Major US Gov Study says Climate Change will shrink US economy and kill thousands

There is absolutely no point in individuals living "greener lives" if the market still relies on fossil fuels. This problem can only be solved at the industry/global cooperation level.

 

I wasn't silent

Secondly, you keep using the phrase 'propping up' . That means you think the coal and oil industries would be dead if not for government interference, which as I just said is ignorant of how efficient fossil fuels are as a store of energy. Nothing comes even close to how cheap and abundant fossil fuels are as a store of energy.

 

No... That isn't what it means. That means the inertia or the desire to invest more into renewables or other forms of energy such as nuclear energy rather than maintain the status quo is lessened. It also creates a situation of bribed legislators spewing this type of bullshit:

 

Yes it does. 'prop up' means something would fall over if not for the support (in this case government support). Oil and Coal would not fall over wihtout government support. That's insane. Quite the opposite as the government is providing for more tax breaks to oil and coal's competitors.

I just showed you that renewable energy gets way more tax breaks than coal and oil......

 

Yes, according to your arbitrary definition. By no means have I ever even remotely implied your definition of "prop up".

Corporations desire to maximize profits even if they are already at the top of the food chain. Oil is still at the top of the food chain. They still want to maximize profits. Hence they donate a **** ton to US campaigns. You think its for charity? No, its to maximize profits. So yes, the industry at the top of the food chain bribed their way into being "propped up".

 

Its not arbitrary. The phrase 'prop up' is not complicated and means the same thing to everyone.

 

To end it here and not go on a pedantic poo flinging debate, let me clarify that no, I never once believed that the oil and gas industry would fall apart if the government didn't subsidize it. So replace the term "prop up" with whatever term best fits in your eyes.

 

That is just flat out false or at least the way you frame the statement is false.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/10/6/16428458/us-energy-coal-oil-subsidies

Read the article before you state "lol vox".

 

First, the difference would be i said tax breaks and not subsidies.

Second, lol vox. Why do you do this to yourself.

Is it lost on you how dumb the above claim is? Basically the way they did their analysis just correlates to what is used more as an energy source. This is moronic. Of course oil and coal are used more as an energy source. who doesn't know this? a subsidy to help heating bills is not a fossil fuel subsidy. its an any energy source subsidy at best.

 

You read that article rather quickly. Why would differentiating between tax break and subsidy effect the federal spending burden? Tax breaks decrease revenue right?

 

more on the NCA report

 

That's a projection out to 2100, 10% of GDP by that time isn't a lot at all, especially given other factors, let me explain this

So under Obama, 2% GDP was the new normal, projected outwards over 80 years, the US economy averaging that grows to 460% of itself in 2100

Under Trump, it's cooking at 3.5%, but it is admittedly running a bit hot, the new norm is probably around 3%, project that out to 2100, and you have an economy at 1060% of today.

Depending how we calculate, linear or magnitude its either a 600% or 60% difference, if people can't grasp the long run GDP difference of 1% compounding, if the US had grown at 3% rather than 4% for those first 200 years, the average US citizen would have the same income as the average mexican citizen, that is how large the gap becomes.

And so in this report, if we take the worst possible situation, that it's a magnitude calculation (I'm not sure about this, it's unusual for a gdp calculation to work that way, but it might), the absolute worst, almost impossible to occur Steyer funded projected outcome using the most generous calculation, has the US economy caused by Trump's policies at wait for it, 954% of its size, running at only 207% the size of the alternative.....

This reads exactly like the Marx and Engels treatise where a snapshot of human conditions is taken, completely avoiding the benefits that come from having a nation magnitudes wealthier (tax revenue comes from the production of that wealth....) which is what actually pays for things.

I'm open to much of the science, and for the most part, i still do trust them (the scientific models in 99% of those projections all look reasonable enough for any long term projection), but they seem to be caught in a net of political charlatans, idiotic media, economic vampires and crony capitalists, because the moment it leaves the scientific sphere, and enters the economic and political spheres, it becomes a whole boatload of crap.

 

More Malthusian nonsense. Can’t believe people still far for this crap — and the “population crisis” nonsense.

