Smoggy Sunshade?
December 15th, 2006 by 
Morgan J. Locke
OK, this is going to be a short, sorry-ass post, and y’all deserve better…but it’s all I have in me for today, so I hope you will come along for the very brief ride.
The fact is, I’m a geek. Something in me responds when smart people propose bold solutions to big, hairy-ass problems. Yeah; I go. We need to think big. Really big.
Global warming is one of the biggest problems we face—if not the biggest. So I can get into space umbrellas. But man, this kind of shit scares me. In a nutshell, Nobel Laureate and Cold War scientist Paul Crutzen is proposing that we dump hundreds of tons of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, to screen the earth from the worst effects of the warming while we get our carbon dioxide emissions under control.
Apparently he has a lot of credibility in the science community, and a couple other folks’ calculations seemed to confirm his, that the amount of sulfur emissions needed to keep the earth from overheating during the next twenty years would be a small fraction of what we are already emitting. The trick is to get it up into the upper atmosphere…but that is not an insurmountable problem. Jets could do it; rockets with SO2 payloads could do it.
And I think, yeah, slowing down the impending heat tsunami is all well and good. A lot of lives could be saved. But even if we get that temporary fix of sulfur dioxide, it means an increase in acid rain. Meanwhile, carbon dioxide will still be turning our oceans to acid. And the longer we wait to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the bigger a problem we will have on our hands down the line.
We dumped a bunch of crap in our air that is about to kill us, and a bunch of other species, off. Whatever will we do? Hey! I know! Let’s dump even more crap into the air!
And who knows? It may even work—maybe even without wiping out all the fish species, or killing off all the trees, or dissolving all our buildings and cultural treasures.
But even if it does, it’s not a real solution. It’s just a bandaid. A stopgap. Once the heat is off, will we really have any political will to change the way we live?
Posted in Morgan, People, Politics, Science, Technology | 
32 Comments »
December 16th, 2006 at 7:34 am
Proposing to terraform our own home planet? This reminds me of when Truman had to decide whether to drop the atom bomb knowing that there was a possibility it would cause a chain reaction in the atmosphere that would wipe out all life on the planet. Truman dropped it anyway. ‘Desperate times call for desperate measures’ mentality that could get us all killed. And this is the right administration to buy into it.
December 16th, 2006 at 11:16 am
Is there any interaction between SO2 and ozone?
December 16th, 2006 at 11:22 am
Yes — sulfur dioxide is a highly reactive compound, and there is evidence that it damages the ozone layer. Our best knowledge about upper atmospheric impacts of sulfur dioxide comes from volcanic eruptions, so we can make some extrapolations using that as a guide.
I haven’t read yet whether Crutzen’s analysis has taken that into account, though some of the climate change scientific community is definitely concerned about that issue.
December 16th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
I can’t help thinking of the school-days flashback in _Annie Hall_, when the kids reveal what will happen to them as adults . . . and one of them says, “I used to be a heroin addict. Now I’m a methadone addict.”
The SO2 solution feels like trading one drug for another, instead of getting off the junk altogether.
December 16th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Yeah. It gives the idea of a “fix” for global warming a whole new meaning….
December 16th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
Wasn’t there some proposal to float huge panels in LEO or geosynch orbit to block some incoming sunlight, as well as maybe generating lots of solar power and beaming it down via microwave?
I seem to remember having read that a year or so ago, and it seemed like a great idea, with a very controllable eco-impact, assuming that it’s technically possible.
December 16th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
There was, indeed. There are definite advantages over sulfur dioxides, but the capital costs would be a lot higher, and there would be maintenance issues, I’m sure.
The real issue, though, is that unless we get the carbon bound up again, instead of loose as CO2 and methane, as soon as our temporary fixes fail, we are back in hot water again, so to speak.
December 16th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
LDA, I found two of your comments languishing in the spam box, and have set them free. Sorry for the lag.
Re Truman — oh, my ghod. You are right; this administration would think nothing of destroying the ozone layer, if they thought global warming was a real threat. Now there’s a scary notion — that we might be even worse off if BushCo cared about the environment than we are already.
December 16th, 2006 at 7:46 pm
Thanks, Morgan. Probably just my imagination after all, it’s totally inconceivable that BushCo would grasp at simplistic solutions to avoid having to address the real underlining causes…
The Hottest Hoax
http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=21239
Petrotheism
http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=19617
December 18th, 2006 at 11:21 pm
You know, I don’t have the technical expertise to really engage with the substance of this, but one area where I know what I’m talking about is language and rhetoric, and when I hear someone say “It’s just a bandaid. A stopgap,” what I want to know is, what’s so bad about bandaids and stopgaps? Bandaids and stopgaps have done me a heck of a lot of good at various points in my life.
