UPDATE: The Inhaber Graph curve is discussed in 2015. Later work shows this curve may be too pessimistic, though the shape of it is largely correct, the numbers are not quite this dismal.
One windfarm: bad; ten windfarms: useless.
If we replace 5% of the power grid with windpower we could reduce our CO2 emissions by 4% or so. (If only there was some point to doing that.)
But here’s the non-linearity trap for the fans of green energy. If we replace 20% of the power grid with wind power, we don’t get a 16% reduction in CO2 emissions: we get about 2% reduction (give or take a lot). Indeed if we use enough windpower we might even increase CO2 emissions. Yes Coal + Wind = more CO2. Oh the irony. Quick, can someone email Julia Gillard?
A review of wind power’s success in reducing emissions of CO2 shows the folly of pretending that successful small wind and solar power units can be upscaled to replace a large part of our electricity grid. The major difference between a coal-burning future and a “clean technology” one turns out to have nothing to do with CO2 — instead, in a coal burning future it’s impossible to waste this much money.
The Gillard Carbon Tax plan very much pretends that Australia can “convert” to wind and solar, but a new review by Herbert Inhaber shows the big gains in cutting emissions with these technologies only applies to the first few percentage points of power generated.
How can this be, I hear you ask? The problem is that because wind and solar are so variable — promising one hour, lousy the next — we need to run the conventional power generators and cycle their output up or down to smooth out the bumps. Inhaber compares the efficiency of power generation to mileage for driving a car in the city versus the country. Major generators are efficient when operating at a steady continuous rate. Starting and stopping these mammoth industrial machines is a bit like starting and stopping a car in city traffic (only with a lot times more horsepower). With city-driving we use a lot more fuel to cover the same distance. And windpower is the tool that converts good country-mileage power stations into sloppy city-mileage ones.
In other words, all the CO2 savings the alternative generators promise us are used up by the reduction in efficiency of our large industrial baseline generators that have to be kept spinning due to the intermittent nature of the wind.
Inhaber’s paper is unfortunately behind a paywall, so I can only link to the abstract of “Why wind power does not deliver the expected emissions reductions”.
You don’t need to study any numbers to know it doesn’t add up. The statistical chicanery in a patchwork tax, with a complex compo plan, and offsets, subsidies, and a$10 billion renewable energy* Christmas wish list is as complex as a climate model. But this time no one is saying “it’s settled”, and is seriously expecting to get their extra 20 cents a week.
Lost among the bedazzling array of numbers are one pair of figures that put the central dumbness of this plan on display.
Australians will pay about $10 billion* a year in carbon fees, overachieving their European competitors who only paid $2.6 billion over, wait for it, six whole years. On a per capita basis the numbers are stark. While Europeans chip in 96 cents a year, Australian’s will be told to pay $500.
The bottom line — figure this — is that we as a nation have “decided” to voluntarily^ pay somewhere from 2 – 5 times as much for our energy, and there are no cheap “technologies” on the horizon unless someone somewhere discovers them (and they’ve been looking for decades). Julia Gillard tried to compare this to other major economic moves like floating the dollar. But those big moves had selling points known as “benefits”.
Let’s list all the advantages, both of them, from this masochistic macroeconomics move:
It will reduce global man made human emissions for the next eight years from 64,000 mt to just 63,840 mt (roughly). (I can’t see people opting to pay much for that).
It will rocket Australia to the top spot on the IPCC’s Miss-Popularity National Rankings.
Yes, we have earned the death-defying Kamikazee-Sovereign-Economy award for 2011. (Competition closed early. There’s no point waiting til Dec 31. ) This will come in handy for some ALP personnel wishing to move onto UN unelected positions after the next election, but otherwise be generally a source of mirth for non-Australians.
The Australian share market took the news of the economic suicide gracefully, losing only $7 billion dollars in the first day. (And that tallies up only the top 25 companies which are going to cop the big carbon-speeding-ticket.)
Julie Novak explains the rise of the Carbonocrats (also known as the Green Police).
Labor’s support falls again in the polls. And while I’ve generously pro rata’d the total revenue estimate to be $10b, Wong guessed $18 b, Pyne guessed $21 b and apparently, the number is really $25 billion. Who knew? Not the ALP finance minister eh?.
