The medieval...whatever you want to call it

Sounds like a perfect time to stimulate job creation by investing in long term renewable energy sources.

Please do. First, I have heard of it.

 

I am not sure what you I am hiding here. The alley estimate is given by him after looking at the other sources, but AFAIK it is his mathematical model, and I'm sure he would agree constrained by the assumptions that I outlined. Some of the estimates are well modeled, but we have seen some estimates are quite political. They are put out there to raise or sometimes lower the group. Its like a bidding war, and IMHO extremely unscientific. I'll leave you to read and site the papers. One thing I like about Alley is he seems quite able to separate his science from his politics, so there is never a question whether he is using some statistical tricks to force a result he wants to sell. He seems to care about the right answer instead of the answer that will motivate governments to spend money on his/her pet projects. That last part was about how politicized the whole arguments seem to get, not to point to any one scientist or blogger.

 

IMHO the science has been politicized, corrupted by both sides. You can see real science in some of it, but most of the MSM shows a distortion. That is independent if you choose your MSM to be fox or msnbc or cnn. They all seem to bias the science to show their political agenda.

Its not surprising that both Hansen on the radical environmental side, and the Koch brothers on the radical I'll burn anything as long as its profitable both were against the cap and tax plan. For both it was a give away to special interests. For Hansen it locked in high levels of ghg not good. For the Koch brothers the problem was the government was giving the money to other people not them. Neither thought it would move the climate change needle although one side claims climate change will kill us all and the other that we just will need to turn the air conditioning up a little. You do get some on the crazy fringe like bob lutz that claims he doesn't believe in climate change and he was happy to put his money and federal flood insurance where his mouth is buy buying an expensive house in harms way in the florida keys.

Having politicians like al gore be representative on the science is part of the problem. Al just sold his tv network to be the US mouth piece for OPEC, yes al jizera is the face of the news from an oil monarchy. John Stewart called him on it last night on the daily show, and al said he was proud of what he had done. You can hardly call Stewart a hater, he seems to genuinely like the guy, but can't believe how he can do deals like this and still pretend to be so green. Somehow al wants us all to pay higher prices, but when it comes to personal profit from oil he his proud of his achievement. Really there is no down side for gore, most on the left love him no matter how much energy he uses, or how much he takes from this government or the government of Qutar.

Unfortunately gore, lutz, and the Koch brothers have undue influence on the government. Is it any wonder that even baby steps seem impossible? There is no reason to demonize the other side if a real piece of legislation comes up. Texas has one of the worst governors on climate change, but has moved regulation to be among the most friendly to building renewables. Some of the groups that pushed for the regulation strongly believe in reducing ghg, but were able to find common ground with the other sides by talking about choice and reducing possibilities of price spikes.

For the US many have proposed some reasonable solutions. For oil a tax, and this should be per barrel and slowly rising. Exported refined products should given credits perhaps excluding gasoline to get rid of economic competitiveness of the tax, imported refined products taxed. This should be revenue neutral with perhaps some funds going to make sure we have enough refineries. Build the keystone pipeline. Do it in a way that gets votes but doesn't give away to special interests. The plug in and café standards to decrease oil use are already in on the supply side.

For electricity a cap and trade bill would be the most economically efficient. The problem with the European one and the one that passed the US house where huge giveaways to special interests and caps that were too high. That made the bill a redistribution of wealth bill instead of a reduction in ghg bill. I don't think the most polluting utilities should be given money because they pump out the most pollution today. No credits given away may not be palatable to this congress, but there are other things that can be done. The first year the price could start at $0.002/kwh to give time and auctions not taken for 10 years, but giving away the credits makes no sense. I would exempt ccgt as this needs to be encouraged and grandfathering needs to get removed for this to work. I would continue to subsidize solar and wind - but wind subsidies probably do not need to last more than 5 years. If cap and trade can't be passed, we can have cap and trade by epa. New regulations closing down the most polluting coal plants will work but more slowly. The EPA did get a little out of control though. It passed a new particulate regulation that only gave some texas power plants 1 year to implement. That was too fast. The utility sued and won. If they had given 3 years instead, those plants would have likely closed and not required a lawsuit.

What we don't need is money going to solydra or fisker to create jobs in the name of ghg, that really is just subsidizing some rich politically connected folks. That is just divisive. We also don't need to pay oil companies to drill in the gulf just because congress decided it was a good idea over 20 years ago.

That was a troubling question for those that want to pin everything on ghg. The answer is one that comes up often in science. There are many theories, but none of them seem adequate to account for the climate. There are many things in science that are unknown and some that are unknowable. We should never bias the data to fit a theory. The climate changes in the medieval period should fall in the area of unknown but not unknowable.

 

I'm pretty sure you do care. If you now don't care, then we all lose a voice worth listening to. Sensible minds already know we have changes incoming. Responding to those changes still requires unceasing efforts to figure out all the interactions.

I have to smile at this comment. Even the greenest of industries love their profits just as intently. One of my (and other's) core points is that we need to to make fossil-C burning less profitable than renewable energy world wide. Economic games in any one country or limited set of countries doesn't work, so this must be a true achievement.

(I personally believe this economic inversion is a much more important goal than better or even perfect climate models. Even if you put a hermetic barrier of truth around the denialist, they can still refuse to lift a finger to help. You start draining their pocket, they become instant, gung-ho believers.)

Once that economic shift happens, the downhill slide hits a major inflection point. Your point about the missing elephant is an extremely good discussion point. However, once the elephant is found, this probably does not change the inflection point so much as it points out the importance of reaching the inflection point.

I think the underlies a big difference in our thinking about the future. If the future depends on the masses (and their voted in leaders) being educated on exactly how climate change plays out, then despair is in order. But if the future depends on just one or a small handful of folks figuring out how to make better money from the "free" sources of energy around us, then the despair only applies to those in the fossil-C industry.

I'll be looking here once you find out.