“Once the heat is off, will we really have any political will to change the way we live?” Wait a minute, what was the agenda here? To keep from boiling ourselves alive? Or to “change the way we live”? Put me down in the “please let’s not boil ourselves alive” column, and also as deeply mistrustful of people who seem to be more interested in fixing my soul than in the plain old material issues at hand.
December 18th, 2006 at 11:24 pm
To elaborate: If we could fix global warming by some solution that had as a side effect that even more Americans would drive giant SUVs, shoot off enormous guns, patronize stupid movies, and listen to awful music, I’d say Bring It On.
I personally ride a bike, don’t own a gun, and my musical taste is ever so fucking better than yours, thankyouverymuch. But I’m still significantly more interested in the Not Boiling Alive agenda than the Changing The Way We Live program.
December 19th, 2006 at 8:53 am
Patrick, where are you getting this “I’d rather people boiled than have people live wrong” position? I’m not seeing it in the post or comments.
What’s wrong with stopgaps is sometimes they mask the illness. I have a headache–I’ll take some really good drugs to stop the pain, but what’s really needed is a spot of quick surgery to stop this bleeder in my skull that’s going to kill me in ten hours.
It is a stopgap with possibility but it’s a stopgap like dialysis. If you don’t get the patient to stop drinking the alcohol that’s impairing his kidney function you’re still going to end up with a dead patient.
It may buy us some time (and for island nations and polar bears and third-world countries most affected by climate change, this might be critical) but it’s not a solution–not because it doesn’t cause people to “live right” but because it encourages us to keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.
It’s still a Boiling Alive end result (possibly even sooner) as we don’t moderate our CO2 production and, with the added benefit of acid rain and acid oceans.
But it’s something this administration would do in a heartbeat because they could say, “See, we’re doing something about global warming.” And the campaign contributors who have spent =billions= on convincing us that global warming doesn’t exist, could still go about business as usual.
This is far more about corporate behavior than individual life style.
December 19th, 2006 at 12:15 pm
Steve has the right of it. By stopgap, I mean, this idea doesn’t stop global warming. It simply masks it — but only for so long as we keep spraying the acid into the upper atmosphere.
Basically, I have two concerns about this proposed technology — the short-term issues of feasibility and side effects, and the longer-term issue of whether we can trust our governments to resist the temptation to treat it as a long-term fix, when it manifestly is NOT. Let me deal with each of these separately.
In some ways, the SO2 project is the best geo-engineering solution I’ve heard yet. But that’s not saying much. Because I’m not convinced they’ve fully addressed all the downsides of this idea. There’s the threat to the ozone layer, and the potential that the acid rain resulting from this will damage forests, soils, and aquatic environments, rendering them inhospitable while they are already under stress. There are others — acid rain also has bad effects on human health, and it eats away at our infrastructure, deteriorating buildings, bridges, etc. Those are all mighty big potential problems. Especially the potential ozone layer impact. Life couldn’t develop on this planet before we had an ozone layer, and if we miscalculate that, we’re all screwed. All I’ve seen to date about those, at most, is hand waving.
Since the effects of global warming will be most damaging to people in developing and island nations, the SO2 sunshade project would buy them time, and that is a big argument in its favor. If the concerns I mention above can be confidently found to be manageable (e.g., we won’t destroy all the phytoplanckton in the ocean by wiping out the ozone layer; we won’t destroy the Amazon rainforest via acid rain and thus accelerate global warming even further as it gives up all that carbon that it’s currently keeping bound; etc.), I would support the temporary use of SO2 seeding in the upper atmosphere. Just because the price of not acting is so high, and time is so short.
But the only way SO2 shading has any use at all is to buy us a limited amount of time to figure out how to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Otherwise, all we are doing is making matters worse. Our government has already demonstrated it has no will to get rid of carbon-based fuels — to stop subsidizing the oil, gas, and coal industries. Funding of alternative fuels research is paltry. I don’t have much confidence that we could get them to change their behavior.
The minute we stop spraying SO2 into the air — let’s say there’s another major war, and we end up with another anti-science president who doesn’t believe in any of this atmospheric chemistry stuff — the global warming process picks up again, and at that point there will be even more CO2 in the atmosphere than now, unless we solve the root problem of a fossil-fuel based economy. So the acceleration to the no-turning-back point will be even faster at that point.
December 19th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
An addendum:
I’m using the word “manageable” rather than “mimimal” regarding the risks, as a deliberate acknowledgement that global warming is so potentially catastrophic that only allowing for “minimal risk” geo-engineering solutions may be too low to be reasonable — in much the same way that chemotherapy really sucks, but cancer sucks worse (though chemo is not the best analogy for the SO2 project, since SO2 doesn’t “cure” global warming).