 

Since you use her as an example to discredit this report, I think it's fair that I'll post a few things about her style (and frankly credibility). Below are those few things that ... well, read for yourself.

p.s. Hulme that you ref is about pragmatism and I fully get that (and think of it myself many times). No issue with that.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/curry-ohc-corrections.html

Recently, Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry, along with Texas A&M climatescientist Andrew Dessler, testified before a US Senate committee on the subject of climate change. While Dessler's testimony was excellent and well-supported by the body of scientific evidence, Curry's contained a number of errors (i.e. see the Guardian on global warming attribution, Eli Rabett on Antarctic sea ice, and Tamino on Arctic warming and sea level rise, for starters).

Curry's main and most flawed argument was that information in the latest IPCC report should decrease our confidence in human-caused global warming; an argument she based in large part on the supposed global warming 'pause', which is itself a fictional creation. While the warming of average global surface temperatures has slowed (though not nearly as much as previously believed), the overall amount of heat accumulated by the global climate has not, with over 90 percent being absorbed by the oceans.

A few days after her Senate testimony, Curry took to her blog to dispute these data, essentially arguing that the amount of heat absorbed by the oceans has also 'paused', which would then support her arguments. However, in evaluating the ocean heat content data and scientific literature, Curry made a number of mistakes. This gives us an excellent opportunity to properly evaluate the science on rising ocean heat content and see what it tells us.
​

https://andthentheresphysics.wordpr...urry-confuses-laypeople-about-climate-models/

The real problem with this report is not that it’s fundamentally flawed; it’s just simplistic, misrepresents what most scientists who work with these models actually think, and ignores caveats about alternative analyses while amplifying possible problems with climate models. Climate models are not perfect; they can’t model all aspects of the system at all scales, and clearly such a non-linear system could respond to perturbations in unexpected ways. However, this doesn’t mean that they don’t provide relevant information. They’re scientific tools that are mainly used to try and understand how the system will evolve. Noone claims that reality will definitely lie within the range presented by the model results; it’s simply regarded as unlikely that it will fall outside that range. Noone claims that the models couldn’t be improved, it’s just difficult to do so with current resources; both people to develop/update the codes and the required computing resources. They’re also not the only source of information, so noone is suggesting that they should dominate our decision making.

Something to consider is what our understanding would be if we did not have these climate models. Broadly, our understanding would be largely unchanged. We’d be aware that the world would warm as atmospheric CO2 increased, and we’d still have estimates for climate sensitivity that would not be very different to what we have now. We’d be aware that sea levels would rise, and we’d be able to make reasonable estimates for how much. We’d be aware that the hydrological cycle would intensify, and would be able to make estimates for changes in precipitation. It would, probably, mainly be some of the details that would be less clear. If anything, without climate models the argument for mitigation (reducing emissions) would probably be stronger because we’d be somewhat less sure of the consequences of increasing our emissions.

I think it would actually be very good if laypeople had a better understanding of climate models; their strengths, their weaknesses, and the role they play in policy-making. This report, however, does little to help public understanding; well, unless the goal is to confuse public understanding of climate models so as to undermine our ability to make informed decisions. If this is the goal, this report might be quite effective.​

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http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/04/judy-currys-attribution-non-argument/

Following on from the ‘interesting’ House Science Committee hearing two weeks ago, there was an excellent rebuttal curated by ClimateFeedback of the unsupported and often-times misleading claims from the majority witnesses. In response, Judy Curry has (yet again) declared herself unconvinced by the evidence for a dominant role for human forcing of recent climate changes. And as before she fails to give any quantitative argument to support her contention that human drivers are not the dominant cause of recent trends.

Her reasoning consists of a small number of plausible sounding, but ultimately unconvincing issues that are nonetheless worth diving into. She summarizes her claims in the following comment:

… They use models that are tuned to the period of interest, which should disqualify them from be used in attribution study for the same period (circular reasoning, and all that). The attribution studies fail to account for the large multi-decadal (and longer) oscillations in the ocean, which have been estimated to account for 20% to 40% to 50% to 100% of the recent warming. The models fail to account for solar indirect effects that have been hypothesized to be important. And finally, the CMIP5 climate models used values of aerosol forcing that are now thought to be far too large.

