Guest post by Alec Rawls
Anthony posted the video earlier. Professor Lindzen as casually bemused dragon-slayer. Highly quotable, so I thought I’d create a transcript. Here is Lindzen’s damning conclusion (after demolishing any scientific basis for Australia’s new carbon tax):
If they can fool the people into thinking that they really want to pay taxes to save the earth, that’s a dream for politicians.
Transcript follows:
Full transcript
Andrew Bolt: Professor Lindzen, thanks for joining us from Paris. Now our government says we must have a carbon dioxide tax to help stop global warming, which it says is damaging Australia already. Can we start with some basics? First, how much is the planet actually warming?
Richard Lindzen: Well… over the century, or maybe 150 years, it may be somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a degree Centigrade. I don’t know what it is locally in Australia. Since ’95 , … 1995, there hasn’t been much warming, certainly not that can be distinguished from noise.
AB: Is that warming lower than what the climate alarmists have been telling us to expect?
RL: Oh yeah. You have a constant game going on. The IPCC once said that they thought it probable that man’s emissions had accounted for most of the warming over the last 50 years. A more correct statement might have been that according to current models man has accounted for between 2 and 5 times the warming we’ve seen in the last 50 years, and the models have cancelled the difference by arbitrary adjustments, and they call them aerosols, but they vary from model to model and they’re just fudge factors.
AB: Now if we see a rise in carbon dioxide emissions as we have, a very big rise, in this last decade or more, but no real warming, what does that say about global warming theory?
RL: What is says is that—and it doesn’t uniquely say anything—it says there are certainly other things going on that are just as big. These things like El Nino, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, are giving you as much variability as whatever man is doing, and because of that you can’t even tell if man is doing anything.
AB: Can I ask you? If we do get further warming caused by man, will that warming be good for us, or bad?
RL: That’s always hard to tell. It will be good for some people, a little worse for others. It will be completely within the range of what human beings have shown they are capable of adapting to and even prospering under.
AB: What effect would a carbon dioxide tax in Australia—the aim is to cut emissions by 5% by 2020—what effect would that have on the world’s temperature?
RL: I don’t think anyone could possibly detect it even with future technology. It would be nothing, for all practical purposes, and it would be nothing if the whole world did the same.
AB: So does it make any sense at all to adopt a tax, or to spend directly on programs to cut emissions?
RL: Depends on who you are. For governments, you know, they want taxes and they know people don’t like to pay them, and I think if they can possibly confuse people into thinking they’re doing it save the earth, they’ll do it more willingly.
AB: So you’d consider this more a sort of big government measure than anything that could really influence the world’s climate for the good.
RL: I think there’s no disagreement in the scientific community that this will have no impact on climate, so it’s purely a matter of government revenue. And, as I say, I mean if they can fool the people into thinking that they really want to pay taxes to save the earth, that’s a dream for politicians.
AB: Well, it’s a very depressing scenario you paint, but thank you very much Professor Lindzen for joining us from Paris. I appreciate it.
RL: Good luck. Good luck.
There will be an election in Australia in 2013.
The tax that will be operational then, may or may not be abolished.
That will largely depend on the financial position of the government at that time.
(My guess is that there will be NO budget surplus – but that’s only a forecast or is it a prediction?)
But we will at least be saved from the futile attempt to reduce our emissions by a full 80%.
“AB: What effect would a carbon dioxide tax in Australia—the aim is to cut emissions by 5% by 2020—what effect would that have on the world’s temperature?
RL: I don’t think anyone could possibly detect it even with future technology. It would be nothing, for all practical purposes, and it would be nothing if the whole world did the same.”
I did some number crunching on this issue since in Alberta, Canada, they still want to spend about a billion dollars on one carbon capture project. At the present time, humans emit about 90 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every DAY. I DO NOT believe this to be the case, however let us assume there will be the IPCC average number of 3 degrees C increase in temperature due to our emissions if we do nothing. So if a billion dollars is spent to capture 1 million tons a YEAR, this amounts to a fraction of 1 in 32,850. So if nothing is done, the temperature will presumably go up 3.0000 degrees C, but if a billion dollars is spent, the temperature would go up by 2.9999 degrees. Or to put in another way, if we take the temperature of 10,000 cities now and then again in 100 years from now, 9,999 cities will have the same temperature and one city will be 1 degree C warmer.
I challenge an Australian government scientist to prove my numbers are out to lunch.
“If they can fool the people into thinking that they really want to pay taxes to save the earth, that’s a dream for politicians.”
