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.
E.M.Smith
———–
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.
————
this claim is false. Population dynamics is far more complex than this.
Historically human populations don’t necessarily follow an S curve either.
Maybe economists need to broaden their education?
Thank you very much. I endorse your point about going for truth. I’ve bookmarked your reply. You’ve now closed all the escape hatches into apocalypticism that I can conceive – at least until I’ve done thorough justice to all your material. And probably beyond. I think I can meanwhile take the line “Chiefio – right until proven wrong”.
Ah, Chiefio, can you now take on the James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford, and answer their key material?? I see Schellnhuber’s mentioned there. Didn’t look any further.
I’ve just one thing to thank GM for. That’s thanks for rousing me to think and write, and EMS ditto.
E.M.Smith says
————
Also incredibly wrong. Once you have a small colony in space, out of the gravity well, dropping materials in is almost free. Especially energetically.
————
I hope you’re right, but until I see the figures for this I will assume otherwise. My instincts are saying changing the orbital vector of a big chunk of nickel iron to intersect earth orbit is gonna be expensive.
Just think about all the whining over the expense of the miserable little space station we have in orbit now.
Thanks for your post, E. M. Smith. I had forgotten the earlier saga. Now I realize that GM is just hobby horse-riding, I will ignore any future comments.
Another ridiculous, tautological straw man. Economics is the study of scarce resources that have alternative uses.
GM while I often agree with you, and I agree that things should be quantified, context is also important. 500 wind turbines a day seems like a big deal. However it comes to less than 200,000 per year, which for an economy that can build 16 million cars trucks and buses a year doesn’t seem so much. In the long run we do not have any energy limitation. We could phase out fossil fuels entirely over a 30 year or so time horizon without strain. We could even phase out nuclear if that made sense, which it probably doesn’t. We probably do have real food limitations due to water and some mineral limitations, but energy is only a matter of will and time.
R. Shearer
September 13, 2010 at 8:09 pm
“David is correct in my opinion. Some environmental legislation has gone beyond rationality,”
Some?
Well,
1. I’m glad we got this all straightened out!
2. I thought everyone knew that Publishers Weekly’s mission was to sell books and so didn’t bother to mention it; and
3. Lucy, your link to the “school” – Thanks, that’s worth following up.
4. I missed Chiefio’s “Everything From Mud” post last month, so there is proof that I haven’t been keeping up with the reading. Additional proof: I really did not know what GM was alluding to with the first comment and that’s why I prodded for an explanation.
5. “lesser lettered folks” ?? That woke me up. Good one, E. M.;
How’s this: E. M. Smith, LLF
E.M.Smith says: September 14, 2010 at 3:50 am
Good post Chiefio – I’ll take a look at some of your links.
Incidently, to try and understand where some of these apocalyptic visions come from, I Googled ‘Peak Oil’. I was shocked at what I read. These doomster’s make the AGW people seem complacent. You can find article after article ‘proving’ that oil production will decline in . . . . well, it’s usually about six years from whenever the article was written. All these articles are well written, and contain a lot of technical jargon, like Hubbert curves etc. One even claimed that the Government know we are about to run out but cannot speak the truth for fear of stampeding the financial markets.
Chiefio, you could think about maybe reading some of that stuff and doing a post – it sure would help some of us more impressionable types to sleep better at night 🙂
E.M.Smith / Jaye Bass / Alex Heyworth / Lucy Skywalker / DirkH / DEEBEE/ kadaka (KD Knoebel) et al;
The two links below are brilliant sources refuting GM’s claims.
NOTE: I have been trying to mostly boycott wikipedia [ the William Connolley thing ] but the link to wikipedia I used below has a good treatment of the now famous Simon–Ehrlich wager. Old population/scarcity doom monger Ehrlich lost : ) .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
John
“The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring an advanced civilization’s level of technological advancement. The scale is only theoretical and in terms of an actual civilization highly speculative; however, it puts energy consumption of an entire civilization in a cosmic perspective. It was first proposed in 1964 by the Soviet Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev. The scale has three designated categories called Type I, II, and III. These are based on the amount of usable energy a civilization has at its disposal, and the degree of space colonization. In general terms, a Type I civilization has achieved mastery of the resources of its home planet, Type II of its solar system, and Type III of its galaxy.[1] Science fiction also may expand the scale to Type IV, where a civilization has mastery of the resources of its universe, and sometimes Type V, all the universes.
