I agree with this. Unfortunately, it is hard to excite readers and galvanize activists with a statement like “climate change is going to make things slightly less good in the future than it otherwise would be.” And this is why they do not say that.
I agree that dynamic is at play, but it's something advocated need to get over. Exaggerating the costs of CO2 accumulation leads to exaggerating the cost of preventing CO2 accumulation and therefor to less prevention and more accumulation.
Good Read. Science should be used to give people facts and not scare tactics. The reality is rapid decarbonization(using current tech) will lead to a much lower standard of living while doing nothing to the weather trends in any significant way. Not only a bad trade-off but by reducing wealth there will be less resources to bring the billions of people out of energy poverty.
If done too rapidly, yes. But if done on the basis of a tax on net CO2 emissions, we can have both, economic growth and a less harmful trajectory of atmospheric CO2 accumulation and eventually dis-accumulation.
Net CO2 emissions in totality? This statement can't take into consideration mining the copper, aluminum, rubidium, lutecium, gallium, and on and on, the manufacture of photovoltaics and turbines then recycling/trashing of same without coming out backwards. The greens have far too comfortable a relationship with alt energy to calculate its true cost in both amount of materials used or HCs burned to evaluate what "net zero" means. And with intellectual cowards like Bill Gates driving the bus that won't change. Gates' contention that he can just plant trees to equal out flying around the planet to spread noise about solar and wind is like a guy giving his wife something she won't buy for herself each time he cheats on her.
Yes. The excise tax on fossil fuels according to carbon content plus subsidy on CCS plus CBAM is pretty straightforward and does not require any calculations.
Very good points. I also find it misleading and a problem to discuss heat related mortality without also discussing cold related mortality. Unfortunately there is good and bad in almost everything.
Co2 is now, has always been and will remain a lagging not a leading indicator. Causal then? No. Is the Earth warming? Yes - slowly in a normal cycle. Has this kind of cycle ever happened on Earth prior to industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels? The records suggest yes. Look to the sun, clouds, oceans and cosmic rays etc. Stop censoring, conflating science with politics and firing diverse scientific voices just to preserve fame, academic gravitas and grants and we might just get to the reality of our situation. Until that happens: Crazy.
In other words perhaps we ought to apply simple logic and intellectual integrity when reading or listening to anyone asserting anything. And keep in mind that to assert that something exists, does not make it true. The person making the assertion carries the burden of proof to show the truth. i. e. to asset that the moon is made of green cheese does not mean that one who disagrees must prove that it is not. The person making the claim must always prove her assertion or acknowledge that her claim is mere speculation.
This is a subtle insight, easy to miss and very easy to misinterpret. I don't really know how to communicate it to a mass audience. Suspect it can't be done.
The point made is a good one; people may misunderstand a statement about the effect of increasing CO2 concentrations to mean wrt the present or the past instead of wrt the no increase counterfactual. But the important point is to be careful to compare policy with policy or more correctly net benefit of one policy with the net benefit of another.
Such an important post. I also wonder what the utility is of contrasting this world with an imaginary one that did not use fossil fuels. If the idea is to sue oil companies are we also going to award them for all of the economic growth and adaptive capacity over the last 100 years?
Agree. The only possible utility could be to produce examples of the kind of damage that policies to prevent CO2 accumulation in the future would avoid. But the confusions introduced could make it a double-edged sword.
No uncredible denies that the use of energy over the past few centuries has massively improved the human lot, but it is just energy. It didn't necessarily have to be fossil fuelled energy. Mr. Brown almost puts forward a denialist arguement that because things have been improving that therefore that there is no problem. But this is rather like saying that, as an analogy, it would be no problem if crime was increasing massively, people had to have increasingly large security forces and build gated communities and have security guards - then safety would be improving but their quality of life would be dropping. The view also does not take into account the increasingly large effects on human civilization and the wider ecosystems with every extra 0.1 °C from now. It further assumes that climate science has got the risks exactly right and that there are no 'unknown unknowns', such as larger feedback effects, than hypothesised to bite us unexpectedly at some point
You are getting dangerously close to Paul Ehrlich territory. Malthusianism is alive and well in the green zealot world and it invariably assumes that their intellect is simply too important and great to be disagreed with. I'll take Judy Curry's thinking over bloviating scientism any day of the week because it doesn't assume an inability to be wrong.
