Is GW a hoax perpetuated by scientists?

No reasonable person believes that the solution lies with "going back to the stone age". That is the myth that the denial community wishes to perpetuate. The solutions are largely simple,, it just takes the will, and the investment to make it happen.

Reducing GHG is a matter of using less fossil energy, using what we do use wisely, and investing in proven alternatives,,particularly wind and solar. The is so much area for conservation that it isn't funny, just look at the single occupancy 4x4 trucks on the commute lanes in good climates!

Icarus

 

Hey, I have a very good friend name Ava. I am incensed.

 

Underpriced "solar arrays" from China are not the real problem. PV modules are commodity item nowadays, the simple fact is that we have off shored much of our manufacturing because, in the net we like cheap stuff!

The real issue is a political policy that is heavily in favor of oil and coal, making real alternatives hard to compete, because the playing field in not level. The fact that PV has come down in price ( due in some part to China) by ~90% in the last ten years makes PV somewhat more competitive on a non level field.

Start paying the true cost of our energy choices, and you will see people buying as much PV as can be produced,, no matter where they are made. The Chinese are just a bit more forward thinking in thier economic policy,, and ergo know where the future lies.

We have had 40+ years to get this figured out, and each time we fall back into the same dark hole,, drill baby drill, and yet we re surprised when the outcome is essentially the same.

Icarus

 

Discussing Global Warming is a lot like discussing religion and politics - to many it IS religion and politics. That said, I get suspicious when I hear politicians says things like "the science is settled". When we thought the earth was flat, the science was considered settled as well.

 

The round vs flat earth issue began nearly two millenia before 'science' as we know it even began, so there was never ever any settled flat earth science.

 

^One could argue, that the "American dream" has already disappeared at least for the working class. Back to the same old argument, when you have increasing concentrations of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and the middle class income is essentially stagnant for decades you have a recipe for that disappearance. Cogent to policy, which should (in part) IMHO include tax incentives for alternative energy, and tax disincentives for fossil fuel, would help on a number of fronts.

Icarus

PS, by not paying the true cost of our ener choices, we, once again pass those costs along to our children and grand children. We just can't quantify it very well!

 

I don't think that economic isolation is the answer. A simple fact is, that we in the west consume far too much of the worlds resources, often at the expense of the third (and fourth) world.

Fundamentally the world is moving to a more economically egalitarian world, much of the worlds standard of living is going up, and we are try ing to protect our own standard of living. In the process however the top tier are amassing as much as they can before the house of cards collapses. A smart society would understand modern world economies work, and would work to create a situation that can adapt, understnding that. Cannot live as high on the hog as we have.

Icarus

 

We're generally spoiled as a society compared to most other countries. There's nothing about China to be envious of. I'm ok playing ball with China as long as the playing field is level for both teams. If we paid the general work force dollars a day instead of dollars per hour and censored all basic forms of communication with the outside world, and arrested anyone not on board with the Plan then we could get a sense of China's "progress".

China has a manufacturing base that has huge challenges to survive as social unrest makes it harder for them to control their society. Over time, human will, always prevails and China's advantage will slowly erode.

Even China's massive investments in the U.S. are relatively safe from our standpoint. We fail and their investments are worth much less. Their own investments have given us a small hammer to hold over their head.

 

We live in a finite world. If 10% of the population use 50% of the resources something has to give. Add to the world wide population, and you add to th e pressure.

Icarus

 

Pinto Girl's thread is turning into a mega economic treatise. OK I'll bite.

For a long view you might like

http://visualecon.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/percent-world-gdp-15001.jpg

For the US since "the big one" (1930s)

File:US GDP per capita.PNG - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The first message seems to be that nobody did "it" better than USA since WWII. By "it" I mean turning an unrestricted use of fossil fuels into economic products.

US clean water and clean air regulations (since about 1975) did not nick GDP growth. It seems not to have been until financial-industry deregulations (from both political parties I guess) have we seen a nick. I'd like to say that reduction on growth is half over, but that may be generous.

Could GDP keep growing, if so how? If not why not? My simple-minded economics is that economies grow when they produce something that somebody wants to buy. It has been so for at least 60 yrs for USA, and it is not (much) less true now. For China, it is very much true that "the somethings" have built GDP for about 30 years.

An aside, that might just confuse things here: US buys from China consumer goods. China buys from US durable goods, high-tech (to the extent that the US is willing to sell) and agricultural products including a lot of debarked trees from the Pacific NW.

