Tag: Global Warming

Must-Read: Cosma Shalizi (2014): Review of Oliver Morton (2008): Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Cosma Shalizi (2014): [Review of Oliver Morton (2008): “Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet”][]:

Of Heliophagy: I cannot remember the last time I read a popular science book with such enjoyment, or learned so much from it….

Photosynthesis… relayed by telling the story of how we came to… understanding… the lives of its discoverers… biochemistry… isotopes and radioactive decay… molecular bonding and the interaction of light and electricity, the biophysics of free energy flow through cells and through molecules, crystallography, the molecular biology which let us isolate and manipulate individual enzymes, and so on…. discovery, rivalry, insights and false paths, human and biological ingenuity, and ultimately a deep understanding of one of the fundamental processes of life as we know it….

The evolution of photosynthesis… everything from the origin of life to plate tectonics to the spread of grasses over the last few million years. Again, much of it is told through stories of discovery and the history of the science. It is necessarily more conjectural than the very settled science of how photosynthesis works, but none the less fascinating for all that. The… “climate/carbon crisis”. Agriculture already had non-trivial impacts on climate, but our real change began with the Industrial Revolution and the vast growth in consuming fossil fuels…. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has already drastically increased… is good at trapping heat radiated back from the ground… warm[ing] the Earth. The exact effects depend on incredibly complicated and ill-understood feedback processes…. To take these uncertainties as ground for complacency, though, seems grotesque.

Our global civilization runs at something like 40 terawatts…. Tidal and geothermal energy are too localized and small-scale…. Nuclear fission looks more attractive when one compares long-lived radioactive waste to long-lived carbon dioxide as a pollutant, but there are very real practical obstacles. All our other options are ultimately solar…. Morton is very hopeful about the last two, and especially about what real molecular engineering might be able to do in the space intermediate between photovoltaic plates (high efficiency, but also high cost) and naturally-occurring leaves (low efficiency, but they grow)…. A marvelous book, filled with wonders: I strongly urge you to encounter them for yourself.

Must-Read: Elizabeth Stanton: Negishi Welfare Weights: The Mathematics of Global Inequality

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: This seems to me to be not quite right. If, say, individuals’ utility is logarithmic in lifetime wealth, then Negishi welfare weights construct the social welfare function by weighting each person’s utility by their lifetime wealth and then adding up individual utilities.

This produces policies that are different from those that would “be optimal only in a world in which global income redistribution cannot and will not take place”. It is the case, even if global income distribution cannot and will not take place, that good government policies maximize the benefit weighting their effects on each person’s utility equally. But with Negishi welfare weights government policies are evaluated by multiplying their effect on an individual’s utility by that individual’s wealth before performing a utilitarian sum:

Elizabeth A. Stanton: Negishi Welfare Weights: The Mathematics of Global Inequality: “The importance of making transparent the ethical assumptions used in climate-economics models cannot be overestimated…

…Negishi weighting is a key ethical assumption at work in climate-economics models, but one that is virtually unknown to most model users. Negishi weights freeze the current distribution of income between world regions; without this constraint, IAMs that maximize global welfare would recommend an equalization of income across regions as part of their policy advice. With Negishi weights in place, these models instead recommend a course of action that would be optimal only in a world in which global income redistribution cannot and will not take place. This article describes the Negishi procedure and its origin in theoretical and applied welfare economics, and discusses the policy implications of the presentation and use of Negishi-weighted model results, as well as some alternatives to Negishi weighting in climate-economics models.

Must-Read: Ria Misra: No, Now This Is Officially the Hottest Earth Has Ever Been [UPDATING]

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Courtesy of Erik Loomis of Lawyers, Guns, and Money: Yes, it is hot. But it’s a dry heat. Why do you ask?:

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Ria Misra: No, Now This Is Officially the Hottest Earth Has Ever Been [UPDATING]: “It’s getting pretty hard to keep track of all the heat records we’ve been breaking recently, isn’t it?…

…Don’t worry, we’re here to help. NOAA’s latest data reveal we just wrapped up the hottest winter the U.S. has ever seen—just like last summer (which also broke its season record), last year (another record-smasher), the year before that, and a whole chain of recent individual hottest months, knocking each out one after the other like dominoes. It’s almost like there’s a pattern in all this, isn’t it? Almost as though our planet was locked into some sort of terrible, human-induced cycle of gradual warming…. Anyway, we’ll be back to update you here next month (or shortly thereafter)….

