50 to 1 Climate mitigation costs 50 times more than Adaptation

I read that news story when it came out and decided it had nothing new to say. So perhaps you will take a minute and explain what you think the headline means, *after* you read the article itself ?

 

Pardon me, but did you compare your first copied snippet of a BBC article to the link I provided? I got it right.

Too bad your source, the Daily Mail, didn't provide the same link so readers to see what they left out (and what you misworded). It certainly wasn't for lack of space, what with over a hundred sleazy or titillating 'Femail Today' and 'Scandals' links unrelated to the article or topic under discussion.

60% is a lie, and you know it because we talked about this earlier.

The record low was a year ago today, Sept. 16, 2012, at 3489063 km^2. This year's season lows appears to have happened four days ago at 5000313 km^2, a 43% increase over last year, not 60%.

To reach the average season low of the 1980s (7312906 km^2), it requires a 110% increase. That is why increases of just 60% or 43% amount to faint praise.

And by renaming me Fussy, you show that you have run out of arguments and are now resorting to name calling.

===========================================
PS. A similar thread began in August, and the above numbers are from the same links used then. I now see that the data series has since been revised, on Sept. 6. The above numbers are from that agency's Version 1. The V1 series will be discontinued at the end of this month.

Here are the corresponding Version 2 figures:

Record low -- 3177455 km^2, on Sept. 16, 2012.
2013 season low -- 4809288 km^2, on Sept 12, 2013, a 51% increase from last year.
1980's average season low -- 7229571 km^2, or 135% larger than last year.

 

^^ That cartoon about sums it up: Denialists cannot understand science, so they try to denigrate it. And since most of them are religious types, they project their own problems and insecurities on to science.

Climate change predicts that the rainy season will increase while the snow pack will decrease, leading to floods and droughts.

Welcome to the future, Rocky mountain states.

 

Many of what you call unintended consequences are often intended by the tax policy loophole writer. It is easier to tell what the loophole writer intended in a straight tax. A properly done cap and trade should be more efficient, that is it should cost less per ton of ghg reduced than a straight tax.

We can look at problems with the btu tax scheme, the latest attempt in the US.
Clinton Retreats on Energy Tax in Fight Over Budget - NYTimes.com

In other words the btu tax was a convoluted tax favoring some industries. In the final form, it favored coal over natural gas, and gave incentives to continue using oil for heating. Dumb dumb dumb. These things could be fixed, but it is not straight forward.

Carbon Tax Center » Brief History

Now what chance does that have to get through congress? No giveaways to special interests. No new money to spend and give to get campaign contributions. The last budget deal that was supposed to be clean stuck through subsidies for NASCAR tracks and electric bicycles. They couldn't even do a quick, lets not let the government shut down without giveaways to special interests in certain districts to buy votes.

A carbon tax per se is a stupid idea though, all carbon is not equal. First there should be an oil tax, as that could get broader support, especially if it was revenue neural by reducing medicare payroll taxes. Oil imports are agreed to be a problem with both parties. Leaving other energy out of it would make this a 30 page bill, instead of thousands of pages of loopholes.

Next comes electrical generation, something here is doable but much harder, and here I would prefer cap and trade. A slowly rising tax based on ghg emitted by burning the fuels would be most straight forward. Since the oldest most unhealthy coal plants cause health problems, this tax could be smaller yet effective if grandfathering was removed, and SO2, NOx, particulates, and mercury were also taxed. Then next lower of the solar subsidies, along with regulatory reform to make solar cheaper to install would push a more efficient market.

[COLOR=#000000][SIZE=15px][FONT=georgia][COLOR=#000000][SIZE=15px][FONT=georgia][COLOR=#000000][SIZE=15px][FONT=georgia][COLOR=#000000]Treading on ugly would be a ghg tax on natural gas used for heating and manufacturing. There is no ready substitute other than electricity for heating, and switching to electric heat would cause more ghg to be released. Efficiency programs could help, and be funded by the natural gas and electrical utilities, but these are typically local not federal matters. Taxing natural gas for manufacturing is counter productive because it makes these manufacturers less competitive than those in foreign countries. Unless you want to shift ghg and manufacturing jobs overseas its not a good policy.[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR]

[COLOR=#000000][SIZE=15px][FONT=georgia][COLOR=#000000][SIZE=15px][FONT=georgia][COLOR=#000000][SIZE=15px][FONT=georgia][COLOR=#000000][SIZE=15px][FONT=georgia][COLOR=#000000][SIZE=15px][FONT=georgia][COLOR=#000000][SIZE=15px][FONT=georgia][COLOR=#000000][SIZE=15px][FONT=georgia][COLOR=#000000]That leaves cement and agriculture as the other big ghg creators. Here we get very heavily into pollitics, and it is regional, not red blue. I do not know the answers here.[/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR][/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR]

[SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px][SIZE=15px]Oil could be taxed when it reached the refinery, making it easy to track. If we want to reduce coal ghg, coal could be taxed leaving the mine. This would reduce exports also, or at least provide revenue to the government for it. Natural gas, SO2, NOx, particulates, mercury would be taxed at the electric power plant.[/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE][/SIZE]

 

Hmmm in two posts you have ridiculed non-believers and warned of horrible punishment for not believing. Sounds like you're all in.

 

I also predict horrible pain if you stick your hand into a flame and leave it there for more than a fraction of a second. Since I ridicule you for your idiocy, it must be safe.

 

Yep, AGW's are butt hurt, and desperate to the point they renamed "Anthropogenic Global Warming" to "Climate Change" but wait the word is out! Another name change has been announced "Carbon Pollution" LoL!

