Why is Trump bothering to withdraw from (or even mention) the Paris climate deal?

by philg

According to my Facebook friends, the world is ending yet again. A few months ago it was Jew-hatred, inspired by the Trumpenfuhrer (see “Donald Trump is threatening Jews?“) and manifested as phone calls to Jewish schools and community centers. Now that the perpetrators turn out to have been an Israeli Jew with an autodialer and an anti-Trump journalist here in the U.S., my friends have been posting like crazy about the dire planet-melting consequences of an American withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. Here are some samples of their posts and shared posts:

As a parent, as a global citizen, as a human being, as a life form sharing this planet, I cannot fully describe how upset I will be if our ignorance-pandering President does what he is apparently likely to do and exits the most promising global compact of any sort in recent years.

Ugh. Ashamed of my country that made such blind idiocy possible.

Jackass. Pulling out: idiotic. Toying with it arrogantly, omnipotently, to keep the world in suspense: disgusting.

Be there if you can to protest should Trump make good on his reckless promise to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord. The rest of the world is aghast. This is no longer just about us or about stupid Trump voters — this decision affects the entire planet. [Regarding an Emergency Rally at the White House.]

I’m embarrassed to admit that, though perhaps I once did know what this agreement was (and in 2015 even asked about it here, with Dumb climate change agreement question: how is it different than a diet pledge?), I’d completely forgotten about it until this Facebook frenzy. I’m trying to reeducate myself on what friends tell me (shout at me, actually) is an item of cataclysmic importance to the planet’s future. So far I’ve read “Q. & A.: The Paris Climate Accord” (nytimes):

Unlike its predecessor treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris deal was intended to be nonbinding, so that countries could tailor their climate plans to their domestic situations and alter them as circumstances changed. There are no penalties for falling short of declared targets. The hope was that, through peer pressure and diplomacy, these policies would be strengthened over time.

So this is like my daily visits to the gym that I conduct annually? And my strict all-organic steamed vegetable diet that I alter as circumstances change, e.g., when bacon is available?

While the current pledges would not prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the threshold deemed unacceptably risky, there is some evidence that the Paris deal’s “soft diplomacy” is nudging countries toward greater action.

Countries are sending each other positive vibes?

Because the deal is nonbinding, there are no penalties if the United States pulls out.

Now I’m more confused that ever. If I go to the Big Texan with friends and chow down on a 72 oz. steak (never beat Molly Schuyler, though, sadly), how would they knew whether or not I am still officially adhering to my steamed vegetable diet?

This agreement seems hardly more than an excuse for a lot of highly paid bureaucrats to gather periodically in beautiful resorts at their respective taxpayers’ expense. (Was it ever approved by Congress, the way that a treaty would be? Is the agreement reflected in any U.S. laws?) So the only arguments that I could see for withdrawing are to save money and to save the planet by keeping these folks from flying around to meetings. But here in the U.S. the government spends $4 trillion per year. Cutting expenses at this level is not a Presidential matter.

So why would Donald Trump even bother to mention this nonbinding penalty-free agreement to make, essentially, New Year’s resolutions? And why do my friends think it makes a difference? If they’re interested in keeping up with things that might affect atmospheric CO2, why wouldn’t they be looking more at solar cell production and innovation, windmill design and installations, etc.?

 

43 thoughts on “Why is Trump bothering to withdraw from (or even mention) the Paris climate deal?”

  1. I really think we are collectively frying the planet and ought to do more–and now.

    That said, a non-binding agreement with no penalties is not much better than no agreement, from what I can see.

    I can’t see the point of such an “international agreement.”

  4. Media is pissing me off the the Paris Climate Agreement coverage. They are saying that if Trump pulls out, the US will join Syria and Nicaragua as the only two countries not part of it. Why wouldn’t other countries not want to be part of receiving billions of dollars from the US? We are paying, they are receiving.

  5. It doesn’t make sense for individuals concerned about climate change to be “looking more at solar cell production and innovation, windmill design and installations”. The goal of moderating climate change can only be achieved if everyone (not just a few individuals) reduces carbon emissions. Atmospheric CO2 levels are a global public good. This means that individual market incentives do not align with the overall interests of the community. An international effort by national governments is required to avert a tragedy of the commons.

