I have not said anything about 'premature power' and 'allowing natural rhythms to reassert themselves', but have simply stated the facts as I see them with respect to the effects of human activities across the biosphere. Our species is simplifying nature at an alarming rate, while knowing that these same systems generate a range of condiitions that make life possible. Every natural system is in decline; some faster than others. This is not controversial. We are living off a one-time inheritance of natural capital and are spending it like there is no tomorrow. Most of the world's leading environmental scientists and population ecologists have been warning for the past 20-30 years that there will be (and already are) consequences of the human assault on natural systems. I can give you many examples if you like; there are already economic consequences of this that are documented. The real question is to better understand how much humans can simplify nature before this rebounds on us in a large way. Given that our understanding of the way that complex adaptive systems function is still in its relative infancy, we continue to conduct this huge, non-replicatible experiment at our peril. But of course, because you are not interested in the underlying science, and the conclusions generated from this science appear to clash with your political views, then all you have left is a witty, curt dismissal.
Posted by: Jeff Harvey | May 15, 2008 10:58 AM
Ian,
I've begun to view offset schemes with some suspicion simply because it seems to me that they rely heavily on good oversight and assessment. If emissions trading schemes are very narrowly defined, I would be happy with them - e.g. if you set a certain well-defined emissions standard for power production or cement factories, etc. But some carbon offset schemes are based on replacements that seem to have much more dubious effects - e.g. the much-maligned "treadle-pumps" replacing gas-powered irrigation pumps in India. Equality and development issues aside, the scheme relies on some relatively dubious measurement - I certainly wouldn't believe those offsets to be as reliable as offset from a much more closely-monitored utility company in a major city somewhere. So: how to deal with this problem? Is there a mechanism that makes those offsets worth less, or makes them riskier to buy? If not, why wouldn't crappy accounting sink this ship?
Posted by: saurabh | May 15, 2008 12:54 PM
Cohenite- an attempt at humour? But you would be better off referencing E E Smith than Van Vogt for all powerful elites who know things we mere plebs can't know.
Posted by: guthrie | May 15, 2008 1:35 PM
Peter....
Here's where you made your mistake.
It's ok to use short term events or trends to point out the possibility of simular future events..... if long term trends continue.
It's not ok to use short term events or trends to point out the possibility of simular future events.....if long term trends don't continue.
Posted by: Betula | May 15, 2008 3:01 PM
Getting back to Tim's absurd assertion that the "no warming" trend is only six years long, here is the latest data, updated to April, that shows that there has been no warming for the last 10 years.
http://tinyurl.com/4de3v7
Posted by: Tilo Reber | May 15, 2008 10:09 PM
guthrie; I'm a married man; humour sustains me. I'm not overly familiar with Doc Smith; read some when I was young in another century and didn't like the ascending, mine's bigger than your's, approach; van Vogt is genuinely surreal, with a hard edge; one of his heroes uses superposition to defend his enemies; actually, it is used twice in what I consider to be his best series, the Weapon Shops; his evolved heroes, Hedrock in Weapon Shops, Cemp in The Silkie -van Vogt liked his little word games with names - battled not only unevolved humans but aliens as well; I always assumed the aliens symbolised the natural universe, which pitiless treatment of humans had to be bested by turning its logic back at it. The reference to this debate makes it a throw-away line; in this respect I don't mind being lectured about the science of nature by Jeff; that's one of the ways I learn; what I object to is any reverence for nature; I'm farm born and bred; I respect nature because she always wins, at least on a personal level; but anything which mitigates the harshness of nature I'm for even if a certain aesthetic has to be sacrificed; if people can't see the difference between that and polluting and soiling our nest -which I am most certainly against - then that is their problem.
Posted by: cohenite | May 15, 2008 10:32 PM
Thank you for the strawman.
Posted by: Chris O'Neill | May 15, 2008 10:46 PM
Tilo, what the fuck is your point? Yes, El Nino years are warm years. 1998 is obviously an outlier. If you construct trends based on outliers, you will get screwed-up trends. That's TERRIBLE science. If you go back another year, the upward trend returns. So... what exactly are you trying to prove, here? That you don't know anything about statistics? That you can draw meaningless conclusions from insufficient data? What?
Posted by: saurabh | May 16, 2008 12:37 AM
Cohenite, Why noty go our and find for yourself how nature subsidizes the bulk of our economies? There's literature available: Daily, Baskin etc. Quite accessible to the lay reader, too.
As a scientist, I don't take quips like 'reverence for nature' particularly seriously. My arguments regarding human dependence on natural ecosystems and the services that emerge from them are empirically founded. There's a huge amount of evidence that we are on a collision course with natural systems (most comprehensively in the recent Millenium Ecosystem Assessment) and that the consequences of the continued assault on the planet's systems are likely to be severe. Just today, the latest Living Planet Index (based on the health and vitality of the three most important ecosystems in terms of human welfare: coastal marine, freshwater and terrestrial forest) reports a continuation in the trend towards a qualitative and quantitative decline - some 27% since 1970 (when the index was started). The Index is co-sponsored by the World Bank - hardly a temple of green extremism. Add to that thousands of peer-reviewed studies in the most important scientific journals and the evidence becomes overwhelming.
The choice is not between wild places and people; basically the choice we humans have is this: a secure or an impoverished future. If we continue on our current self-destructive path, we are greatly increasing the possibility that it will be the latter.
As for Tilo's disposable comment, I dealt with that yesterday.
Posted by: Jeff Harvey | May 16, 2008 3:40 AM
Ian -
The specific problem with CO2 markets is the size and timescale of the investments involved.
For example, a coal fired power station is typically a 50-year investment. Which means that if you suddenly impose a carbon tax or quota 10 years into this period, then it has to have extreme costs or penalties to change behaviour (Turn the plant off or spend a huge amount on a sequesteration scheme) - going way beyond the relatively easy task of scrubbing SO2. And that's one of the simpler cases.
