The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming is now available at Amazon.com
Why has the world been unable to address global warming? Science policy expert Roger Pielke, Jr., says it’s not the fault of those who reject the Kyoto Protocol, but those who support it, and the magical thinking that the agreement represents.
In The Climate Fix, Pielke offers a way to repair climate policy, shifting the debate away from meaningless targets and toward a revolution in how the world’s economy is powered, while de-fanging the venomous politics surrounding the crisis. The debate on global warming has lost none of its power to polarize and provoke in a haze of partisan vitriol. The Climate Fix will bring something new to the discussions: a commonsense perspective and practical actions better than any offered so far.
Editorial Reviews via Amazon
From Publishers Weekly
Pielke (The Honest Broker) presents a smart and hard-nosed analysis of the politics and science of climate change and proposes a commonsense approach to climate policy. According to Pielke, the iron law of climate policy dictates that whenever environmental and economic objectives are placed in opposition to each other, economics always wins. Climate policies must be made compatible with economic growth as a precondition for their success, he writes, and because the world will need more energy in the future, an oblique approach supporting causes, such as developing affordable alternative energy sources rather than consequences, such as controversial schemes like cap-and-trade, is more likely to succeed.
Although some may protest on principle the suggestion that we accept the inevitability of energy growth, Pielke’s focus on adaptation to climate change refreshingly sidesteps the unending debate over the reality of anthropogenic climate change, and opens up the possibility for effective action that places human dignity and democratic ideals at the center of climate policies.
The book is available at Amazon.com and I think it is destined to be a best seller in the “Global Warming” category.
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There are so many problems with this line it is hard to know where to start.
First, although our planet is finite, many of the materials we use to make goods are effectively infinite resources. For example, iron or aluminum. The quantities of such materials in the earth is so great that we have no prospect of using them up in the lifetime of the solar system.
Second, we do not in fact consume any of these materials. They are transformed from one form to another. None of them leave the planet.
Third, as societies become wealthier, they get better at making more valuable things from the same materials. Thus more value (and hence economic growth) can be created from the same inputs.
Finally, economic growth can continue simply because as people become wealthier, they start to value non-material things more highly. Hence we now have the concept of intellectual property, which would have been meaningless in former eras. Even in Australia, supposedly just a mine for the rest of the world, 70% of GDP is produced in the services sector.
How can it be that an old family doctor with interests in geology, astronomy and marine biology is aware that the greenhouse gas chosen by Earth is water vapour 73% while a professor writing a book does not have this basic knowledge. Methane and Carbon Dioxide come in at 3% each. The reason CO2 variations do not matter is that the absorption bands for infrared are fully saturated. The book “Cool It” by Bjorn Lomborg shows how a little free trade would give nations enough cash to deal with climate changes. He makes no claim to scientific expertise but quietly sinks Al Gore with a few simple illustrations. Read it first. Geoff Broadbent Old North Queensland Doctor
I typed 73% instead of 93%for water vapour. Geoff Broadbent
Did you read what I said above about Liebig’s law? Apparently not.
In the process, however, they get from a low entropy (high-grade ore) to a high entropy (dissolved in the ocean, for example) state. In order to reverse that, you need a lot of negative entropy, which is in short supply.
And as societies become wealthier, they start eating more meat, buying electornic toys, going on vacation to the Hawaii, and other such activities that ultimately increase their per capita resource consumption. Again, show me an example of society that had actually decreased its per capita consumption by becoming wealthier. Do not give me an example of a single area where some small efficiencies improvements have been introduced, give me an example of a society that has lowered it’s total environmental footprint. It doesn’t exist because it never happens.
Again, economist or madman
Because only the energy needed for that in 2050 will be 4 or 5 times the current energy consumption. Care to elaborate where it is going to come from when in the same time, Peak Oil, Gas, Uranium and Coal are going to hit in that order?
Yet another post pushing the premise that man’s emissions are definitely causing the earth to warm, no mistaking, so lets put another brick on top of the foundations and ask everyone what colour to paint it.
