Stupid revealed preference arguments …

Not the least funny thing about this argument is the implication that economists who live in Chicago are 1) too dumb to come in out of the rain; 2) severely constrained in their choice of employment; or 3) yetis. I have some sympathy for all of those possibilities, but I doubt that Mr. Tol shares my disdain for freshwater economics.

That’s a pretty funny joke at the expense of climate denialists.

Wait a minute, are you saying he was serious?

This could be turned into a good argument as to why Germany should embrace that dreaded transfer union to the Mediterranean countries. Holiday and migration patterns show that teh market has spoken!

I quote it in its entirety.

But Henry, you left out the part where he reports how many have moved from an area not covered by seawater to that paradise under the sea awaiting so many of us who live near the coastline.

David, I had the same initial thought, but then realized that this is a _very_ high standard indeed. I am willing to say that it is the stupidest argument I have seen made by someone who has academic credentials which are relevant to one bit of the global warming debate.

Walt: Yeah, if you read the comments its quite clear that he’s serious.

On the other side of the coin, we have Hank Hill’s riposte to Dale Gribble’s enthusiasm about growing oranges in Alaska, that if it gets one degree warmer in Texas he’s going to kick Dale’s ass.

Unfortunately the only Youtube clips of this I could find the last time I looked for it cut off right after Dale’s line…

He’s got to be joking! Well, no, he doesn’t, actually. Plenty of enthusiasts would flock to his door even if he weren’t. That’s the scary part.

Actually, now that I think about it, I am reasonably confident that it wasn’t on the initial post – if it were, I almost certainly would have seen it when I cut and pasted the text (the tag resides just beneath the bit of text that I excerpted).

@Henry
I thought it was obvious that the piece was tongue-in-cheek. Your reaction and Peter Dorman’s convinced me that it was not. That is why I added the tag.

I thought it was obvious that the piece was tongue-in-cheek. Your reaction and Peter Dorman’s convinced me that it was not. That is why I added the tag.

Yes, that’s one possible explanation of the sequence of events. Its credibility would have been enhanced if you had updated the post rather than just quietly changing the tag, but whatever.

Henry – nonsense! I asserted that you that you had missed something. Regardless of the issue of the ex post tag addition, it did not come within an ass’s roar of constituting a personal attack. It’s a pity you feel that way.

Ahhh, seen the tag now, that’s better.

Fair enough, Henry. The alarmist “Look out for the bus!” was poorly phrased by me, mis-interpreted by you, no offence intended, no harm done, let’s all be friends.

I love The Onion. Oh, wait…..
Enda, lost in the homilies about ad hominem is the question of Tol being serious or not. You seem to be maintaining that he is not. Evidence has been produced that he is.

Poe’s Law: without an explicit label, it’s more or less impossible to make a satire so ridiculous that someone won’t entertain the idea that it might be sincere.

But, then again we are all historians not economists.

See, that just proves that economists have higher risk tolerances.

“It is odd that a species that lives on the equator and on the pole, in the desert and in the rainforest, is worried about climate change.”

Species don’t worry; people do. All of us living in temperate climes that might be overrun by hundreds of millions of desperate refugees worry at least a little.

“It is odd that a species that lives on the equator and on the pole, in the desert and in the rainforest, is worried about climate change.”

It’s odd that a professor of the economics of climate change could make such a statement seriously. What about all the other species that inhabit the planet that do not have the same adaptability as human beings? Many of which we depend on economically, I might add.

I’m waiting for this comment to be taken down:

Not thinking of going anywhere yourself, Richard? I’ve heard Harare is balmy at this time of the year.

You could continue to triple-job for the Koch Br^h^h^h^h^h^h^h sorry Global Warming Policy Front.

In a way this kind of thing is encouraging: it’s a sign that the “warming isn’t happening” line of denial is no longer convincing to anyone, so people are forced back to the next line of defence, which is “the effects of warming will not be all that bad [at least for people who don’t live near the coast, or depend on glacier-fed water supplies, or rely on crops grown in marginal areas, etc]”. (After that line is no longer convincing either, the line after that will be, “tough luck, there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.” Coming to a blog near you in a few years’ time.)

Man is not a flea, gets used to anything.

“It is odd that a species that lives on the equator and on the pole, in the desert and in the rainforest, is worried about climate change.”

Yes why would anyone worry about rising sea levels, desertification, more extreme weather and the as yet known affects on the ecology of massive changes in the temperature. Not to mention the possibility at some point the methane stored in Siberia will be released causing even worse problems. Obviously this is exactly the same as a professor choosing to take a position at a university with a warmer climate.

Or is that the joke?

@Cian
No joke. An invitation to think. Tokyo subsided by 5 metres in the 20th century. Projected sea level rise for the 21st century is in the order of 0.5 metre. Why would Tokyo worry about a problem one-tenth of the size it has successfully mastered? And if the Japanese could do it in the 20th century, could the Americans do the same in the 21st?

This sort of stuff unfortunately has political relevance. Among the intended audience of mid and high latitude dwellers, warmer (weather) is usually thought of as better. So the argument -even if not intended to stand up to scientific relevance has a lot of political salience. A lot of people are closet fans of a warmer planet.

Well, Richard it is very unlikely to be .5M, more likely 1-2M per century. And this rate of change will continue for several hundred years. Dealing with inconstant, and rising sealevels will be a serious tax/expense on coastal communities for hundreds of years to come. The benefits of a minor extension in the age of cheap energy will be dissipated within a couple of decades. Not to mention all sorts of other changes away from the conditions upon which the design of our infrastructure -especially stuff like farming practices was predicated upon. And the natural world which humans are as reliant upon as any other creatures, that doesn’t figure in economic analysis -so it doesn’t matter.

It is odd that a species that lives on the equator and on the pole, in the desert and in the rainforest, is worried about climate change.