I suppose that the future of GDP growth for any country depends upons its ability to offer things that others wish to buy. US and China both have strengths here, that both ought to continue to be developed. Those strengths are not much different from the above. US = high tech, China = "simple" consumer goods. It would seem folly in the extreme to imagine that US manufacturers could recapture the global consumer goods market. Not least because of wage and benefits differentials. Not least because of current "honest evaluation of externalities" differentials. So, I say you gotta let that (old stuff) go, and work with your strengths.

Obviously this idea relates to the US pursuing ever higher high-tech, and the educational system backbone required for that in the long term. If US cannot keep science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM by the National Science Foundation) as a goal, that advantage will be lost. Forever, perhaps, and then Pinto's gloomy "we have hit the peak" prediction will unfold.

The tricky thing here, and perhaps repated to the thread's GW title, is thus: Need we double down (and triple down) on the idea that something other than fossil carbon is the best path forward for the continuing growth of the US? This is where the global climate-change scientist have not yet offered a convincing answer. If we could be sure that global 21st-century warming will be less than 2 oC, we can continue on the 20-century fossil-fuel path. But if the global 21st-century warming will be something like 6 oC, then the fossil path is whacked and we must go exclusively with renewable energy. In the intermediate cases, I suggest that your response would have a lot to with politics. It is, of course, a sad thing that climate models cannot now adjudicate this in a way that convinces all parties.

But there is is. What shall we do? Go will what worked really well in the past, or innovate and lead yet again?

Separetely...

The "occupy" protesters and some (liberal) economists will tell you why recent GDP growth has benefited top earners and not the US in general. Buy that or not, it seems to be down to personal political inclinations.

Come elections, the US will choose next president and next congress. Could turn out to improve GDP. or otherwise. I guess we'll just wait and see how it goes. But please, chose wisely y'all, choose accordingly to what you really think will help.

 

I really don't see where we have stopped leading. The volume of science publications concerning improving solar energy collection systems, techniques, chemistries, and materials often comes from US University groups. More importantly, the economic viability of the research is very often explicitly analyzed. Previous papers often just covered the effects and results. We desperately need products coming out of the research, but the pipeline has quite a few things working in the background. (I keep an eye on Sun Catalytix as one barometer of future technology).

I've never really believed that the president and congress control or determine the GDP. They certainly can insert perturbations, but do they really hold all the controls? Also, is GDP the same as a standard of living? A major reason for doing all the climate science would be to figure out all the mechanisms and effect our pollution is having, and going to have upon us. From that, optimizing a standard of living would seem to be priority, since GDP is rather meaningless if you can't enjoy life.

 

Innovation plus raw materials, in the face of market pressures, drives standard of living, regardless of metric. Government can improve the standard by removing constraints and providing incentives and credit (free market kinda like USA), or retard by dictating absolute control (NKorea). The US government has not done much of anything to discourage innovation lately, therefore, our standard of living will continue to increase. How many of the Occupy protesters had cell phones? Twitter accounts? There is the question of raw materials, but the market generally does a good job of taking care of that. World society managed to survive the tulip bubble of 1637, after all.

Don't ever work as an economist, the most dismal of jobs.

 

Leadership in technological innovation is widely studied, and a range of opinions exist. One among many:

http://hbr.org/hbr-main/resources/pdfs/comm/fmglobal/restoring-american-competitiveness.pdf

We might find the most concensus in the idea that the educational pipeline is a critical component. No one doubts the role of the best (even the 'second-tier') universities. On the other hand, the fraction of US children (let alone adults) with basic scientific literacy is not high. Nor is it growing. Ultimately this matters not because so many (more) people ought to be doing technological innovation. Rather, it matters because voters need to broadly recognize who aspires to lead them along what paths.

When even a fraction of people believe that some aspect of science (pesticide side effects, vaccinations, climate change, for 3 examples) are founded on hoaxes, the path to increasing innovation seems longer and more winding. I hope that is mostly my own pessimism.

More cheerfully, we can read "
The Runaway Greenhouse: implications for future climate change, geoengineering and planetary atmospheres"

for free at arXiv, and get some assurance that Hansen is wrong about the burning all fossil fuels makes Earth into Venus thing. It contains more equations than most people would enjoy, but the written words are not too opaque.

 

The biggest barrier to an ongoing increase in the standard of living for the U.S. is our migration to a service employment base vs manufacturing. Companies that remain U.S. based for manufacturing and stay profitable while offering price points for the average consumer should be commended and emulated.

 

"Companies that remain U.S. based for manufacturing ... should be commended."

I heard something in the State of the Union speech about that.

Civilian aircraft and semiconductors are the top 2 us exports globally. One might wonder whether those would have eroded more like other manufacturing categories. Had they not been viewed to some extent as security sensitive.