Ah ha. So that’s why Obama wants to raise the debt ceiling by $4T. He’ll need to add $2T a year just to pay the US share for the next 40 years.
Enough already! Let’s choose mitigation and get back to the same old, same old! If AGW ever happens we can throw money at the specific problem(s) and not just throw money in the air. This way the warmers should feel happy and the rest of us can create more jobs.
A tax on CO2 is only a legitimate Pigouvian tax (also called a “micro-economic tax”) if there is an actual negative externality that it is internalizing, but the actual expected external value of CO2 is unambiguously positive. Internalizing this externality would call for a negative tax, or a subsidy.
Why are the side effects of CO2 burning unambiguously positive? First, because history tells us that warmer is better. Not just mankind but the biosphere in general prospers when the planet is warm and suffers when the planet is cold. Thus so long as the warming effect of CO2 is modest, this warming effect is all to the good. If natural variation is in the cooling direction, any effect CO2 has in moderating natural cooling is good, and if natural variation is in the warming direction, a bit more of good thing is also good.
The only way CO2’s warming effect can be bad is if it is powerful enough to overwhelm natural variation and create the scenarios of “runaway warming” that the IPCC warns of (with all of its talk of “tipping points”). But the IPCC is only able to raise such scary prospects by attributing virtually all 20th century warming to CO2, when the evidence says it was due to the 80 year grand maximum of solar magnetic activity that ended in 2003. Take away that misattribution and what is left to attribute to CO2 is only modest, and hence can only be beneficial.
Then there is the plant-food aspect of CO2, which is also unambiguously positive in value. Thus if anything we should be subsidizing CO2. Not what politicians, looking for an excuse to tax, want to hear.
I agree with Alec Rawls.
but now..how about…?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/11/transcript-of-andrew-bolts-carbon-sunday-interview-with-richard-lindzen/#comment-698109
???
Thanks for the transcript. Australia is becoming more and more of a laughingstock o/s.
THE THINGS THAT PEOPLE WILL SAY:
Julia Gillard is Australia’s own Nancy Pelosi, arm-twisting her caucus into voting for something which is likely to cost many of her members, and probably Gillard herself, their jobs when the next election comes around. Nevertheless, she, like Madame Defarge, keeps on knitting the seeds of economic destruction into the fabric of the Australian economy.
http://justmeint.wordpress.com/2011/07/12/carbon-tax-australias-economic-suicide/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Marshall_Plan
You have to understand the people involved know that the ‘science’ is as corrupt and as odious as they are.
Our PM, Julia Dullard, finance minister, Wrong-way-Wong, the head of the US EPA, Gore himself, are members of International Socialist. This has always been a political scam using crooked science and scientists to fulfill the agenda. They learnt this from the Nazi’s science of Aryan supeiority. enough said Orwell was ignored.
regards
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” Frederic Bastiat (from his booklet: “The Law”)
sorry, I forgot to paste this. sound familiar???
regards
The sole purpose of this tax is to finance the birth of fascism in Australia.
“Ha, ha, doomie shite denierist. Do you sex mommy you weigh 500 pound? Study up statistics, neanderthal. I reada book. Toss off, A’Turf!”
That’s summation of the best-in-class debate points I was so frighteningly confronted with this weekend on dozens of sites that don’t desperately moderate.
David Mamet, the former lefty playwright now turned conservative summed up this bile-spewing phenomenon as being driven by a very primitive lizard brain level of subconsciousness, namely the urge to hiss and spit at outsiders of one’s inbred group.
I noticed another thing, only this weekend, embarrassingly, for I should have seen it before: those who are most energized to publicly attack the character of skeptics in cartoonish haunted house fashion are also most likely to spend hours at a time mass huddling in miserable raw pain on Tamino’s uber-moderated blog, kvetching, rubbing open sores, searching for the logic of it all: how it’s possible that their bright lockstep Utopian skies have suddenly darkened, blame gaming and themselves wondering how to game the evil system that is the dinosaur ridden fossil fueled “denialist industry.”
Their souls are human reincarnations of cockroaches, and this invokes an odd flavor of pity in me that makes me as comfortable as naively saying a glad-handed “hello” to a bunch of addicts in a reddened needle strewn drug den.
AGW is the crack cocaine of leftism, it’s spiritual Soma, sacrament, and sublime divine halo, one which has stopped growing in their lost rainforest of the mind, now a scarce commodity, the horror, the horror of it all, withdrawal being very devil Himself.