December 20th, 2006 at 12:54 am
this was such the wrong post to read before going to bed
December 20th, 2006 at 12:58 am
I’ll try to make my next post a more cheerful one, Dave.
March 4th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
“Computer-designed Molecule To Clean Up Fluorocarbons?”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070302130935.htm
March 5th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Guys, I know I’m going to get under some collective skin with this – please bear with me. I’m not writing to inflame, and I know that this is one serious political and polemical hot button. I’d like to propose to you (plural), though, some arguments for consideration.
Doctors spend most of their time prescribing band-aids, and watching the results carefully. The truth of it is that complex systems are hard to diagnose, and even then the cure may be a matter of trial and error. A genius physician is one who knows exactly when a band-aid is the correct response, and when he needs to order up some MRIs.
With nonlinear systems like foreign policy, stock markets and climate, there is even less guidance available to the “doctors”. There are statistics available on billions of different “medical experiments” – e.g. living people – that can help guide a diagnosis, and the system is more resolvable because of those stats. There are no other worlds running in parallel to ours, and foreign policy/stocks are almost quantum in their sensitivity to observation and analysis – they change instantly upon revealing the results.
I am very uncomfortable with the climate change debate right now. I read both sides, and am an enthusiastic supporter of ‘real’ environmentalism, as distinguished from the environmental activists who make the news. I recycle and ride my bike, I avoid paper waste, I keep my consumption low. My reasons are practical (I want to retire somewhere pretty and have my many grandchildren there to enjoy it with me)(yes, there’s one place I think the eco movement has screwed up), and from a religious standpoint, God has us here as stewards of this planet. We’ve so far screwed up from ignorance and misunderstandings of scale. There’s recently been the Somebody Else’s Problem issue that’s come into play as we’ve started to become aware of the scale of our intervention in planetary dynamics. We have to get back on track to address our responsibilities as caretakers, or He’ll have a bone to pick with us at our next inspection.
Carbon emissions need to be reduced. It’s hard and will take a long, long time to get right. The progression is inevitable, however – economics will require it. Fossil fuels are only getting harder to find, and barring any major discoveries, that’s going to continue to provide an incentive to use other sources. The reason that oil is king is not this administration’s shortsightedness or manipulation of these vast markets – it’s that there has never been an economical competitor. Period. The energy is simply too easy and cheap. After minimal refinement and transportation, you can burn it cleanly (only invisible gaseous residue and water remaining – easily disposed of, right?) and get huge amounts of mechanical force in return. It’s too good to be true.
And like all things that are too good to be true, there’s a catch. It stinks and is poisonous, polluties when burned, and has a finite supply. We didn’t really have a sense of scale on that until the recent past. We’ve come to live with some of the more offensive immediate consequences because of the amazing usefulness of gas engines. Like most urban humans learned to live with the constant stench of horse dung because they were simply indispensable to a working society.
Even with the immense economic pressure to move an entire society built around horses and animal power to fossil fuels (miracle machines, etc), it took the better part of a century to make the shift completely. It’s a good thing we did – horses would never have scaled well enough to support the world as it is.
Now, at the end of it, we face buyer’s remorse – the bill for this advantage is beyond our ability to pay indefinitely. We can’t just dump our cars, trucks, power plants and etc. The very structure of our commerce, farms, cities and communities, education and specialization have been shaped by the underlying power source, and not in a very portable way. We can’t go back, and life as we know it would end immediately with any serious disruption of our energy supply. That’s not fearmongering – that’s a fact.
Add into this mix an urgent voice – that of a fanatic. “Fire” is shouted in the crowded theater. With a call that serious, reflection time is trumped by the survival imperative. People get crushed and trampled, but most make it out. There had better be a fire, though – deliberate deception in this case is a terrible crime. Mistaking the smoke from someone’s cigar as a fire is dangerous stupidity.
I spend substantial time dealing with the scientific world – and a lot in dealing with the religious world as well. They each have their applicabilities and strengths. In either one, however, the voice of a fanatic is a frightening sound. The old chestnut – “a fanatic is a person who is just doing what God would do if He had all the facts.”
The classical wild-eyed fanatic, running around and screaming about the end of the world, is easy to recognize and filter. They are also rare. The far more dangerous and insidious fanatic is a part of all of us – it is part and parcel of our fear response. When someone plays on our fears (Red threat, hantavirus/bird flu, Jews are bad, ad nauseum) we default very quickly to an us v. them posture. Not very nuanced – but very satisfying. It helps us feel safe – and it doesn’t really matter whether our fears are reasonable. We also automatically enforce orthodoxy – because heresy can people you killed if the threat is immediate and the heresy weakens your response.
