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If this is global warming, then bring it on! I love this weather! It's 64 degrees outside right now, where it normally would be -2 on a day like today. I haven't used a drop of heating oil so far this season. If this keeps up, I stand to save $1200 this season. :lol:

My wife claims responsibility for this warm spell. She said she did not want to drive in snow this year, so she wished for a warm winter. Talk about primacy of consciousness, and mind over matter. :ninja:

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Second theme, the real consequences: whatever its causes (man made or not), what would be the consequences of significant global warming (like 5 to 10 degrees, not the decimal degrees per decade we are experiencing)? Its hot, we get air conditioning (people already live in the desert for crying out loud). More heat and more CO2 means more crops. If the sea rises, we build dams (we already have whole countries below sea level!). Man can control nature - that is how we live.

Isn't it pretty hard to build a dam on the sea? I imagine a dam to protect say NYC would take millions of dollars and would still be pretty unsafe. This is the only point that troubles me and makes me worry about Global warming.

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Isn't it pretty hard to build a dam on the sea? I imagine a dam to protect say NYC would take millions of dollars and would still be pretty unsafe. This is the only point that troubles me and makes me worry about Global warming.

Levees are a better word than dam here, and to my knowledge this is challenging (at least for government bureaucracies to maintain). Look at what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Nearly all of the flood damaging there was because of levee failure, not because the city directly filled up with rain water.

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David, a mean 10 degree change over the world could have a huge impact on the viability of crops in the Artic: Ice ages that covered all the North 3 miles deep were caused by less than a 5 degree mean drop in the temperature. This is, I believe, because of two factors: the way ice pack forms and the fact that ice pack itself exacerbates the situation by reflecting nearly all the ground-warming sunlight. If the Arctic ice pack were to significantly melt, the temperature in the Arctic (at least in very icy regions) would probably enjoy a huge change in its habitability.

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As far as I know, there is no evidence for an ancient tropical paradise at the North Pole, at least over the past million years. The question isn't whether things couldn't get icier and worse, by dropping the temperature, the question is what you'd have to go to make things better in the Arctic, crop-wise. In order to get melt-off of Arctic ice and snow and a general raising of temperature so that useful seeds would sprout, you gotta add heat to the system, and it's hard to just warm up one location. Making summers another 15-20 degrees hotter in Ohio would be just so evil (please flash back to July if you don't know what I mean), not to mention not very useful for agriculture, and the same change in Texas would be devastating.

Anyhow, before concluding that a rise in temperature to, say, an average of 35F would be a good thing for Greenland, agriculturally speaking, I'd want to factor in such questions as soil conditions (there isn't much) and the amount of sunlight not just in hours but in watts (it's hard to get a sunburn at the North Pole, even when the sun is up all day). So I'm skeptical at the idea that Greenland could be turned into a huge wheat-growing region if only we could melt off that pesky ice. Maybe, but we know that temperature is not the only thing that affects plant growth. Plus, the transition period would suck.

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If you believe various sources that say that average global temperates have risen like 1 degree in about the last one hundred years, than a 2 degree rise in the next 100 years does not sound so unreasonable.

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Levees are a better word than dam here, and to my knowledge this is challenging (at least for government bureaucracies to maintain). Look at what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Nearly all of the flood damaging there was because of levee failure, not because the city directly filled up with rain water.

Well, I don't know what they did wrong in New Orleans, but half my country is underwater and we're doing alright. We don't have to worry about hurricanes, though, but the North Sea can still be quite nasty at times. After one such bad storm where lots of people died they decided to protect the entire river delta here with dams. If you want to read more about it, look up "The Delta Works" on the internet, for example. It's really quite awesome.

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They had the Army Corps of Engineers build it, not the Dutch. That was the basic mistake.