Richard Tol is welcome to show us a sustainable modern civilisation which exists on either Pole.

Otherwise, this is just more attempted muddying of the waters from “Lord” Lawson’s messenger.

Richard Tol at 43, to dave heasman: ‘Why do you worry about that prospect [of desperate refugees fleeing the effects of climate change]? At the moment, there are hundreds of millions of desperate people would love to overrun Europe and North America. They do not. Immigration barriers are pretty effective. Why would that be any different in the future?’

I don’t want to speak for dave heasman, but I worry about this because I care about other human beings. I therefore think that your comment reveals a pretty repulsive unconcern: ‘why worry? It’ll only be some distant poor people who are hurt by all this climate-change stuff’.

@cian
So you are concerned about the impact of sea level rise on poor people. You can do three things. You can reduce your emissions. You can finance dike building. Or you can help them develop. Which is most effective? What do you think they would prefer?

Not to speak for Cian, Mr Tol, but I try to do all three in my house, and the use I make of my spare income. Unfortunately, deniers and their fellow travellers like yourself are persuading governments to do none of the above. Development won’t do much for the populations of the Maldives, or many Pacific islands which will not have a country to develop in. But they are poor brown people, right, so I guess they don’t matter.

One of the most nauseating things about libertoonish ninnies is their habit of clumsily feigning concern for people in less-developed countries, in an effort to score cheap rhetorical points that a clever five-year-old could see through.

I would point out to Richard Tol@41 that not that many people live deserts. But the deserts will spread, taking over steppes and savannah which are now home to millions. We don’t know how far they will spread, as we know from paleoclimatology that ‘tipping points’ can turn wetlands into the Sahara very quickly. Trusting on immigration barriers as in @43 seems rather callous. Is there any evidence adaptation to mass desertification will happen easily and non-violently?

Amazingly, this whole debate does not seem to have much advanced since 1983, as described by Naomi Oreskes. The issue is still wether adaptation is feasible at all at higher levels of warming. Isn’t the burden of proof on economists who use high discount rates here, as their calculations recommend a potential all-bets-are-off warming as great as the one since the last ice age? Climate models can be run for such a warming, but trust in those models becomes low at these extremes. All kinds of terrifying scenarios become thinkable.

Speaking of discounting, shouldn’t the unsolvability of this issue have buried intergenerational CBA’s by now? There are perfectly rigorous arguments to pick low discount rates (by Amartya Sen for example) and arguments from market analogies to get high discount rates. Even leaving aside the philosophical problems with discounting future lives, you can cherry pick a discount rate to defend any moderately feasible climate policy you like. Then what is the use of CBA as a decision making mechanism here?

(Of course, the ethical argument against contributing to desertifying the third world, bleaching coral reefs or causing possible global disaster is trivial, as is the argument for helping the poor or preserving nature in other ways.)

So you are concerned about the impact of sea level rise on poor people. You can do three things. You can reduce your emissions. You can finance dike building. Or you can help them develop. Which is most effective? What do you think they would prefer?

What is the argument even supposed to be here. First of all we know that you don’t actually give a damn about the poor, as you’ve already stated that problem can be solved with bigger borders around Europe. You’re not fooling anyone.

Secondly effective at what? Given we in the west produce most of the emissions, its kind of a no brainer that the most effective way to reduce emissions would be for the people producing them to, you know, reduce emissions.

Thirdly development is doing a lot of work here, given that development can mean an awful lot of things ranging from educating children to building carcinigen spewing chemical factories in countries with no environmental standards.

And fourthly. Dyke building. Everywhere where people live. That’s your solution. Rather than, I dunno, reducing emissions.

Rather than trying to get others to think, has it occurred to you that perhaps you should be the one thinking.

“Tokyo subsided by 5 metres in the 20th century.”

The accuracy of this claim is under dispute in the comments here:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/11/where-does-richard-tols-claim-that-tokyo-today-is-16-feet-lower-relative-to-sea-level-than-it-was-in-1900-comes-from.html

I do remember a conversation with somebody… was it Hal Varian?… who said that his people had estimated that with 20 feet of sea level rise we lose London completely (and everything else that low) because we could not build enough nuclear power plants to pump enough water to keep it from being submerged. But I haven’t done the math. I do know however, that the force on a seawall is not proportional to its size…

“My original post was serious and not.”

OK, now that was stupid. More stupid than if it was described as either serious or not serious.

The build environment, everywhere, is closely calibrated to local climate. Farming is strongly affected by local climate. Ecosystems have evolved to match local climate. A human being can easily move to an area a bit warmer or colder, but none of those other things can move so easily.

Rather than make an argument against that, you claimed your piece was only half a joke. That means that if anyone does address it seriously, you can say “it was only a joke!”; if people don’t address it seriously, you will continue to claim, as you’ve done here, that it means something.

Standard denialism. If Tol is remembered at all, it will be in keeping with Father Coughlin. Oh, that was a joke. Well, maybe serious and not.

Several people have demolished RT @ 41 well enough, but it’s also worth noting that this:

Otto Pohl demonstrates that humans can experience drastic climate change and live to blog the tale.

at best blatantly equivocates on “climate change”.

I think we should worry about a sudden unpredictable heat spike, due to natural variation, that ends agriculture for a couple of years, and with it, ends almost all of human civilization. It is a very likely pattern in complex systems dynamics, although many previous occurrences might not show up in the fossil record, due to the survival of wildlife species in cryptic refugia. Yet we know of a few occasions of sudden drastic change, and it would be devastating to us, now. The reasons why are unclear and even after it happens, people will argue about why — that is, if there is anyone who survives the mayhem.

Even without heat spikes, and with climate sensitivity at the low end, it is going change natural ecosystems from the patterns that we currently rely upon. You would think that by now, economists would have some understanding of the unpredictable nature of the dynamics of complex systems, having just witnessed the crash of the housing and financial bubbles. Alas, a form of anal analytical thought still rules, without the ability to think synthetically. They will never understand ecology.

