by Andy West
Climate culture versus knowing disbelief.
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‘Climate culture’ versus ‘knowing disbelief’
15 Aug 2015 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economics of information, economics of media and culture, environmental economics, global warming Tags: climate change, conjecture and refutation, global warming, philosophy of science, political psychology
The global warming hiatus? Climate models all wrongly predicted warming, so let’s call it a discrepancy
22 Jun 2014 Leave a comment
in economics of climate change, environmental economics, global warming Tags: climate change, hiatus in global warming, IPCC
Ross McKitrick noted this week that the IPCC still uses the word unequivocal to describe the evidence, but has let a new word slip into its lexicon : hiatus – the global warming hiatus since 1998.
How times have changed. Up until now, to mention this hiatus was to be a climate denier – pure wickedness: to be anti-science and a paid lackey or wannabe paid lackey of Big Oil.
Has the IPCC become a climate denier? Trends change. Differentiating a break in trend from fluctuations around a trend is never easy.
I have not seen a statement of when this hiatus becomes a break in trend. Nor have I seen an estimate of when a return of warming, in what year in the 2020s or 2030s or whenever, will a return in warming make recent trends in global temperatures statistically significant evidence of global warming.
What global warming will cost us if we do nothing
18 Mar 2014 1 Comment
in David Friedman, economics of climate change, environmental economics, Public Choice Tags: climate change, global warming, ice ages, social cost
David Friedman at Ideas delved into the best estimate of the global cost of global warming – by William Nordhaus – $4.1 trillion this century. This is $48 billion a year – 1/20th of one per cent of world income! Friedman then asked this:
Friedman’s even better argument on the social costs of global warming is that the costs of unlikely but catastrophic risks are included in the social cost arithmetic to make the problem serious. Without including them, global warming up to about a 2-degree warming provides a net benefit.
Friedman shows great insight when he goes on to say that there is “no similar attempt to take account of low probability, high cost consequences of preventing global warming”.
That low probability, high cost consequence, which will occur sooner or later, is the next ice age. The next ice age could include a drop in sea levels of three hundred feet and half a mile of ice over the top of London and Chicago. That would bring a new meaning to climate change refugees. We are in a relatively warm period – an interglacial – in an ice age that started two million years ago.
Friedman asked whether “It is at least possible that global warming is all that is preventing the interglacial from ending”.
The great tactical victory of environmentalists is keeping the debate on the science going because even if the science is right, the economic costs are small.
How much will global warming cost is the correct question for policy debate. Let the science be settled!
Economists have no more expertise to judge the science of global warming than they do in judging the science behind the inevitability of super volcanoes going off again such as the one just north of me. The Yellow stone national park super volcano is 50,000 years overdue, by the way.
Economists can comment on the likely consequences, intended and unintended, of different choices and the constraints that different national and international institutional frameworks place on what policy choices might be made.
The chances of India, China and the rest of the Third World agreeing to forego or even slow their economic development to fight global warming is zero even before you consider the international collective action, verification and free rider problems. Adaptation and ‘richer is safer’ are the only game in town whichever way the climate goes!
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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