This seems like a bit of a strawman or an argument in in tone. The arguments within this essay don’t really come across as denialist at all to me (Brown does not deny that climate change is a problem) but rather is clarifying what seems to be a common misunderstanding regarding the direction of trends. Regarding your analogy, a better one would be if building big gated communities and more secure houses but has made some people angry at you - your overall risk of being a victim has decreased dramatically, but the magnitude of this reduction is slightly lower because you have a few more people who are angry and might attack you.
Patrick's well known to argue the position that things are not likely to be as bad as the vast majority of climate scientists' work suggest. He's not a 'denialist' but he is an 'undermines what the overwhelming scientific consensus about the risks is'ist...'. It's implicit in most of what he writes, which has been seized upon before by the real denialists to promulgate their viewpoint.
I don't think you understood my analogy very well...
Climate scientists make descriptive claims about climate change, and overwhelmingly agree, because those descriptive claims ARE correct. That does not mean that climate scientists are correct about their normative claims about decarbonization, which are better handled by economic analyses, who’s consensus I believe Brown is generally in agreement with.
I think Patrick's views are helpful to the denialist community because he cherry picks a certain type of economic analysis which makes selective value judgements as to what is 'worthy' or not - what is included or excluded from their deliberations. It's been said that if you get a 100 economist in a room you will find they have 100 different non-compatible views depending on whichever political ideology - Left, Right Libertarian etc - they are prejudiced by.
Here's a recent article which goes into how over-simplistic economics can be used as a subtle form of delay'ism/denialism.
I agree with this. Unfortunately, it is hard to excite readers and galvanize activists with a statement like “climate change is going to make things slightly less good in the future than it otherwise would be.” And this is why they do not say that.
I agree that dynamic is at play, but it's something advocated need to get over. Exaggerating the costs of CO2 accumulation leads to exaggerating the cost of preventing CO2 accumulation and therefor to less prevention and more accumulation.
This is an extremely helpful way to phrase things. Thanks!
Good Read. Science should be used to give people facts and not scare tactics. The reality is rapid decarbonization(using current tech) will lead to a much lower standard of living while doing nothing to the weather trends in any significant way. Not only a bad trade-off but by reducing wealth there will be less resources to bring the billions of people out of energy poverty.
If done too rapidly, yes. But if done on the basis of a tax on net CO2 emissions, we can have both, economic growth and a less harmful trajectory of atmospheric CO2 accumulation and eventually dis-accumulation.
Net CO2 emissions in totality? This statement can't take into consideration mining the copper, aluminum, rubidium, lutecium, gallium, and on and on, the manufacture of photovoltaics and turbines then recycling/trashing of same without coming out backwards. The greens have far too comfortable a relationship with alt energy to calculate its true cost in both amount of materials used or HCs burned to evaluate what "net zero" means. And with intellectual cowards like Bill Gates driving the bus that won't change. Gates' contention that he can just plant trees to equal out flying around the planet to spread noise about solar and wind is like a guy giving his wife something she won't buy for herself each time he cheats on her.
Yes. The excise tax on fossil fuels according to carbon content plus subsidy on CCS plus CBAM is pretty straightforward and does not require any calculations.
Bill Gates????
Very good points. I also find it misleading and a problem to discuss heat related mortality without also discussing cold related mortality. Unfortunately there is good and bad in almost everything.
Excellent. The 2nd derivative is not the 1st derivative, unless you're trying to scare people!
Co2 is now, has always been and will remain a lagging not a leading indicator. Causal then? No. Is the Earth warming? Yes - slowly in a normal cycle. Has this kind of cycle ever happened on Earth prior to industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels? The records suggest yes. Look to the sun, clouds, oceans and cosmic rays etc. Stop censoring, conflating science with politics and firing diverse scientific voices just to preserve fame, academic gravitas and grants and we might just get to the reality of our situation. Until that happens: Crazy.