Don’t forget to keep reminding those Labor Marginal Seats of their new favourite piece of legislation. There are groups forming in Greenway and La Trobe, so let us know if you want to join them, or start a new group elsewhere.
* (The massive $10b renewable energy plan is now known as the Brown Bank).
** The Minerals Council calculated the tithe collected in the name of carbon would be around $11 b per annum at $25/ton, which translates to about $10 b at $23/t.
Everyone wants a free lunch, and some people even believe it exists. Julia Gillard is playing to that crowd, offering the impossible. Somehow, we will cool world temperatures while using some of the most expensive forms of energy we can find, and, wait for it, most Australians will become better off too. It’s money for nothing.
Why we didn’t do this years ago?
Quotes from wise men tell us that there is nothing new under the sun, and those who forget history are condemned…
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“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
“Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.”
Are we at the “apathy stage” or is this “dependence”?
Faced with paying $500 a year per house for no measurable benefit, only a few percent of the population seem to realize that it’s worth investigating the reasons, the evidence, or taking the effort of actually protesting. Few large businesses will benefit from the “tax” (aside from the financial broking houses, and the renewable industry) and those businesses that are about to be whacked are waking up slowly, but ought to have been fighting this last year.
The cost of this ill-begotten fairyland plan is estimated by Lord Monckton to be 22 times the maximum estimate of the welfare loss from doing nothing about the climate. It’s got all the good value of paying $220,000 to insure your $10,000 car. Only a socialist could call this a free market solution. Only a Green could call this an investment: Greens deputy leader Christine Milne said the dedicated funding represented the biggest single investment in renewable energy Australia has ever made.
Remember the deadly price of “opportunity cost”? The ALP are effectively taking $10 billion from schools, roads and medical research and pouring it into renewables “clean” schemes. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Unelected bureaucrats will be redistributing your wealth
If the Australian Government’s proposal to oblige 500 big “polluters” to engage in what the City of London calls “trading hot air” were to achieve its stated aim of cutting 5% of Australia’s CO2 emissions by 2020, and assuming HM Treasury’s 3.5% pure-rate-of-time-preference commercial discount rate for inter-temporal investment appraisals –
By 2020, CO2 in the air would be 411.987 parts per million by volume, compared with 412 ppmv if no action were taken.
Global warming forestalled by 2020 would be 0.00007 C°: i.e. 1/14,000 C°.
0.00007 C° is 1/700 of the threshold below which modern instruments and methods cannot detect a global temperature change at all.
At this rate, total cost of the carbon tax/trade policy will be not less than $127 billion between now and 2020, not counting gasoline and power price hikes.
If all the world’s measures to cut greenhouse-gas emissions were as cost-ineffective as the Australian Government’s proposed policy, forestalling just 1 C° of global warming would cost the world $1.7 quadrillion.
Forestalling all of the 0.24 C° global warming predicted by 2020 would demand almost $60,000 from every man, woman and child on the planet.
That cost is equivalent to almost 60% of global GDP to 2020.
That is 22 times the maximum estimate of the welfare loss from doing nothing about the climate, which is just 2.7% of global 21st-century GDP.
It is 83 times the minimum welfare-loss estimate of just 0.7% of GDP.
Garnaut’s 1.35% and 2.65% inter-temporal discount rates are very low by usual economic standards, artificially making the cost of action seem less costly compared with the cost of inaction than it really is. However –
Even at Garnaut’s artificially low discount rates, the cost of the Gillard policy would be 7.6 to 15 times the cost of doing nothing about climate change.
At the 5% discount rate recommended by President Dr. Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic for climate-related appraisals, the cost of doing what Gillard proposes would be 36 times the maximum cost of doing nothing.
For most Australian households, the $10.10/week benefit from the Gillard scheme will exceed the $9.90/week cost, providing no disincentive to emit.
For 500 big “polluters” (CO2 is not a pollutant, but plant-food to green the planet), compensation plus higher prices provide no disincentive to emit.
Thus, all the above calculations overstate the scheme’s cost-effectiveness.
Bottom line: It is many times more costly to try to prevent global warming by Gillard‟s methods than to adapt in a focused way to the predicted consequences of global warming.