JWP 11.26.11 at 2:46 pm
“Not the least funny thing about this argument is the implication that economists who live in Chicago are 1) too dumb to come in out of the rain”

Snow

I do think that there is serious problem with the “2K warming is dangerous” theme. Otto Pohl demonstrates that humans can experience drastic climate change and live to blog the tale. It is odd that a species that lives on the equator and on the pole, in the desert and in the rainforest, is worried about climate change.

As anybody stupid enough to say this sort of thing and mean it seriously would likely have difficulty remembering to breathe, in charity and the interest of Mr Tol’s continued respiration I’ll read this as an addendum to his joke (such as it was).

re:43 and the effectiveness of limits on immigration

Whew. I was worried that we’d have to put up with the unwashed after we’d made their countries uninhabitable.

Jeff is right that 2C is just an arbitrary number. The danger/damage is some unknown (and possibly discontinuous) rising function of temperature increase. I disagree about the tundra outgassing, that is a conceivable but not expected feedback. But the trend to more variable weather, with bigger droughts and floodsis serious if it continues. People don’t realize that human society are stretching sustainable food supply limits, with soils and groundwater resources being seriously depleted, add climate instability to it, and the potential for significant dieoff goes way up. But those are the unwashed third worlers mostly, so they don’t count?

@Brad DeLong
I see that people have answered your question about Tokyo on your blog. My source is a paper by Robert Nicholls, who indeed writes “up to 5m”.

The work cited by Hal Varian is about Holland. London was another case study in the same research project, which, incidentally, was led by me.

The subsidence in Tokyo has been mostly away from the coast and is due to the extraction of ground water. See Figure 9.4.7 in

http://wwwrcamnl.wr.usgs.gov/rgws/Unesco/PDF-Chapters/Chapter9-4.pdf

The chart is not sufficiently detailed to see what is happening in the east part of Tokyo where subsidence is greatest, but Tokyo has had to substantially raise its levees in that area.

Needless to say, this is tangentially relevant to the issue of a general rise in sea level. And the use of a statement of “up to 5m”, while accurate, spreads more disinformation than information.

@Tol. I’m sure the people of Tuvalu will be comforted by that.

@Akshay – you don’t need to “tweak the paradigm” to get the answer given by Stern. He is presenting the standard utilitarian analysis which gives the right answer. The people who give a different answer don’t understand the economics of discounting.
http://johnquiggin.com/2007/02/23/discounting-the-future-yet-again/

By the way, although I can hardly enjoin others not to ‘feed the Tol’ since the post is about him, I’ve had my fill of pointless engagement with him, which ended with my banning his sockpuppets from my blog. So, I agree with Eli @81, and will not respond to anything he writes here.

Having read Mr Tol’s “arguments” I now realise he must be part of some hitherto unknown Irish stimulus plan. He is being paid by Trinity College to dig himself into holes on the internet.

A man walking on the deck of the Titanic could walk 180 degrees away from the iceberg.

I would like to thank Jeffrey Davis for this, which gave me a genuine chuckle in the midst of the most depressing thread I’ve ever read on CT.

Sev @79

would be nice if economists in general would show some professional courtesy to the climate scientists who actually know what they’re talking about on this subject.

That’s asking rather a lot, since they don’t even show it to each other.

But the way we’re going, in the long run, there will be nothing but salt water, so those debates will become passe.

WASF,
JzB

Sev @79

” would be nice if economists in general would show some professional courtesy to the climate scientists who actually know what they’re talking about on this subject.”

jazzbumpa ” That’s asking rather a lot, since they don’t even show it to each other.”

More importantly, the past few years have shown that ‘professional courtesy’ toward reality is far from universal among economists, even the elite ones.

Here’s a serious question for Henry, John Q and Brad – who are the honest economists specializing in the effects of AGW?

Another example is this one, by folks from U Waterloo in Ontario.. I.e., the same sort of argument has been made quite seriously by others.

Good god that article is stupid. Please tell me ‘Climate Research’ is a minor journal of zero significance.

Here is a map of subsidence in Tokyo between 1938 and 1975:
http://wwwrcamnl.wr.usgs.gov/rgws/Unesco/PDF-Chapters/Chapter9-4.pdf

Google Earth has a digital elevation map. Elevation is the third number at the bottom of the graph. It shows, of course, current elevation, which is measured relative to mean sea level.

Jeffrey Davis,
Thanks – great comments.

John Quiggin,
“By the way, although I can hardly enjoin others not to ‘feed the Tol’”

Priceless, the thread has been redeemed.

Tokyo dealt with its subsidence problem by imposing strict new planning regulations which stopped people from doing the thing that was causing the problem. Applying the same procedure to…

@Barry – Global warming raises a lot of different economic issues. The result is that, except for full-time modellers, not that many people specialise in global warming as a topic. Rather you get auction theorists weighing in on the design of emissions trading markets, benefit-cost people talking about discount rates and so on.

The big reports that do a reasonably good job are by Stern in the UK and Garnaut in Australia. Both are highly-regarded economists who came to the field without any particular preconceptions.

re: #108 cian
“Good god that article is stupid. Please tell me ‘Climate Research’ is a minor journal of zero significance.”
Well, these days it seems credible. It went through an interesting time (~1997-2003) when Chris de Freitas was an editor and publication of a paper by Soon and Baliunas ended up causing resignations of editors.

I don’t mean this to be as impertinent as it sounds, but didn’t Fukushima in fact contribute to the available evidence? (I realize that defenders of nuclear power have every right to treat Fukushima as a one-off, but in my opinion, we still haven’t adequately discounted the dangers lurking in the economics-driven re-licensing of plants already well past their designed lifetimes. I wonder particularly about France, which despite its enviably competent management, and equally enviable safety record, seems also to have been forced by economic necessity into flirting with potential future disasters.)