    >So the only arguments that I could see for withdrawing
    >are to save money and to save the planet by keeping
    >these folks from flying around to meetings

    The carbon overhead for operating the international management system needed to address climate change is trivial compared to the emissions reductions needed and basically unavoidable if global warming is to be addressed.

    It may be that the Paris Agreement isn’t very good, but if this is so, the appropriate response is for the U.S. to participate and strengthen the agreement over time. Let’s not forget that a predominant reason why the Paris Agreement is so weak is that the world’s second largest carbon emitter (with triple the emissions of #3) cannot commit to aggressive reduction targets because the Republican Party (currently led by Donald Trump) has (for decades) blocked the policies needed to meet those targets. Arguing that it doesn’t matter if the U.S. withdraws from the Paris Agreement because the agreement is weak when the U.S. has been a major factor in producing said weakness is circular reasoning.

  6. Philip: Liberal tears are exactly the point. For Bannon, liberal outrage serves to demonstrate to Trump’s supporters that he’s not like other politicians. It’s like virtue signalling: it’s entirely symbolic.

    You’re correct that the Paris Agreement doesn’t bind the US at all. The US could stay in the Paris Agreement and do whatever it wants. David Roberts explains: Bannon is pulling one over on Trump. There is zero reason to exit the Paris climate accord.

    After decades of frustration, negotiators finally accepted that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) simply does not have the power or legal authority to force serious action to reduce carbon emissions. A comprehensive, legally binding, unanimous agreement was always an impossible dream.

    Instead, the Paris accord relies on the power of transparency and peer pressure. It asks participants only to state what they are willing to do and to account for what they’ve done. It is, in a word, voluntary.

    In Canada we have a phrase describing this approach: “sunny ways,” referring to Aesop’s fable about a contest between the Sun and the North Wind. The three elements of diplomacy are persuasion, compromise, and threats. The Paris Agreement relies entirely on persuasion and compromise; there’s no legal consequences for failing to meet the goal (“Nationally Determined Contribution”) that you’ve set.

    G C: A voluntary agreement is the only kind that’s available. We don’t have a world government (Hobbes’ “Leviathan”), so there’s no way to force national governments to cooperate. Think of the Paris Agreement as an institution for coordinating voluntary actions – it’s a way to add up each country’s contributions.

    What happens when the US withdraws, besides liberal tears? Within each national jurisdiction, there’s a domestic political argument playing out. For example, in Canada, the four largest provinces have brought in carbon pricing, and the federal government is going to bring in a national carbon price floor which rises over time. Naturally, there’s opposition to carbon pricing (“this is just a tax grab!”), led by the federal Conservative Party. They’ll use the US withdrawal as ammunition for their arguments: “Why should we act when the US isn’t doing anything?”

    So withdrawing from the Paris Agreement will likely weaken somewhat the commitment of other countries to reduce their CO2 emissions. That said, I think the agreement itself will remain in place: China (!), the EU, and Canada are all committed to continuing.

    More concretely, it’ll damage US power and US foreign policy. The US is the most powerful country in the world, but ultimately, power depends on consent. Louis Halle, The Cold War as History (1967):

    … real power is always something far greater than military power alone. A balance of power is not a balance of military power alone: it is, rather, a balance in which military power is one element. Even in its crudest aspect, power represents a subtle and intimate combination of force and consent. No stable government has ever existed, and no empire has ever become established, except with an immensely preponderant measure of consent on the part of those who were its subjects. That consent may be a half-grudging consent; it may be a consent based in part on awe of superior force; it may represent love, or respect, or fear, or a combination of the three. Consent, in any case, is the essential ingredient in stable power–more so than physical force, of which the most efficient and economical use is to increase consent.

    When the US withdraws from the Paris Agreement, it’s basically saying to the rest of the world, “screw you, we don’t care about climate change.” It’s a stupid thing to do. The US’s blatant refusal to cooperate with the global effort against climate change will make other countries (whether allies or adversaries) less likely to accept US power. And as the effects of climate change become worse and worse – killer heat waves, droughts, natural disasters, refugees – people will be looking for someone to blame. The US will be an obvious target.