UPDATE April 19, 2:12 pm: Sorry, February, you thought you were pretty hot, but March laughs at your attempts at hot temperatures. According to NOAA’s latest data, the new hottest month ever was this March, marking the 11th consecutive month in a row that record has been broken…. UPDATE May 18, 1:15 pm: Congratulations, humanity—we did it! (It, in this case, being cooking our planet into a slow rolling boil.) NOAA’s latest climate update reveals that we just wrapped up the hottest April ever recorded. That gives us twelve consecutive months—a full year—in which every single month set a new temperature record. Will next month make thirteen? Probably! See you then, my warm friends. UPDATE June 20, 8:45 am: And here we are at lucky number 13 of the hottest consecutive months ever recorded—if by ‘luck’ you mean an unstoppably rising heat wave, accompanied by an unsavory mix of both droughts and floods. (Note: This is no one’s definition of luck.)

Must-Read: Martin Wolf: Why Fossil Fuel Power Plants Will Be Left Stranded

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Martin Wolf: Why Fossil Fuel Power Plants Will Be Left Stranded: “Virtually all new fossil fuel-burning power-generation capacity will end up ‘stranded’…

…This is the argument of a paper by academics at Oxford university…. February was the warmest month on record. The current El Niño–the warming of the global climate triggered by the Pacific Ocean–has boosted temperatures, just as it did in 1997-98…. Two forms of inertia govern climate policy…. Infrastructure in power generation… is long-lived…. Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries. Thus it is necessary to think not of annual flows but of cumulative emissions or of a global carbon budget…. Within power generation itself, there are four options. The first would be a more or less immediate shift to zero-emissions technologies. The second would be retrofitting of conventional capacity with carbon capture and storage. The third would be to replace new capital stock with zero-emissions capacity early in its life. The last would be early introduction of technologies to remove atmospheric stocks of carbon….

Far from having years to work out how to curb the risks of climate change, we face an imminent moment of truth…. After last year’s Paris climate conference, the world congratulated itself on having agreed a new process, even though real action was postponed. Yet, given the longevity of a large part of the capital stock, the time for decisive change is right now, not decades in future. But the world is not really serious about climate, is it? It prefers fiddling while the planet burns.

Must-read: Kevin Drum: “Global Warming Went On a Rampage in 2015”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Let the record show that there was never any honest and honorable statistical or smoothing model-based way of extracting global-warming trends that would even hint that there was some kind of “pause” in global warming starting at the very end of the twentieth century:

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And let the record show that those I ran across who were claiming that there was such a “pause”–the Tobin Harshaws and the Clifford Assesses and the Tom Campbells and the Steve Levitts and the Steve Dubners and the Russ Robertses the Richard Mullers and the George Wills–ought to be profoundly ashamed of themselves, and would be if they were capable of shame:

Kevin Drum: Global Warming Went On a Rampage in 2015: “Remember that old chestnut, the climate chart that starts in 1998…

…and makes it look like climate change has been on a ‘pause’ ever since? It was always nonsense produced by cherry picking an unusually high starting point, but it was still effective propaganda. But those days are gone for good. Last year was already considerably warmer than 1998, and this year has now blown away everything…. George Will is now going to have to find some other way to lie about global warming. I don’t doubt that he’s up to it, but at least he’ll have to work a little harder.