Nick Barnes: “Now either he knew this, in which case he is dishonest, or he didn’t, in which case he couldn’t be bothered to spend 30 seconds researching it…”

I vote for Tol as simply dishonest.

@Richard Tol 92

You can build dykes around Tokyo Harbour but you can’t build dykes around every continent and low lying Pacific Island! Even to build dykes to protect the huge number of houses built on low lying sand and drained marshes around the rich world is a bit of an ask. Even if we stick to Japan, we’ve seen the lack of effectiveness of sea walls to stop a tsunami. And short sightedness led to massive populations building on areas below warning stones set up by their ancestors. Most probably some crude “cost-benefit analysis” by some people many years ago said that the likelihood of massive death toll in later generations was of low present value.

The problem is that the effects of coal plants are identifiable statistically rather than individually. If the nearby nuclear plant melts down and you find cesium-137 in your soil, everyone knows who’s to blame. If a new coal plant goes up nearby and your son dies of an asthma attack or your father dies of a heart attack, who can say whether the plant is to blame? It could have been smoke from forest fires. It could have been emissions from your neighbor’s car. It could have been uncorrelated with any external stimulus. Epidemiologically, it’s clear that coal pollution kills a lot of people before you even get to coal’s long-term climate effects, but (except for coal miners) the weapon always has its serial numbers filed off. So who cares that normal coal plant operation kills more people through air pollution alone than nuclear core breaches? You’ll never make liability stick for the former. Better hope that people developing renewable energy knock our socks off and beat coal on unsubsidized price, because it’s pretty clear that in the foreseeable future there are going to be no effective legal curbs on the damage coal does.

Ranjit:
If the cause of the problem is industrialization how is more industrialization the solution? China, for example, has “successfully” industrialized with attended increases in pollution, exploitation of workers, and income/wealth inequality. Are you suggesting that engaging in more of the same will lead, some how or another, to less of the problems the industrialization created? I

New Orleans lives behind levees. It’s disconcerting to look up into the sky to see a tanker sailing past on the Mississippi. It’s enormously expensive to protect the city from water, and it’s made more difficult because it’s an ongoing enterprise: the weight of the levees drives the city even lower. In the future, such projects will be continuous around every place that’s within a few meters of sea level. In this country, we don’t even repair our bridges until pieces fall off, and one party is actively sabotaging the economy to make a point about how dreadful government is. So, the odds of the success of future projects to protect us from the sea are tiny.

All so carbon extraction tycoons won’t be taxed or forced to account for the externalities of their products. It would be nice to think that the rise in sociopathy is due to something novel in the environment.

It is worth revisiting one of Tol’s comments, from earlier:

It is odd that a species that lives on the equator and on the pole, in the desert and in the rainforest, is worried about climate change.

I find this to be one of the most breathtakingly short-sighted, frankly dumb, comments on the topic I’ve seen. The notion that, because people manage to live in lots of different biomes, they shouldn’t care about those biomes changing, is just dumb on its face. What professional economist would assert that, for instance, a car manufacturer shouldn’t worry about gas prices, changes is rubber availability, or shipping?

And if those are valid concerns, why are the literally thousands of other concerns that go along with climate change no big deal?

This is the sound of someone unconcerned with millions of deaths, because, hey, people keep making people.

@Richard 135

I’m thinking of some place like the Gold Coast in Australia, with significant infrastructure built on huge sand spits and reclaimed swamps with multiple points of entry to the ocean. What well known technology has been adopted to protect such places that does not significantly affect their amenity? Coastal defences of sand beaches has not worked in Australia.

Admittedly, the forced relocation of such a city, or the massive loss of its current amenity (beaches, easy access for boating), in a rich country like Australia would be no great tragedy compared to, say, the Japanese tsunami. We’ll adapt, but what cost is there for the rest of the world? Bangladesh?

Migration implies individual climate change

No, it implies that you want to change the subject, and that you’re still trying to make a deniable defense of the third dumbest climate change denialist argument I’ve seen in… Well, weeks.

It isn’t cute. I hope it tl least makes you money.

An epidemic implies individual hygiene issues. Any recession implies individual spending cuts. Inhabiting the moon implies individual rocket flying. & Babies imply individual love making.

Boy, this is a promising line of research, this is.

(I felt addressed by @All to feed the Tol. By the way, if I would live in the Netherlands I would be very worried about nature. In fact, I would be so worried by it that I would dedicate lots of funds to insure against the global inability to deal with the root cause.)

I don’t really se how this ‘prioritizing’ is supposed to work in practice. It’s not as if development aid is this new and untried field just waiting for someone to give it priority to go ahead.

@Watson 127 – it’s spelled “dyke” in British English at least… Interesting thread.

Is it really so difficult to disagree with a modicum of civility? Tol may be incorrect in certain of his factual claims, but has yet (correct me if I’m wrong) to engage in ad hominem, in contrast to a remarkable number of other commentators.

Tol’s claim that Tokyo has subsided 5m over the 20th century appears to be inaccurate (though the widely cited paper above seems to contain data on subsidence in Tokyo only up to 1975).

However, it does appear, from the same paper, that large areas of Tokyo bordering the Bay have experienced subsidence of 2-3 meters from 1938 to 1975.

This is the easy part of the disagreement to resolve, and should be quick prelude to to the heart of what could have been an interesting discussion about the economic effects of climate change and rising sea levels on coastal areas. Instead the easy part seems to have become an opportunity for the less restrained to throw tomatoes.

I’m curious as to the estimate of the cost of building protections against rising sea levels, though. Tol earlier claimed that, in most cases, the cost would be roughly .1% of GDP.

