A good piece, thank you. One comment: "domestically, we see over 20 “Billion dollar disasters” per year." See Roger Pielke Jr. on his The Honest Broker blog on this topic. Roger finds serious flaws in the billion dollar disaster approach.
Very good essay. Informative and to-the-point. I do have one objection, though.
You mention, almost in passing, "...coastal flooding (sea level rise)" I just don't see it in the data I have access to. The oceans have been rising, relative to land, by about .9ft/century for as far back as records go (NOAA; admittedly not far) and there's plenty of evidence of rising from much farther back.
One can follow the ancient path of the Hudson River far out to sea on Google maps to a depth of 250/350ft. Probably inundated beginning ~15000 yrs ago.
In fact the natural sea level rise is a great example of climate mitigation and resilience, natural and man-made. If one peruses old maps, The Battery in NY harbor for instance, you see that the inhabitants dealt with that ~2.5 foot of rise since Revolutionary times by landfilling. Also the very fragile barrier islands along the East Coast of the US have been surprisingly resilient, considering they're made of sand, which moves around constantly and barely rise more than 10ft above the tide mark.
Also, observe both Mont St. Michel and Lindisfarne Island and their thousand years old, low-tide only causeways.
There's really no need to lose sleep over the sea levels.
From your conclusion, "general economic development should be prioritized over restrictive energy policies that insist that a carbon budget is near-to-be or has already been breached" I gather you are endorsing Pielke's Iron Law. I wish our so-called "leaders" in government would also recognize the importance of this law.
The hypothesis that CO2 will cause future warming has been debunked. The hypothesis never did include forecasts of increasing high temperatures; it only forecast higher daily average temperatures. The average daily temperature was forecast to be the result of higher average night time temperatures; that caused by a slowing of the escape of IR from the atmosphere to the cosmos.
Is Patrick Brown denying the reality of climate change and if so why? Does he really think we can adapt faster than the process of desertification, ocean warming and the crash of the fisheries and the increase in violent weather? That we might is hopeful but is it realistic? His example of the well built well designed house equipped with flood proof windows isn’t going to save the tens of millions who don’t have and won’t have the resources he says we ought to have if only we allow the free markets to reign as they should.
Straw manning someone’s argument or purposefully misconstruing what someone said may have worked for you as a lawyer, but it’s pretty obvious when we can all go back and read exactly what the article claimed.
>Patrick Brown denying the reality of climate change and if so why?
Doesn’t seem like it to me. Why are you asking? You can read in the article that he clearly isn’t.
>Does he really think we can adapt faster than the process of desertification, ocean warming and the crash of the fisheries and the increase in violent weather?
Again, he didn’t say that so not sure why you are asking questions about what he said when you can read in the article that he didn’t make that specific claim.
>house equipped with flood proof windows isn’t going to save the tens of millions who don’t have and won’t have the resources he says we ought to have…
Yeah that is the claim. It’s well established that free markets allow for more economic growth, which he is claiming would help. Do you deny this?
There is no reason to expect an increase in violent weather. If the hypothesis were true the future would have less violent weather. Violent weather is driven by the temperature gradient between the Tropics and the Poles. CO2-induced warming would raise Polar temperatures and lessen the gradient.
There is noting in advocating for adaption that implies it should all or even mainly be done by private investment.
Nor does investment in cost effective adaption mean that we should not ALSO invest in cost effective mitigation. The two are complementary. If fact, the most cost effective way of doing mitigation, a tax on net emissions, provides fiscal reauorces for public investment in adaption.
Emissions of CO2 are not causing global warming. Let's wait until we know what is causing the warming. We also need to know how much warmer it might get before we know if mitigation is required or necessary.
The vaporizing of fossil fuel, at least of gas/diesel, may decrease of its own accord simply because it is a finite resource. About a 50 year supply is what I've read, with the cost of extraction going up sooner as harder to reach reserves are mined. Natural gas and coal are still plentiful though. With promising work on solid state batteries we may eventually want to choose an EV over our ICEs anyway (if the much vaunted 900 mile range, quick charging, and longer battery life claims are true). This will probably have to concomitant with replacing coal plants with SMRs and such. As the article suggests, heat is our main enemy and perhaps some stratospheric shielding with sulfur compounds are worth experimenting on a small scale, if needed later en masse.