The moment I hear the echoes of fanaticism in a scientific argument, I start looking much more carefully at what’s being said. Cold fusion and bubble fusion and their ilk do lots of damage to people’s perception of the reality of science, which is already tenuous. Letdowns like that affect my funding. :
March 5th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Well, looks like I ran into the comment length limit.
More below.
March 5th, 2007 at 9:39 am
No – it seems to be sensitivity to a certain character.
(Continued…)
What I hear in the climate change research community tells me that there is some serious enforcement of orthodoxy going on. The herd has circled, horns out, to repel any attack. Why? Because the threat is so severe (in their view) that discussion is dangerous in and of itself.
There _is_ ongoing discussion about the sources and trends of global warming as it stands. There has to be. The system is deeply complex, and the models are (frankly) inadequate. They always will be – it’s science fiction to believe that they have any serious predictive power. Collective nonlinear phenomena are *poorly* understood – we have no analytical means at our disposal to deal with them. Especially because we have no statistics to reference on this scale. So we do our best, but if there is no dissent, there is no discussion. Period.
Various things have been revisited – like the fameous hockey stick curve. Flawed methodology – it happens, and is not deliberate. Meanwhile, however, the word has gotten out that Doom Is Upon Us, and the press and popular culture latch onto the paradigm – and they’re not capable of analysis and revision.
Part of popular culture is predisposed to believe the Word from On High. Another part hates being told what to do, and reacts negatively to nagging. Lots of sincere people start slashing SUV tires and making slideshows, and a corresponding bunch of sincere people starts quoting Ann Coulter and saying that there’s no truth to the studies being done.
As the debate slips its leash and heads into the crowd, strong forces on both sides try to twist the orthodoxy reflex their own way. Auto industry players try to hire on the scientists that are skeptical. University faculties get on board with what the Left has to say, because they belong to a community that loves internal orthodoxy and punishes lapses worse than most others, and it’s *undeniably* lefty. Suddenly, each side has great ammo to say that the other side has paid or bullied or manipulated to propound the desired result. This is when the political carnage begins. It’s true – suddenly neither side is provably neutral. People who have so far managed to resist the call of the herd have a VERY hard time finding voices who are still engaged in the initial debate – over the data and its consequences, rather than the “righteousness” of each position.
This is why I’m VERY uncomfortable. There are no hard data (really, there aren’t) – certainly not to the level needed to make sound policy decisions. There are lots of puff pieces on CNN and BBC, though – and lots of pontifications by Coulter and Hannity that make the entire conservative movement cringe. We’re told that if the Antarctic ice cap melts, sea levels will rise 200 feet, and Al shows us a very nice slideshow of it. BBC says 200 meters, demonstraing that newsreaders really know nothing of what they’re saying.
Has anyone here really looked at that number? It was bothering me, as a physicist, so I had a look at it. Turns out that if the ice cap were all at 0 degrees Celsius, at the equator, with an albedo similar to normal terrain (not reflective and white), flat and uniform, and with no regenerative mechanism, it would take on the order of 100-115 years to melt all that ice. Just overcoming the enthalpy of fusion. Those are VERY generous numbers. Really, there are no circumstances that such a thing could EVER happen (supernova, perhaps – but then flooding would be the least of our worries) – but the number is thrown out ALL THE TIME. Why? Because it gives a sense of urgency. It scares you into thinking about action. It’s that override.
I don’t know whether the Earth is in the balance, and nobody else does either. The question at this point is how to treat the problem we see – rising temperatures.
People interested in keeping the economy healthy love to say there is no problem, and the ecoroots are wack jobs. People who are at the center of the other side of the debate, trying to preserve the planet, say that the producers are all evil and are doing this deliberately, killing the planet for their own shortsighted gain (always plays well in populist theater) and that we need to take drastic measures *now*.
Politicians see this, and are pulled two ways. The people giving them real money are the producers, and the people electing them are being swept along by the media/academic tdal wave of fear. What to do? Ignore the problem in practical terms but pontificate endlessly.
Is it this administration’s fault that there is peanuts available for alternate fuels and that ethanol is the stupidest possible one so far, yet is being foisted on us? No – and neither was it Clinton’s fault. Nor any predecessor. The money government has to spend in research is chump change compared to the engine of industry. They spend most of it in medical/NIH directions, and a lot in military hardware – stuff where they have an interest, and where they have to sponsor far-out stuff before it becomes attractive to a market. Those are their priorities – Democrat and Republican alike. When government tries to guide research, they both fall into the ditch frequently. When there is a compelling economic need (think of the history of computing, for example), the market engine driving the research is irrestible. That is the only engine that can possibly make the changeover to whatever’s next (solar, biodiesel, etc) – the gov’t couldn’t even hope to begin to fund the infrastructure changes needed. That is already starting – oil is expensive enough now that other technologies are already rearing their heads.