So two questions: (1) why would the cost in so many different areas remain proportional to the GDP of the country in which it was undertaken? (2) does this cost take into account the effects that the increased demand, resulting from the protection building project, on certain skilled workers, machines, and material will have upon other projects underway in the same country or region?

I don’t mean this to be as impertinent as it sounds, but didn’t Fukushima in fact contribute to the available evidence?

The contribution being “you can take a nuclear power station – not even a particularly modern one – hit it with ten metres of tsunami, take out all its backup power and push its core into meltdown, and you still won’t see a single death from radiation sickness”.

are you equipped with precog powers re @145?

Just adaptive expectations based on @143…

It seems to me building a dyke in Japan is a completely proposition to building a dyke in the north of Germany for instance. It has to cope with earthquakes and typhoons. And in extreme circumstances, a breached dyke is worse then no dyke at all.

It is odd that a species that lives on the equator and on the pole, in the desert and in the rainforest, is worried about climate change.

I was finished typing “But we rely on other species to survive. There’s not a lot of agriculture happening in the deserts or on the poles.” …before I realized this too was completely tongue-in-cheek.

Richard Tol, you’re too subtle; for goodness’ sake please start marking your jokes with squiggly ~ or italics or something. Please?

Surely, it will increase GDP to tear down most sea-level cities and rebuild them somewhere else. No problem. Think of all the construction jobs, especially as oil becomes less plentiful and more manual labor may be required. Even building dikes will be good for that. I’m sure people’s great-grandchildren will be pleased for those jobs.

Of course, the Dutch plan ahead, see Netherlands floating houses.

As usual, a fine way to make money is:
a) Privatize the profits and socialize the costs or risks.
Example: will the Oz coal exporters pay for replacing the Gold Coast?
b) Create unfunded liabilities, preferably where someone else has the liabilities, including those not yet born.

I grew up near Pittsburgh, PA, i.e., near coal country. Houses still collapse, although the mine owners are long gone.

It seems to me that if we do give some serious thought to Tokyo’s groundwater subsidence issue, we’d notice that what they did was to pass ordinances addressing the root cause of the problem by banning further groundwater depletion. We also notice that they built no dykes, levees, special migration routes to higher ground or even giant robots purpose designed for pushing back water piloted by giant-eyed blue-haired teenagers. We also notice that after tackling the root cause of the problem half a century ago, no one talks about Tokyo sinking into the sea. Except Richard Tol. I think his example doesn’t say what he thinks it says.

Mr Tol,
As a resident of New Orleans and involved in ecological and environmental issues in this region, I remind you that your suggestion of building levees (or dykes as you call them whatever those are, pardon the LA humor) as the magic bullet to sea level rise is laughable. As you encase the low-lying areas with ever higher rims all you do is create an ever-larger catastrophe when they are (inevitably) overtopped.

Also, let me remind you that there is no magic earth-making machine so the expanse of building 10 meter high levees across hundreds of meters means you are stealing land from the interior which either reduces habitable land in the interior or if spread across a region merely adds to subsidence. And trust me, trying to acquire earthen resources from some far-flung area unimpacted by the loss is ALWAYS cost-prohibitive.

@ John Mashey

Surely, it will increase GDP to tear down most sea-level cities and rebuild them somewhere else. No problem. Think of all the construction jobs, especially as oil becomes less plentiful and more manual labor may be required. Even building dikes will be good for that. I’m sure people’s great-grandchildren will be pleased for those jobs.

As ever, Mr. Tol is existing beyond the bleeding-edge of satire:

“Prof Richard Tol of the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) has said that while the flooding has caused widespread damage, there may be an unexpected fillip to the economy once the clean-up operation begins. “Floods are bad but flood restoration can actually provide a stimulus to the economy,” said Dr Tol.”

http://www.corkeconomics.com/?p=760

I don’t mean this to be as impertinent as it sounds, but didn’t Fukushima in fact contribute to the available evidence?

The contribution being “you can take a nuclear power station – not even a particularly modern one – hit it with ten metres of tsunami, take out all its backup power and push its core into meltdown, and you still won’t see a single death from radiation sickness”.

This goes to the nub of the matter, namely that whatever else happens, the rest of the world will continue to modernize and “develop”. And while Peak Oil is upon us, Peak Coal is not; accordingly, those equatorial people seeking relief from the heat will plug their air-conditioners into an electrical grid powered by . . . fossil fuels.

The only way around this is to go nuclear. Yes, yes, this is where the advocates (whatever their motives are) for “renewable energy” jump in and go on about the evils of nuke power, the benefits of “clean” solar, wind, etc. But haven’t we done this one already? In fact, at just about this time last year, i.e. two Friedman units ago? And remember all those breezy claims about where we’d be a year from then? How did those predictions pan out?

On the economics side of course, this makes the inclusion of the effects of global warming into the costs of fossil fuels all the more obvious – and necessary. So maybe there was a valid point somewhere inside Tol’s mischief after all :-)

Richard Tol @ 163:
Levee is the French word for the Dutch word dyke. There is no English word.

Good Lord. “Dike” (and its alternate spelling “dyke”) goes back to Old English (with some influence from Old Norse).

Levee does come originally from French, but it’s a been a perfectly good English word for over two centuries.

One fallacious way to deal with sealevel rise, is to limit the time span to say a century (or 89years i.e. year2100). Once we get done emitting, sea level will continue rising at whatever rate it reaches for several hundred years. Unless mitigation consists of abandoning low lying areas, the cost of a dike (I won’t go into the spelling game here), goes up much faster than linearly with the height. Its not just a matter of building a mound that is X meters high, such things have to contend with water seepage underneath, pumping any leakage out, the ability of ships to pass in and out of the protected zones, the potential for catastrophic overtopping, etc. So the cost in the first century of SLR is considerable less than the cost of the second century which is … But, those folks aren’t even our children’s children, so I guess they don’t count.

