The environmental lobby has been insisting for thirty years now that doom is imminent unless radical steps are taken immediately. I remember thinking in the 1990's that at least the global warming debate would be settled within ten years or so. Al Gore and company were saying that if global warming were not stopped by then it would be too late to do anything effective. I didn't realize that Climate Change was a new religion, and could not be proven or disproven. Global catastrophe, like the Second Coming, keeps receding into the future.
I have met many people in the UK who believe that, if not themselves then certainly their children, will die young because of global warming. Our government, which knows this to be untrue, says nothing. Where is this damage to happiness and mental health accounted for in their ideological rush to net-zero?
Either they believe that that cost is worth paying to get support for policies that slow climate change or they believe that it is in their political interest to pretend to believe that. Or they think the policies are worth doing for other reasons and climate catastrophe is a useful pretext.
As with any problem, it is instructive to learn how it arose. However, to decide on the best path forward one must look far beyond the cause, because the best alternative may be completely unrelated to addressing the cause of the problem.
I think what goes hand in hand with the argument that climate change is a natural variation rather than anthropogenic is that the change is in line with what has happened before in human history, and there is no reason to be any more alarmed about this than, say, the little ice age. On the other hand, if this change is anthropogenic, then it is a lot more plausible that it could be catastrophically worse than any natural variations in recorded history.
Why is even slight warming held to be catastrophic in itself? Why can't a say 2 C warming be net positive, given that the poles warm much more than equator?
It can be. In my posts on climate I argue that it may be. In particular I offer estimates of the increase in habitable land with a 3° increase in average temperature, due to climate contours shifting north towards the pole.
Note that cold seasons warm more than hot seasons as well. The pattern of warming is biased in our favor, greater when it is cold, when warming is usually good, than when it is hot, when it is usually bad.
I know that as a forester in the western United States, our forests are dependent upon winter snowpack and warmer winters will deprive them of their primary water source. ~2 degrees more of global warming will likely result in very large and socially/economically changes at least in the western US.
Hardly to be dignified by the word "calculation" actually. The Indian meteorology department gives current average temperature based upon 1990-2020 and I remember my textbook giving 1950-1980 figures.
A human has control over his actions, but humanity is not a person, and the result of each person doing what is in his interest is not necessarily in our interest.
Yes, but we have even less control over the sun brightening or massive volcanoes or changes in ocean currents. Plus war only takes one to tango, and a government which believed fossil fuels were an existential threat to all human life would not hesitate to destroy oil fields, refineries, ships, and other infrastructure.
Governments have done some massively stupid things and always will. Outlawing fossil fuels wouldn't have to be 100% effective, it would destroy the economy, but if the alternative is literally boiling oceans as the UN head honcho has proclaimed, well, a weak economy is better than no human life.
This is all why I do not believe AGW alarmists believe their own dog food.
“The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Thursday, speaking about new data released from the European Union and the World Meteorological Organization.
We have easy control over fisheries that naturally support large amounts of fish. But that doesn't stop human overfishing from depleting the natural stock of fish.
If saving the fish was an existential threat, it would be easier to make fishing illegal than to stop underwater volcanoes or some other natural threat over which we have no control.
Despite being 90% of the way to the next ice age, it is very common for people to believe that we lived in a Edenic state in 1850. So the belief that it is human caused leads most people to assume it is bad.
To be fair, it may be more of an argument that we have the capability to change ecosystems faster than any previous cause. I listened to a Decouple episode about historical extinctions of which the worst was due to massive volcanic activity. We are adding CO2 faster than that, but we would have to really burn all the world's peat for fun to match the eventual total.
I didn't know it had been 3 million years. Remarkably, I tried to get ChatGPT to draw a graph of a stick figure standing near the dawn of the expected glaciation, looking myopically up in distress at an IPCC warming graph which rises above it and levels off. GPT wouldn't draw it until I changed the request to not use the word ice age, as that might 'support skeptical viewpoints'
I'm not sure I understand your first point. If global warming is our fault, that means it is happening because of something we are doing, and the most effective solution would likely be stopping whatever we are doing. If it is not our fault, stopping what we are doing is less helpful, and we need active countermeasures.
Determining the fault/cause is important because it determines shape/viability of the potential solution space. I don't think you can separate cause and solution so easily.
I don't know if you know, but there's a large solution space known for CO2 in the atmosphere, so the issue you raise, while true in theory, is not applicable for the case at hand.
Some pretty major institutions are falling into the fallacy David describes. For example, here is the IPCC's principles document:
"The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the
scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of
What we are doing includes things like providing heat and air conditioning, feeding people, and developing technologies and accumulating wealth with the cheap surplus energy of fossil fuels
My someone snarky answer to all this AGW hysteria is that if the hysterics actually believed their own hysteria, they would be moving heaven and earth to get nuclear power reactors built in two years, or one year. The first ones only took, I think, 3-4 years; surely if AGW were an existential threat, they could start mass producing new ones faster than that.
That nuclear power is still treated as more of an existential threat than AGW is one of several reasons why I don't believe that the AGW hysterics believe their own hysteria.