In the meantime, the marketing case for more effecient vehicles and less waste is beneficial for the environment and innovation. Certainly in the IT sector, I see a lot of increased efficiency, and it makes me happy.
The dangerous fanatical voices are still with us, however. On one side, the’d have us drive off a cliff, denying that there’s a problem all the way… if there’s a cliff. On the other side, they’d have hamstring our civilization to reduce our footprint… without any evidence that we can make a difference, or that a difference is needed.
Emergency measures like this sulfur proposal are impractical in scale unless the world is screwed up enough that we have no other options – and at that point we couldn’t possibly coordiate. Likewise the iron in the oceans proposal I saw the other month. This kind of thing – theoretical exercises – are why politicians and scientists are such a volatile mix.
Where to put the band-aid – or whether to authorize urgent surgery – needs to be done in an environment of rationality and calm. That may be too much to hope for, but still I do. What I’d really like is for all the idiots to pipe down and let the results speak for themselves.
Yeah, right.
“It isn’t what people don’t know that makes the trouble; it’s what people know that ain’t so.”
March 5th, 2007 at 11:59 am
Alden, I truly appreciate the careful thought you put into your posts. I am at a week-long working conference with an end-of-week deadline, and don’t have time right now for a detailed reply. I will try to do your posts more justice when I return. But here is a quick response.
First of all, I do agree with you about the complexity and depth of our dependence on carbon fuels, and that that dependence is not the fault of our leaders. The fact that we primarily use carbon for energy goes way back to the first deliberately made fire, and I dream of an energy-abundant future for all human societies.
However, I believe you are unfairly characterizing an entire worldwide body of climate change researchers. For instance, your point about the melting of the Arctic ice cap. Pretty much very credible study and article I’ve read on the subject of sea level change has told me exactly what you post. Many of the worst outcomes of global warming are long-term — 50 to 150 years down the road. The problem is that the level of emissions *now* is what will determine that 150-year outcome.
Furthermore, you are incorrect about the models. The primary climate models that are being used for predictions now have been tuned and well vetted with observations from the past several decades (and some with data from even further back), and are showing good agreement with the data.
Finally, you are accusing thousands of scientists of colluding? You must be joking. Scientists are paid to disagree with each other. Just covering the same material and coming to the same conclusions as everyone before you gets you zip, in the scientific academic world. Of course, they have to prove that they are right. It’s how they make their mark. That’s how scientific consensus comes about in the first place.
If you really believe there is still doubt about the extent of global warming, the severity of its impact, or the fact that humans are the primary cause (which last point you don’t seem to dispute), I would challenge you to do a little serious research. Read the IPCC’s 2007 report, hot off the presses. Study the archives at http://www.realclimate.org — a website maintained on an ongoing basis by serious climate researchers.
I’ll back in town in about a week, and we can pick up this discussion then, if you are so inclined.
March 5th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Oh, I’d never accuse scientists of active collusion on a large scale – I know better.
What I do see is that the data being passed along by nonscientific organizations and representatives are sensationalistic and untrustworthy. This is too important an issue to treat so lightly, yet I hardly see an alternative as things are going.
The icecap issue is that the 110 years is the soonest possible timescale for that kind of action, taking all sorts or ridiculous optimizations, in a completely thermodynamic sense. The number that people should be bandying about is the number of centimeters we’ll see by 2100 by the models, something between 10 and 20 from the numbers I’ve seen.
I’ve been very interested in the realclimate discussions I have read in the last few minutes – and will be pursuing them in more depth.
Maybe I do shortchange the climatologists a bit. They’re herd animals just like the rest of us, though – and some of the rhetoric I see on the site confirms my impression that there is some clamping down going on. ‘Course, physics clamps down all the time on idiot theories as well – I just don’t have enough info to separate them when I look at climatology.
This is the difficulty – a nonspecialist sees both sides of the battle and both are compromised. One is larger – herd or correct? One is smaller, but composed of non-fruitcakes. Bought, or victims of the herd? I can find my way through the math, but what are their assumptions? Right?
To decide for myself who’s right, I need to know who’s right. Dang. ‘Cause both sides have taken credibility damage to me.
Meanwhile – the solution to the problem (and CO_2 is a problem) – gov’t policy is too thin a reed, as I have argued.