@Peter
Dike is an old word, shared by many Germanic languages. Offa was an Anglo-Saxon, though. Later dikes were built by Dutch immigrants.

re: 169 “But, honestly sealevel rise has gone away”

Sea level, like air temps, can always be construed to favor a denialist narrative. All that’s required is to pick the right subset to trumpet. But from the geological record we know that sea levels can rise and rise a lot. And they rose from Milankovich forcings which are an order of magnitude less than those from the current increase in greenhouse gases.

But this whole issue is a fairly minor one. Sea level is just something that mass media has picked up on because it can illustrated with dramatic headlines, but AGW is primarily an agricultural issue. Droughts. Floods. The increase in habitats for pests. Constrictions in growing seasons and the decline in suitability of major crops. The industrialization of the food supply has done great things, but we’ve also had great luck. Whole civilizations can disappear quickly when the food supply goes south. So to speak.

Okay, I’ll put the “stop digging” comment up front this time.

This paper has that groundwater extraction continues, and that groundwater tables are falling in one of the coastal municipalities.

Ground water extraction is continuing at one third the peak rate. To bring it back to climate change, it’s not but the patchouliest reeking of hippies that’s calling for a GHG reduction to a third of peak. And while the water table is still dropping in some localized areas, your linked paper indicates that this is an infiltration problem. Also that the actual issue of subsidance has been reduced an order of magnitude. IOW, Tokyo addressed it’s sinking problem by replacing most of their tradition method of supplying water via groundwater extraction with a combination of conservation and alternate water supply (i.e. deslination). From that article, and the previously linked USGS one, it’s clear that Tokyo’s approach was to address the water table issue and not to erect giant levees.

Your links. Your metaphor. Thinking about Tokyo w/r/t land level vs sea level leads us to the conclusion that we ought to be cutting CO2 emissions.

As to migration: You don’t have the right data at a global level and neither do I. So let’s stop speculating. My initial remarks referred to Europeans and European policy. I wish I had global data.

If climate change were a Europe-only phenomenon you might have a point, other than the fact that the actual comparison still doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. And while the plural of anecdote isn’t data, I’m pretty sure we’re all familiar with the idea that the warmer equatorial countries have net migratory outflow and the colder northern countries in the Western hemisphere have net migratory inflow.

Canada for example has a very high net migration rate with the four primary sources being the Pakistan, the Phillipines, India and China. What little emmigration we have mostly goes to the US. The US four top immigration source countries are Mexico, China, India and the Phillipines with quite a few Caribbean nations featuring in the top ten. It’s also fairly high in net migration, so for North America, the average international migrant almost certainly experiences a colder climate. Basically, your entire revealed preference argument can only be demonstrated to apply to the very specific term you defined, intra-union migration. You’ve even discounted, for example, persons moving from North Africa to France, or the Middle East to Germany or South Asia to the UK. Even if you do accept the ridiculous notion that migration is driven primarily by climate, it seems to me that you are still far away from demonstrating that people prefer warmer environments. Unless only the opinions of European people count.

SoV and ajay, you may well be right—certainly I don’t know for a fact that you aren’t—but I do know that the present economics of nuclear power plant construction and reconstruction which makes it difficult to build new ones, will also make it almost irresistibly tempting for politicians to wink at keeping existing ones running forever without at the same time making adequate investments in upgrading them.

That’s probably true. But I’m not talking about old plants in developed countries, I’m talking about building new ones in countries that are trying to catch up to first world living standards. I don’t see how Usians have the moral authority to dictate how developed the third world may become and more practically, I don’t see any way to enforce those sorts decisions. So given that third world development is going to occur and given that the only options to power it are coal or nuclear, I don’t see how to avoid pricing the alternatives accordingly. Or for that matter, how to avoid pricing the U.S.’s refusal to build more nuclear plants.

The contribution being “you can take a nuclear power station – not even a particularly modern one – hit it with ten metres of tsunami, take out all its backup power and push its core into meltdown, and you still won’t see a single death from radiation sickness”.

You forgot to mention that it was built on the coast of a Pacific Rim nation, i.e. the most tsunami-prone place you could possibly pick if you were actively trying to get hit by as many tsunamis as possible. Granted, Japan doesn’t have any really tectonically stable places to build, but they could at least have built on 20 or so meters of elevation. 20/20 hindsight, I guess, but it’s not like tsunamis are an unforeseen problem there.

Surely, it will increase GDP to tear down most sea-level cities and rebuild them somewhere else. No problem.

This seems like some kind of sarcasm, but aren’t cities in fact being torn down and rebuilt somewhere else constantly? It’s just piecemeal so people can overlook it when rhetorically convenient. If the average life of a building is measured in decades, and the sea level is moving a few centimeters per decade, isn’t it fairly simple to plan for new buildings to be sea-level-change-safe for their entire expected use lifetimes?

All I’m saying is, look at the problem with some perspective. “We’re going to have to replace all our building stock!” –because we totally weren’t doing that a couple times a century anyway? Besides that, if the US in particular wants to get serious about reducing emissions, we need to replace a lot of our building stock even faster than we normally would, in order to replace it with something that’s configured to allow more use of transport modes other than individual motor vehicles with ruinous inefficiency. Compared to that challenge, building on land with positive elevation is easy.

What’s utterly bizarre here is that the actual costs to society are not being borne by the people doing the polluting. In some rational world we’d say “the cost of dealing with climate change is X to Y”, so we should price carbon accordingly. But this would make fossil fuels quite expensive, which would drive their usage down. But we’re not allowed to do that; instead we get the ludicrous game of pretending that abandoning all coastal cities or adding massive walls to them is somehow a rational response. And it’s completely out of the question to, say, perhaps spend money on solar or wind or geothermal at a fraction of the likely cost of climate change.