I feel just the same! Early on I came up with the concept of a vast program to sponsor nuclear to displace new coal in China and India, if it were all true. And I never really heard anyone else ever mention it. Many of them believed in their solutions before they believed in the problem.
Something I've come to realize, as noted by Bjorn Lomborg, is that for many the belief that it is a very serious problem actually degrades their ability to come up with and apply quality solutions. People use their intuition for small decisions and their reasoning for bigger ones. But for very big issues with emotional and moral content they return to intuition.
I don't believe it truly is a problem, but I do find it compelling that quality solutions with long time horizons would be much more effective at lower costs than current policies, creating at least an initial common ground to move towards.
"New Delhi: The Union coal ministry on Monday announced plans to increase India’s coal production to 1.404 billion tonne by 2027, with an eye to further boost it to 1.577 billion tonne by 2030."
"Current domestic production hovers around one billion tonne annually. This increase in output aims to ensure ample supply of domestic coal to India’s thermal power plants, which are essential for the country’s growing energy needs"
Nuclear radiation is unsafe at any dose according to the nuclear establishment itself.
To mitigate the radiation risk is very expensive. That's why only one reactor has been commissioned in US over last 50 years and that too almost prohibitively expensive.
But solar is riskfree and cheap. Its only drawback being too much greedy for land and thus causes habitat loss.
The radiation level in Denver, a mile high, is substantially higher than at sea level. If radiation from the large thermonuclear reactor in the sky is unsafe at any level, why do people still live in Denver? Why don't the people there have a high level of cancer or radiation sickness?
Or in other words, you may believe what you say but it is complete nonsense, as you could discover with only a little research.
I have not said what I believe, only what the nuclear establishment itself has propagated.
When one continues to hype safety, safety and how we have improved safety, people naturally think you must be very unsafe,
Please see Gordian Knot substack for follies of nuclear establishment and how they are bilking taxpayers for entirely unnecessary cleanups of nuclear sites,
The nuclear establishment saying that reactors are safe does not mean they are not. Where is there a claim by the “nuclear establishment” that "Nuclear radiation is unsafe at any dose"? Can you link to it?
On a meta commenting level, I have noticed you often seem to say things in a way that implies you mean them yourself, but then back away and claim someone else actually says them and you are just reporting that.
I suspect English might not be your first language, but whether or not that is true, I would recommend you be more careful about how you present ideas to make it clear what you mean vs what others have said that you are reporting. It will ease communication and understanding of what you are getting at.
That would all be immaterial if I believed that global warming was going to reach a tipping point in less than 10 years, as has been frequently claimed. Solar and wind are intermittent, an unacceptable flaw if fossil fuels had to be eliminated in less than 10 years.
I repeat, this is if I thought fossil fuel use was an existential threat which had to be curtailed within 10 years, as we have been reminded over and over again during the past 30 years. That alarmists don't think so is all the proof I need that they don't believe their own hogwash.
Yes, but if necessary we can find substitutes/alternatives. For example, if coal is the major issue, we can go heavy into nuclear. But if the actual sun is the issue, the power source being coal is irrelevant, and we would need a different countermeasure.
An example is the hole in the ozone layer back in the 80s/90s. CFCs were the issue, we substituted other compounds for CFCs, and that fixed the problem.
That's the point. If it's AGW, the mitigation is at hand: stop doing whatever we're doing. If not, then it's Mother Nature, and other measures are necessary.
1. How do you know they are sincere believers, and in what? That climate change will make us worse off is a defensible view, although I am not sure a correct one. That it will wipe out humanity or at least human civilization is not a defensible view, and if the Indian government believed it they would not be planning increased coal production.
2. No cash may have been transferred to India, but quite a lot of people have argued that cash should be transferred to poor countries to help them deal with climate change, which is a reason for them to talk about catastrophic climate change whether or not they believe in it.
They are sincere believers in Climate Change Green Energy cult, to my regret. I would go in for coal and more coal since solar is too land hungry and destructive of habitat and crop land.
Unlike them, I think food security is fragile in India. We have been enjoying luck of 20 years of good monsoons and increasing yields (partly owing to CO2 increase).
But no one else is slowing down their hysteria and greed for other people's money. If Harris or AOC is President in 2029, their first executive orders will reverse the hysteria almost instantly.
“If the world is changing in ways that cannot be predicted, estimates of costs in the distant future ought to be heavily discounted for uncertainty, given little weight relative to costs in the near future.”
First, make *no* mistake that I 100% agree with your conclusion (that almost all actions to prevent “climate change” now are foolish and should not be done).
But re: discounting the future, you bring up one of the strongest arguments for the currrent leftist position.
Because if one believes - as Tyler Cowen and many Effective Altruists do - that the proper discount rate for the welfare of future humans is zero or nearly zero - then their case for preventative actions against catastrophic climate change now, even if those actions have only a low probability of being successful, becomes stronger.
Because using uncertainty to assume “well, they may be wiped out by something else anyway”, does not seem a valid moral argument re: what proper policy should be.