I think we should just let the Dutch do what the Dutch do best, and leave your army alone to do what it does best; fight wars ;) Lord knows we're not any good at that, at least we haven't been for the last 4 centuries :)

Edited by Maarten
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Abstract from Volume 315, Number 5808, Issue of Nature, 05 January 2007 (bold mine):

Numerous studies of Cenozoic climate have shown how climate and the carbon cycle are inked, but similar records much farther back in time are rare. Before the start of the current "icehouse," around 35 million years ago (Ma) when large ice sheets began to form in Antarctica, the last period when Earth had sizable volumes of continental ice was during the late Paleozoic (between 265 and 305 Ma). Montañez et al. (p. 87) used a 40-million-year-long record of the stable isotopic compositions of minerals formed in soils, fossil plant matter, and shallow-water brachiopods to explore the relation between continental surface temperatures and the concentration of atmospheric CO2 during this interval when Earth drifted in and out of glaciated and fully deglaciated conditions. Changes in continental ice volume were strongly correlated with shifts in atmospheric partial pressure of CO2, and paleofloral data chronicle the repeated restructuring of paleotropical floral communities that accompanied the inferred climate shifts. These findings suggest that greenhouse gas forcing of climate occurred during remote times in a manner similar to the present era.

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Beware anything you hear from Nature magazine:

(3) And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming--not whether it would actually happen. [bold added]
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I agree that one cannot definitively argue if so-called "global warming" is caused by human activity. However, the cloud of smog that engulfs the city of Los Angeles is clearly the result of human activity. This shows that we are polluting the air to the point of negative consequences. Given that, wouldn't it make sense to assume that we are the culprit of "global warming" and act accordingly, rather than do nothing and realize, when it is too late, that we could have prevented or reduced it.

The solution to increasing "environmentaly friendly" practices is not more regulation, however, but, as is often the case, de-regulation. If one were inclined to offer "green electricity" using wind power (I understand the difficulties and limitations to current wind technology, this is just for illustration), one would be competing with the state sponsored, coal burning, monopolies currently providing electricity. Because a state sponsored monopoly exists, further competition is excluded. Whether or not my hypothetical company would be viable is debatable. However, only through pure market forces would we be able to say for sure. We may never know....

There is one example, that I can think of off the top of my head, of a so-called "green friendly" company that is having success in the market. Honda has built its reputation from day one as being "environmentaly friendly." Where major U.S. manufaturers laughed at Honda and Toyota in the past, the American firms are now playing catch-up. Honda is always innovating to provide "greener" products, and is doing quite well as a firm. They have always been providing cars that would exceed the standards of the most stringent U.S. emmisions controls.

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The planet has undergone countless thousands of warming and cooling trends since its formation, many occurring on scales far beyond anything the craziest of the saner ecopanickers are warning of. Nature has certainly survived. There are countless rocks, countless insects, countless lakes, countless species still around after five billion years of thermal ups and downs.

The real questions are: how do slow, minor deviations in planetary temperature affect us, and what ought we to do?

The real answers are: they affect us very slowly and very minorly, and we ought to carry on as normal.

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These are my views on global warming. I welcome your comments. (It is a long post.) - GB

Global Warming: An Economic Case for Doing Nothing

The complexity of the global warming debate makes it a good one for those who want to use it as a lever to fight modern, industrial capitalism. It is similar to the Marxist critique of capitalism where the proponent takes a few truths and mixes it in with a variety of half-truths and some lies to create a theory that becomes difficult to make heads or tails of, let alone refute. The Marxists did this by taking certain historical facts such as child labor and slavery and weaving them into an argument that these were caused by capitalism. (That is not true, and can be the subject of another post, or I would simply cite Andrew Bernstein's book "The Capitalist Manifesto" for his discussion of those issues.)

In evaluating any particular global warming claim, we must carefully examine the motive and method of the proponent. Is he honest, does he deal only in facts, or is he dishonest? Most environmentalists, from what I can observe, are dishonest in their motive and method. They have a goal -- the establishment and preservation of a pristine natural environment that excludes man -- and they are willing to use any tactics to achieve it. For example, that could mean citing part of a time-series of data -- the part that supports their claim -- and then ignoring the other "inconvenient" part of the data that would contradict their claim. It may also mean citing a wide variety of anecdotes and then claiming that those anecdotes constitute proof.