March 5th, 2007 at 1:23 pm
Mr. Stradling, I’d like to offer a few observations on your posts. First, I find myself in strong agreement with most of your recommendations and in very strong agreement with your emphasis on rational debate as opposed to fanaticism.
My quibbles arise over two points: first, your suggestion that the scientific community is irrationally biased in favor of the most dire interpretations of the data; and second, your suggestion that we don’t know enough to justify altering policy.
On the first point, I am surprised that, with your training in physics, you would think that scientists like to behave like sheep. As Locke pointed out, nobody gets ahead in the science biz by parroting the party line. Nobody ever got a Nobel Prize for being a yes-man. The big winners are the nonconformists who go against the grain and prove that everybody else was wrong. I guarantee you that, should somebody come up with proof that global warming is a chimera, they’ll get a Nobel Prize for it. With that kind of inducement, don’t you think that there are lots of scientists mulling over the possibility?
As to your second point, that we don’t know the situation well enough to start making policy, I think that you underestimate our degree of certitude and overestimate the cost of initial responses to the problem. Let me remind you that the National Academy of Sciences has issued a report declaring that anthropogenic global warming is real and that it poses a significant threat to our economy. Now, the NAS was founded just after the Civil War to provide Congress with reliable scientific advice on matters affecting public policy. The NAS has taken its charge very seriously and has been quite conservative in its estimates. In terms of policymaking, the NAS is to science what the Supreme Court is to law. And while the Supreme Court has admitted that previous decisions wrong by reversing them, the NAS has NEVER, to the best of my knowledge, been shown to be wrong on ANY of its formal published determinations. If the NAS says so, you can be damn sure it’s right.
Lastly, the costs of reducing carbon emissions need not be destructive to our economy and may in fact prove to be salutary in the long run. For example, we know perfectly well that the price of oil will continue to rise, yet the American public doesn’t seem to see beyond the price at the pump. So why not impose a gas tax meant to send a clearer pricing signal to the American people so that they can start replacing the automobile fleet with more efficient cars? Done properly, such a gas tax could actually reduce GDP costs for gasoline over the long run.
The serious proposals for addressing global warming go hand in hand with the obvious need to prepare for declining fossil fuels. This is not a battle between economics and environmentalism. You can be the vilest of nature-haters and still embrace measures to combat global warming for the most angelic of economic motives.
March 5th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Oh, yes, and to prove that I am the nit-pickingest sonovabitch in the valley, I’d like to correct LDA’s comment about Mr. Truman dropping the bomb despite the possibility that it might ignite a nuclear reaction in the atmosphere. In fact, that possibility was recognized early in the Manhattan Project, and two physicists were assigned the task of attempting to prove that it could happen. Their input was taken before the Alamagordo test, and had they made a halfway decent case, the test would have been scrubbed. But Oppenheimer et al concluded that there was no substantive case, and proceeded with the test shot.
Besides, if there was any possibility that Hiroshima might ignite the atmosphere, that would already have happened at Alamagordo and Mr. Truman would not have had the opportunity to make the decision in the first place.
So there! My knowledge of useless trivia is bigger than yours! Nyahh, nyahh, nyahh!
March 5th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
Alden, your post got hung up in moderation, and when I tried to approve it, I inadvertently deleted it. I’ve restored it.
March 5th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Thanks, Chris. Admittedly, I was being causal w/ the historical instance. I bow to your command of useless trivia.
And I’m not sure if my posting of the SD news link triggered Alden’s post. I simply found it perhaps not so ironic that Phillip Morris USA was behind the research for carbon & fluorine scrubbing bubbles.
March 6th, 2007 at 6:39 am
This is a great discussion (for me at least) – people are actually addressing the arguments. What a rare thing this is on the web.
I spent a large chunk of my free time in the last 12 hours churning this topic over in my mind. I think, from the comments, that people think my problem is with the scientists. I think I wasn’t as clear as I needed to be.
Collaborative statements made by scientific organizations express positions of orthodoxy. They always will. I work in a collaboration (cern.ch/atlas) and have watched this process. The wrinkles get smoothed out.
Sometimes the wrinkles are important things to address – but their time and place is not in the collaboration-sponsored publications. These sorts of things are resolved internally before the rest of the word gets a look.
In this case, the collaboration is ad-hoc, without any defined internal consistency mechanisms. There is a lot of internal debate in the places I have been reading – and I have noticed real orthodoxy police (Gavin Schmidt as the most polemical). The mechanisms that are usually (for good reason) codified in large collaborations are here absent, and the ad-hoc structures that take their place seem less compelling to me. It seems important signal may be tossed out in the noise-reduction efforts because the interventions aren’t preplanned. That and the fact that the noise level (because of the public nature of the debate) is extraordinary.