Conclusion: Mitigation policies cheap enough to be affordable will be ineffective: policies costly enough to be effective will be unaffordable. It is unlikely that any policy to forestall global warming by regulating, reducing replacing, taxing or trading greenhouse-gas emissions will prove cost-effective solely on grounds of the welfare benefit foreseeable from global-warming mitigation. No such benefit is discernible.
High abatement costs, and the negligible returns in warming forestalled, imply that focused adaptation to the consequences of such future warming as may occur will prove more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation. The opportunity cost of diverting trillions of dollars to mitigation is heavy. Therefore, the question arises whether mitigation should be attempted at all.
Lord Christopher Monckton compares the cost of action with the cost of inaction and finds that even assuming that the IPCC estimates are correct, that would be far more expensive to reduce CO2 than to pay to adapt to the potential damage. He compares 8 case studies of carbon trading schemes, as well as wind-farms, and even a bicycle-hire program, and finds that costs vary from $90 tr -$101,000 tr per degree forestalled. By Garnaut’s own discount rates, the global abatement cost would be 2.3-4.5 times the inaction cost. — Jo Nova
John: But everyone wins a prize in this raffle – we’re going to save the world!
Bryan: What from?
John: Everything!
Bryan: What does Everything do?
John: Everything does Everything, Bryan! Droughts, floods, heatwaves, blizzards, hurricanes, volcanoes, melting ice caps, rising sea levels, species extinctions, plagues, pestilence and starvation. And that’s only for starters…
PS: I’m touring at the moment with Monckton, sorry for the gaps between posts. It’s much fun all round, especially as journalists try to trip him up and come unstuck, as did the ABC this morning, when Adam Spencer was so angry that Christopher had excellent answers to all the questions that he hung up mid-interview. Ouch for him. Monckton was nonplussed about this interview, so much so, he couldn’t remember who the interviewer was he told us the story this morning.
Why don’t the interviewers do their homework and read the answers the Monckton has given to Abrahamson and others before they try to “enjoy” scoring points? These are the holes you might step in if you don’t read both sides of the story. When will the believers wake up and realize they’ve been living in a groupthink bubble?
As I’ve said — Monckton puts on a clown disguise, arrogant interviewers think that it will be an easy kill, and they get shocked when they discover the man is razor sharp and so used to be being attacked he has an answer before they ask…
The presentations in Newcastle went very well. There are many well informed and dedicated skeptics there.
From Andrew Bolt:
“Listen to Spencer’s attempt to discredit Monckton without tackling his arguments here and, and post hang-up, here.”
I kid you not. Chris Mooney at Desmog has got the data that shows skeptics were more literate and numerate than believers, and he wants to share it.
Last week, an intriguing study emerged from Dan Kahan and his colleagues at Yale and elsewhere–finding that knowing more about science, and being better at mathematical reasoning, was related to more climate science skepticism and denial–rather than less.
When faced with the news that smarter more mathematical people were skeptical of man-made global warming, it’s a sure bet that as a Desmogger, he would fail to reach the obvious conclusion. Are believers gullible fools who can’t see the flaws in the reasoning? No. Skeptics are more literate and numerate about everything else, except for climate science, when they become dangerously overconfident and seek only to use their intellect to punch holes in the theory. Its not like these bright types have anything else to do is it? Of course.
This is bad, bad news for anyone who thinks that better math and science education will help us solve our problems on climate change. But it’s also something else. To me, it provides a kind of uber-explanation for climate skeptic and denier behavior in the public arena, and especially on the blogs.
Anson Cameron makes a PR contribution in the big fog of the Climate War (Please: don’t dump the Monck), and I must say that it’s more sophisticated than the 50 religious academics who have no answer to Monckton and are terrified he might — God-forbid — speak.
Cameron’s been called out from somewhere to go into damage control. The pro-tax-team might be catching on to the idea that academics and clumsy GetUP campaigns have helped the skeptics no end. (Ta boys!)
Cameron’s better than the brutes-of-silence, and pretends to be oh-so-sensible and wise, but in the end the pretext that underlies his commentary is a joke. He can point to lots of keywords that are ripe for mockery, but when it comes down to it, Mr Cameron can’t explain why Monckton is wrong on the climate. Oh, he can link to Real Climate and mention the Stefan-Boltzman equation, but can’t explain it (I assume, or he would have; this is his only substantial point after all).