The global warming advocates have used these tactics. For example, the earth appears to have warmed since 1970, but it was cooling in the several decades prior to that. The entire time-series of temperature history may reflect warming due to man's emission of carbon dioxide into the air... or it may not. Going back further in time, there is a correlation between carbon dioxide levels and temperatures. Both of these measures have fluctuated in tandem in a regular cycle going back millions of years. What is the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature? In which direction is causation, or are they both caused by a third factor? The global warming advocate asserts that carbon dioxide causes the temperature increase, and that the recent man-made emissions of carbon dioxide will cause further global warming. How does he know this?

These are just a few questions that I would ask regarding the global warming debate.

However, my main objective here, in addition to encouraging a very healthy skepticism regarding the motive and "facts" of the global warming advocates (and some of their opponents, to the extent they are loose with the facts), is to interject an economic perspective into the discussion.

* * *

To start, let us assume that the "global warmers" are correct. The earth will warm a few degrees over the next century because of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by man. My first economic question is: What will be the cost of abating that carbon dioxide?

Carbon dioxide is the central by-product of the key life-sustaining activities of man. First, it is the product of respiration, the process that every human and most non-plant life forms use to convert their food into fuel. Obviously, the carbon dioxide that is produced from respiration could not be controlled without killing humans or other living things.

Carbon dioxide is also the most abundant by-product of combustion. Analogous to respiration in its importance, combustion of fossil fuel is man's number one industrial process, in terms of its importance to our standard of living. For ancient man, combustion of wood, when cavemen learned how to control it, was his key technological achievement. It put man on the path to civilization. Today, combustion of fuels including natural gas, coal and oil is what provides us with heat in winter. Combustion of fuels is the basis of nearly all methods of transportation. Combustion of gasoline powers cars, combustion of jet fuel powers airplanes, and combustion of diesel powers ships and trucks.

Combustion of fossil fuels provides man with most of the electricity he uses. Electricity is the most useful form of energy man has invented to date. It powers our computers, which amplify the power of our minds and enhance our productivity. It powers our televisions, our power tools, the implements used by surgeons to heal us, and the kitchen appliances that make our lives easier and more enjoyable. The list is extensive; try thinking of more examples of how you personally benefit from electricity.

The only way to reduce carbon dioxide is to reduce combustion. By reducing combustion we will have less of all of the life-sustaining and life-enhancing processes and products that arise from combustion, including all of those that depend on electricity.

Let us be clear with examples what is involved in reducing carbon dioxide so that the earth may become a couple degrees cooler and the sea level a couple feet lower a hundred years from now. We are talking about making our homes colder in winter, driving our cars less often, turning on the lights less frequently, and paying more for all goods that are transported by truck, rail, plane or ship. We are talking about increasing the cost of nearly all industrial processes and the cost of almost all manufactured goods. In sum, we are talking about reducing our standard of living.

The degree to which carbon dioxide output can be reduced is directly proportional to how expensive we can make fossil fuels so that we burn them less often. That is why every plan for reducing carbon dioxide emissions talks about imposing a “carbon” tax, i.e., a tax on fossil fuels.

* * *

The second economic objection to the global warming argument is that it ignores the tremendous power of the human mind to solve problems. Even if global warming will result in warmer temperatures and higher sea levels, these effects will transpire over many decades. Will engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs do nothing during that period of time? Of course not. Will man’s technological capacities and ability to solve problems remain static during that time, or will it advance, as it has at an accelerating rate for the past thousand years? The latter is true, as long as the world’s economies remain sufficiently free and unencumbered by regulations, such as those that the global warmers would like to impose. As long as the human mind is free to employ reason, our technological capacity to solve problems will improve.

Given man’s inventiveness, are we to assume that he will passively do nothing while rising ocean levels submerge some of his coastal lands? Even with 20th century technology (which should be dramatically eclipsed in this century), consider the problems man has been able to solve. Much of Holland lies below sea level. Yet in the middle of the last century, a water control system was deployed that keeps Holland dry and prosperous. Venice, which has been sinking in the mud for hundreds of years, is now in the process of deploying a water management system that is designed to keep not just the magnificent Piazza San Marco, but all of Venice, from flooding.