One interesting part of the publicized debate (which ties both to my comment that the hockey stick model was revisited and to the IPCC Summary for Policymakers). In reading the Climate Audit and RealClimate differences, and the NAS report in response to Mann(thanks for the mention, Chris – it was informative). Lots of corrections are needed to it – but because it’s indicative rather than central to the NAS’s concern that climate change is forced by human activities, they reiterate their 2001 position.
The reason the NAS has been reliable, as in the case of most collaborations, is because it sticks to what it knows and does not speculate beyond that. This is a tougher question than most, though, because the nature of the phenomenon is not within our analytical grasp. Seriously. While I love to trust folks with a good track record, I might also point out that infallibility is a pseudo-religious principle rather than a scientific one. Dice don’t have a memory, and smart people still get it wrong, even in bunches. I interact daily with NAS members (including my boss) and I _know_ that they are just folks.
I’ll address the issue of complex modeling. The models are constructed with certain very serious approximations. Sometimes that works and other times not. The test of a model is predictivity, not hindsight – if the temperature DOES take off and kill us all, we’ll have proven the models right. In fact, I see in some reliable places that some models have failed to correctly predict some of the temperature data that followed their finalization. This should come as a surprise to nobody. Predictive analysis on such a system is at least as complicated as stocks or microclimate weather prediction – and those have much more funding and computing available.
So – until we see it, the models are still quite questionable. The only reason they are taken so seriously is that their predictions are quite dire – even if the odds are good that we’ll be OK, the consequences of losing the bet are unimaginable.
Chris – everyone in science gets ahead by parroting the party line. Nobelists are rewarded for being anomalous – they manage to break out. If I wanted funding for magnetic monopole research, I’d get bupkus because nobody thinks there’s anything there. It’d be Quixotic. However, Higgs searches get big bucks (my group, for example). Is there a Higgs? No idea.
Most theorists in HEP are all for the supersymmetry arguments – it looks good, and things sort of work. When we turn the accelerator here on at the end of this year/beginning of 08, we’ll see. They might be right, or wrong, or right enough to compensate. It will be interesting. Right now, however, the “consensus” is just a fad until we manage a peek under Nature’s skirts to see just how things work.
The same is true of the climate change debate, except that it has teeth.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ironically, despite my revulsion at the foolishness of the public debate, I think I’ve proven to myself (in my first post) that it’s the best possible outcome. As I said – CO_2 needs reduction, the change has to be economically attractive, and fossil fuels are going to dead-end sooner or later.
The Britney Spears-level debaters (Hollywood, etc) are really driving that change, changing fashion and behavior. Not enough, but a shove is useful. The public perception outside these spheres of narcissistic frivolity, where most of us live, is that there may be a crisis, and better safe than sorry – so people will buy a smaller car, look for more efficiency, and be excited enough about new tech to buy it. GE’s ecovation marketing (or whatever) or Ford’s work on that, is a response to their research on market desire, so it changes them. The fact that Phillip Morris sponsors real researchers with real money (LDA, I finally read it – and that NIST connection is definitive) means that they’re “getting religion” too, as an enhancement to public image. Remember Exxon a decade ago?
This is good! This is encouraging! It makes me more able to stomach the pious crap pouring from the media, because it’s all in a good cause… I hope. ‘Course, what do I know? What does anyone know?
Again regarding 24. (Chris) -
When I say gov’t is to thin a reed, it’s because it serves at the will of the people. When a gas tax (like we don’t already have them
) goes into place “for our own good”, and prices rise, people start screaming. No matter how foresighted the goal, the near-to-mid-term implementations is a bear. If the timescale is significantly larger than an election cycle for the changes to take effect and the benefits to be clear, they will be rolled back – because the winners of the next cycle will come in promises to make the crooks who did this pay. *chuckle* I’ll even compare it to the War on Terror – the goals are decade-spanning, and the pain is NOW. Just one reason things are so hard here and abroad right now. That was the real mistake.
The US government spends hugely on defense. Other nations much less so. France and Britain and Germany are all very eco-aware. People here drive much smaller cars and pay much more for gas – and therefore food and other transport. Enormous government taxes.
Where’s my flying car? If not the US, why not here? Why haven’t they, with the social conscience and massive tax revenues from fuel, and miniscule military budget, made the dream a reality? Major car manufacturers exist here – why not them? There’s world-class research here, and smart folks, and no Texas to get us down!
It’s the same thing – economics. Until oil gets prohibitively expensive (soon), there will be no serious push behind finding a solution. When the push happens, it will take decades to make things work. Alternatives will flourish and wither as they’re proven to be workable or not. It will be HARD, as compared to the glory days of the reign of oil.