Cameron resorts to ad hom after ad hom, probably doesn’t realize how anti-scientific that is, and pulls out all the usual Monckton Voodoo doll points to stick pins in. But, when it boils down to it, what we are reading, thanks to our tax dollars and the ABC, is essentially the scientific opinion of a fiction writer (Lies I Told About a Girl, Tin Toys, etc etc) who can’t explain why Monckton is wrong, but reckons that the blog site realclimate is right and Monckton is wrong.
I guess poor cad, no one has told him that realclimate is run by the same guys who withhold their data, use tricks to hide declines, turn graphs upside down accidentally, and base much of their work around a tree species known to be the wrong one for the job.
This is, of course, par for the course for a quality piece of ABC “science discussion” (aka propaganda). Ergo, Ad hominem Unleashed strikes again.
Put Anson and Christopher in a room and let them go head to head over the Stefan-Boltzman equation. Cameron’s climate science knowledge would be crushed to dust, ground into the floor, and blown away by the first light breeze.
All of the questions and answers herein must be reproduced in full: otherwise none of my answers may be disseminated in any form, in whole or in part.
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Q. I’m mainly interested in your reaction to the petition that’s been going round in Western Australia urging Notre Dame to cancel your visit. Is this an issue of free speech?
I understand that the petition makes the following assertions, to which I shall respond seriatim:
Primo, I am alleged to have circulated “widely discredited fictions about climate change” and to have distorted the research of countless scientists.
Please specify three instances in which I am thought to have circulated “widely discredited fictions about climate change”, with a clear citation in each instance of my ipsissima verba, and provide evidence, in the form of at least five peer-reviewed refutations in each instance, that the widely discredited “fictions” are indeed fictions.
Please specify 25 instance in which I am thought to have “distorted the research of countless scientists”, with a clear citation in each instance of my ipsissima verba, and with evidence from each of the scientists in question that he or she has directly criticized my work from their personal knowledge of it, rather than from hearing a distorted account of it via an interfering third party, and with evidence in each instance from the peer-reviewed literature that the scientist’s criticism is justifiable, and with evidence in each instance that the scientist in question is unaware of any peer-reviewed literature that might reasonably be held to support my alleged “distortion”.
Menzies House are reporting that GetUP are so scared that some Australians might hear Christopher Monckton speak, that they had a campaign to get the Brisbane Broncos football club to break their contract and cancel the “Climate of Freedom” speeches by Monckton in Brisbane.
GetUP are a virtual arm of the Labor Party, being funded by Unions*. They’ve already removed the “idea” where someone boasted they’d axed the Bronco’s deal. (Did anyone save a screen image? Pass it on 🙂 )
They are desperate! They know they have no answer to what Monckton has to say, and that Monckton convinces people everywhere he goes, so their only option is smears, slurs and banning him. GetUP have become ShutUP.
We don’t ask to silence them. We know if people hear both sides of the story they’ll make up their own minds, and we look forward to that happening.
Their plan will backfire, and could prove a media bonanza for us. Right now, scores of people are phoning the club to express their disappointment that the Broncos turned out to be spineless puppies, obeying their masters, caving in to “pressure” and not standing up for Australians.
We can thank the global warmers for one thing. Their claim that the sky is falling got people like me to investigate. What I found was that global warming is exactly wrong. Instead of warming, our planet is cooling as solar activity weakens.
The heating effect of carbon dioxide is minuscule. It is lost in the noise of the climate system. That is why the temperature of the planet today is exactly the same as it was thirty years ago. On top of all that, the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere is dangerously low. All living things would be better off if we had more of it in the atmosphere.
You have not been told that before because the global warmers have corrupted all the institutions that are meant to serve us. The CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, the universities, have all sold their souls, and sold the Australian People down the river. Those institutions we once respected are now venal and not to be trusted.
Global warming is a litmus test for our politicians. If they believe in global warming, they are easily deluded fools.
That leads me to a useful outcome from this debacle. Global warming is a litmus test for our politicians. If they believe in global warming, they are easily deluded fools. Either they are easily deluded fools, or they are Australia-haters. Because surely by now they would be aware of the economic damage the carbon tax would do to Australia. Yet they persist, and this tax has come back from the dead.