Whatever the discount rate, the lower the probability of the cost you are trying to avoid is the less it is worth spending to avoid it. It might be still worth doing, although I doubt it, but less worth doing.
In the limiting case where you have no idea what the future world will be like — arguably the case for 2300 if you consider how much has changed in the past 300 years — you don't know if the expected cost is positive or negative, do know that the cost of what you do to prevent it is positive.
Given only the assumption that the expected benefit of action now is not negative - an assumption imo most people would have, especially given the overwhelming likelihood that humanity could adapt along the way if and when it became obvious that the intervention was negative - then using a discount rate at or near zero for the utility of future humans makes it more worthwhile to do interventions now even if they have only a low probability of success.
In particular, a low probability of success to be the difference between “no appreciable difference in warming” and “very bad, and then starts to accelerate and get even worse” catastrophic warming.
Personally, I do not agree with the idea of a near zero or zero discount to the utility of those in the future, for reasons very similar to yours above and in the piece.
But IF one does argue for near zero discounts on the welfare of future humans, then the case for these expensive interventions that are highly unlikely to work (and so very likely only to impoverish, with third world women and children hardest hit…) becomes stronger.
The expected benefit is benefit minus cost. The cost is now and known. If the benefit is in the distant future it is not known and the less certain it is, ceteris paribus, the lower its expected value.
Further, the longer we wait before taking action the more information we will have when and if we do.
One way the expected benefit could be negative, even ignoring the cost, is if it turns out that climate change benefits us, as I have argued in earlier posts it might. We then have born a cost to make ourselves worse off.
Very relevant to the question of cause is the proposed solution. If solar activity were the cause of warming then we have no control over whether it will continue to increase or go back to lower levels. If we take any steps to mitigate the heat and the levels go back down, we'll have caused an ice age.
If instead warming is caused by CO2 emissions from humans, we can understand with relative certainty that the trend is going to continue and provides a baseline for action. Also we could investigate ways to reduce emissions or otherwise mitigate the warming, but those would not work if the warming is from other sources. We could spend trillions cutting carbon emissions to find no change.
"But doing that might be, very likely is, enormously costly, perhaps more costly than letting global warming happen."
What makes reducing fossil fuel extraction 'enormously costly' in neoclassical economics? The economic growth does'nt come from energy consumption. It's just one commodity among others. This is the position of ecological economics you firmly rejected. Unsurprisingly, it's not 'enormously costly' according to Nordhaus' calculations, because he exactly knows what neoclassical growth models say.
Reducing one source of energy (fossil fuels) requires increasing other sources of energy or reducing energy use. Fossil fuels are so ingrained into world economies that reducing it arbitrarily and as quickly as the alarmists demand is costly, as witnessed by the incredible subsidies required for any private company to build solar and wind unreliable power.
"The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources." - Robert Solow, "The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics" (1974)
No, it does'nt require in the fantasy land of neoclassical economics. If you don't aggre with that, you should start to learn ecological economics and you'll become an "alarmist" at the end.
"I've never heard of any study refer to the anti-tipping point of drawing us out of the ice age and preventing the next glaciation"
Burning fossil fuels is probably good to keep the earth in the interglacial period. However, our resource extraction behaviour is completely uncontrolled, so we don't know how it will turn out. The scale of our extraction makes it a extremely dangerous geoengineering.
If it is uncontrolled, that might mean too much or too little, but in fact it isn't uncontrolled. It is controlled, like the rest of the world economy, by the tradeoff of costs and benefits. One of the costs of extracting a natural resource today is that it is not there to be extracted tomorrow, a cost taken account of by the owner of the resource.
You quote one sentence from an article by Solow. Have you read the article? If not, do you think a single sentence quoted out of context is an adequate basis for understanding an argument you have not seen?
You will probably never have the courage to address this issue the way you address climate change. The empirical and theoretical evidences are clear but you can not accept it. We observe Hubbert curve, it is real. And the Hotelling's prediction of ever increasing price for natural resources is false. Hubbert curve (peak oil) is simply destructive for your world view and your entire career. That is the real problem.
"The price of oil must go up, year by year, at the interest rate." This is from your book. This is a false prediction. We know historical oil prices. And we know historical oil extraction curves.
I notice you did not answer my question about the Solow article. I conclude that you think a single sentence quoted out of context is an adequate basis for understanding an argument you have not seen.
Similarly, you did not notice that my explanation of Hotelling's argument started with simplifying assumptions. For some of the other complications, keep reading until you get to "Oil Prices and Insecure Property Rights."
I notice you did'nt answer my question about the cost of solving climate change.
It is incredible that like Chartertopia, you don't understand the point I want to emphasize. From the first comment it is clear that Chartertopia's argument cannot be against me, but against neoclassical economists. Because I know that economic growth comes from energy consumption. And reducing fossil fuel extraction will be end of the growth. A premature energy transition must be also costly. The purpose of quoting Solow is just to show that this thinking doesn't belong to neoclassical economics. And Nordhaus' calculations prove that: it is not 'enormously costly' in neoclassical economics. Unlike Nordhaus, you and Chartertopia lack a coherent understanding of energy, growth and climate change. What you oppose is just government intervention, what you defend is just anything against ecological sciences. That's all. This is the real motivation for defending the Hotelling model against the Hubbert model.