These claims are either wrong or simply don’t have the implications she claims. Let’s go through them one more time....​

Here you see an issue with Curry pushing bad information. This is a back and forth between Curry and Tol (Tol is a critic of the doom and gloom viewpoint and isn't a fan of IPCC; more aligned with being pragmatic):

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/c...-curry-peddling-disinformation/#.W_rxFOhKiUm\

https://judithcurry.com/2011/11/08/tols-critique-of-the-ludecke-et-al-papers/​

 

I know who Tol is and I'm well aware of Curry's reputation among her "peers." I also know that science is a process of back-and-forth, and that not everyone gets everything right every time. I also did not cite Curry to "discredit" the report, only to suggest that the report should not be accepted at face value uncritically, and that people with a lot more expertise on the topic might disagree about what's in the report. By focusing on Curry's credibility rather than her specific arguments (and the original post was a guest post on her blog, so you're not even really critiquing Curry in this instance), you run the risk of merely distracting from the critique. Not saying that that is your intention, but potentially that can be the effect.

 

The last example from my post is her pushing bad info (I mean really bad info, to the point of ... is she trying to mislead on purpose?).

She posted many articles from Pat Michaels and some of those, including this, fall into the...pushing bad info. You can read up on him and some of his wild claims to some of his conspiracy theories about climate change as a money maker. You should know that he himself stated (in 2010) that about 40% of his works are funded by petroleum industry. That's problematic and his wild claims make him quite not credible... you (Curry) don't post someone else article, especially bad one, and be a by-stander.

With that said, she also contributed her own comments as copied below. And yes, there is a back-and-forth in science, with newer info sometime correcting what was once thought to be correct info. It's the overall process of ever increasing understanding that eventually lead to consensus and theory and law. The process, however, doesn't apply to claiming and making arguments that are known wrong, or a misunderstanding (nothing wrong if it's corrected and not a regular occurrence) or misrepresentation of current known info - that's where you lose credibility. And yes, there is consensus and once you have consensus, if you want to break that, you better bring some solid points... not wild claims, not bad arguments, not misleading info... that's just not going to do it in Science (but it just might work in politic, or to confuse the public).

JC comments: I think that the idea of a National Climate Assessment Report is a good one. Documentation of regional climate change and variability, and interpretation of this change in context of land use changes, natural variability and external forcing would be a valuable exercise. Historical records as far back as we can go, and the regional paleoclimate analyses are necessary to provide context for any recent changes. Interpretation of these changes in context of local and regional vulnerabilities would be valuable.

What is NOT needed is naïve attribution of everything ‘bad’ to human-caused CO2 emissions, and projections using climate models that are most definitely not fit for the purpose.

Let’s see what the Report looks like (I wonder if there will be ‘leaks’ so we can see what it is like), but I am not optimistic given the problems with the previous Assessment Reports. My suspicion is that the Trump administration will find that it needs to push the ‘reset’ button on National Climate Assessment process.

Or, this could be the perfect opportunity to implement the red team/blue team approach that has been advocated by Steve Koonin, John Christy and myself.
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I don't bother with someone with a lack of credibility, but there is a response to that article:
https://blog.hotwhopper.com/2017/06/pat-michaels-theorises-climate.html


p.s. I stated this before in past posts about climate change - I wish the consensus is wrong, that we are all wrong. Show it and I'm happy.

ps2. you used "history" to claim the report should be taken with a grain of salt --- perfectly fine. I used "history" here about her and the author of that article. It's not a distraction, it's an appropriate response. But I also posed a link with a direct response above.

 

I took the point of your last example to be the disagreement over her "take" on attribution--the RealClimate source you linked to says as much: "In response, Judy Curry has (yet again) declared herself unconvinced by the evidence for a dominant role for human forcing of recent climate changes."

I don't see how someone "declaring herself unconvinced" is "pushing bad info" . . .

seems to my there are two attempts here to question the credibility of two different people. that's fine, but I may not spend much time (sorry!) with trying to "refute" attempts to question credibility.

good point

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Again, I don't see someone "pushing bad info" here. we may just have to agree to disagree. You may in fact simply be disagreeing with Curry's views--hard for me to tell.

thanks for the link to hotwhopper.com

 

https://babylonbee.com/news/global-...e-front-door-wide-open-while-the-heater-is-on

 

A Christian news satire site. Really? You are actually quoting a Christian version of the onion. Have we really resorted to this in the D&D section.