In other words perhaps we ought to apply simple logic and intellectual integrity when reading or listening to anyone asserting anything. And keep in mind that to assert that something exists, does not make it true. The person making the assertion carries the burden of proof to show the truth. i. e. to asset that the moon is made of green cheese does not mean that one who disagrees must prove that it is not. The person making the claim must always prove her assertion or acknowledge that her claim is mere speculation.
This is a subtle insight, easy to miss and very easy to misinterpret. I don't really know how to communicate it to a mass audience. Suspect it can't be done.
The point made is a good one; people may misunderstand a statement about the effect of increasing CO2 concentrations to mean wrt the present or the past instead of wrt the no increase counterfactual. But the important point is to be careful to compare policy with policy or more correctly net benefit of one policy with the net benefit of another.
P1 =>B1-C1= N1
P2 =>B2-C2= N2
Such an important post. I also wonder what the utility is of contrasting this world with an imaginary one that did not use fossil fuels. If the idea is to sue oil companies are we also going to award them for all of the economic growth and adaptive capacity over the last 100 years?
Canada going all in nevertheless https://www.tvo.org/article/when-heat-waves-strike-environment-canada-can-link-them-to-climate-change-fast
Agree. The only possible utility could be to produce examples of the kind of damage that policies to prevent CO2 accumulation in the future would avoid. But the confusions introduced could make it a double-edged sword.
No uncredible denies that the use of energy over the past few centuries has massively improved the human lot, but it is just energy. It didn't necessarily have to be fossil fuelled energy. Mr. Brown almost puts forward a denialist arguement that because things have been improving that therefore that there is no problem. But this is rather like saying that, as an analogy, it would be no problem if crime was increasing massively, people had to have increasingly large security forces and build gated communities and have security guards - then safety would be improving but their quality of life would be dropping. The view also does not take into account the increasingly large effects on human civilization and the wider ecosystems with every extra 0.1 °C from now. It further assumes that climate science has got the risks exactly right and that there are no 'unknown unknowns', such as larger feedback effects, than hypothesised to bite us unexpectedly at some point
You are getting dangerously close to Paul Ehrlich territory. Malthusianism is alive and well in the green zealot world and it invariably assumes that their intellect is simply too important and great to be disagreed with. I'll take Judy Curry's thinking over bloviating scientism any day of the week because it doesn't assume an inability to be wrong.
This seems like a bit of a strawman or an argument in in tone. The arguments within this essay don’t really come across as denialist at all to me (Brown does not deny that climate change is a problem) but rather is clarifying what seems to be a common misunderstanding regarding the direction of trends. Regarding your analogy, a better one would be if building big gated communities and more secure houses but has made some people angry at you - your overall risk of being a victim has decreased dramatically, but the magnitude of this reduction is slightly lower because you have a few more people who are angry and might attack you.
Patrick's well known to argue the position that things are not likely to be as bad as the vast majority of climate scientists' work suggest. He's not a 'denialist' but he is an 'undermines what the overwhelming scientific consensus about the risks is'ist...'. It's implicit in most of what he writes, which has been seized upon before by the real denialists to promulgate their viewpoint.
I don't think you understood my analogy very well...
Climate scientists make descriptive claims about climate change, and overwhelmingly agree, because those descriptive claims ARE correct. That does not mean that climate scientists are correct about their normative claims about decarbonization, which are better handled by economic analyses, who’s consensus I believe Brown is generally in agreement with.
I think Patrick's views are helpful to the denialist community because he cherry picks a certain type of economic analysis which makes selective value judgements as to what is 'worthy' or not - what is included or excluded from their deliberations. It's been said that if you get a 100 economist in a room you will find they have 100 different non-compatible views depending on whichever political ideology - Left, Right Libertarian etc - they are prejudiced by.
Here's a recent article which goes into how over-simplistic economics can be used as a subtle form of delay'ism/denialism.
https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/07/how-much-will-climate-change-drag-down-the-economy/
Also, this link to a survey of hundreds economists is instructive.
https://policyintegrity.org/publications/detail/gauging-economic-consensus-on-climate-change
Which of Brown's positions do you think vary significantly from what the economic consensus is in the linked document?
rapid decarbonization*
I don't think you understood my analogy very well...
Should have been 'no-one credible'....
Amen!