Your predictions regarding property rights and oil production are also completely wrong (Your production cost hypothesis is also wrong for a simple reason). We know that because the extraction curves of countries where property rights are protected are much more consistent with the Hubbert model. The prime example is US L48 conventional oil production. The reason is simple: When property rights are not protected, political and economic instability can occur. Political and economic instability is the killer of capital and destroying capital leads to reduced extraction. The prime example is the oil production of Russia. I want to end this section with a prediction: You won't respond to a single sentence in this paragraph like you did'nt respond to my first question. Because you can't, these are very clear observations. You can't find any counterexample.
People don't behave as Hotelling assumed. They behave like any other predator population in nature. So, there is no allocation of production over time. Wolves don't allocate rabbits. It makes sense to act like this from the perspective of an individual in the predator population because it is in competition with other species and with individuals of its own kind. Allocation over time is a very costly behaviour from the point of the struggle for survival. The fundamental mistake is the ill-founded leap from profit maximization to allocation.
If you think so highly of climate alarmism that anything else is fantasy, then you put your faith in liars and scam artists whose predictions have all failed spectacularly. We still have polar bears and penguins, Arctic summer ice has increased instead of disappearing, Mt. Kilimanjaro still has snow, we haven't become Venus. Michael Mann is still a liar. Climate models still don't account for clouds and humidity properly, and when fed 20-year-old conditions, still can't model today even close to accurately.
Nordhaus did project 2.5°-3° as the policy and warming cost balancing point with ideal policy, which costs half as much as actual policy. My understanding is that the IAMs also use an assumption that there is a point of a carbon tax where complete replacement technology is assumed to develop at that price point.
I think additionally the costs literature is biased towards finding costs and not benefits of warming. I've never heard of any study refer to the anti-tipping point of drawing us out of the ice age and preventing the next glaciation. A good tell for this is how the astonishing global greening since 2000 is reported in science magazines - always contextualized as minor and irrelevant to the total effect.
There is actually a scientific literature arguing that AGW is keeping us out of a glaciation — not AGW from the industrial revolution but from the invention of agriculture. I discuss it in an old post:
Having re-read that article, I continue to find something about that argument bugs me. Primarily it's the presumably very large error bars on exactly when glaciation periods start. They appear to span roughly 12,500 years; if they take even 1% of that time to "begin", that's already longer than most IPCC forecasts, and the nature of ice ages suggests to me that they would take much longer than that to ramp up.
Moreover, I don't see that I can trust where those yellow columns are located in the graph at that link; they're especially confusing when I notice they straddle periods of high insolation. Shouldn't they be in troughs? Or correlating with periods of low temperature?
Ideally, I would trust the argument that we're preventing a new ice age if we had other present-day indicators to check, particularly things independent of atmospheric CO2. For instance, that graph clearly suggests a cyclic change in insolation, regular enough to be traceable to something like distance to the sun or maybe changes to our orbit's eccentricity. Both ought to be easy to measure, and it's possible our instruments are sensitive enough to detect changes that correspond to the roughly-20,000-year periods in the graph.
I remember reading that idea (might have been yours, I do not remember) and mostly thinking it amusing how little we know about AGW that we can't even show it's boon or bane.
The environmental lobby has been insisting for thirty years now that doom is imminent unless radical steps are taken immediately. I remember thinking in the 1990's that at least the global warming debate would be settled within ten years or so. Al Gore and company were saying that if global warming were not stopped by then it would be too late to do anything effective. I didn't realize that Climate Change was a new religion, and could not be proven or disproven. Global catastrophe, like the Second Coming, keeps receding into the future.
I have met many people in the UK who believe that, if not themselves then certainly their children, will die young because of global warming. Our government, which knows this to be untrue, says nothing. Where is this damage to happiness and mental health accounted for in their ideological rush to net-zero?
Either they believe that that cost is worth paying to get support for policies that slow climate change or they believe that it is in their political interest to pretend to believe that. Or they think the policies are worth doing for other reasons and climate catastrophe is a useful pretext.
As with any problem, it is instructive to learn how it arose. However, to decide on the best path forward one must look far beyond the cause, because the best alternative may be completely unrelated to addressing the cause of the problem.
I think what goes hand in hand with the argument that climate change is a natural variation rather than anthropogenic is that the change is in line with what has happened before in human history, and there is no reason to be any more alarmed about this than, say, the little ice age. On the other hand, if this change is anthropogenic, then it is a lot more plausible that it could be catastrophically worse than any natural variations in recorded history.
I discuss the evidence that warming is faster than in the past 2000 years in an old post:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/the-hockey-stick
Why is even slight warming held to be catastrophic in itself? Why can't a say 2 C warming be net positive, given that the poles warm much more than equator?
It can be. In my posts on climate I argue that it may be. In particular I offer estimates of the increase in habitable land with a 3° increase in average temperature, due to climate contours shifting north towards the pole.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/land-gained-and-lost
Note that cold seasons warm more than hot seasons as well. The pattern of warming is biased in our favor, greater when it is cold, when warming is usually good, than when it is hot, when it is usually bad.