So far, it has been people like you and me who have taken on the responsibility to protect Australia against the depredations of the carbon tax. Our politicians are easily cowed, and a lot of them don’t seem to care even if they could tell the difference between right and wrong. Our academics have met our lowest expectations of them.
Dante said that the darkest recesses of hell are reserved for those who remain neutral at a time of great moral crisis.
Missing in action are the major companies who have the resources to sort right from wrong, and who should be working to protect their factories, their workers, their shareholders, their customers and the society they operate in. The society that has trusted them with a role to provide for the common good. But they do nothing, and have reneged on their side of the bargain with Australian society. This madness would be so easy for them to stop, if only they would choose to do so.
Dante said that the darkest recesses of hell are reserved for those who remain neutral at a time of great moral crisis. That time is now, and most of our major companies have condemned themselves to the darkest recesses by their inaction and silence. Then there are those who do worse than that, and actively connive against the Australian people.
On the 24th of March, the Prime Minister herself provided us with a list of the names of these companies. These are companies who, instead of contributing to greater wealth for all, would rather feed on the shrunken carcass of an enfeebled Australian economy. I will now read the Prime Minister’s list of conniving companies.
Origin Energy
AGL
BHP
Santos
Shell
Insurance Australia Group
Westpac
These are the companies that wish ill on you and your children. They would sell the Australian people into the slavery and oppression of the carbon tax so that they can get their own snouts deeper into the trough. It is your patriotic duty to avoid these companies as much as you can.
These are the companies that wish ill on you and your children. They would sell the Australian people into the slavery and oppression of the carbon tax so that they can get their own snouts deeper into the trough. It is your patriotic duty to avoid these companies as much as you can. Withhold the blessing of your custom. If you need petrol, and it is a choice between Shell and some other brand, for Australia’s sake, for your children’s sake, for God’s sake, choose the other brand.
It’s all become a media frenzy. Who would have thought that holding an opinion about climate sensitivity due to a trace gas could become a reason to mark someone as an untouchable heretic? Venues are being canceled (and new venues arranged), the media are hunting in packs, and the university witchdoctors are coming out to show how neolithic (but politically correct) their reasoning is.
And they think they are so civilized.
They are stone age tribes with smartphones.
University Witchdoctors — collapse under the hypocrisy of their own reasoning
Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s serious. We can no longer stand by and watch as once great institutions embarrass themselves with childlike efforts to silence dissent.
Natalie Latter, a PhD Student at UWA, wrote a letter, endorsed by a few other academic types (who ought to have saved her and themselves from such an embarrassing mistake):
“Lord Monckton propounds widely discredited fictions about climate change and misrepresents the research of countless scientists,” says the letter. “With zero peer-reviewed publications, he has declared that the scientific enterprise is invalid and that climate science is fraudulent …
“Only last week one of your leading newspapers, leading columnists, wrote a column saying that people like us should be gassed,” he said.
“No apology and none of you have gone round to her house and thrust microphones in her face and said don’t you think you’re being a bit unfair.
“So there is very plainly a nasty double standard here.”
Latter’s current research is a PhD thesis on the intergenerational and global ethical dimensions of climate change. It’s not like she has any conflict of interest then is it? And nor is it likely that she has published any papers in radiative physics, or analysis of climate feedbacks. Yet such is the poor standard of academic quality at the formerly great University of Western Australia that she doesn’t realize that when someone without any publications demands that someone else without publications be silenced because they don’t have any publications, she’s wallowing in abject hypocrisy.
Over the last month there has been a great deal of coverage in the Australian media of the death threats and abusive emails that have targeted Australian scientists working on climate change. These threats are fuelled by misinformation spread by figures like Lord Monckton and the distorted coverage that they receive in the Australian media.
Yes, let’s look at the death threats. These are the same ones that are two rehashed 1 – 5 years old “threats”, and mostly not death threats, and not worth reporting to the Australian Federal Police. Those who make wild exaggerations claimed they were given new swipe cards for security, yet the whole Chemistry Department got new swipe cards (thanks Brice Bosnich for letting us know). These people are serial exaggerators of the pathological kind. They are the team who send up hate-mail through the media all the time. Deniers ought be jailed, tattooed, gassed, and it’s “funny” ha ha if we blow up their children, right? Memo to Natalie, research means reading both sides of the issue.