Pielke and the other luke-warmers are just a tool of the Climate Change brigade.
The publishers description easily confused as an Amazon review is bare faced cheek. Why would this site use the book’s advert and not an impartial review. This would never have been done on the old WUWT. Just a week or so now feels like a lifetime away.
Are we supposed to not notice what is happening here?
Philip Thomas
This fear of yours that there has been some sort of manipulative sea change in WUWT is unfounded. The Pielke’s have always been respected and given a forum here. Anthony is at the helm. If you don’t like the tone of the articles then wait around, there will be some you do like.
Unlike most even here, I’m not polarizing into “for GM” or “against GM”. I think there are important issues on both sides.
Remember the Haber process? Used to fix nitrogen, a staple of our current fertilizer production. That was invented by Germans in WWI – an invention that happened under a state of duress because there was a need. Many other major inventions have happened under similar circumstances. Sure, the last thing one can do is predict inventions, or assume that inventive capacity is infinite and accessible on demand. But challenges do have ways of eventually being met.
Following the challenges of the Industrial Revolution, town sewers were built, the understanding of sepsis and cleanliness and pasteurization and vaccination grew to protect health, railways brought the countryside back within romantic reach of city dwellers again, wages went up, the Methodist church arose to cope with the alcoholism following the inner disruption of moving to cities, education improved by leaps and bounds, finally the Clean Air acts were passed… The major indication of success was demographic – population increase.
Now the population has increased so much, and life has continued to change and globalize so much, there are new challenges that the negative sides of global changes bring up (overpopulation, exhaustion of nonrenewable resources, pollution, technologically advanced warfare, terrorism, control by the banking elites, etc).
We should not forget the huge and continuing improvements in both quality and quantity and length of human life in the last century, owed to human inventiveness, decency, creativity, and respect for life.
But neither should we forget the sudden escalations of problems into global warfare and fundamentalisms that “divide and rule”. Winston Churchill was laughed out of court… until Hitler became very real.
So I think there are elements of truth on GM’s side (the pessimist projections of straight bookkeeping, and the new-ish global possibilities of catastrophically multiplying sudden collapse) and elements of falsity (the neglect of creative potential, much of which can already be found, much of which can clearly be developed further if the situation of dire need provokes sufficient support eg thorium reactors).
GM does not perhaps realize that most of those here also see the same facts as GM sees but draw different conclusions eg
* the population curve working out in practice not exponential but S-shaped;
* agriculture could be developed to sustain a far bigger global population if all the orthodox and unorthodox creative possibilities already known were developed;
* we need to proactively find ways of cooperating rather than competing because war is the single item that bankrupts wealth most rapidly.
Can I suggest that we could start that process of cooperation right here, with discovering where GM and others AGREE? then it might be a lot easier to see where both the pessimists and the optimists, both the apocalyptic liberal dreamers and the practical economic realists have important and complementary contributions. At present there is so much ding-dong and then the science itself suffers.
Charles Higley says:
September 13, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Chernobyl is the outlier as its designed truly sucked, being built effectively out of charcoal and set to become a bonfire upon meltdown.
I agree with your comment about nuclear (e.g. 4th generation) being the logical future for at least baseline electricity generation.
There is a great book you may have read by Zhores Medvedev, “The Legacy of Chernobyl” that gives a detailed account from the inside of the series of events – principally politically driven – that led to the Chernobyl accident. Gross human error was at the heart of it. The design used graphite as the neutron moderator – graphite is the best moderator and also maximises the yield of plutonium, which the military periodically creamed off. Thus the RBMK design had partly military objectives. The design as such (apart from being a charcoal bonfire as you say) was not too bad, it took a series of stupendously stupid decisions to precipitate the meltdown.
Slightly O/T but this from the Daily Telegraph:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8000350/Arctic-fox-joins-polar-bear-on-new-list-of-Arctic-species-in-danger-of-extinction.html
Plus ca change; plus c’est la meme chose comes to mind!
