>>Economists, science and climate change
Freeman Dyson is emeritus professor of physics at the Center for Advanced Studies at Princeton — the chair once held by Einstein and Oppenheimer and currently by nobellist Frank Wilczek. In the current issue of The New York Review of Books Dyson tackles The Question of Global Warming.
Specifically, Dyson excoriates Yale professor of economics William Nordhaus for the kind of financial forecasting that ignores the state and progress of technology. In his new book A Question of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies, Nordhaus identifies putting a price on carbon as a necessary first step for climate action, and Dyson likes this. But then Nordhaus dismisses as horribly expensive and counterproductive most aggressive investment in new technology. Nordaus identifies “low-cost solar power, geothermal energy, some nonintrusive climatic engineering, or genetically engineered carbon-eating trees” as “low-cost backstop” technologies that might save the world.
Concerning the possible candidates for a low-cost backstop technology . . . Nordhaus has little to say. He writes that “no such technology presently exists, and we can only speculate on it.” The “low-cost backstop” policy is displayed in his tables as an abstract possibility without any details. It is nowhere emphasized as a practical solution to the problem of climate change.
Dyson points out very sensibly that low-cost backstop technologies do exist now, and others will exist within five to ten years. A number of these technologies (solar power, tidal power, wind power and even carbon-eating trees) are economically scalable to eliminate the need for coal and other fossil fuels within a very few decades. Economists don’t like to place bets on new industries, but the very existence of these technologies moots the whole book.
For a more optimistic take on what the future holds in efficient technology — in direct opposition of the dire economists’ view — see Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns. –Seth Masia
>>Ethics of climate change
Interesting article in Scientific American on the ethics of climate change, by John Broome, professor of moral philosophy at Oxford.
Formerly an economics professor, Broome notes that economists inevitably value current decisions by applying a discount rate. They do so, he says, without recognizing that a discount rate is a moral judgement: How can we value a future life, or a future quality of life, differently than a life today?
It’s a good read. It largely ignores more proximate issues: What are the costs of massive migration and resource wars, and what are the potential benefits of immediate investment in emerging technologies and industries. Historically, the cascading effects of wars and new technologies have far exceeded “realistic” forecasting. Choosing between resource wars and profitable new investment should be a no-brainer for any ethical person. The question for the financier might be this: which investment has a richer, more immediate payout, General Dynamics (a defense contractor) or Nanosolar (a new photovoltaic technology)? If you choose the defense contractor, you’ve made a morally indefensible discount-rate decision.
The comment train following the article is also instructive. It’s amazing how many flat-earth climate-change deniers are still out there, and reading Scientific American. –Seth Masia
>>April was the cruellest month for Arctic sea ice
Arctic sea ice melted quickly in April, leading researchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center to forecast that the Arctic may have more open water this coming September than ever.
After reaching an historic minimum last September, polar sea ice bounced back over a cold winter. Now much of the cover is composed of thin first-year ice, which disappears more than twice as fast in the spring melt as thicker, denser second-year ice.
Full details are available at the NSIDC website.
>>German study: Warming trend will flatten for a decade
By Seth Masia
SOLAR TODAY
For years, a debate has raged between climatologists who forecast global climate change based on greenhouse gas forcing, and global-warming deniers who say it’s just part of a natural cycle and we can expect things to cool off again someday.
Deniers often point to a phenomenon called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation as a natural cycle causing climate heating and cooling. The AMO is a 70-year cycle in ocean-surface temperature first identified in 1994 by Michael Schlesinger and his team at the University of Illinois. Schlesinger doesn’t like the name, because the same cycle can be found in Pacific and Indian Ocean waters, too. The temperature oscillation can be traced back to the last ice age, and beyond. The cycle last “bottomed” 35 years ago, and it has just peaked.
Last August, a group of researchers at the British Met Office reported that the AMO’s upcoming cooling mode is likely to “flatten” global warming for the next few years. Now a team of climate modellers at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University confirm that prediction. They say the AMO cooling trend will flatten out most global warming trends for about 10 years. After that, their model predicts, temperature will soar upward again, assuming we don’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions sharply in the interim. According to both the British and German models, as long as greenhouse gases continue to rise, average global temperature will snake upward in a 70-year stepping pattern: upward for several decades, then flat for awhile, then upward again — but never downward.
The danger, of course, is that climate change deniers will jump on any “flattening” we may experience as evidence that global warming is a myth.