I know that as a forester in the western United States, our forests are dependent upon winter snowpack and warmer winters will deprive them of their primary water source. ~2 degrees more of global warming will likely result in very large and socially/economically changes at least in the western US.
Is that true if the warming is combined with increased rainfall, also a predicted element of climate change?
More intense rain events but overall the southwest has been in historic drought conditions since around 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwestern_North_American_megadrought
New species of trees will take over the forests then. Such replacement of species has always occurred.
Sure, although one of the big questions is whether species will move fast enough to track the rate of warming.
Some good research exploring this question here for example: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adr6700
I have estimated, based on public records, that Delhi has not warmed even slightly in last 50 years,
Have you webbed your calculations somewhere?
Hardly to be dignified by the word "calculation" actually. The Indian meteorology department gives current average temperature based upon 1990-2020 and I remember my textbook giving 1950-1980 figures.
Why would anthropogenic change be catastrophically worse? That's the one kind of change which humans have the easiest control over.
A human has control over his actions, but humanity is not a person, and the result of each person doing what is in his interest is not necessarily in our interest.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/market-failure
Warfare is anthropogenic, but we have not yet controlled it.
Yes, but we have even less control over the sun brightening or massive volcanoes or changes in ocean currents. Plus war only takes one to tango, and a government which believed fossil fuels were an existential threat to all human life would not hesitate to destroy oil fields, refineries, ships, and other infrastructure.
Governments have done some massively stupid things and always will. Outlawing fossil fuels wouldn't have to be 100% effective, it would destroy the economy, but if the alternative is literally boiling oceans as the UN head honcho has proclaimed, well, a weak economy is better than no human life.
This is all why I do not believe AGW alarmists believe their own dog food.
" but if the alternative is literally boiling oceans as the UN head honcho has proclaimed"
Do you have a link for that? It seems unlikely.
It was hyperbole from the UN. Certainly boiling oceans is unlikely, but I never expected the UN to get so hysterical.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/27/the-era-of-global-boiling-has-arrived-says-un-boss-antonio-guterres.html
“The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Thursday, speaking about new data released from the European Union and the World Meteorological Organization.
Thanks. He doesn't say "boiling oceans," does say "boiling."
“…but I never expected the UN to get so hysterical.”
I believe this is the most naive/unreasonable thing I’ve ever seen you put out there. 😏
We have easy control over fisheries that naturally support large amounts of fish. But that doesn't stop human overfishing from depleting the natural stock of fish.
Due to a lack of property rights.
Doesn't matter. Fishing on that scale is easy to make illegal. Fishing small enough to get away with wouldn't matter.
If saving the fish was an existential threat, it would be easier to make fishing illegal than to stop underwater volcanoes or some other natural threat over which we have no control.
Despite being 90% of the way to the next ice age, it is very common for people to believe that we lived in a Edenic state in 1850. So the belief that it is human caused leads most people to assume it is bad.
To be fair, it may be more of an argument that we have the capability to change ecosystems faster than any previous cause. I listened to a Decouple episode about historical extinctions of which the worst was due to massive volcanic activity. We are adding CO2 faster than that, but we would have to really burn all the world's peat for fun to match the eventual total.
You mean a glaciation. We are in an ice age, have been for about three million years.
I didn't know it had been 3 million years. Remarkably, I tried to get ChatGPT to draw a graph of a stick figure standing near the dawn of the expected glaciation, looking myopically up in distress at an IPCC warming graph which rises above it and levels off. GPT wouldn't draw it until I changed the request to not use the word ice age, as that might 'support skeptical viewpoints'
An ice age is defined as a time when there is an ice cap on one or both poles.
I'm not sure I understand your first point. If global warming is our fault, that means it is happening because of something we are doing, and the most effective solution would likely be stopping whatever we are doing. If it is not our fault, stopping what we are doing is less helpful, and we need active countermeasures.
Determining the fault/cause is important because it determines shape/viability of the potential solution space. I don't think you can separate cause and solution so easily.
I believe I made that point in the post, starting:
"Of course, the questions of causation and prevention are not unrelated."
And responded to it.
I don't know if you know, but there's a large solution space known for CO2 in the atmosphere, so the issue you raise, while true in theory, is not applicable for the case at hand.
Some pretty major institutions are falling into the fallacy David describes. For example, here is the IPCC's principles document:
"The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the
scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of
risk of human-induced climate change".
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/09/ipcc-principles.pdf
The people who approved that principles document are generally aware of this issue and are not looking out for the general public.
What we are doing includes things like providing heat and air conditioning, feeding people, and developing technologies and accumulating wealth with the cheap surplus energy of fossil fuels
My someone snarky answer to all this AGW hysteria is that if the hysterics actually believed their own hysteria, they would be moving heaven and earth to get nuclear power reactors built in two years, or one year. The first ones only took, I think, 3-4 years; surely if AGW were an existential threat, they could start mass producing new ones faster than that.