Reply: It’s seriously off topic, but I’m not deleting so I can quote the article for the major funny.
ack ~ ctm
Yes.
Jeff L says:
“IMHO, The deep greens & “watermelons” won’t like this as AGW has been purely a political / psychological item for them (either consciously or sub-consciously) since the beginning of the concept…”
Dead right! The whole global warming fraud is nothing but the drip-drip-drip brainwashing of the public by every organ of the state and the mass media combined. They have conjured out of thin air (ha!) a whole lexicon (or should that be lexi-con?) of global warming jargon with which we are so familiar; the “carbon footprint” the “ocean acidification” etc., and they’ve invented scores of icons and symbols to associate with these false concepts; the polar bear, the “melting” ice-caps, extreme weather events, and the latest desperate “let’s throw in some starving Africans” pictures to try to prop up their miserable lying propaganda.
In spite of the billions spent, there’s still not an atom of evidence that the Earth’s climate has been, or will ever be, altered by any human activity short of nuclear war. Hence the need for all the brainwashing: to get the public to “see” something that isn’t there (and never existed), and so succumb to policies based upon that fantasy.
“charles the moderator says:
September 14, 2010 at 2:10 am
Philip Thomas
This fear of yours that there has been some sort of manipulative sea change in WUWT is unfounded. The Pielke’s have always been respected and given a forum here. Anthony is at the helm. If you don’t like the tone of the articles then wait around, there will be some you do like.”
The use of the Publishers blurb is a completely new approach by WUWT. I welcome articles from all corners of the debate so long as they are fair and balanced. It is the tone of this site that has seperated it from the others and it is the tone that I believe is changing. I will wait; I have done for some time now. Nothing has caught my interest intelectually since Thomas Fuller began to use too many words to say nothing. Suprise me – please.
I see that GM is attempting another thread hijack to his / her favorite Panic Attack. Having carefully ignored all the evidence to the contrary presented in response to prior such rants. To spare folks who DID read it the first dozen times, I’ll not repeat it all, and the links to references, simply give the high points of the results. The super short form is:
1) Meadows et.al. is a broken argument based on false assumptions.
2) We have effectively infinite energy available to us.
3) That means we can do effectively infinite material transformations, we never ‘run out’ of stuff.
4) The whole planet is a resource. The tons per person is astounding.
5) Real populations do not do exponential growth, they do S shaped, so all the exponential paranoia is just that.
6) Technology is your friend.
7) The sizing is such that we might need to worry about where we are on the S shaped curve in about 500 years or so.
GM says: To which I can’t help but reply with the classic line that “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist”.
I’m an economist. I’d suggest you learn some of it too. One of the things we have to study is Malthus (one of the founding lights of economics and why it is called The Dismal Science). So right off the bat, your putting ‘economist’ as a contra position to Malthusian doctrine is about as bass-ackward as you can get. Then we have to learn a great deal about population dynamics and demographics. You might want to learn a bit too.
So in response to your “classic” I’ll give you a “modern” understanding. ALL biological populations follow an S shaped growth curve, not an exponential.
Take a basic biology class ( I recommend bacteriology) and you will be taught this.
The reason it tops out can be any of several; from predators growing apace to evolution of new diseases or even just eventually reaching a ‘carrying capacity’ limit of food, shelter, or environmental degradation. But that is not a disaster, just a natural limit to the growth rate.
Given the relative evolution rates of bacteria and people and our growth rate, the most likely limit on US will be antibiotic resistant bacteria. News tonight had a new ‘gene packet’ identified that gives just about any bacteria resistance to almost all present antibiotics. Cases identified in several US states with all individuals having come from India, where it is much more common. So long before we hit any ‘resource limits’ (which is itself an oxymoron) we will start dropping like flies from our old causes: TB, Staph, Strep, Plague, etc. as they join MRSA in the antibiotic proof group. As bacteria swap “plasmids” across species, these genes will fairly rapidly come to be widespread.
