By Richard Rahn, Washington Times
How much in additional taxes are you willing to pay now in order to ensure that the Earth would not be 3 degrees warmer 100 years from now (assuming the science is even possible) - $100 or $1,000 or $10,000 or more? Should the government prevent us from selling some of our body parts to allow others to live or have better lives?
This was one of the subjects of learned discussion at the 60th anniversary meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) that just concluded here in Tokyo. Members come from many countries and include notable economists (including many Nobel prize winners) and other scholars representing the humanities, the law, and the natural sciences, as well as a few business people, high ranking government officials, and journalists.
As an example, global warning is an issue where members have different beliefs as to how real a threat it is or is not. The Czech president and MPS member, Dr. Vaclav Klaus, presented a paper in which he argued his very well-known public position (he has written a book on the matter) that the science behind global warming is highly suspect, and that many of those who propose expensive solutions for what he believes is a nonproblem are self-interested individuals who hope to share in the government booty spent on global warming. Others had some disagreement with his views, but engaged in a lively discussion of how much should be spent, if any, on a problem whose negative effects are likely to be experienced by future generations. For instance, assume you believe global warming is both real and man-made, but you also understand that expensive actions taken now to deal with a future problem may not be cost-effective.
Technologies are improving rapidly so it might be far cheaper to wait until the new technologies become available before taking action. It also might be less expensive to find ways to adapt to climate change (either cooler or warmer) than try to change the climate - people in Minnesota adapt to cooler climates and do not suffer lower incomes than those in warmer Florida.
Finally, people living 100 years from now are likely to be perhaps 10 times richer than those living now (which was roughly the experience of the last 100 years in many parts of the globe). Therefore, does it make sense to tax the poor (those living today) to benefit the rich (those living 100 years from now)? In sum, when the issue of global warming is looked at dispassionately, both those who see it as a problem and those who do not might conclude it makes sense to wait before taking any expensive action, when normal discount rates - e.g. the cost of capital - are properly taken into account. Read more here.
The Daily Telegraph
During the Cold War, Moscow’s leverage depended on its military might. Today, vast reserves of oil and gas, lying between the hungry markets of Europe and East Asia, have taken over that role.
The importance that Russia attaches to hydrocarbon diplomacy was underlined yesterday by President Dmitry Medvedev’s call for a formal demarcation of the territory that it claims under the Arctic Ocean. Its aggressive policy towards a region whose melting icecap offers access to possibly huge energy and mineral deposits was dramatically illustrated last year by the planting of a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole.
Any unilateral action by Moscow will be contested by America, Canada, Denmark and Norway, in particular with regard to the Lomonosov Ridge, which runs under the pole. The four should co-ordinate their policies before the deadline next year for submitting claims to the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. And it is high time that America ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
EU members likewise need to integrate their energy markets in order to discourage Russia from using its gas exports as a political weapon, as a report from the think tank Chatham House argues today. The front line of the confrontation between Russia and the West has shifted from the North German Plain to the fossil fuel deposits that lie beneath Siberia and the Arctic. Read story here.
Also here in the UK Times Online, Tony Halpin in Moscow wrote: Russia triggered a fresh scramble for the oil wealth of the Arctic yesterday when President Medvedev called on his security chiefs to establish a formal border in the region.
Mr Medvedev laid claim to a vast tranche of the Arctic, telling his National Security Council that it had “strategic importance” for Russia. The US Geological Survey estimates that the region contains 90 billion barrels of oil, as well as gas reserves - all of it increasingly accessible as global warming shrinks the ice cap.
“We must wrap up all the formalities for drawing the external border in the continental shelf. This is our direct responsibility to future generations,” Mr Medvedev told the Kremlin meeting.
Nikolai Patrushev, the director of the council, said that Russia would defend its interests in the Arctic against rival claims from the United States, Canada, Norway and Denmark. “We must define the borders in the north of our country, where the Arctic lies. Our estimate is that it makes up 18 per cent of our territory. And we are saying that 20,000km of the state border runs in this region.”
Icecap Note: While politicans and environmentalists argue about preserving the pristine nature of ANWR although the area we want to drill is a small coastal section, the Russians realize the huge potential of the arctic energy and plan to capilatize. See Russian Energy history here.
By Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science
There is an important and informative new paper on the role of the radiative forcing of CO2 on the climate system. It is
Douglass, D.H., and J.R. Christy, 2008: Limits on CO2 Climate Forcing from Recent Temperature Data of Earth. Energy and Environment, accepted.
The abstract reads “The global atmospheric temperature anomalies of Earth reached a maximum in 1998 which has not been exceeded during the subsequent 10 years. The global anomalies are calculated from the average of climate effects occurring in the tropical and the extratropical latitude bands. El Nino/La Nina effects in the tropical band are shown to explain the 1998 maximum while variations in the background of the global anomalies largely come from climate effects in the northern extratropics. These effects do not have the signature associated with CO2 climate forcing. However, the data show a small underlying positive trend that is consistent with CO2 climate forcing with no-feedback.”
This is an excellent paper which provides a new perspective on the role of CO2 as a radiative climate forcing. There is one statement in the paper that should be clarified. “The atmospheric CO2 is well mixed and shows a variation with latitude which is less than 4% from pole to pole [Earth System Research Laboratory. 2008]. Thus one would expect that the latitude variation of delta T from CO2 forcing to be also small”.
The actual radiative forcing is not as small as indicated from 4% value. We have explored this issue in two Climate Science weblogs; i.e. Relative Roles of CO2 and Water Vapor in Radiative Forcing and Further Analysis Of Radiative Forcing By Norm Woods.
While much smaller than the effect of the more heterogeneous climate forcings {as we reported for example, in Matsui, T., and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2006: Measurement-based estimation of the spatial gradient of aerosol radiative forcing. Geophys. Res. Letts., 33, L11813, doi:10.1029/2006GL025974, it is larger than 4% since i) the temperatures within the atmosphere vary latitudinally, and ii) the higher water vapor levels in the lower latitudes reduces the fraction of absorption that can be attributed to CO2.
The conclusions of the Douglas and Christy paper, however, are not altered by this issue, and all of us should look forward to objective scientific scrutiny of their study [after all, that is the scientific method].
The paper should be required reading for all climate scientists, and the conclusions tested to order to build confidence or to refute their findings. Climate scientists who ignore this paper (as seems to be a frequent policy by some) must mean that they agree with the science in the Douglas and Christy paper, but elect to ignore it since it conflicts with their narrow perspective of the dominance of the radiative effect of human-added CO2 as an anthropogenic climate forcing. Of course, ignoring peer reviewed papers, is not the scientific method. Update: I have been informed that the journal Energy and Environment is not scinetifically peer reviewed nor in any citation index. Unfortunately, this significantly diminishes the impact of this very important paper. While the publication process is a difficult road for research that differs from the IPCC type perspective, papers must stll be submitted and published in peer reviewed journals that appear in science citation indexes].
See full post here.