    As David Roberts puts it: the US is basically shooting itself in the foot.

  7. Miha: Sure. The basics are pretty simple: CO2 traps heat, and we’ve raised the level of CO2 by a huge amount. We can’t do anything about the CO2 that’s already there. We can only slow down and eventually stop adding more CO2. So the CO2 that’s already there will continue trapping heat and raising temperatures long after we stop. Watts’s graph is only looking out to 2100.

    (As an aside, I find the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance around global warming to be extremely interesting. It’s a collective action problem, so people aren’t motivated to do much about it, even when it’s blatantly obvious that we’re facing a huge problem: the cost of action is entirely borne by you alone, while the benefits are spread out over the entire planet, so the benefit to you personally is trivial. And yet people don’t want to just say, “I know it’s a problem, but I don’t want to do anything about it.” So they convince themselves that it’s not a problem.)

    To explain in more detail: Why the delayed reaction? Why aren’t CO2 and temperature directly related?

    It’s basically conservation of energy. A warm object radiates heat into space, and a warmer object radiates more heat. So the Sun warms the Earth to the temperature (“equilibrium temperature”) where incoming solar energy = outgoing thermal radiation.

    By dumping a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, we’ve reduced outgoing thermal radiation. Therefore the Sun will slowly warm the Earth until it reaches a new, higher equilibrium temperature where incoming solar energy = outgoing thermal radiation again.

    But the key point is that if we raise the equilibrium temperature fast enough, the actual temperature can’t keep up.

    Tyndall, who discovered that CO2 blocks longwave radiation in 1862, compares the atmosphere to a dam thrown across a stream: water slowly rises behind the dam until it reaches the top (the equilibrium temperature). We’re raising the top of the dam extremely rapidly, and we’re not slowing down. Estimates of where exactly the top of the dam is don’t really matter, because by the time the water reaches that level, the dam will be even higher!

    The Paris Agreement is an attempt to slow down the rate that the equilibrium temperature is rising, and eventually stop it. But of course it doesn’t lower the height of the dam that’s already there!

    If the Paris Agreement is successful, we can expect it to have two effects:

    (1) What the eventual stable temperature of the Earth is, centuries from now – is it going to be two degrees higher? Six degrees? More?

    (2) In the shorter term (over the next century or so), how rapidly temperatures rise. The more we can slow them down, the better chance we’ll have to adapt successfully.

    Things are not looking great; we’ve waited too long. As Machiavelli says:

    … the Romans did in these instances what all prudent princes ought to do, who have to regard not only present troubles, but also future ones, for which they must prepare with every energy, because, when foreseen, it is easy to remedy them; but if you wait until they approach, the medicine is no longer in time because the malady has become incurable. For it happens in this, as the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure.

    Thus it happens in affairs of state, for when the evils that arise have been foreseen (which it is only given to a wise man to see), they can be quickly redressed, but when, through not having been foreseen, they have been permitted to grow in a way that every one can see them, there is no longer a remedy.

  8. Neal: “The goal of moderating climate change can only be achieved if everyone (not just a few individuals) reduces carbon emissions.”

    But if innovation in solar cell design and manufacturing makes solar cells way cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels, won’t everyone then reduce their carbon emissions?

  10. >But if innovation in solar cell design
    >and manufacturing makes solar cells
    >way cheaper than electricity from fossil
    >fuels, won’t everyone then reduce
    >their carbon emissions?

    Yes, but new energy sources must compete against network effects and massive government subsidies (past and present) given to carbon heavy energy sources while one of their key advantages is not priced in to their competitors costs. Of course it makes sense for individual investors to pursue these innovations to the extent they think they can succeed in the existing market against these headwinds. However, as a strategy for moderating global warming, the best which could be hoped for is progress which is much slower than it should be.