50 years is faaaar too pessimistic. If the price goes up high enough, even the ecofascists in California would allow drilling, and the size of that shale resource is about as big as what is already being tapped in Texas.
My bet is we have closer to 1000 years of coal, 500 years of gas and 2-300 years of oil left, and if we can’t get fission and then fusion working in that timeframe, then we get what the Malthusian decelerationist losers want for us.
So a nearly continuous 250 year track record of technology and efficiency improvement with continued increases in resource extraction is just meaningless speculation in your view?
Was there a rational global policy in place since the Industrial Revolution?
We have known the physics since 1930 and there are 400+GW of currently deployed nuclear tech, but sure, it’s “to be developed.”
Are you familiar with Mark Mills' book, The Bottomless Well? If not, I think you will find that to be an interesting read. He suggests the limits on production are not supply-driven (that is, not finite), but economic. It is an interesting and believable theory; his book documents it very well.
Haven’t read the book, but I am much more on the Mills side of the argument than the King Hubbard peak oil thinking. We aren’t going to be supply limited for a really long time (subject to normal ups and downs), but that is how energy transitions work anyway. New resources become more economic and the world slowly moves away from the old resources and becomes less economically dependent on them.
Like I said; let's find out what is going on before we undertake mitigation efforts. Reducing CO2 emissions will be impotent because CO2 is not responsible for the warming. Please, we should not embark on geo engineering projects before we can be sure they are safe.
We geoengineer all the time. Ever heard of farming? Golf courses? Particulate emissions? 50 megaton nuclear tests? I’m not terribly worried about it as long as we don’t have Mr. Burns trying to block the sun entirely- the tools might even be useful!
Humans have developed means of surviving hostile climates for a long time. The Dutch levees are a good example. Of they fail a few thousand folks drown, but the entire world does not become uninhabitable. Humans have never tried to modify the entire Earth at one time. If we do and it goes horribly wrong we could wipe out everything. That is an unacceptable risk to take to avert an imaginary climate change.
A good piece, thank you. One comment: "domestically, we see over 20 “Billion dollar disasters” per year." See Roger Pielke Jr. on his The Honest Broker blog on this topic. Roger finds serious flaws in the billion dollar disaster approach.
Very good essay. Informative and to-the-point. I do have one objection, though.
You mention, almost in passing, "...coastal flooding (sea level rise)" I just don't see it in the data I have access to. The oceans have been rising, relative to land, by about .9ft/century for as far back as records go (NOAA; admittedly not far) and there's plenty of evidence of rising from much farther back.
One can follow the ancient path of the Hudson River far out to sea on Google maps to a depth of 250/350ft. Probably inundated beginning ~15000 yrs ago.
In fact the natural sea level rise is a great example of climate mitigation and resilience, natural and man-made. If one peruses old maps, The Battery in NY harbor for instance, you see that the inhabitants dealt with that ~2.5 foot of rise since Revolutionary times by landfilling. Also the very fragile barrier islands along the East Coast of the US have been surprisingly resilient, considering they're made of sand, which moves around constantly and barely rise more than 10ft above the tide mark.
Also, observe both Mont St. Michel and Lindisfarne Island and their thousand years old, low-tide only causeways.
There's really no need to lose sleep over the sea levels.
Right. Don't lose sleep; invest in adaption that has NPV >0
Nicely done, sir, thank you.
From your conclusion, "general economic development should be prioritized over restrictive energy policies that insist that a carbon budget is near-to-be or has already been breached" I gather you are endorsing Pielke's Iron Law. I wish our so-called "leaders" in government would also recognize the importance of this law.
The hypothesis that CO2 will cause future warming has been debunked. The hypothesis never did include forecasts of increasing high temperatures; it only forecast higher daily average temperatures. The average daily temperature was forecast to be the result of higher average night time temperatures; that caused by a slowing of the escape of IR from the atmosphere to the cosmos.
Sophistic!
The "climate we have" _means_ the climate expected to prevail over the life of investments made today.
Is Patrick Brown denying the reality of climate change and if so why? Does he really think we can adapt faster than the process of desertification, ocean warming and the crash of the fisheries and the increase in violent weather? That we might is hopeful but is it realistic? His example of the well built well designed house equipped with flood proof windows isn’t going to save the tens of millions who don’t have and won’t have the resources he says we ought to have if only we allow the free markets to reign as they should.