The original and the final draft for this particular scale had energy consumptions ranging so widely from each other, that Kardashev himself revised the scale as to include values between, in hundredths. The human civilization as of 2010 is currently somewhere around 0.72, with calculations showing we will reach Type I status around 2100, Type II status around 3100 and Type III status from one hundred thousand to one million years time.” (Wikipedia)
We are now around 0.72. So we have long road to go to Type II which is only level where we can survive longer than Dinos.
So GM relax and enjoy interglacial.
From: LazyTeenager on September 14, 2010 at 6:33 am
Depends on where and when you change it. We calculate space probe trajectories years in advance, and make mid-course adjustments with small pushes to adjust where they’ll be many months later. If the math is right and the force is applied properly, and you don’t mind waiting awhile, a multi-ton space rock can be set on a collision course with Earth by a blow from a sledgehammer.
The operative word E.M. Smith used was colony. A colony is a (practically) self-sufficient entity, they’ll be able to mine and grow and generate what they need to survive. The expense of the space station comes from ferrying everything up from Earth. Big Hope #1 is a colony on the Moon, looks like the essentials are there, only the initial base and the processing equipment will be needed. But the occupants will still be tied to Earth, and the interesting stuff is elsewhere. The main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is the place to be, lots of available resources. Ceres, the dwarf planet, looks to be a good place to set up shop. With just enough gravity to keep things together without it being too hard to get away from, it has a good mix of rocky minerals and water. Available water is important, not only for life but for reaction mass for spacecraft.
In response to the flap over “To GM, or not to GM”
Believe it or not, I am thankful for GM’s inability to grasp simple concepts, as it has led to Chiefio’s elegant response above. ( E.M.Smith @ur momisugly September 14, 2010 at 3:50 am ) I too have bookmarked the comment, and have copied it into my “Useful Arguments for Useless Idiots” file for future conflicts. Now I can return to ignoring GM’s diatribes.
GM,
You said something like, “Just think about all the whining over the expense of the miserable little space station we have in orbit now.”
Nah, the colonization by mankind beyond old Terra Firma will be by profit making capitalists. : ) The people with money will go along with the paid employees of the space colonization corps. So, no need to worry about the public funding mess.
Remember, look at what public funding of climate science has wrought, yuck, the destruction of some of the credibility of science.
Individual people actually have empirical evidence of being smarter and more adaptable than any government.
John
I don’t think the climate needs a ‘fix’.
If it’s anything like software, the ‘fix’ will introduce three other bugs, known as ‘features’ to the people who implemented the ‘fix’.
What ‘features’ will we get as the reult of the climate ‘fix’?
Environmentalists are anti-industrialists, anti-capitalists, and anti-modernists.
Be they scientists, educators, students, researchers, corporate moguls, artists, or whatever, they are unaware – or worse in denial – of planetary mechanics which solely dictates our climate thru Input Of the Torque (IOT) imposed on the Sun by the Jovian planets (Landscheidt).
Environmental organizations, in the words of Edwin X. Berry PhD are designed like watermelons: Green on the outside, red on the inside!
Lucy Skywalker says:
September 14, 2010 at 1:28 am
Unlike most even here, I’m not polarizing into “for GM” or “against GM”. I think there are important issues on both sides.
As indeed there are with most issues.
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.
It was invented pre-war – 1909 or there abouts. Germany could not have fought the war without it being in existence already.
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.
And following the demands of the Black Death? Ah yes, we went round whipping ourselves…
Beware of remembering the successes and forgetting the failures. Medicine is especially good at that. I could start listing them, but I’m sure everyone else has their own favourites.