There are two protests coming up in Sydney. Friday – tomorrow with David Archibald in Martin Place, and Saturday week with myself Christopher Monckton and David Evans at Hyde Park on Saturday 9th July.
Click on this link to see the Monckton tour dates.
Click here for other protests around the country.
If you live in or near the electorates of Greenway (NSW) and La Trobe (Vic) groups are forming. Please add a comment below or email me to find out more. If you want to start a group to meet like minded people, Holler!
Click on the image to see a larger one.
THE HUNTER VALLEY — SAYING NO TO THE CARBON TAX RALLY
Saturday, 2nd July 2011 1pm Foreshore Park, Newcastle see Facebook
Shouldn’t the government know what the benefits and costs of the carbon tax are before they make it into law? This is looking awfully like a case of “policy first, justifications later”.
First they promised they won’t do it. Then they do it, and they ask for even more of our money so they can pay PR hacks (introduced to us as scientists and economists) to tell us how fabulous their unwanted plan is — after all, the Climate Change Commission has no purpose other than to advertise the Carbon Tax. Then there’s a $12 million advertising program. But wait, there’s more…
Amazingly, there are now $250,000 grants (how many?*) from the Department of Climate Change to anyone who can persuade the public to accept the carbon tax!
If the government had thought this through, they’d already know why they wanted to bring in the tax. (Or maybe they did think it through, but are afraid to tell us the real reasons?)
As it is, they’re only bringing in the tax because 12% of the voters voted one green member into the House of Reps, and it was the price paid to keep Gillard in power. But for most Australians that’s not quite sufficient reason to fork out hundreds of dollars per person each year. It’s a tough call to “sell” that to the other 88% of the voters.
This is not rule by the people for the people. This is the rule of the elite self-anointed superior beings who “know” what is right for the rest of us.
Where do I apply for a $250,000 grant to teach politicians and teachers the basic laws of logic and reason so that they might protect us from scams, con artists, and schemes to control the weather, issued by witchdoctors who do not even promise to “cool” the world by more than an unmeasurable thousandth of a degree? Can someone point me to that department?
Let’s apply for a further $10 million to make sure all Australian children understand that argument from authority is the mark of totalitarian dictators, and that those who silence dissent (by paying to promote one side of the story, and denigrating critics as Nazi sympathizers) are acting in their own interests to deceive the public.
Thank God for the Internet.
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*UPDATE: Thanks to Dave in comments, apparently there is a $3,000,000 total.
Almost no one has gone from skeptic to believer on global warming. The conversion flow is nearly all one-way traffic. But on the Skeptoid site, author Craig Good is a “convert” of a sort, and I have to give him credit for writing the most sensible advice yet for believers of man-made global warming (see below).
But before anyone gets too excited, the two key questions here are: how much of a skeptic was he, and what did it take to change his mind? Answer, not much and not much.
This is not a big believer-awakening-moment of the Mark Lynas type, or another Judith Curry sort of conversion. Both of those were active, involved and outspoken in the climate debate. Craig Good’s entire skeptical position can be summed up in a few paragraphs, so yes, he qualifies as a skeptic, of the gut-hunch-it’s-wrong-but-haven’t-read-a-single-skeptical-paper-type skeptic.
If there are grades of skeptic from 1 to 10, he was only a 2.
So here’s the flash of insight, that’s never been seen before from alarmist circles
This is great stuff (if blindingly obvious):
To my friends on the Left: Do you want to convince more skeptics? I mean really? Is the truth more important than your politics? Great. I have some suggestions.
Stop calling people “deniers”. That’s very clearly a slap in the face, designed to link skeptics to holocaust deniers. Maybe it plays well with the base, but you’ll make no friends nor influence people with that kind of disrespect. Don’t poison the well.
Stop calling it “climate change”. That’s a weasel-worded political phrase that dances around the real issue. It looks stupid. Of course the climate is changing. It always has! If the problem isn’t human-caused warming, there isn’t a problem. So call it what it is: anthropogenic global warming.
Stop blaming every unusual weather event on global warming. “We blame global warming” has become a joke on the Right, and for good reason. Scientists need to do a better job explaining why a global average temperature change so small that nobody could feel the difference (how about I warm your room up a half a degree and see if you can tell?) can change weather patterns in a way that some places might actually get colder and some weather may get more intense – sometimes. But blaming every heat wave, hurricane, tornado and earthquake on global warming only confuses the issue. It’s hard enough for most people to understand the difference between climate and weather.