Final note to Chris – if there were someplace that the AGW theory could be attacked and noticeable damaged by an individual or small group, you’d see it happening. In fact, you _do_ see it – but the damage cannot be mortal, because the whole thing is so flexible and unprovable that attacks are easy to swallow, and the datasets are intractably large and multivariate (as far as I can divine from the literature I’ve digested).
March 6th, 2007 at 6:42 am
testing
March 6th, 2007 at 6:57 am
OK – several attempts to post have (apparently) failed – so here’s a link to the text for anyone interested:
wisconsin.cern.ch/~stradling/GWResponse.txt
March 6th, 2007 at 9:59 am
Alden, I’m not sure why your posts got stuck in moderation, but I freed them and deleted the first two copies… sorry for the inconvenience. Will respond in more depth later.
March 6th, 2007 at 10:00 am
Interesting thread. Alden, I read GWResponse.txt It was a bit of a pain, because my browser didn’t word-wrap the text file. Why the heck couldn’t you post in the thread ( a hiss and a clawing motion in the direction of the implementors/maintainers)?
I don’t have much in the way of concrete arguments to add to the discussion. My own state of mind, based on reading and thinking, is one of deep worry. We are in a race between resource exhaustion and technological innovation. Every new solution becomes a problem, which calls for new technological solutions, which in turn beget problems. My perception is that the world is heading for a kind of phase transition, and that a larger than usual number of people will suffer and die. (Shameful Disclosure: lots of people are suffering and dying right now. Could this is all be about the suffering penetrating to our side of the world membrane?) The world system has crashed before and has had some near crashes (e.g., Dr. Strangelove/VonNeumann’s nuclear weapons game theory). There is lots of evidence coming in that we are heading for another crash. For my part, I don’t think it will be the climate that kills us – that’s too long term. My money is on petroleum overdependence coupled with a growth-oriented economic model and booming populations. Once we are down, the climate change will just keep us down. So, I find myself singing the Malthusian blues. In the words of Boromir,
“She said to me, ‘Even now, there is hope left.’ But I cannot see it. It is long since we had any hope.”
March 6th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Mr. Stradling, as I read your post, I find my head nodding in complete agreement with everything you say. There really isn’t any substantial disagreement between us — just minor differences in emphasis. On the matter of scientific conformism, I have to agree that the great mass of scientists do respond to simple social pressures to conform. You seem to agree that the pig-headed noncomformists who defy the consensus and are proven right do exist and are richly rewarded. We both agree that these noncomformists are rare. I suppose our difference lies in my greater confidence that there are enough of them to keep the herd of scientists honest. Who wants to end up as the red pulp between the toes of an Einstein’s massive feet?
There was an English economist last summer who wrote a white paper for the government on the economics of climate change and he carried out a detailed economic analysis of costs and benefits. I can’t recall his name so I can’t give you a reference to his white paper — I think it was published in August. Anyway, he made an interesting point. He conceded that, in terms of straight cost-benefit analysis based on the most likely outcomes, there wasn’t an economic justification for major sacrifices to be made now. However, he offered another idea that I find both interesting and convincing: the cost of the worst-case scenario is so high that massive sacrifices are justified to obviate that scenario. It’s rather like our policy on nuclear power: we require the operators to spend a great deal of money to protect against all manner of highly unlikely scenarios, because those scenarios are so expensive. Or the money we’re spending on earth-grazing asteroid research — does anybody really think a collision with an asteroid in the next century to be at all likely?
This brings me to your point about governments, populism, and elitist decision-making. This is one of the oldest political problems in history; Plato’s Republic addresses it directly and we still argue over it. On the one hand we have the absolute truth that The People are too damn dumb to make reasoned decisions, especially when these require trade-offs between the present and the future. On the other hand, we know equally well that The Big Shots will always abuse any power we give them. Hence the Jeffersonian insistence that we can only trust The People, and try to educate them to make better decisions.
I’ll not attempt to resolve this ageless problem — at least, not until I attain the intellectual prowess of Jefferson, which may take some time. However, I will end on a deeply depressing note:
Consider that the assessment of the threat posed by global warming requires considerable intellectual sophistication, which is why our body politic is doing such a poor job with it. Consider that, with the passage of time, technology grows ever more powerful and its ability to wreak devastation through subtle avenues grows. We can see immediate dangers such as terrorism, but we are blind to the dangers that require intellectual perceptiveness — and the hidden dangers continue to grow. Clearly the time will come when we are unable to perceive one of those dangers in time to avert it, and we will succumb to it. In other words, “The End is Near!”
And have a nice day.