* the population curve working out in practice not exponential but S-shaped;
It is looking exponential in terms of world population.
http://www.vhemt.org/world.pop.time.jpg
If I knew how to do in-line images, it would probably help.
Populatation controlled by an external force goes S shaped. Population controlled by choice looks rather like the graph of x^3.
You can simulate this by using an Excel model (robust of course… 😉 )
Have a starting population where 99% of the population have 1 child (per couple), and 1% have 10 children. Then start adding the generations on, and keep adding them If you know spreadsheets, you can parametise the expansion conditions, and experiment with different shapes of graphs.
A t -> infinity, population growth tends towards the maximum growth rate, no matter how small the initial segment of the population is with that rate.
* agriculture could be developed to sustain a far bigger global population if all the orthodox and unorthodox creative possibilities already known were developed;
It could. But there would still be limits, so that’s not solving the problem, but kicking the can down the road. Pulling in anything that is not inexhaustible, will just make the problems worse when the buffers come. That pretty much leaves you with water, sunshine and air. Possibly electricity generated from other sources, but I can’t guarantee that.
There have been indications that our food is less nutricious than from the 1970’s because of mineral depletion – it has been about 12,000 years since glaciers dragged pulverised rock over thousands of miles to fertilise the ground with minerals, and with modern farming, they may be getting low.
That’s not proven – but you can dig now (if you pardon the pun).
* we need to proactively find ways of cooperating rather than competing because war is the single item that bankrupts wealth most rapidly.
That depends on which side you are, and how you deal with winning.
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.
Unfortunately, GM has the same bug as the “Team” – the “I’m saving the world” bug. That leads to similar traits such as being a stuck record, and dealing poorly with dissention. I personally do believe there are finite limits to growth, and I can explain where that belief comes about.
Mathematically it’s not really up for negotiation, timing-wise – there’s everything to play for.
In any case, what you do about it is your business. I’m not here to save the world.
E.M.Smith says:
September 14, 2010 at 3:50 am
Also incredibly wrong. Once you have a small colony in space, out of the gravity well, dropping materials in is almost free.
Only if your time is free. Your time is not free unless your food is free. If your food is free, why are you messing around with rocks?
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.
First *find* your ‘nickel iron’ asteroid. There’s a lot of space that consists of…space. Then there’s a lot of space that consists of asteroids made from fairly worthless silica.
(The technically inclined will recognize ‘nickel iron’ as ‘stainless steel’).
I recognise chromium and iron as stainless steel – I’m obviously not technologically inclined.
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.
The biggest problem is the time it would take. F=d(mv)/dt You need a lot of “spare mass” to throw around in order to get the “useful” mass to the place you want in within a reasonable time-scale.
I would however, recommend you take your time de-orbiting a year’s supply of stainless steel as the shock-wave from the crater formation would be the thing destroying the market. There’s a limit as to how much mass the atmosphere can make “fly”.
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.
It’s not how common it is on earth, it is how concentrated it is. Earth has water to concentrate minerals. Or magma when it gets desperate.
OK, sea water disperses minerals, but two-edged swords and all that.
Jaye Bass says:
September 14, 2010 at 7:34 am
Another ridiculous, tautological straw man. Economics is the study of scarce resources that have alternative uses.
So why do they study money?
“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. ”
So how would he explain the great success of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, elimination of lead from gasoline, the huge reduction in the use of CFC’s, RoHS, etc? It seems to me that when the environmentalists can clearly demonstrate the problems of continuing the status quo, they will gain not only popular support but support within the scientific community, and change will come about, even at the expense of economics. The situation is different with AGW, in which the environmentalists may have had some early support, but the evidence that would warrant drastic changes in our economic system (and most likely a sustained drop in our standard of living) does not stand up to scrutiny.