Straw manning someone’s argument or purposefully misconstruing what someone said may have worked for you as a lawyer, but it’s pretty obvious when we can all go back and read exactly what the article claimed.
>Patrick Brown denying the reality of climate change and if so why?
Doesn’t seem like it to me. Why are you asking? You can read in the article that he clearly isn’t.
>Does he really think we can adapt faster than the process of desertification, ocean warming and the crash of the fisheries and the increase in violent weather?
Again, he didn’t say that so not sure why you are asking questions about what he said when you can read in the article that he didn’t make that specific claim.
>house equipped with flood proof windows isn’t going to save the tens of millions who don’t have and won’t have the resources he says we ought to have…
Yeah that is the claim. It’s well established that free markets allow for more economic growth, which he is claiming would help. Do you deny this?
There is no reason to expect an increase in violent weather. If the hypothesis were true the future would have less violent weather. Violent weather is driven by the temperature gradient between the Tropics and the Poles. CO2-induced warming would raise Polar temperatures and lessen the gradient.
There is noting in advocating for adaption that implies it should all or even mainly be done by private investment.
Nor does investment in cost effective adaption mean that we should not ALSO invest in cost effective mitigation. The two are complementary. If fact, the most cost effective way of doing mitigation, a tax on net emissions, provides fiscal reauorces for public investment in adaption.
Emissions of CO2 are not causing global warming. Let's wait until we know what is causing the warming. We also need to know how much warmer it might get before we know if mitigation is required or necessary.
The vaporizing of fossil fuel, at least of gas/diesel, may decrease of its own accord simply because it is a finite resource. About a 50 year supply is what I've read, with the cost of extraction going up sooner as harder to reach reserves are mined. Natural gas and coal are still plentiful though. With promising work on solid state batteries we may eventually want to choose an EV over our ICEs anyway (if the much vaunted 900 mile range, quick charging, and longer battery life claims are true). This will probably have to concomitant with replacing coal plants with SMRs and such. As the article suggests, heat is our main enemy and perhaps some stratospheric shielding with sulfur compounds are worth experimenting on a small scale, if needed later en masse.
50 years is faaaar too pessimistic. If the price goes up high enough, even the ecofascists in California would allow drilling, and the size of that shale resource is about as big as what is already being tapped in Texas.
My bet is we have closer to 1000 years of coal, 500 years of gas and 2-300 years of oil left, and if we can’t get fission and then fusion working in that timeframe, then we get what the Malthusian decelerationist losers want for us.
Meaningless speculation. Everything depends on policy and to-be developed technology.
So a nearly continuous 250 year track record of technology and efficiency improvement with continued increases in resource extraction is just meaningless speculation in your view?
Was there a rational global policy in place since the Industrial Revolution?
We have known the physics since 1930 and there are 400+GW of currently deployed nuclear tech, but sure, it’s “to be developed.”
Are you familiar with Mark Mills' book, The Bottomless Well? If not, I think you will find that to be an interesting read. He suggests the limits on production are not supply-driven (that is, not finite), but economic. It is an interesting and believable theory; his book documents it very well.
Haven’t read the book, but I am much more on the Mills side of the argument than the King Hubbard peak oil thinking. We aren’t going to be supply limited for a really long time (subject to normal ups and downs), but that is how energy transitions work anyway. New resources become more economic and the world slowly moves away from the old resources and becomes less economically dependent on them.
Like I said; let's find out what is going on before we undertake mitigation efforts. Reducing CO2 emissions will be impotent because CO2 is not responsible for the warming. Please, we should not embark on geo engineering projects before we can be sure they are safe.
We geoengineer all the time. Ever heard of farming? Golf courses? Particulate emissions? 50 megaton nuclear tests? I’m not terribly worried about it as long as we don’t have Mr. Burns trying to block the sun entirely- the tools might even be useful!
Humans have developed means of surviving hostile climates for a long time. The Dutch levees are a good example. Of they fail a few thousand folks drown, but the entire world does not become uninhabitable. Humans have never tried to modify the entire Earth at one time. If we do and it goes horribly wrong we could wipe out everything. That is an unacceptable risk to take to avert an imaginary climate change.
Good. More than philosophical ranting. Actual data, and from a source I trust, Our World in Data. This is the Breakthrough Institute as it used to be.