  11. http://www.breitbart.com/economics/2017/05/31/every-bad-thing-avoided-rejecting-paris-climate-accords/ Seems to be a decent listing of all ‘cons’ of Paris ‘deal’ . Not to mention that it does not have power of treaty because it was never before US Senate for ratification in the first place. With so much our governments can’t do it seems a very long shot that they can affect climate. But as Russil noted, French are going to blame US when next cyclic heat wave catches lots of older people who could not afford air-conditioning without ‘free’ quick ‘medical care’.

  12. @anon: A gradually increasing globally coordinated carbon tax would not be difficult to organize and implement. It would do the trick (perhaps it’s the only way to do the trick). Moderating global warming isn’t even the most compelling reason to do it. Cutting traditional pollution, conserving a remarkable resource (which will be depleted anyway) for other uses, and improving security alone provide sufficient rationale. The economic catastrophe predicted by that Brietbart article is typical of the arguments made against all of the major environmental improvements we’ve made in the past (e.g. removal of lead from gas and paint, elimination of ozone depleters, reduction of employee exposure to vinyl chloride monomer). History tells us that environmental improvements are likely to be much less expensive than originally anticipated because our economy is quite resilient and adapts to change.

  13. I am neither climate scientist nor a chemist but have dabbled in solving real world problems that required physics. Can someone explain me in few paragraphs, with H2O vapor being prevailing greenhouse gas in the atmosphere dwarfing rising CO2 amounts in the atmosphere why is there any focus on CO2? As far as I recall water has highest heat retention per unit of weight. That is why it, and not containers of CO2, is used for cooling engines and machine guns .

  14. Neal:
    I stopped reading your post after ‘A gradually increasing globally coordinated carbon tax would not be difficult to organize ‘ – it is very hard and it already happened that state actors faked the numbers and took donation money. It would require correctly measuring any source of CO2, nearly impossible task. The simplest thing that could happen is sensor hacking even if someone could install sensors at all CO2 source, assuming it were legal in any liberal democracy.

  15. It’s official: The US has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. As Philip notes, there’s basically no reason for it to do so; if the goals set by Obama are too onerous, Trump could have just changed the goals.

    anon: A carbon tax is basically just a sales tax on fossil fuels. It’s not hard to implement – British Columbia did it in six months back in 2008. You just need to know the carbon content of different fuels (how much in gasoline, how much in diesel, etc.). BC’s carbon tax was brought in by a right-wing government, so they used all of the revenue to lower provincial income taxes (it’s revenue-neutral), keeping the government the same size. BC currently has the lowest income tax rates in Canada. If American conservatives ever overcome their cognitive dissonance on climate change, that’d be the most free-market way to go: polluters pay, and everyone who pays income taxes gets an income tax cut.

    “Can someone explain me in few paragraphs, with H2O vapor being prevailing greenhouse gas in the atmosphere dwarfing rising CO2 amounts in the atmosphere why is there any focus on CO2?”

    Sure. Excess CO2 stays in the atmosphere for about 100 years. (It doesn’t dissolve into the ocean immediately because the ocean’s surface is saturated; Revelle figured this out in the 1950s. It eventually gets removed through ocean turnover.) So when we elevate the CO2 level, it stays elevated for a long time, trapping more and more heat. H2O, on the other hand, is directly related to temperature. If you put more water vapor in the air, it precipitates out in about 10 days. So it doesn’t have this long-term effect.

  17. @anon: Almost all of the carbon which we burn is supplied through a relatively small number of companies that in fact are already taxed. There is no need for tailpipe CO2 monitors; a tax applied at the other end of the supply chain would not be difficult to administer.

  18. Neal , not so: everyone can burn fires using free or almost free wood.
    Past administration did try to mandate something on fireplaces but it is near impossible. I afraid that in free society with free economy Russil’s BC tax on few producers is a fig leaf: many people can start companies and get creative with fuel sources they need, not necessary going renewable. I agree that economies will adopt and report fake numbers out of the blue, as has happened in some other non-producing industries. And indeed, last year after lobbying for taxes on coal same billionaires invested in devalued by their lobbying US coal and started sell it abroad, for heating and steel production by CO2 level – faking entities. CO2 is different from list of poisons you mentioned that there is no need to make effort mining and producing it to make it part of complex products, it is non-poisonous byproduct of oxidation chemical reaction life on Earth has been relying upon.