In reality, in the vast majority of cases a sea level rise of a couple feet that manifests itself over decades will be handled with much simpler, “low-tech” solutions, such as: building sea walls higher, and putting new buildings and houses on a higher base of earth. Property owners will have decades to incrementally make these changes.

To worry about a rise in sea level of a couple feet is to assume that people in the affected regions will do nothing. Instead, scientists, engineers, businessmen and property owners will figure out how to prevent flooding, or people will gradually move inland from affected areas, or they will address the problem through simple methods such as building taller sea walls. It will be in their self-interest to do so. The time-frame for action will be stretched out over decades. No one is facing the prospect of an immediate flooding of coastal regions, which is the unstated fear the global warmers want to convey.

Man’s inventiveness is abundantly capable of solving big problems. When whales disappeared in the seas due to over-fishing in the 1800s, and whale oil prices shot up 10-fold, scientists discovered kerosene, which turned out to be better than whale oil. Not only was it cheaper, but it emitted less smoke and better light. When rubber and oil became unavailable to warring nations in World War II, scientists invented processes for making synthetic rubber (still used today) and processes for converting coal into oil (used extensively by South Africa when it faced a trade embargo). To solve the “problem” of slow travel, engineers invented airplanes to replace ships. To solve the “problem” of slow, hand calculations, scientists invented the calculator and later on the computer.

The point here is obvious. Man’s ability to solve problems is limitless. That ability requires only one thing: freedom. This means the freedom to size up a problem, investigate it and solve it using his own mind. This means economic freedom: secure property rights unencumbered by taxation and regulation. This means the right to act as he sees fit, without having to gain approval from a governmental authority. This means not facing the type of regulations, such as taxes on carbon, or prohibitions on certain technologies and subsidies for others, that the global warmers advocate.

In other words, to solve whatever global warming problem may exist, the exact type of controls the global warmers advocate cannot be implemented, for those controls restrict the human mind to solve problems. Introducing those types of controls makes our society one of “command-and-control,” not freedom. Those types of controls breed more controls. By implementing them, we become less free and less able to solve all of the problems we face, including global warming. Therefore, the best defense against potential problems from global warming is the unfettered human mind.

The first economic point I have made so far is that restricting carbon dioxide emissions will reduce our standard of living. The second is that if the human mind is kept free, it will solve whatever problems may emerge from global warming.

* * *

The last economic question I will ask is: What are the benefits of global warming? This question is largely ignored in the debate. Yet, it must be asked. For instance, the earth was warmer during the “Medieval Optimum” and then cooled significantly before the temperature rose again more recently. During the last Ice Age, man discovered how to control fire which, arguably, was the most important technological advance of human history. Man has demonstrated an ability to adapt and even prosper under varying climatic conditions. Why should we assume that global warming will only be bad for him?

A few examples illustrate the significant benefits from having more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and from higher temperatures. For example, consider that carbon dioxide is plant food. When there is more carbon dioxide in the air, plants will grow bigger and faster. Therefore, more carbon dioxide in the air may enhance crop yields, and make food for humans more abundant and cheap. (It may also introduce a positive feedback loop whereby more plant mass converts more of the carbon dioxide in the air into oxygen, thereby bringing down the carbon dioxide levels naturally.)

Warmer temperatures may open up frigid lands in Canada and Siberia to cultivation.

Less ice in the Arctic may open up the Northwest Passage for ocean-going vessels, thereby reducing the shipping distances between Europe and the Far East.

Warmer temperatures at northern latitudes reduce the cost of heating homes in winter.

Of course, all of the standard claims regarding the disasters from global warming counteract these benefits. Pick up any newspaper or magazine to read about those; I will not recount them here.

An objective analysis, untainted by the environmentalist mission of the global warmers, may show that global warming is a mixed bag. Both good and bad consequences could emerge over the coming decades and centuries. Of course, all of this assumes that global warming is really happening and that it is caused by man.

The “threat” of global warming provides a convenient scare campaign for those who oppose man’s industrial progress and material comfort on earth. It is a campaign that unites environmentalists, who prefer pristine nature over man, and religious ascetics, who despise material comfort.

