From the University of Gothenburg , some appearance of sanity.
The identified critical threshold for dangerous climate change saying that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius seems not to have helped the climate negotiations so far. New research from the University of Gothenburg and Columbia University shows that negotiations based on such a threshold fail because its value is determined by Nature and is inherently uncertain. Climate negotiators should therefore focus on other collective strategies.
Presenting their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Astrid Dannenberg, Postdoc researcher at the Environmental Economics Unit, University of Gothenburg and Columbia University, and Professor Scott Barrett, Columbia University, explain the paradox of why countries would agree to a collective goal, aimed at reducing the risk of climate catastrophe, but act as if they were blind to this risk.
If the critical threshold for climate catastrophe could be identified with scientific certainty, their research suggests that countries very likely would propose a collective target certain to avoid catastrophe, would pledge to contribute their fair share to the global effort, and would act so as to fulfill their promises. However, if there is scientific uncertainty about the climate threshold, countries are very likely to do less collectively than is needed to avert catastrophe. Dannenberg and Barrett, who provide experimental evidence, grounded in a new analytical framework, show that failure of negotiations is practically certain, because the climate threshold is determined by Nature, and uncertainty about its value is substantially irreducible.
“Climate negotiations are more complex that the game played by the participants in our experiment. The basic incentive problem, however, is the same and our research shows that scientific uncertainty about the dangerous threshold changes behavior dramatically,” Dannenberg says.
Their research may explain why the UN climate negotiations have been framed around meeting the 2 degrees Celsius threshold and why negotiators wanted the threshold to be determined by science rather than by politics because only the former would be credible. Yet, the emission reductions countries have pledged in Copenhagen in 2009 virtually guarantee that this target will be missed.
“We will not know until 2020 if the Copenhagen Accord pledges will be met, but if our results are a reliable guide, countries may end up emitting even more than they pledged – with potentially profound and possibly irreversible consequences. Our research suggests that negotiators should focus their attention on alternative strategies for collective action, such as trade restrictions or technology standards,” Barrett says.
Catastrophe in climatology speak = end of funding. Now I understand the article.
Just noting that the 2.0C target is really 450 ppm CO2.
They originally wanted to set the max CO2 level to be 450 ppm and that is how it was originally described. But they switched it to a temperature target just so that it would be more meaningful for people (and more ominous sounding).
450 ppm = 3 / ln(2) * ln (450ppm / 280ppm) = +2.0C
If you think temperatures will rise at 3.0C per doubling then 450 ppm will limit the temperature increase to just 2.0C. Lags and uncertainty and the fact that 3.0C per doubling is not actually happening means that there is no real limits set with a 2.0C target. We will never get close enough to start enforcing GHG emission reductions.
We are only at about 0.75C so far (and only 0.4C when you pull out the fake temperature adjustments) so if 2.0C was the target, we wouldn’t have to so anything about GHGs for 100 years or so when temps start getting up to +1.5C or so (assuming the increasing every few months fake temperature adjustments are stopped sometime in the next decade or so).
“Our research suggests that negotiators should focus their attention on alternative strategies for collective action, such as trade restrictions or technology standards,” Barrett says.”
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Apparently someone has noticed that cutting CO2 at home by increasing taxes drive CO2 production to China. Along with that Co2 production goes the prosperity that access to low cost energy provides.
In this highly automated age of robotic manufacturing, if you have the lowest cost energy on the planet, then you can manufacture products more cheaply than anyone else and drive every other country on the planet into poverty in the process, by destroying their manufacturing base and the wealth it creates.
Anymoose says:
October 16, 2012 at 11:59 am
and the United States will have to figure out how to house and feed 40 million Canadians for the next 40,000 years.
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I vote they send us to Mexico, or anyplace 2C warmer than Canada. For 300+ days of the year the only thing you can grow in 90% of Canada is ice. Someone please explain again why warming is a problem!!
If the Canadian Arctic does open up to agriculture, trade and commerce, we might just be able to provide jobs for the 50 million Americans that currently don’t have one.
We also have to take another motive into account for wanting to back away from the 2.0C target. It is very likely connected to concerns about the climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2. The 2.0 C target has been pegged with the assumption, based on modeling, that the climate sensitivity is 3-4C for a doubling of CO2. Meaning with those assumptions, we can only got to a CO2 level of about 1.6 times preindustrial.
So what happens if countries sign a treaty limiting CO2 to 2.0C and the climate sensitivity is not in the 4C range? What if doubling CO2 actually has a climate impact of about 1C as many of us suspect? Well if we lock in a treaty allowing 2C worth of CO2 warming that would mean we could quadruple CO2 from preindustrial levels and still meet the 2.0C goal. I think this is clear evidence that they know the climate sensitivity is exagerated, and that when that exagerated value is figured out, the CO2 level can go much higher to achieve the result they have been asking for.
in australia, we’re doing everything to justify a carbon dioxide price…at everyone’s expense:
17 Oct: Australian: ANNABEL HEPWORTH/PIA AKERMAN Brown out in coal power squeeze
A MAJOR brown-coal power station in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley will cut production by operating only three of its four units, prompting new warnings that the federal renewable energy target is threatening the sustainability of the electricity market.
The Australian can reveal that Energy Australia will today announce it will scale back electricity generation at the Gippsland-based Yallourn power station. The company says the carbon price, which started on July 1, is driving up operating costs while wholesale electricity prices are weak and demand for electricity is plunging.