That nuclear power is still treated as more of an existential threat than AGW is one of several reasons why I don't believe that the AGW hysterics believe their own hysteria.
I feel just the same! Early on I came up with the concept of a vast program to sponsor nuclear to displace new coal in China and India, if it were all true. And I never really heard anyone else ever mention it. Many of them believed in their solutions before they believed in the problem.
Something I've come to realize, as noted by Bjorn Lomborg, is that for many the belief that it is a very serious problem actually degrades their ability to come up with and apply quality solutions. People use their intuition for small decisions and their reasoning for bigger ones. But for very big issues with emotional and moral content they return to intuition.
I don't believe it truly is a problem, but I do find it compelling that quality solutions with long time horizons would be much more effective at lower costs than current policies, creating at least an initial common ground to move towards.
India no longer has new coal. It is going on strongly for renewables.
False. From 2 years ago:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/11/16/india-to-increase-coal-production-by-60/
"New Delhi: The Union coal ministry on Monday announced plans to increase India’s coal production to 1.404 billion tonne by 2027, with an eye to further boost it to 1.577 billion tonne by 2030."
"Current domestic production hovers around one billion tonne annually. This increase in output aims to ensure ample supply of domestic coal to India’s thermal power plants, which are essential for the country’s growing energy needs"
Imported coal is being substituted. Previously, as freight was a bottleneck necessitating import.
I think if you focus on coal consumption, the data would not seem so alarming.
I agree, and have long done so.
That said, while large majorities of catastrophists are anti-nukes, there is a significant minority who are pro-nuke.
Nuclear radiation is unsafe at any dose according to the nuclear establishment itself.
To mitigate the radiation risk is very expensive. That's why only one reactor has been commissioned in US over last 50 years and that too almost prohibitively expensive.
But solar is riskfree and cheap. Its only drawback being too much greedy for land and thus causes habitat loss.
The radiation level in Denver, a mile high, is substantially higher than at sea level. If radiation from the large thermonuclear reactor in the sky is unsafe at any level, why do people still live in Denver? Why don't the people there have a high level of cancer or radiation sickness?
Or in other words, you may believe what you say but it is complete nonsense, as you could discover with only a little research.
I have not said what I believe, only what the nuclear establishment itself has propagated.
When one continues to hype safety, safety and how we have improved safety, people naturally think you must be very unsafe,
Please see Gordian Knot substack for follies of nuclear establishment and how they are bilking taxpayers for entirely unnecessary cleanups of nuclear sites,
The nuclear establishment saying that reactors are safe does not mean they are not. Where is there a claim by the “nuclear establishment” that "Nuclear radiation is unsafe at any dose"? Can you link to it?
On a meta commenting level, I have noticed you often seem to say things in a way that implies you mean them yourself, but then back away and claim someone else actually says them and you are just reporting that.
I suspect English might not be your first language, but whether or not that is true, I would recommend you be more careful about how you present ideas to make it clear what you mean vs what others have said that you are reporting. It will ease communication and understanding of what you are getting at.
That would all be immaterial if I believed that global warming was going to reach a tipping point in less than 10 years, as has been frequently claimed. Solar and wind are intermittent, an unacceptable flaw if fossil fuels had to be eliminated in less than 10 years.
I repeat, this is if I thought fossil fuel use was an existential threat which had to be curtailed within 10 years, as we have been reminded over and over again during the past 30 years. That alarmists don't think so is all the proof I need that they don't believe their own hogwash.
Yes, but if necessary we can find substitutes/alternatives. For example, if coal is the major issue, we can go heavy into nuclear. But if the actual sun is the issue, the power source being coal is irrelevant, and we would need a different countermeasure.
An example is the hole in the ozone layer back in the 80s/90s. CFCs were the issue, we substituted other compounds for CFCs, and that fixed the problem.
Not so. Even if sun is generating more heat, the greenhouse effect would amplify the warming.
That's the point. If it's AGW, the mitigation is at hand: stop doing whatever we're doing. If not, then it's Mother Nature, and other measures are necessary.
Great, as usual. I would interject that climate change political hysteria has peaked. This is not the end, but it is the beginning of the end.
I think the attitude for Indian govt would be critical going forward. So far, it has been siding with alarmists.
The attitude of the Indian government is to extract cash from the West. That's demand. Supply is zero.
No cash is transferred to India. They are sincere believers
1. How do you know they are sincere believers, and in what? That climate change will make us worse off is a defensible view, although I am not sure a correct one. That it will wipe out humanity or at least human civilization is not a defensible view, and if the Indian government believed it they would not be planning increased coal production.
2. No cash may have been transferred to India, but quite a lot of people have argued that cash should be transferred to poor countries to help them deal with climate change, which is a reason for them to talk about catastrophic climate change whether or not they believe in it.
Do you disagree?
They are sincere believers in Climate Change Green Energy cult, to my regret. I would go in for coal and more coal since solar is too land hungry and destructive of habitat and crop land.
Unlike them, I think food security is fragile in India. We have been enjoying luck of 20 years of good monsoons and increasing yields (partly owing to CO2 increase).
Coal production is increased but not many new coal plants are underway, unlike China. I think we may reduce coal imports.