  19. @anon: CO2 emissions from wood burning are trivial and can be ignored; they don’t contribute to global warming anyway because the carbon source for wood is atmospheric CO2.

  20. “It’s official: The US has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement. As Philip notes, there’s basically no reason for it to do so; if the goals set by Obama are too onerous, Trump could have just changed the goals.”

    But Philip doesn’t seem to care about the $100 billion per year that is redistributed to other countries. I do. People here have said that the US didn’t need to pull out if they don’t like the terms, but that is hardly true. There is no reasonable way to stay in, and not pay.

  21. The CO2 correlation with heat is like people who get along marrying each other. It appears intuitive but in reality, it probably never happens. Marriages are usually between people who hate each other & there are probably many factors changing the climate which we don’t know about. It’s definitely hotter, but it’s hard to believe it can be from CO2 unless the concentration is so high, it’s hard to breathe.

  23. Finn: I didn’t mean to turn this posting into a referendum on the “science” (such as it is) of climate change. But… since you referenced that video (which I hadn’t seen before), this Nobel-winning physicist isn’t saying anything all that different from what astronomers have told me privately (they don’t want to have their labs shut down so they are afraid to utter their heresies in public). It may be that the Earth is warming, but they don’t believe in any of the results from the climate change prophets.

    When people have a religious commitment to a point of view and funding critically depends on staying within the religion, I don’t see how the published research can be correct. (See http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 for the classic paper on how most published research is wrong even when the topic is something people are less passionate about.)

    Whoa… at about 27:00 he speaks an inconvenient truth! China’s one-child policy prevented about 375 million people from being born. That’s a whole U.S.+Canada! So if you really cared about the Earth you would spend nearly all of your energy on cutting population, especially in the countries that consume a lot of resources per capita You’d try to prevent most immigration to the U.S., for example. You’d eliminate tax deductions, tax credits, and welfare programs that encourage Americans to have kids. Since nobody in the U.S. is seriously proposing this, I think we can infer that Americans don’t care about climate change.

    [I have to part company with him at 28:xx. Nuclear power seems like a crazy bad idea in a country such as the U.S. that is incompetent at building and maintaining infrastructure. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power#.WTDLtOXysuU says “By 1985, Forbes had labeled U.S. nuclear power ‘the largest managerial disaster in business history.'” I’m sure that nuclear power is working well in France, but they also manage to do health care without bankrupting themselves!]

    All of that said, I think we should be funding research on solar cells, windmills, and batteries. Then we can stop burning coal, oil, and gas while saving money. We’ll have less pollution in our cities. And maybe we will reverse global warming to the point that Facebook can be filled with “next Ice Age” paranoia!

  24. @philg: Do these astronomers think it is a good idea to do the experiment and take global CO2 to 600 ppm?

  25. As Steven Chu put it, the Stone Age didn’t finish because they ran out of stone. The Carbon Age will not end because we run out of coal or oil, but because we collectively move forward towards better resources. This, as Phil says, is done by investing in solar, windmills and batteries, but also investing in energy efficiency and reduced power consumption. While we’re ever increasing our energy consumption, the productivity of our energy has been rising (see energy efficiency in household appliances, or computers).

    I know this argument is not popular, but there’s also the question of symbolism. As an anecdote, an example from Switzerland: here people are conscientious about the source of their meat. Not only quality wise, but also geographical provenance. Products are labeled, and people actively avoid eating meat that comes from far away countries, because it’s perceived as environmentally bad to eat chicken from Thailand, for example. This is mixed with patriotic feelings of wanting to support the Swiss producers, but I’ve seen these behaviors even at college canteens, by students. One can argue that Switzerland is rich enough to engage in such behavior, but it is also an entirely voluntary behavior. And the US is one of the richest countries in the world.

  26. Neal: Do these folks who are experts in planetary physics express an opinion about what will happen if global CO2 output continues to be X for Y years? No. They don’t seem to be worried about climate change at all (just like the rest of us, apparently, since, as noted above, nobody is seriously talking about reducing population in the high-consumption countries and reducing global population overall). They don’t say that climate change is impossible, only that it is likely to be gradual and that technology will evolve to cope.