Energy Australia will also warn that the renewable energy target is suppressing wholesale power prices to uneconomic levels and point to modelling that finds the RET will cost consumers $53 billion – almost 50 per cent more than the National Broadband Network.
The decision means that more than 3000 megawatts of coal-fired power generation capacity has been cut back or closed in recent times…
Mr Combet said the RET was bipartisan, remained a “very important” part of the Clean Energy Future package and was always intended to work with the carbon price to cut emissions by making renewable and low-emissions electricity generation more competitive…
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/brown-out-in-coal-power-squeeze/story-e6frg6xf-1226497360617
“If the critical threshold for climate catastrophe could be identified with scientific certainty, ………because the climate threshold is determined by Nature, and uncertainty about its value is substantially irreducible.”
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If you listen very very closely, with only half a brain, you might possibly detect a signal to noise issue, embedded in what would appear to be normal interglacial climate. If the “climate threshold” during a normal interglacial envelope includes everything we have seen to date in the Holocene, then greater than +2C and +2C have occurred anyway. Assuming the present climate will go on forever we are going to have one heck of a time picking our signal out of unending interglacial noise if it is just +2C or say -2C.
But what if the current interglacial is just about kaput? It either is or it isn’t, there is no in between. So far, all the extreme interglacials have ended with from 1 to 3 strong thermal pulses at their very ends (MIS-19 had 3, MIS-11c had 1 and MIS-5e had 2….). In terms of sea level, which we have much better global agreement on in the paleoclimate literature, Sea level could spike anywhere from +6M to +21M (MIS-5e and MIS-11c, respectively).
How are we to know 1 end extreme thermal peak from another or 3 vis-a-vis anything we might spawn? Well it would simply have to be larger than whatever caused those 1 to 3 typical spikes which, goldarnit, just seem to happen anyway.
I seem to have lost my set of Murphy’s laws, but one of my favorites goes something like this:
“When in the course of any endeavor one finds oneself with a choice between an obvious wrong answer and an obvious correct one, it is usually wiser to choose the obvious wrong one first, thereby eliminating subsequent revision.”
Or something like that.
The obvious right choice would seem to be to recognize the inherent uncertainty contained either in unending normal interglacial noise, or the possibility that we might be at yet another end extreme interglacial with dramatically larger envelopes of end extreme interglacial noise, recognizing that anything we might, could, should must do will have an unmeasurable effect in either case.
The obvious wrong choice would seem to be to fail to recognize that either normal interglacial noise or end extreme thermal spikes is at the very least equal to modeled AGW “worst case” signals, or miniscule by comparison. Once you have ignored both envelopes of demonstrated natural noise (ignorance?) you must do something. Such as “propose a collective target certain to avoid catastrophe” “that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius.”
The neat part about the marriage between that Murphy’s Law and the Precautionary Principle is that it holds the potential to “eliminate subsequent revision”!
Cut CO2, sprinkle the oceans with iron, the atmosphere with aerosols (lemme see, that would be air pollution that is being recommended, right?, erect enormous ethereal mirrors in geosynchronous orbit between earth and sun (tip: buy meteor and maybe asteroid insurance for the mirror!) and now try to extract yourself from the inevitable glacial, whenever it comes.
Beyond the collective limits of our intelligence, failure becomes the next best instructor of success.
Good points, William. As one who is anticipating the end of this interglacial far more than some catastrophic, man-induced tipping point, I believe most scientists will be so caught up looking for the aforementioned tipping point they’ll miss our drop into the temperature abyss until it’s too late.
Then there goes most of the human race.
Answer to Bill Illies,
The biggest problem with the so called experts still leaning towards their dreamproject of reducing the CO2 is that they never learnt to understand the math…..
Doesn’t matter IF it had been true that there had been or in the near future would be a 450 ppm rising of CO2. As long as they don’t understand that not even 500 ppm would change the approximation of CO2 in atmosfere to 0.04 % when added to the figure which is approximated to 0,04…..
One other thing they forgotten: Archimedes’ principle shouldn’t be dismissed…. but of course some of them might have had to strong drinks due to no ice in the glass 🙂
It seems that ‘catastrophe’ in terms of global warming equates to ‘we all die’ (politician terms). Until such a time, there will continue to be people, and groups of people, who are in denial. Who said that climate change is merely due to anthropogenic forcing? This gets even the skeptics thinking. Its not like this is the first time this has happened. If indeed warming does reach ‘worrying’ temperatures, for scientists the only way to get policy onboard…sadly…is to lie…or lets say exaggerate. What a great job everyone has been doing with that! Surely we have it all figured out.
I’ll have my drink with ice please, its very hot in Africa!
What will really happen:
countries will end up emitting far more than they pledged – with agriculturally profoundly positive and climatically trivial consequences.
For [snip . . blasphemy is frowned upon here, sorry . . mod] sake, when is someone going to finally come out with it … the whole sodding climate change scare has been a scam, hoax, false alarm … the IPCC should be shut down … politicians should cease using climate science for political purposes … and scientists should get back to real science and stay the hell away from politics.
Is the Royal Society listening?
JR:
At October 17, 2012 at 2:03 am you say
That is so wrong it boggles the mind.
Firstly, there is no reason to think warming would or could “reach ‘worrying’ temperatures”.
Secondly, scientists DON’T “lie” or “exaggerate”: they report their findings.
Thirdly, politicians “get policy on board”; scientists don’t.
But climastrologists have lied and exaggerated again and again and … Fortunately, nature is revealing their lies and exaggerations.
Richard
This only goes to illustrate the muddle you get into if real time data is ingored in favour of some model.