Must-read: Paul Krugman: “Bully for Neurotoxins”

Posted on by Brad DeLong
Bully for Neurotoxins The New York Times

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Bully for Neurotoxins: “The Wall Street Journal has a remarkable editorial titled “The Carnage in Coal Country”…

…accusing President Obama of destroying jobs through his terrible, horrible, no good regulations on coal… ‘40,000 coal jobs… lost… since 2008.’… But what really struck me were… the editorial sneers that we’re ‘still waiting for all those new green jobs Mr. Obama has been promising since he arrived in Washington’… [and] that the editorial simply takes it as a given that any regulation is bad, including regulations on mercury and coal ash…. Mercury is a neurotoxin, which can impair intelligence; other heavy metals can cause cancer and poison people…. In what moral or even economic universe is it obviously wrong to limit emissions of neurotoxins?

Must-read: Adair Turner: “Facing Up to Climate Reality”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Adair Turner: Facing Up to Climate Reality: “Achieving a low-carbon economy is essential…

…new technologies make that goal attainable at an acceptable cost; but technological progress alone will be insufficient without strong public policies…. The climate agreement reached in Paris last month represents a valuable but still insufficient response…. Wind energy is now cost-competitive in many locations, and the costs of solar energy continue to plummet–down around 70% since 2008. Rapid cost reductions are also being achieved in battery and other energy-storage technologies, bringing electric cars closer to economic viability and enabling flexible electricity supply even where a large percentage of power comes from intermittent sources…. Strong public-policy interventions are… essential to support an adequately fast energy transition that is as cost efficient as possible…

Must-read: Ria Misra: “You Can Barely Even See Yosemite’s Largest Glacier Anymore”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Ria Misra: You Can Barely Even See Yosemite’s Largest Glacier Anymore: “Lyell Glacier was Yosemite’s National Park’s largest glacier…

…In 1883, park officials took a photograph of the ice giant. This year, NASA’s climate team recreated that photo with the glacier in its current state. The comparison is stunning. Lyell Glacier is not only the largest in Yellowstone, it’s also the second largest in the Sierra Nevada range. Since 1883, it’s lost 80 percent of its surface area, to the point where it covers only 1/10th of a square mile—and of that loss, 10 percent occurred in just the last four years. The historical loss is huge, but even more sobering is what it suggests for the future. We’re rapidly losing the ice and snowpack that have been especially key for Western and mountain states—not just in Yellowstone or the parks, but all over…

You Can Barely Even See Yellowstone s Largest Glacier Anymore

Must-Read: Ryan Cooper: How Climate Change Ate Conservatism’s Smartest Thinkers

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: It is important to note that global warming is not unique here. There has been no sign of the reemergence of technocratic voices on the right in health care, macroeconomics, anti-poverty policy, inequality, or–increasingly–national security..

Ryan Cooper: How Climate Change Ate Conservatism’s Smartest Thinkers: “Ross Douthat grappled yesterday with the issue, arguing that…

…he’s basically okay with doing nothing….

We could be wrong; indeed, we could be badly wrong, in which case we’ll deserve to be judged harshly for misplacing priorities in the face of real perils, real threats. But on the evidence available [at] the moment, I’m willing to argue that we have our priorities in order, and the other side’s allegedly forward-looking agenda does not….

Like Clive Crook, Will Wilkinson, and Walter Russell Mead, Douthat doesn’t seriously engage with the evidence… constructs a lengthy Rube Goldberg analogy to ‘insurance’… to cast doubt on every portion of the climate hawk case, but he doesn’t take the obvious next step of trying to work through what that means on a quantitative basis…. Without numbers, Douthat’s case is nothing more than vague handwaving that reads very much like he has cherry-picked a bunch of disconnected fluff to justify doing nothing…. Saying we can chance 3 to 4 degrees of warming and that sensitivity is much lower than previously thought might give us enough space to push CO2 concentrations up to 5-600 ppm or so. But right now we’re barreling towards 1000 ppm and beyond….

Like Douthat, the few conservatives who even talk about climate (like Reihan Salam and Ramesh Ponnuru, who he mentions) are constantly saying whatever policy is on deck at the moment is no good. It’s too inefficient; it’s too expensive; it’s trampling on democracy; we should be doing technology instead, etc, etc…. Consistent advocacy against every single climate policy amounts to little more than putting a patina of credibility on the denialist views of the Republican majority.