Pielke believes that global warming is real, which is a shame. He also thinks that remedies proposed by advocates have gone too far for the public to accept and sets to work proposing kinder, gentler ways to mitigate. To me spending any money and effort to fight a non-existent threat is totally irresponsible but you can’t say this to a true believer. Don’t forget that Bjørn Lomborg also believed in warming but felt that the way to handle it was to prepare for the warming instead of trying to stop it. He was vilified and threatened by radical advocates of warming for that. I suspect those same people will attack Pielke as well for having come up with a middle course or “Lomborg Lite.” Rather than wasting his effort on books like this he would be better off trying to master the facts on warming. If he reads me he will discover that the anthropogenic global warming has never been observed, that temperature curves from NASA, NOAA, and the Met Office showing it are cooked, and that arctic warming is real but non-carbonaceous and started at the turn of the twentieth century when warm currents began to reach the Arctic. And if he really does his homework he will discover Ferenc Miskolczi’s work with radiosondes which proves that CO2 has not done any greenhouse work for the last 61 years.
The big expense in space exploration and colonization is the cost of getting out of Earth’s gravity well. Eventually we’ll figure out how to do it cheaply (the Space Elevator is the most exotic, but might be possible within this century), and once we do, “the sky’s the limit.”
/Mr Lynn
Has Arno Arrak’s work,
http://www.amazon.com/What-Warming-Satellite-global-temperature/dp/1439264708/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279741512&sr=8-1
been discussed here? If not, perhaps it might be worth having him do a lead post, summarizing it.
/Mr Lynn
1. Mix Natural Gas with Coal = higher temp = less Soot + effectively, twice the electricity per N. Gas.
2. LNG Icebreaker-Tankers Sell North Alaska Gas EXCEPT that near the pipeline (which pressures the Oil). To China.
3. Remaining Soot harvested to provide the Fly-ash for Giga-crete — to build Tankers.
= Cuts Global Soot in half
4. New Zealand’s successful “No-Fish” Zones = restore the Balance of boneless/bony Fish = Cheaper Fish
= Also: 94.6% of the Increase in CO2 will reverse, as bones are Calcium CARBONATE.
5. All new Homes have Ground Water Heat Pumps (for Military/High Wind/Super-Disease Reasons = provides a Water supply in the basement).
– – but also uses 15-to-40% the energy of other systems. Legislation for shared wells would make it cheaper to build, as well as run.
6. Science needs 25 parts per million of GDP per year from 1744. = over Triple what we do now = + $75 B/yr
>>> This Doubles the Economy in 40 years – – Cost: half a percent of the Economy.
OR: make 90% of Military Research Public (possible as Anything Specific, today, would be obsolete by the time a Real Threat built up e.g. China — – – the only worthwhile Military R&D $ is: keeping our ECONOMY at a HIGHER TECH Level — so they can’t Catch Up).
… this was the method used for 160 years, from 1798 when Eli Whitney got a Military Contract for Interchangable Parts, until the A-bomb Secrets Theft persuaded Ike to Classify everything. Note he precisely MATCHED the Classified R&D – – 0.5% of GDP – – with new, Civilian Science – – lest Real Growth, go to near Zero.
Which it has save for Population Growth (including Illegals).
Since the early 1970s, Except for the High Tech Revolution 1992-8.
Basically Bush #1 .. PAID for that, by tripling NASA Space Science.
Clinton looked “Lucky”, even if the Growth began before his election & ended 2 years before he Left. So he could NOT have caused it, & did … kill it.
This reinforced the Lesson of Nixon greeting the Moon Landers = JFK paid for it, Nixon gets the credit.:
Politicians learned THIS Lesson:
Anything for the Future = it takes too long = you only MAKE YOUR SUCCESSOR LOOK GOOD.
But nothing BIG can be done Instantly.
So we are DOOMED.
Debt, AGW, a Super-disease from an Enemy, China Passing us in Tech …
We are doing Nothing about ANYTHING.
It used to be the Republicans BUILT things, but Anarchists ate the GOP.
It’s only a matter of which DOOM catches us first.