Coal transport was a bottleneck, thus it was economical or necessary to import coal. Now, freight movement has improved.
The current "peaking" is primarily to Trump issuing executive orders. It may well repeak in 2029.
I was thinking of COP 30.
Fundamentally, if the money for the nonsense stops, the nonsense will stop.
But no one else is slowing down their hysteria and greed for other people's money. If Harris or AOC is President in 2029, their first executive orders will reverse the hysteria almost instantly.
“If the world is changing in ways that cannot be predicted, estimates of costs in the distant future ought to be heavily discounted for uncertainty, given little weight relative to costs in the near future.”
First, make *no* mistake that I 100% agree with your conclusion (that almost all actions to prevent “climate change” now are foolish and should not be done).
But re: discounting the future, you bring up one of the strongest arguments for the currrent leftist position.
Because if one believes - as Tyler Cowen and many Effective Altruists do - that the proper discount rate for the welfare of future humans is zero or nearly zero - then their case for preventative actions against catastrophic climate change now, even if those actions have only a low probability of being successful, becomes stronger.
Because using uncertainty to assume “well, they may be wiped out by something else anyway”, does not seem a valid moral argument re: what proper policy should be.
Whatever the discount rate, the lower the probability of the cost you are trying to avoid is the less it is worth spending to avoid it. It might be still worth doing, although I doubt it, but less worth doing.
In the limiting case where you have no idea what the future world will be like — arguably the case for 2300 if you consider how much has changed in the past 300 years — you don't know if the expected cost is positive or negative, do know that the cost of what you do to prevent it is positive.
Given only the assumption that the expected benefit of action now is not negative - an assumption imo most people would have, especially given the overwhelming likelihood that humanity could adapt along the way if and when it became obvious that the intervention was negative - then using a discount rate at or near zero for the utility of future humans makes it more worthwhile to do interventions now even if they have only a low probability of success.
In particular, a low probability of success to be the difference between “no appreciable difference in warming” and “very bad, and then starts to accelerate and get even worse” catastrophic warming.
Personally, I do not agree with the idea of a near zero or zero discount to the utility of those in the future, for reasons very similar to yours above and in the piece.
But IF one does argue for near zero discounts on the welfare of future humans, then the case for these expensive interventions that are highly unlikely to work (and so very likely only to impoverish, with third world women and children hardest hit…) becomes stronger.
The expected benefit is benefit minus cost. The cost is now and known. If the benefit is in the distant future it is not known and the less certain it is, ceteris paribus, the lower its expected value.
Further, the longer we wait before taking action the more information we will have when and if we do.
One way the expected benefit could be negative, even ignoring the cost, is if it turns out that climate change benefits us, as I have argued in earlier posts it might. We then have born a cost to make ourselves worse off.
Very relevant to the question of cause is the proposed solution. If solar activity were the cause of warming then we have no control over whether it will continue to increase or go back to lower levels. If we take any steps to mitigate the heat and the levels go back down, we'll have caused an ice age.
If instead warming is caused by CO2 emissions from humans, we can understand with relative certainty that the trend is going to continue and provides a baseline for action. Also we could investigate ways to reduce emissions or otherwise mitigate the warming, but those would not work if the warming is from other sources. We could spend trillions cutting carbon emissions to find no change.
"But doing that might be, very likely is, enormously costly, perhaps more costly than letting global warming happen."
What makes reducing fossil fuel extraction 'enormously costly' in neoclassical economics? The economic growth does'nt come from energy consumption. It's just one commodity among others. This is the position of ecological economics you firmly rejected. Unsurprisingly, it's not 'enormously costly' according to Nordhaus' calculations, because he exactly knows what neoclassical growth models say.
Reducing one source of energy (fossil fuels) requires increasing other sources of energy or reducing energy use. Fossil fuels are so ingrained into world economies that reducing it arbitrarily and as quickly as the alarmists demand is costly, as witnessed by the incredible subsidies required for any private company to build solar and wind unreliable power.
"The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources." - Robert Solow, "The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics" (1974)
No, it does'nt require in the fantasy land of neoclassical economics. If you don't aggre with that, you should start to learn ecological economics and you'll become an "alarmist" at the end.
"I've never heard of any study refer to the anti-tipping point of drawing us out of the ice age and preventing the next glaciation"
Burning fossil fuels is probably good to keep the earth in the interglacial period. However, our resource extraction behaviour is completely uncontrolled, so we don't know how it will turn out. The scale of our extraction makes it a extremely dangerous geoengineering.
If it is uncontrolled, that might mean too much or too little, but in fact it isn't uncontrolled. It is controlled, like the rest of the world economy, by the tradeoff of costs and benefits. One of the costs of extracting a natural resource today is that it is not there to be extracted tomorrow, a cost taken account of by the owner of the resource.
The relevant economics were worked out almost a century ago by Harold Hotelling. You can find a brief explanation in Chapter 12 of my webbed Price Theory [http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Price_Theory/PThy_Chapter_12/PThy_Chapter_12.html] under the subhead "Depletable Resources.] Or see https://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2006/03/peak-oil.html
You quote one sentence from an article by Solow. Have you read the article? If not, do you think a single sentence quoted out of context is an adequate basis for understanding an argument you have not seen?