So take what joy you may ( knowing that the “doom and gloomers” are only really happy with a looming disaster of death and destruction) from the knowledge that we are on the cusp of losing the race of new antibiotics vs bacterial evolution and billions will die. Hopefully this new found source of worry will let you let go of the pointless and irrelevant resource limit panic.
I’ve done the S shaped growth experiment with several species personally. Many bacterial cultures. Some snails. Fish especially. Had a 250 gallon tilapia tank I let free run. The fish ended up stopping growth at about 4 inches instead of 14 inches, and I got more but smaller fish. Eventually the number also stabilized at a very high population density. BUT stop it did.
So please please please: Put down the “Limits to Growth” as it is horridly flawed.
Forget about the ‘exponential growth’. It is a LIE. A broken assumption that is not real. A falsehood. And irrelevant to the real world.
I can make a fine house out of trash and dirt. (“Earthship”; links in the link I posted earlier that you seem to have ignored). I don’t think we’re in danger of running out of trash and dirt any time soon. It is fully self supporting for water, energy, and waste recycle. We can grow many more tons of food than at present IFF we ever need to (but we don’t) with examples like Rice Intensification waiting in the wings with 4 x to 9x potential (demonstrated) yield improvements.
We can make beams and wall board of of straw (that we burn, trash, feed to cows, or plough under today). We can ECONOMICALLY extract U from sea water and the amount that washes into the sea is more each year than needed to power the whole planet. We don’t do it as the land sources are a bit cheaper. We run out of energy when we run out of planet. And with energy we can do everything else.
So please memorize these words: “Don’t PANIC”.
Panic is a very bad strategy for problem solving and clouds ones ability to think.
Excerpt from: Charles Higley on September 13, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Graphite is used for crucibles for molten steel, which may be wholly made of graphite (smaller ones) or graphite may be a lining material (industrial size). It takes a lot to get it burning, and as with the slightly-better-burning next-lowest form of carbon, anthracite coal (diamond being next-highest), without a substantial continual supply of fresh air it tends to go out leaving behind an unburned portion.
Chernobyl’s design sucked for many reasons, but the use of graphite in and of itself wasn’t one of them.
Meanwhile in reactor designs and other industrial processes, liquid sodium is used as a coolant, sodium is even used inside the stems of engine valves for better heat transfer. And you know what happens when sodium is exposed to air or dropped in water…
GM. I read your posts and your replies and feel nothing but sadness, your total lack of faith in the human race is a despair to the soul.
Nineteenth century scientists were of the consensus that all had been discovered and only needed expanding for full understanding of all things. Science can be blind for it was proved beyond scientific doubt that heavier than air machines could never fly.
Meantime everyday seeing birds and insects proving them wrong. Who would have thought in the nineteen seventies that GM and all of us could discus issues of world importance in real time from all over the world,, from our little screen at home. The inventiveness of man will overcome all obstacles when the need arises and shortages will become an opportunity for inventive change.
The more we learn, the larger the horizon of the unknown becomes, our knowledge in the twenty first century still makes us babes in the woods. Many surprises await us in all branch’s of knowledge for we have yet only scratched the surface all of our sciences are riddled with anomolies
GM the world is filled with impossible possibilities that will one day be every day such as your internet.
From: E.M.Smith on September 14, 2010 at 2:53 am
After observing GM’s modus operandi, I can see the distinction needs to be made between those who panic and those who seek to utilize the panic of others.
😉
GM now give us a few thousand (or a few hundred) words on why your ideas will not come true.
GM says:
September 13, 2010 at 9:34 pm
“[…]I find it particularly amusing that the people who warn about the limits to growth all come from highly technical backgrounds, ”
The Club Of Rome? Paul Ehrlich? Are you kidding?
@Lucy Skywalker:
I’m neither pro nor anti GM. I’m pro-truth. And there are clearly demonstrated and working at present technologies that give us near infinite energy available. That puts the nail in the ‘running out’ coffin. There are clearly working at present food production systems and home building systems and… {very long list left out…} that put the lie to the ‘running out of stuff’ meme. One simply MUST have basic facts right before attempting to predict what the future will hold. So as soon as GM has a grip in the reality of what technology is already doing, I’ll be more than happy to explore where there might be some interesting extrapolation that is made from there. Until that point, it’s just an exercise in getting them up to speed on what has already been solved; often in a dozen different ways.