John F. Hultquist says:
5. “lesser lettered folks” ?? That woke me up. Good one, E. M.;
How’s this: E. M. Smith, LLF
Mikey Likey 😉
I actually have a few other letters I can add after my name if I was “into” that. A Doctorate of Divinity (cost me $20 😉 Yes, when other folks were just getting the free ‘Minister’ I did the hard work of going for the Doctorate. Added application AND writing a check! Then I can have “CDP” as I did the (actual work) and testing for that professional credential in Data Processing.
So I’m E.M.Smith, A.B., CDP, DD, LLF
and of all of them, I think I like the LLF the most 😉
I occasionally think I ought to get a Ph.D. in something (earned) just to feel like I’m not not being lazy… but it’s getting a bit late in the game for that now :-{ I could probably get one in “climate science” for some of what I’m finding, but that would require a thesis advisor not of the AGW cloth… Oh well. For the greater good, then, will have to do.
Vince Causey says: Incidently, to try and understand where some of these apocalyptic visions come from, I Googled ‘Peak Oil’. I was shocked at what I read. […]
Chiefio, you could think about maybe reading some of that stuff and doing a post – it sure would help some of us more impressionable types to sleep better at night 🙂
I cover peak oil somewhat in the “no shortage of energy” posting. The short form is that the Hubbert Curve is just a bell curve fit over the oil production data. Works well for a single field with a single technology. Not so well globally with long times for technology to change. They also miss that what is a resource changes with price and changes with technology. So all the Trillions of bbl of oil in tar sands and shales were not “oil” until the price when over about $35 /bbl for good sands and $100 / bbl for shales.
So take a look at the ‘no shortage’ link and if that is not enough, leave a comment on it and I’ll do another posting specifically on oil. (One of the more interesting bits is that in the lab we’ve taken carbonate rocks and with naturally occurring catalysts heat and pressure made oil. Substantially what is likely to happen in subduction zones (per the Russian Theory). They have been using that theory to find LOTS of oil… There are also some interesting oil wells that were ‘depleted’ and then found to be ‘refilling’…
@Z : OK, you ‘got me’. I was sloppy. I ought to have spent even MORE time listing that particular asteroid types you have to get together to melt in space to make the particular alloy you want and that chromium is ‘part of the mix’ too. But ‘nickel-iron’ is what folks are used to hearing, so I just truncated at that. But, just to satisfy you and for painful completion:
So you rope in some IIIF type for the chromium. Then you get your nickle and iron in the proportions desired, and you melt them in space and form your lifting body from it.
If you want more nickel.
If you want more iron. You can also select for more, or less carbon and other elements you might want, or not want, in any particular steel melt. Other choices here:
http://www.manzanitalab.com/content/iron-meteorites
You will also note that these alloys (that the common man would call stainless steel given their uses) are mostly made of Nickel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconel
Also, from: http://www.nickelinstitute.org/index.cfm/ci_id/11021.htm
we have:
And the chart further down shows an Austenitic stainless as being
904L N08904 austenitic 20% Cr 25% Ni 4.5% Mo
So forgive me for leaving out the Mo too…
So yes, you need some Chromium, and it is in the Nickel Iron asteroids along with everything else you need. And YES, you can have stainless steels with more Nickel in them than Chromium.
Sheesh… the detail you have to go into sometimes … and folks complain that my comments are too long already.
Oh, and the de-orbit plan has an atmospheric skip phase, then a high heat phase like the shuttle. It ‘lands’ in water so there is no crater. And since I’ve been drug back to this: Look up transfer orbits. Some orbits are ‘free’ energetically. Others have net energy gain. All it takes is time. And a large computer. And if you are delivering a years supply at a whack, you can ‘entrain’ them spaced on 1 year intervals and then you don’t care too much how long it takes, once the first one arrives.
Z says: So why do they study money?
Because it’s so SHINY!!! Unlike paper currencies… Oooohhh, the Shiny Thing!!!
😉
Gold and other precious metals up nicely today as the world wakes up to their paper currencies not really being “money” as money has “store of value” in the definition and currency only has “medium of exchange”…