New Orleans, by the way, is an example of what will happen to coastal cities. Flooding of vulnerable cities won’t be a stately affair; the dams will be breached by massive storms and a lot of people will die. We could see collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, or other sudden shifts not captured in the models. And for what? To keep profts higher for fossil fuel producers for a few years?

“This seems like some kind of sarcasm, but aren’t cities in fact being torn down and rebuilt somewhere else constantly?”

Not really, no. It’s not everywhere that building lifetime is measured in a few decades. Although that perspective may be common in the US.

and given that the only options to power it are coal or nuclear

Assumes facts not in evidence.

You’ve got your assumptions backwards. We already know that nuclear can handle the baseload requirements of any given country. Otoh, no such thing is known for alternative energy schemes. And I think history has been pretty clear on the subject. As I said, look at all those predictions for alternative energy that were being made this time last year. I predicted at the time this just wasn’t going to happen. I also pointed out that the crowd saying this switchover was going happen Real Soon Now have been saying this for, oh, the last twenty or thirty years. At least.

Guess who turned out to be right one year later ;-)

So if you want to try to convince me, give some hard numbers, feel free to do so. You know of course that I’m not really the guy you should be concentrating on; these figures have also got to be good enough to convince developing countries to go with alternative energy schemes as opposed to coal or nuclear.

Until then, the conversation ought to be, properly speaking, about how to figure in the cost of dealing with AGW when it comes to fossil fuels . . . which also includes the cost of the U.S. not more aggressively building new nuclear utilites. Again, if the U.S. doesn’t do this, how could we possibly expect developing countries not to automatically go with coal-fired plants?

@Dragon-King
I am reluctant to discuss facts with someone who does not put her reputation on the line.

It is clear that Tokyo got its subsidence problem under control in the places that matter.

It should also be clear that Tokyo has extensive coastal defenses. If you don’t want to believe me, try Google. Or fly there and see for your anonymous self.

I am reluctant to discuss facts with someone who does not put her reputation on the line.

it’s comforting to know you’re not a hypocrite.

I should add, too, that there aren’t any countries which handle their entire baseload with nuclear. Even France has quite a bit of non-nuclear generation.

“It is clear that Tokyo got its subsidence problem under control in the places that matter.”
Whew. I thought you were arguing the exact opposite.

“It should also be clear that Tokyo has extensive coastal defenses.”

That’s not clear to me, and I’ve lived here 30 years. The Tokyo bay area tends to look like this:
http://www.pbase.com/davidjl/image/37431099/large
Much of the lowlying areas are filled land that is subject to nasty liquefacation effects when shaken by an earthquake. Oops. That the lowlying areas around Kamakura have far less coastal defenses than the areas destroyed by the March 11 tsunami was discussed on the tube here. Most of the “public works” of a defensive nature have been to deal with erosion of riversides from floods (and to prevent landslides). I guess that counts as typhoon defenses. Although Japan’s crew of pet rich white foreigners complain bitterly about how the Japanese despoil nature with these defensive projects. But that’s another rant.

@SoV

I don’t know what predictions you are talking about, I wasn’t around for them. I don’t know how you’re gauging things either, I do know that last year saw significant increases in the install base of both wind and solar energy. Last year saw 38 GW of new wind power generation. The fifty largest solar farms in the world all date from 2008.

Your assessment of how clear history has been – I’m not sure I get that either. Utility scale PV is pretty new so there’s not a lot of history to be looking at. But in terms of new generation, it’s growing at the fastest rate.

As to the question of ability to supply base load – that question is set up to derail renewables. Yes they are intermittent generators, but if you look at the electrical system as a whole unit then the problems start to disappear. Solar’s production is coincident with peak demand in areas with air conditioning. A large and widely enough spread network of wind farms can provide a steady minimum level of generation. Will it need to be supplemented to meet fluctuating demand, sure but that’s true of a predominantly nuke based electrical systems as well.

Nuclear power also has some pretty steep cost of entry requirements aside from the actual cost. Stability and security are issues, having a large enough technically skilled workforce to run the thing is a problem, since you basically never want to turn the thing off you have to be pretty certain about your fuel rod supply as well as your electrical demand. These are problems more likely to be found in developing nations. They may get to the point where nuke plants are viable, but something has to bridge that gap. To produce and deliver power during the period before the prerequisites are fulfilled.

Renewables make perfect sense for the developing world. Where there’s little to no transmission infrastructure so smaller localized generators make more sense than large central ones. The drawback is that this necessitates energy storage solutions, but with consumer electronics becoming as big a part of the economy as it has, R&D resources are being spent on related battery technology. There’s no fuel requirement so there’s no need to worry about the logisitics of regular deliveries. You don’t need nuclear engineers.

Is there a long way to go before renewables make up the majority of power generation? On a global scale, most definitely. The installed power base of nukes and coal plants is huge. But in developing countries where that pre-existing inventory doesn’t exist?

@Richard Tol,

I’m glad to see that you’ve acknowledged the existence of typhoons. You’ve been studiously avoiding any discussion of the expected increase in severe and extreme weather events resulting from a rise in temperature. I would have expected that any attempt to determine the economic costs of adapting to climate change would have at least a line item for this.

But back to Tokyo, where holding Posiedon at bay is apparently trivial – Typhoon Songda in May of this year forced Tokyo to issue evacuation notices. So even in the most populous and technologically advanced city in the world, the current conditions (re: sea level and typhoons) still occasionally overwhelm. This seems to weigh further against your position that levees will save all the coastal cities. In fact, arguing that they just build ever higher retaining walls while not acknowledging that hurricane and typhoon activity will be worse under your proposed approach of not dealing with GHG, well there’s all sorts of words for it but I am making an effort to refrain from ad-hominem.