  28. PhilG

    “When people have a religious commitment to a point of view and funding critically depends on staying within the religion, I don’t see how the published research can be correct. (See http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 for the classic paper on how most published research is wrong even when the topic is something people are less passionate about.)”

    Are you sure you represented the contents of that paper accurately? Knowing something about the mathematical literature–I can state with near certainty, that except for small errors of convenience, almost the entire mathematical literature (refereed journals) is true and accurate. I suspect the same is true in physics, chemistry, and computer science.

  30. ZZAZZ:

    Phil has referenced the well-known article that deals primarily with replication crisis in medical research.

    While social “sciences” and bio/medical research are the undisputed leader in production of scientific junk :

    http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/
    http://andrewgelman.com/2016/10/22/30294/

    saying that in physics “refereed journals” ensure that publications are “true and accurate” sounds too optimistic:

    Physics paper’s results off by factor of 100
    Physics journal pulls two papers for data shortcuts
    Science retracts physics paper after magnetic field wasn’t what it seemed
    Physics paper sinks amid accusations of unacceptable “overlap”
    Texas participant in physics breakthrough repaid $5M in misspent funds
    etc
    etc
    …

    http://retractionwatch.com/?s=physics

  31. ZZAZZ: Could Ioannidis be wrong? He says “The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.”

    I think this is consistent with your statement that mathematical literature is mostly true. Can there possibly be a field that attracts less public interest?

    Your statement is also consistent with

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/28/science/retractions-scientific-studies.html

    (they don’t list any math papers, but maybe because the journalists don’t care enough about math)

    I’m not sure why it would be worth retracting a paper describing the output of a climate model. It will take a few hundred years before we know how well the model predicted reality and there was never an expectation that the model was complete (since the Earth is more complex than any model).

    (Note that heaping derision on planet doomsayers and academics who get funding for scribbling out models doesn’t mean someone is in favor of continuing to dig up all of the coal and oil and set it on fire.)

  33. Carbon emissions restriction is a moot concern at this point. Global oil, natgas, and coal production are going to fall into steep decline inside the next 15 years because of rapidly declining Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI). The much ballyhooed American shale plays are already in decline because the product is simply not economical. Even the Saudis are clearly in financial trouble, as their extraction costs are skyrocketing. This is clearly happening all over the world right now.

    We need to be talking about ways to make sure people don’t chop down every tree in the world for fuel as this unfolds. Setting up another derivatives market (carbon credits) is beyond ridiculous.

  34. >Do these folks who are experts
    >in planetary physics express an
    >opinion about what will happen
    >if global CO2 output continues
    >to be X for Y years?

    Thank you for answering this question, but it is not the question I asked.

    >They don’t seem to be worried
    >about climate change at all

    This isn’t surprising or responsive to my question. Regardless of what one thinks about climate change, it does not make sense for individuals to worry much about it, especially when the political climate rules out the most (only?) effective policy responses.

    >only that it is likely to be gradual and
    >that technology will evolve to cope

    Wait, I thought you said they did NOT have an “opinion about what will happen if global CO2 output continues to be X for Y years”. It seems they DO have an opinion which is apparently based on ignoring one side of the error bar on the analysis work which has been done.

    Let’s accept the premise that climate change is “likely to be gradual and that technology will evolve to cope”. In fact, it is vague enough that I agree it is an accurate (but incomplete) statement of our current understanding. This does not explain why we should take the bet that this particular likely scenario will come to be. There are other more problematic scenarios which are also likely, and some which are unlikely but significant enough (in probability and/or consequence) to be worth considering. After all, we are talking about an irreversible (on human time scale) change to the planet.

    Against this uncertainty we have a set of policies which really do nothing more than move forward changes which the market will bring anyway because the carbon we are burning is a nonrenewable resource. If anything, these policies would enable us to make these inevitable transitions in a more orderly fashion because they will be triggered by more flexible policy constraints rather than inflexible resource constraints.