GM says: Did I mention the word “madman”? In the same thread it was explained to you that the energy cost of mining asteroids is such that it will first, always be uneconomical to mine them (filtering sea water makes more energetic sense),
Also incredibly wrong. Once you have a small colony in space, out of the gravity well, dropping materials in is almost free. Especially energetically. There is already in existence a project evaluation of taking a ‘nickel iron’ asteroid and shaping it into a triangle airfoils shape with solar heating, then deorbiting it. (The technically inclined will recognize ‘nickel iron’ as ‘stainless steel’). Not only is the energy required vastly less than that needed to mine and refine iron and nickel then make stainless steel, but the economics are incredibly good as well.
The biggest problem? ONE such deorbit load is a one year supply of stainless steel and would ‘crash’ the world price so low as to destroy the market.
It really does pay to do a bit of library work prior to ranting about what can’t be done… This particular plan was developed by the Japanese, IIRC. BTW, the present work on SSTO vehicles is looking to drop the cost to orbit per pound by about an order of magnitude, with more after that possible. We could do it today if we wanted to, with existing technology.
you can not mine asteroids for energy/negative entropy, and there is no substitute for that.
Um, and you know there is zero uranium and thorium in space how? I’d expect it to be about as common as it is on earth. Not to mention all the solar harvesting plans. The energy density in sunshine in space is rather high.
The above is dictated by the laws of physics, the denial/complete lack of understanding of which seems to be a common diseases afflicting the minds of the posters here.
Oh please, lose the ad-hom attacks. There are more technical masters and Ph.Ds per capita here than I care to think about. I’ve had a collection of classes from the Engineering College at University prior to settling on Economics and have a teaching credential in Data Processing (along with a Math award and several years of math classes). Including a couple of years of physics classes and a rather fascinating Geology of the Solar System class. You seem to have no clue about the level of education here, especially considering that I’m one of the lesser lettered folks.
No technological progress can get you past the laws of physics. Something that only a madman (or an economist) will not recognize
Did you flunk an econ class or something? Where does your hatred of economists come from? No, no, don’t tell me… FWIW, economists are widely employed in agriculture and factories doing something called “linear programming” as a part of process optimization. Often the title is “Manager” rather than Economist, though. They MUST be familiar with what is achievable with the technology, and what is not. I had a whole class devoted to just that kind of problem. Looking at choices between different production paths and calculating the one with the best return. Many (maybe most) “agri-business” has a “farmer” with an Ag-Econ degree running the place and deciding how to most profitably make your food. Biology and chemistry figure highly in their training. And yes, even understanding ‘the laws of physics’ especially as applied to land, tractors, harvesters, trucks, fuel, sprays, freezing, thawing, weather, …
I find it particularly amusing that the people who warn about the limits to growth all come from highly technical backgrounds, thus calling them neo-Luddites (and coming from people from economic, i.e. non-technical, background most of the time) is deeply ironic…
And I find it astounding that you actually believe that.
Look, most of the “Technology will free us” folks are Engineers. Not Economists.
As I mentioned before, Malthus IS an economist and his doctrine is REQUIRED reading in Economics training. Often it takes years for Econ majors to grow out of that indoctrination and many never do. You have this spectacularly backwards. It is the non-tech folks who moan in their latte about doom. It’s the tech folks who tout Tech as the cure all. (I’m the odd bit as I’m some of each, trained in both).
GM says: You misrepresent what I was saying. The alternative energy option can not replace what we are getting from fossil fuels.