‘Carbon pollution’: What’s the use of a new term in the climate debate? | Carbon Brief

It's getting so bad that Secretary Sally Jewell of the Department of interior has to issue veiled threats in order to make people believe. Her warning to federal employees, First Amendment be damned, was “I hope there are no climate change deniers in the Department of Interior.”

 

^^ As I hope there are no flat earthers in NASA. Preserve the 1st amendment, but fire the idiots.

 

^ No warming since 1997. The sun has entered a different phase. Your Insistence that human caused carbon pollution increases global temperatures is without scientific basis, facts or evidence.

I'll take a flat earther over your lying scientists any day . . .

Over $100 billion wasted on AGW, shameful.

 

Being a scientist, you of all people should know that the intensity of your conviction that you believe a hypothesis to be true (AGW is just a hypothesis) has no bearing on whether it is true or not. Running around calling "deniers" idiots doesn't help further your cause. It only further invalidates it.

 

If this is to become another 'since 1997' thread, I hope a few will consider my suggestion to read Tsonis' publications about how the oceans variably source or sink heat on the scale of decades. The cartoon characters in #23 here would not, but y'all can make choices about reading, thinking, and understanding.

To see that most (CO2) excess trapped heat since 1997 is now in the oceans, one would have to read Levitus and others similar. That is hard, I admit.

If this is to become another 'since 1997' thread, I 'd ask why every decade of air T is warmer than the previous? You may suppose (anyone can) that CO2 does not absorb infrared energy, but what are you going to do about those pesky thermometers?

Climate models are probably handling ocean processes poorly. Some climate modelers are certainly talking up their work too strongly. But CO2 absorbs IR, and every decade is warmer than the previous, and that's what we are stuck with. Our world.

If a carton character tells you that the next decade will be cooler? Work that out on your own.

 

Massparanoia, if you regard AGW as an hypothesis and nothing more, perhaps we should start a new thread about physics of CO2 and observed CO2 increases and air T trends and ocean-heat content and global glacier recessions and ecological migrations and other such things that distinguish this theory from an hypothesis.

A theory is an hypothesis with supporting evidence. Is that what you are looking for? Or are you just driving by?

This is, after all, the '50 to 1' thread where ideally we would be comparing the top-posted video to many studies that have examined the financial implications of what we we might do about AGW.

 

CORRECT.

INCORRECT

Flat Earthers are idiots
AGW denialists are idiots in much the same vein

Neither changes the science

 

No, it just invalidates your argument.

 

While I think the massparanoia snoopy cartoon is cute, and in many ways accurate, that video was just a bunch of crap, by the believers on the other side.

The only way we get no warming since 1997 is if you don't look at the data properely
Climate at a Glance | National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)

clearly natural variation but the trend line over any decent period of time is up. You probably meant 1998 not 1997, 1998 was a relative peak.

I don't think many of us that laugh at that cartoon would disregard possible explanations, but these are just hypothesis. What if those stories of doom aren't true? If you even question them, you are labeled a denier by the true believers. But these "climate preachers" tell you that we need to say if you can't prove it isn't AGW it must be AGW (trenberth paper). Like those christen preachers when confronted with evolution, said Jesus hid dinasaur bones to test our faith, are we now to believe that the flying spagetti monster hid the missing heat (same AGW preacher again) but this time in the oceans to test our faith?

Completely agree we should use long term trend lines, and not cherry pick data. When you do that we continue to see warming, but much less than the true believers said there would be. To me this is good news, but these sites like wattsupwiththat (#1 science related blog in terms of popularity) that seems to be its own satanic religion, uses the same technique as MBH '98 to cherry pick data to graph, and Jones hide the decline. Lets get rid of the religious belief on both sides.

Well if that is the case the models need to change drastically. The heat would not be trapped, but stored in the ocean, used to heat deeper waters, just as greater co2 in the air is sequestered in deeper waters in the ocean.

Science doesn't trap heat in the oceans, there is no box to hide it. Natural processes can move heat and co2 from the air into the ocean, as they do the reverse creating a dynamic exchange.

 

I agree stored is a better word than trapped .

There is a new paper about ocean vertical mixing, but I just flashed by it and haven't yet the details. Underwater mountains increase vertical mixing. Just that - and it really jumps out (at me) as a sensible idea. This is what happens when air moves past (terrestrial) mountains. This is what happens in fluids.

So there you have a sensible idea, absent in current models. Not good. The Charney report in 1979 (something of a classic) said we really need to figure out what the oceans are doing, This is still true, to an uncomfortable degree.

 

Sorry, AustinG, I did not see your link to sfpublicpress until now. Based on reading this article, I would agree that Calif. is (on the verge of) doing it wrong.

Search the article for the word 'soil' and you get to the interesting part about halfway down. Soil carbon is a large pool (especially in old-growth forests) and it is not handled appropriately in most carbon-accounting programs that I know.

The timing and magnitude of soil carbon loss has been extensively studied. It happens even when old forest is replaced by young, fast-growing forest.

But what I came back to say is that a new paper on climate-response economics has been published

Economic mitigation challenges: how further delay closes the door for achieving climate targets
Environ. Res. Lett. 8 (2013) 034033 (8pp) doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034033

I do not suggest that it is most definitive definitive study. But, it is new (published Set 17) and is open access so anybody can click to get a copy.

 

Someone needs to tell the Arctic sea ice that it was supposed to quit declining in 1997. It still hasn't received that message:

 

Here is an animated GIF from another source, showing the summer Arctic sea ice 'Recovery' since 1980. (This is labeled 'Skeptics' vs 'Realists'. If I could, I'd relabel the later to 'Warmists' for sake of neutrality, but can't edit it.)
(Apologies if the animation does not play.)