    Public goods and externalities are well understood causes of market failure. Why shouldn’t we prefer to leave a little more carbon in the ground and a little less in the atmosphere than the market will produce given the presence of these causes of market failure?

    >nobody is seriously talking
    >about reducing population in
    >the high-consumption countries
    >and reducing global population overall

    Straw Man: There is no reason to think this is the only way to moderate global warming.

  35. Thanks Russil Wvong. If tax on carbon is tax on fossil fuel then we already have it in the USA in some form or shape, proceeds being routed to political needs as current moment calls (we have been adopting for a long time).
    Your account of CO2 vs H2O in atmosphere does not match direct observation and analysis: CO2 molecule is over twice weight of water molecule and should stay lower than water molecule in Earth atmosphere, CO2 actively filtered from atmosphere by trees and anything green, including green staff in oceans, and water is highly visible in atmosphere sometimes blocking sky for weeks, having accumulating all passing heat. Does not exactly matter if it recycles in 10 days, more accumulated heat passed to environment if recycles often. Since water is prevailing it seems a bad joke to care about CO2 before water (and it seems futile to care about water). If it were serious we would try invert cheap processes that suck CO2 out of atmosphere on a large scale cheaply, similar to NH3 production by Haber invention and Haber-Bosch process.

  36. @anon: The MW of CO2 is not an important factor in its behavior in the atmosphere because concentration is a factor in the relative density of gases and the concentration of CO2 is low. That is, even though the CO2 molecules are heavier, they do not contribute significantly to the overall density of the gas because there are only 400 of them for every million molecules. As Russil points out, the key difference between water and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is that water often reaches saturation concentration while carbon dioxide never does.

  37. Neal, that’s exactly my point. We see lot’s of water that is concentrated in lower atmosphere, but in addition there is lot’s of water gas in upper atmosphere that is not seen and is not being recycled as often due to lower density and pressure in upper atmosphere. If CO2 were as prevailing in atmosphere we would have in Antarctic and probably CO2 clouds elsewhere in colder climates.

  38. Neal, regarding “@anon: CO2 emissions from wood burning are trivial and can be ignored; they don’t contribute to global warming anyway because the carbon source for wood is atmospheric CO2.”
    There are regions on Earth where wood (and coal) burning in open fires produces sooth that is a major pollutant and the cause of regional warming. What makes you think that US could not go that way? When we born we are no better or worse than other people, a decade or so of bad policies and bad actions and everyone becoming $20K poorer could cause people here start burn wood and coal in open fires for heat and other necessities.

  39. >Nuclear power seems like a crazy bad idea

    One place where I do not see any carbon free alternative to nuclear is international shipping.

  40. I looked around a bit and I see that maybe Physics is not as pure as I thought. Nevertheless, I would say that Physics is pure enough that there is no room for dispute in all the well established theories: mechanics, electromagnetism, optics, quantum mechanics, relativity, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.

    And, I admit that there are untrustworthy journals in every field.

    I also admit that most people place way too much faith in computer modeling. I was once appalled to see an engineer doing research against model generated data rather than against collected data. He actually believed the model more than he believed reality.

    But, putting that aside.

    If you throw out climate modelling as a tool to look into the future, what’s left? How would you investigate these potentially important phenomena? If you have already come to the conclusion that the changes happening to the climate are not man made, what evidence led you to that conclusion? And if you haven’t come to that conclusion, why do ridicule people worried about it so persistantly?

  41. “If CO2 were as prevailing in atmosphere we would have in Antarctic and probably CO2 clouds elsewhere in colder climates.” above should read “If CO2 were as prevailing in atmosphere we would have CO2 ice in Antarctic and probably CO2 clouds elsewhere in colder climates.” When I was young there were ice-cream carts that used CO2 ice to cool ice-cream.

  42. >By 1985, Forbes had labeled U.S.
    >nuclear power ‘the largest managerial
    >disaster in business history

    In the 1970s, a recently retired engineer told me the story of how he had tried to get the pour of a section of the very thick primary containment wall delayed until provisions could be made for the pipes which blueprints showed crossing the wall at that point. He was unsuccessful, and provision was eventually made using jack hammers.

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