Here is an excellent essay on the economics of various global warming scenarios. It does not propose that the current hysteria is incorrect. It simply considers the costs of various proposed remedies, a little bit like Bjorn Lomborg does.
Whether someone is serious about tackling the global-warming problem can be readily gauged by listening to what he or she says about the carbon price. Suppose you hear a public figure who speaks eloquently of the perils of global warming and proposes that the nation should move urgently to slow climate change. Suppose that person proposes regulating the fuel efficiency of cars, or requiring high-efficiency lightbulbs, or subsidizing ethanol, or providing research support for solar power—but nowhere does the proposal raise the price of carbon. You should conclude that the proposal is not really serious and does not recognize the central economic message about how to slow climate change. To a first approximation, raising the price of carbon is a necessary and sufficient step for tackling global warming. The rest is at best rhetoric and may actually be harmful in inducing economic inefficiencies.
This is a quote from one of the books being reviewed. It is so sensible that I am surprised to find it in The New York Review of Books, a publication I once subscribed to but gave up on years ago.
He proposes five possible scenarios to deal with the problem and calculates the economic cost of each. One scenario is “business as usual.” Two are radical programs proposed by Al Gore and Sir Nicholas Stern. The results of those two programs, calculated purely on economic terms and based on projected conditions in 2100, are disastrously worse than business as usual.
Personally, I am a skeptic and believe that, while the planet is warming, this is a natural phenomenon and we can do little to alter it, nor should we. I am also watching the sun spot cycle over the next year to see if the climate might change yet again.
Tags: economics, global warming, science
Dr K., the review is written by one of most brilliant and insightful scientists of the 20th Century, Freeman Dyson. He is 84 years old. Writes well, doesn’t he? I wish I wrote one hundredth as well, even twenty years ago. Such a mind.
Read about him at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeman_dyson
And he never earned a PhD! The great Richard Feynman joked about it in one of his books: Dyson would come into Hans Bethe’s lab at Cornell about 10AM, do the NY Times crossword puzzle in pen while drinking tea, then chat with Bethe right before lunch. Then go home…having done more than anyone else in terms of theory.
Honestly, Dr. K. you should check out a couple of Dyson’s books. They are humane, well written, and much, much smarter than I can ever be:
Disturbing the Universe, 1979
Weapons and Hope, 1984
Origins of Life, 1986
Infinite in All Directions, 1988
From Eros to Gaia, 1992
The Sun, The Genome and The Internet, 1999
The Scientist as Rebel, 2006
A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe, 2007.
If nothing else, I recommend the last two. Seriously, order them from Amazon. You won’t be sorry.
And if you don’t have time for that, at least read this:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20370
Dyson doesn’t care about what people think, nor about fashion. He cares about science as a vehicle for uncovering truth. He is the last, I think, of the true British polymath intellectuals. His views on science and religion, the future of science, and yes, global warming, are thoughtful and well reasoned. Check out this great quote from Dyson last summer:
“My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.”
-Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society”, Edge, August 8, 2007.