You should read this blog post to learn the extraction behaviour of humans and all other predators:
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2025/09/15/insights-from-the-lotka-volterra-model/
You will probably never have the courage to address this issue the way you address climate change. The empirical and theoretical evidences are clear but you can not accept it. We observe Hubbert curve, it is real. And the Hotelling's prediction of ever increasing price for natural resources is false. Hubbert curve (peak oil) is simply destructive for your world view and your entire career. That is the real problem.
"The price of oil must go up, year by year, at the interest rate." This is from your book. This is a false prediction. We know historical oil prices. And we know historical oil extraction curves.
I notice you did not answer my question about the Solow article. I conclude that you think a single sentence quoted out of context is an adequate basis for understanding an argument you have not seen.
Similarly, you did not notice that my explanation of Hotelling's argument started with simplifying assumptions. For some of the other complications, keep reading until you get to "Oil Prices and Insecure Property Rights."
I notice you did'nt answer my question about the cost of solving climate change.
It is incredible that like Chartertopia, you don't understand the point I want to emphasize. From the first comment it is clear that Chartertopia's argument cannot be against me, but against neoclassical economists. Because I know that economic growth comes from energy consumption. And reducing fossil fuel extraction will be end of the growth. A premature energy transition must be also costly. The purpose of quoting Solow is just to show that this thinking doesn't belong to neoclassical economics. And Nordhaus' calculations prove that: it is not 'enormously costly' in neoclassical economics. Unlike Nordhaus, you and Chartertopia lack a coherent understanding of energy, growth and climate change. What you oppose is just government intervention, what you defend is just anything against ecological sciences. That's all. This is the real motivation for defending the Hotelling model against the Hubbert model.
Your predictions regarding property rights and oil production are also completely wrong (Your production cost hypothesis is also wrong for a simple reason). We know that because the extraction curves of countries where property rights are protected are much more consistent with the Hubbert model. The prime example is US L48 conventional oil production. The reason is simple: When property rights are not protected, political and economic instability can occur. Political and economic instability is the killer of capital and destroying capital leads to reduced extraction. The prime example is the oil production of Russia. I want to end this section with a prediction: You won't respond to a single sentence in this paragraph like you did'nt respond to my first question. Because you can't, these are very clear observations. You can't find any counterexample.
People don't behave as Hotelling assumed. They behave like any other predator population in nature. So, there is no allocation of production over time. Wolves don't allocate rabbits. It makes sense to act like this from the perspective of an individual in the predator population because it is in competition with other species and with individuals of its own kind. Allocation over time is a very costly behaviour from the point of the struggle for survival. The fundamental mistake is the ill-founded leap from profit maximization to allocation.
If you think so highly of climate alarmism that anything else is fantasy, then you put your faith in liars and scam artists whose predictions have all failed spectacularly. We still have polar bears and penguins, Arctic summer ice has increased instead of disappearing, Mt. Kilimanjaro still has snow, we haven't become Venus. Michael Mann is still a liar. Climate models still don't account for clouds and humidity properly, and when fed 20-year-old conditions, still can't model today even close to accurately.
Nordhaus did project 2.5°-3° as the policy and warming cost balancing point with ideal policy, which costs half as much as actual policy. My understanding is that the IAMs also use an assumption that there is a point of a carbon tax where complete replacement technology is assumed to develop at that price point.
I think additionally the costs literature is biased towards finding costs and not benefits of warming. I've never heard of any study refer to the anti-tipping point of drawing us out of the ice age and preventing the next glaciation. A good tell for this is how the astonishing global greening since 2000 is reported in science magazines - always contextualized as minor and irrelevant to the total effect.
There is actually a scientific literature arguing that AGW is keeping us out of a glaciation — not AGW from the industrial revolution but from the invention of agriculture. I discuss it in an old post:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/how-humans-held-back-the-glaciers
Having re-read that article, I continue to find something about that argument bugs me. Primarily it's the presumably very large error bars on exactly when glaciation periods start. They appear to span roughly 12,500 years; if they take even 1% of that time to "begin", that's already longer than most IPCC forecasts, and the nature of ice ages suggests to me that they would take much longer than that to ramp up.
Moreover, I don't see that I can trust where those yellow columns are located in the graph at that link; they're especially confusing when I notice they straddle periods of high insolation. Shouldn't they be in troughs? Or correlating with periods of low temperature?
Ideally, I would trust the argument that we're preventing a new ice age if we had other present-day indicators to check, particularly things independent of atmospheric CO2. For instance, that graph clearly suggests a cyclic change in insolation, regular enough to be traceable to something like distance to the sun or maybe changes to our orbit's eccentricity. Both ought to be easy to measure, and it's possible our instruments are sensitive enough to detect changes that correspond to the roughly-20,000-year periods in the graph.
I remember reading that idea (might have been yours, I do not remember) and mostly thinking it amusing how little we know about AGW that we can't even show it's boon or bane.