Of course, if a power station run out of permits to emit, should we force it to switch off, bringing down the power grid for a few million people?
At the individual level, reducing consumption can involve large capital costs - replacement of heating systems, insulation, replacement of car, microgeneration, that sort of thing. That is something that has never been done before.
To give an example, here in the UK, fuel duty has beens specifically raised to give a market force to discourage waste (I hesitate on CO2 emissions because it's been going on for a long time). To the extent that we now have a $8 gallon. Based on a US default, our fleet economy is circa 30mpg vs. 20mpg (despite the widespread availability of higher mpg cars). So a 'carbon tax' in excess of 150% has increased economy of only 50% - and this is because capital costs (buying a car) exceed running costs even with extreme carbon taxes.
So the real world issue here is that if you wise to use carbon taxes then you have got to set them at painfully high levels - levels that would be politically impossible given the effect on the poor - in order to make changes to behaviour in capital investment that would actually make a detectable difference.
Personal tradeable carbon quotas will simply get disregarded, since the consequences of miscalculation - elderly people forced to turn off heating in cold weather, electric grids going down, people banned from driving their cars to work - are clearly impossible to enforce, yet allowing breaches brings down the system.
The difference between cap and trade on CFCs and cap and trade on CO2 (as an example) is the difference between squeezing water from a sponge and a sandstone.
Posted by: Andrew Dodds | May 16, 2008 4:21 AM
I'm afraid I've been unwell for the past couple of days and can't currently respond to people in detail.
Hopefully I will be feeling better tomorrow and will be able to do so then.
Posted by: Ian Gould | May 16, 2008 4:57 AM
Nice to find someone else who has read van Vogt. Unfortunately I can't recall a huge amount about them, its been a few years. Compared to many authors of the period, he was trying to do interesting things, and make people look at the world more clearly. But as for reverence for nature, that is a personal values ridden thing. Sure, some greens worship nature. But they almost certainly are not the ones pointing out the problems via the scientific literature. Reverence is rather a religious word as well. I don't have reverence for nature, but a certain respect (See, another value laden word). I've not grown up on a farm, I mostly walk through the countryside, pausing ocaisionally to prise a rabbit from the dogs jaws. (well, she's too old now to go rabbit chasing)
But anywayas Chris Neill said, your statement regarding reverence is a straw man.
Posted by: guthrie | May 16, 2008 6:03 AM
@All
I don't know much much facts about the subject, I honestly don't. But I attempt a question: What does the following report mean for the price building of carbon offsetting programs and who will pay the insurance premium for droughts and other natural disasters that affect the success of offsetting emissions? China quake may cut carbon offset supply.
Posted by: climatepatrol | May 16, 2008 7:52 AM
Tilo proves that everywhere he posts, and does so frequently.
In other words, he's just another troll.
Posted by: dhogaza | May 16, 2008 8:27 AM
Sorry to get back to the original theme here, but this is how I see the problem. I have nothing at all against wealthy people buying up a gazillion houses and yachts and automobiles and private jets etc, and using them all. But when they do that and then claim there's a global warming catastrophe looming around the corner, and that their lifestyle is cool because they "offset" their carbon, well, I don't believe them.
To borrow a statement I read elsewhere... when they start acting like there's a crisis, I'll consider believing them. Offsetting of carbon by folks like these doesn't do much to convince me that they really believe in the crisis.
Posted by: ben | May 16, 2008 10:28 AM
Ben, that seems strange: you'd have less confidence in a person who with foresight acts calmly and incrementally to head off a problem, than in one who does nothing until it's time to panic?
I suppose it makes sense if you believe all long term or large scale planning is doomed to fail, in which case I guess the good leader is the one who panics most effectively in a crisis.
Posted by: Vagueofgodalming | May 16, 2008 11:07 AM
"Tilo, what the fuck is your point?"
That you are a moron. Do you have any clue about what happened in 1998. First, go and get the El Nino, La Nina record. You will see that we had a few month left of El Nino, but, the thing that stands out is that we had more than 2 years of La Nina immediately following that El Nino. And those two years of La Nina pull the front end of the trend line down more than the El Nino pulls it up. Following that La Nina there were 3 El Nino's. If you take all of the El Nino's, and La Nina's together for that time period they worked more to give you an upward slope than anything else. You cannot simply take what happened in 1998 and in the last year when you look at a trend line. So get your head out of your butt and understand this simple fact - NO WARMING IN THE LAST TEN YEARS!!!
Posted by: Tilo Reber | May 16, 2008 12:09 PM
For those of you supporting the dumb argument that we only have a ten year flat trend because 1998 was an El Nino year, here is the NOAA El Nino, La Nina record.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml
So:
El Nino from May of 97 to April of 98. 12 month of El Nino.
Followed immediately by La Nina from July of 1998 to June 2000. 24 month of La Nina.
Followed 3 month later by La Nina from Oct. 2000 to Feb. 2001. Five more month of La Nina
Basically we had 12 month of El Nino followed by 29 month of La Nina. All of this in the early portion of the 10 year trend. So those that suggest that we only have a 10 year flat temperature trend because the time period starts with a La Nina, clearly have their head where the sun don't shine.
http://tinyurl.com/4de3v7
No warming for ten years - end of story!
Posted by: Tilo Reber | May 16, 2008 12:31 PM
Andrew Dodds,
While I don't doubt that there would be some details to iron out, I don't see the issues you mention as being insurmountable barriers. It shouldn't be too hard to have part of the quota designated as non-tradeable set-aside for the essentials such as heating, cooking, refrigeration and lighting. Thus, at any point in time some limited amount of power woul