And once again, spectacularly wrong. We can easily (though not cheaply) replace all fossil fuels with “alternative energy”. It is just too expensive to be worth it at present. A couple of examples (that you would already have seen had you read the link I posted): California can get ALL its electric energy needs from a 10 x 100 mile wave bobber farm off the coast. Make that 10 x 200 if you want to power all the oil driven transport too. The coastline is way longer than 200 miles. (And the bobbers are spaced such as to not hinder life at all). Demonstration plant being installed in Hawaii for the Navy and a few bobbers going in off N. California already.
ALL of the USA can be powered by a solar farm in the Mojave of about 100 x 100 miles. The country is about 2500 x 1200 miles. Think about it… Oh, and no “Research” is needed to do that. This is based on existing and proven designs. It’s not about the technology, it’s about the linear programming solution that says it costs a bit more. Sterling engine thermal works best, though others can also be built. Thermal has the advantage that heat can be stored for use at night.
All this and more at:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
What can be done with mud:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/everything-from-mud/
Near Infinite energy supply:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/29/ulum-ultra-large-uranium-miner-ship/
So, if I get this right…
To keep the economic engine flowing, we have to go into massive debt to buy this inferior wind and solar technology on the premise of reducing CO2?
When the science is in question.
‘Hope Reigns Eternal!!!’ Well, not really.
Life is so difficult, we have to listen to everyone and make up out own mind every single day.
‘It’s always better to listen to an optimist than a pessimist’, said the realist. And then he also said, ‘Of course, sometimes pessimists can say some pretty intelligent things and we should listen to them too.’
Why has the world been unable to address global warming?
Who says that the World NEEDS to address Globwl Warming?
There is no
newer and better or cheap nuclear power–
and it is amazing to watch the spinners
of nukes (telling you to feel good about nukes) always deftly dancing away from
gore’s (mr uranium dust)personal connection to GE nukes
and his family’s historic links to nukes
(his senator grandfather founded the nukes
industry in tennessee-you know–TVA)–
just the facts–not more nuke coolie hot air–
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2010/04/after-getting-bailed-out-by-american.html
leaky yankee nuke pipes
http://iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/228057
http://iraqwar.mirror-world.ru/article/224327
http://notsylvia.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/the-origins-of-the-global-warming-scare-2
trillion dollar loan guarantee to nuke industry
http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/alexander-webb-bill.pdf
http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/look-out-for-the-nuclear-bomb-coming-with-your-electric-bill/
http://indymedia.org.nz/article/77839/uranium-dust-gore
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/polluted-by-profit-johann-hari-on-the-real-climategate-1978770.html
http://www.alternet.org/environment/146813/how_global_warming_and_capitalism_are_deeply_intertwined_?page=entire
leaky yankee nuke pipes
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=18951
http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/2009/12/03/theres-more-to-climate-fraud-than-just-tax-hikes/
http://nuclear-news.net/2009/06/05/is-nuclear-a-green-fuel-%C2%AB-voices-from-ghana/
http://nuclear-news.net/
http://nuclear-news.net/2009/05/06/former-federal-regulator-plans-for-fermi-3-nuclear-reactor-could-lead-to-job-loss/
http://arizona.indymedia.org/news/2009/10/74943.php
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/brenda-norrell/2010/06/popcorn-and-beans-depleted-uranium-and-raytheon
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/brenda-norrell/2010/07/racism-irony-and-censorship-trademarks-us-media
The planet is not finite. Nature transforms. Nature is creative. All of human progress has been accompanied by novel ways to transform worthless material into something useful and uplifting. That’s what nature has always done and that is what we must continue to do if we are not gripped by fear and loss of courage. Even the call for green energy is a form of creative repurposing of something worthless into something useful. What happens when you eventually run out of wind and sun because you need more? You invent something more novel and daring, you create more abundance. The direction is always towards more and more, as our imaginations continue to soar. The planet is not finite because our imagination will continue to create. Problems are merely a matter of bad timing and lack of creativity.
I have not read this new book by Roger Pielke, Jr.
Based on what the lead-in post says about it, I will probably not read it.
This is because it appears to be just another case of putting politics before objective knowledge of climate reality is obtained. Has anyone read the book? I would be open to being convinced otherwise.
John