So what was his epiphany?
He watched a Dr. Gleick who was polite, and then read things on skepticalscience.
To my friends on the Right: Are you willing to follow the data? Good, because if nothing can convince you to change your mind, your mind is closed.
Exactly. Follow the data. What data though? You mean the raw numbers that the CRU team lost, or the data Michael Mann hides, or do you just mean the “data” on meaningless things like the number of climate scientists who tick “yes” on a 2 minute internet survey? (And since we are asking, what do you mean friends on the Right? I thought this was a science question?)
Check these out. There’s been an ongoing war of ideas, Hayek vs Keynes, for eight decades and counting — and these videos sum it up consummately. This ongoing academic fight has shaped lives and countries for decades: booms, busts, unemployment, and possibly even wars.
Indeed it’s an ominous sign of the times that there is a resurgence of this debate. (The masses take no interest in monetary policy when times are booming.)
(If you are in a tearing hurry, skip the first minute).
I’m not a rap fan, but this is so good that, for the first time, I have to admit rap has its role.
There’s a second in the series and it’s even better.
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There are parallels between climate and economics. Using global markets against “man made global warming” is a Keynesian solution to the weather.
The big left-right divide is not about conservative versus progressive. The “progressives” want us slow down, and give up cars, flights and air conditioners, and the “conservatives” fight to keep development rolling. Ultimately the left right dichotomy boils down to the individual versus the collective. Thus Keynes (the big government solution) is the collective end, and Hayek (let the free market decide) makes the most of individual intelligence and choice.
On these YouTube videos, the Keynsian econs students wield jargon with flair in the comments, but ultimately, they miss the point. Could Keynesian “stimulus” packages be good at some point in the economic cycle? Sure. But do we have to have a cycle? If there were no low interest rate fueled booms, there would be no need for stimulus bailouts when it busts.
Fame and rewards go hand in hand with being a champion of collective action. It suits those who hold the largest purse strings in the land. Those who oppose pumping that purse, always push against the tide.
The Hayek team stands up for individual rights, and has few big backers, not government agencies, not bankers, not big business. The skeptics stand up for individual rights — for the right not to have liberties and finances confiscated for no good reason. If the skeptics win, millions benefit. But if alarmism wins then, like when Keynesianism reigns, big government and some financial institutions grow larger — government power and patronage increase. Paradoxically skeptics work to benefit all the people equally, yet have few collective backers. Even the large fossil fuel companies have put more money into renewables, or carbon trading, than skepticism.
This review of a book on Keynes is worth reading. My favourite snippets from a fascinating struggle:
Click on the image to go to a fully interactive infographic where you can find out just how much money people have buried, I mean, invested in clean energy in your country. It’s nifty.
Have you ever thought about how lucky we are that only kind-hearted helpful souls are involved in the erstwhile cottage industry known as “renewable energy”?
Imagine if a less-than-scrupulous agent got into these green-fields of money, and frolicked in the vast acreage of subsidies, schemes, and easy loans? Where would we be? The public would think the people and the industry were here to save us, the industry could prod levers of government to encourage more subsidies and pro-renewable energy legislation. The “cottage” industry could also pay for and help write reports that the government then used in order to convince the people to put more of their goods and chattels in the public-trough. In variations on the circular theme, the industry could apply for grants from the government to help pay for the reports it wrote for the government to help it earn even more subsidies, or to cripple it’s competitors. (eg. See here).
Thus deadly positive feedback would spiral out of control.
Then imagine it wasn’t just less-then-scrupulous renewable energy fans, but if money-hungry-profiteers from large well financed houses were set loose in a global trough?
Ponder that it doesn’t take a less-than-scrupulous operator to fund an army of full time emissaries-of-green as PR agents and lobbyists. Any honest businessman would do it, and no one would fault that. It’s just advertising and networking.
Even a small percentage of $243 billion worldwide buys quite a lot of lobbying. It’s time the world woke up and realized that renewables are no longer a small time struggling industry. They might not produce more than a tiny percentage of the goods and services, but they’re a large multinational conglomerate force.
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