While parts of their argument may turn out to be correct, I skeptically challenge and refuse to accept at face value the claims, conclusions and calls for action made by such a disingenuous group of advocates. For each of their points, the burden of proof is clearly on them. Yet, even if man is causing global warming through his industrial processes that emit carbon dioxide, restricting those processes will harm us enormously today for a small benefit many years in the future, if there is any benefit at all. Ultimately, even if everything the global warmers say is true, the best solution is the unfettered human mind, not the controls they advocate.

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If an "unfettered human mind" can deal with the potentialy irreversable effects of global warming, does it not stand to reason that that same mind could devise ways to prevent, or reduce, those effects before they happen, with out reducing our standard of living? The burning of fossil fuels is not the only potential means of producing electricity. It's just the method that is most engrained.

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If there is an alternative method that is clearly better at providing us with energy, then it will be adopted in the absence of any global warming scare tactics. If, however, the alternative method is cleaner but way more expensive then the only way to push it through is by enacting laws; which is exactly what people have been trying to do.

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Which is all the more evidence that they're not really after cleaner and better energy sources, even though some may claim they have the best interests of mankind in mind.

I guess one problem you have in convincing most people that environmentalists are actually downright evil is that you run into the "they can't possibly mean that!" thing. I'm not sure if that is because many people are too benevolent to believe this to be true, or whether it's more a matter of ignoring the evidence in front of their eyes because they don't want it to be true, or because they are afraid of it being true.

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If an "unfettered human mind" can deal with the potentialy irreversable effects of global warming, does it not stand to reason that that same mind could devise ways to prevent, or reduce, those effects before they happen, with out reducing our standard of living?

Perhaps... if the mind remains unfettered.

The burning of fossil fuels is not the only potential means of producing electricity. It's just the method that is most engrained.

And it is the cheapest.

Of course, nuclear energy also is an excellent source of energy, but it is too expensive because it is subject to onerous regulations. Unfetter the nuclear energy industry, and it becomes cheaper, and will displace a good deal of fossil fuel consumption.

The solution always has to be freedom, never controls.

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If an "unfettered human mind" can deal with the potentialy irreversable effects of global warming, does it not stand to reason that that same mind could devise ways to prevent, or reduce, those effects before they happen, with out reducing our standard of living? The burning of fossil fuels is not the only potential means of producing electricity. It's just the method that is most engrained.
You're assuming that the motivations of environmentalists are rational and pro-human. If one drops that assumption, the suggestion becomes besides the point. Why? Because the next environmentalist battle will be against the supposed harm caused by the new technology. If you drop the assumption of environmentalists being rational and pro-human, then technological solutions will not help.
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You're assuming that the motivations of environmentalists are rational and pro-human. If one drops that assumption, the suggestion becomes besides the point. Why? Because the next environmentalist battle will be against the supposed harm caused by the new technology. If you drop the assumption of environmentalists being rational and pro-human, then technological solutions will not help.

Yes, yes and yes! This is the key philosophical issue and what I was trying to get at when I addressed the dishonesty of the environmentalists. The environmentalists have no regard for man. In fact, they want man to suffer and die. That is why they are against nuclear energy, even though by simply removing regulations on nuclear energy, it would likely displace more fossil fuel consumption than all of the Kyoto controls they can imagine.

When windmill generators were seen as the environmentally-friendly technology, they opposed them because they kill birds (or obstruct pristine views). When electric cars are seen as the alternative to combustion-engine cars, they point to the toxic chemicals in batteries that make them hard to dispose. Watch the current ethanol hoopla (which I may address in a future post; it is an enormous boondoggle). We will soon start to see articles talking about the despoliation of nature due to the increased production of corn and and other ethanol crops.

Don't take anything the environmentalists say at face value. That includes the entirety of the global warming argument.

If we strip the environmentalists from the debate, and consider this as life-loving rationally-self-interested people, we may develop quite a different attitude about gutting our standard of living now for small, potential benefits that our great-great-offspring may enjoy many decades in the future. But before we can even consider having that discussion, we have to get the facts straight, which we won't get from environmentalists.

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