I’m glad that you’ve taken enhanced storms into account, but again your assertions leave me skeptical. $19 billion globally? Let me say that I am surprised that it’s so low. Those linked papers will be interesting to read.

Your assessment of how clear history has been – I’m not sure I get that either. Utility scale PV is pretty new so there’s not a lot of history to be looking at. But in terms of new generation, it’s growing at the fastest rate.

Google “rare earth’s” for this blog from December of last year; I’m not going to rehash this one. Suffice it to say, certain people made some rather, er, optimistic claims about how much capacity would be installed by now. Pointing out the basic physics, the history of the field, or even how a lot of those installations were done with some rather hefty subsidies due to expire shortly didn’t deter them in the slightest. The only thing left to do was wait them out . . . and I have no compunctions about pointing out how wrong they were. This stuff is hard.

But in any event, that’s getting rather far afield; I’m not the one you have to convince. Those worthies, in case you’ve forgotten the original point of this thread, are the ones who will be called upon to make “sacrifices” and curtail their own development in the name of global comity. Since that takes the easiest, cheapest and highly reliable source of energy – coal – off the table, that leaves nuclear and alternative energy. And nuclear is already a known and reliable quantity. Good luck convincing these people to wait until batteries (if!), solar voltaics (if!) and so on and so forth become good enough to invest in. Awfully easy to ask other people to sweat it out from you air-conditioned digs, isn’t it?

You said:
nuclear is the only known candidate that can meet the energy requirements of any developing nation that is not also an emitter of greenhouse gasses.

…and this is not true. There are developing – and developed – nations which are almost entirely reliant for their electricity on non-GHG emitting, non-nuclear methods of electricity generation. (Less than 1% of fossil fuel generation.) Some are even net exporters of electricity. Your assertion that all developing nations must either use fossil fuels or nuclear is wrong.

Google “rare earth’s” for this blog from December of last year; I’m not going to rehash this one. Suffice it to say, certain people made some rather, er, optimistic claims about how much capacity would be installed by now

Fascinatingly, nothing turns up.

SoV:

If you take a look, there are 3 countries in the world that use renewable sources for 100% of their generating capacity, 10 that use them for greater than 99%, and 17 who use them for greater than 90%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_production_from_renewable_sources

When you write:

‘Are you seriously claiming that solar voltaics, wind power etc. can deliver on the base load requirements for every developing nation? That’s some claim your making!’

I don’t know exactly who you think is arguing this. Clearly, each country has to be treated as an individual case. Nobody’s advice to a developing country is ‘be Paraguay or Iceland’. However, what people are arguing is that renewables can be a vastly larger part of the mix, especially in those countries, such as – as DKW points out – those in North Africa, where climate conditions are most favorable.

re: 193 “If you can defend a coast against a tsunami, then you can defend a coast against half a metre of sea level rise over a century.”

Let me know where you live. I’ve got the building scrap from our home improvement projects to dispose of — bits of dry wall, an old commode, metal trim from the shower stall, odd bits of fibreglass and old linoleum. That kind of stuff. And a piece of pipe that looks like a saxophone! People dispose of stuff all the time so you shouldn’t have a problem with it. I know I own it, but why should I deal with it? You’ve given us all intellectual cover to dump it on you!

“you can take a nuclear power station – not even a particularly modern one – hit it with ten metres of tsunami, take out all its backup power and push its core into meltdown, and you still won’t see a single death from radiation sickness”

Radiation covers 8 percent of Japan:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-22/japan-land-contaminated-by-radiation/3686324

Google “rare earth’s” for this blog from December of last year

Is it this thread? Because you come out of it looking like an idiot. Again.

Really, Substance? So you’ve got all sorts of links, cites, whatnot to this supposed “breakthrough” in extraction technology? Some 24 point headlines to the effect that bloom boxes are moving like hot cakes? Or some nifty graphics showing penetration of solar-electric into the market is way up and the rate is increasing? Or anything else amazing battery technology now hitting the shelves just in time for Christmas? I’d sure be interested in being brought up to speed on all or any of these wonderful events. So can you give us any articles, stories, reports, whatnot that we can check for ourselves?

No?

Thought not. And you’ve had Two Friedman units for this to have happened since that thread and the one before it was initiated.

Yeah, I’m looking like a real idiot now, aren’t I ;-) But it’s nice to have a recent example of what’s been typical of the industry for many years now. And right here on this blog.

Well, yeah. And sure it would have a lot more force if we completed the phase out of our own coal fired generation, but basically yes, that’s what we’d tell them. In actuality we’d probably say that they could generate however they wanted, but trade and/or aid requires they meet certain requirements like zero mercury emissions or something.

This edict seems to lack force, moral or otherwise. I’m generally not down on the concern trolling you see in these types of cases. But in this particular instance, it looks to me rather strongly like elites who already got some preaching austerity to the come-latelys who don’t. FWIW, I grew up for the most part without running water or electricity, so I have first-knowledge of what it’s like to do without those particular amenities. Especially since my chief job title down on the farm was “alternative energy manager”, i.e., I cut and stacked a lot of wood back in the day – all by hand – and was the first to get up in the morning to get the fires going. It was not pleasant. And I think I would be vexed if meddling foreigners told me I couldn’t have the amenities they have, the central air and heating, the microwave and refrigerator and gas stove and all the other Bourgeois luxuries unless I was hooked into a grid that met with their approval. Why should I abstain from coal just to curb greenhouse emissions? Especially since the guys telling me I’ve to do so for the good of the planet didn’t have any problems with releasing a little CO2 into the atmosphere when it came to their own comfort?

And what are you trying to say about hydroelectric? That it’s not a renewable? I mean I’ll buy the not-carbon neutral argument because of reservoir off-gasing, but unless you’re flooding rain forest, it’s still better than coal.

No, I have nothing against hydroelectric. A fine source of power. But it strikes that people citing a country that get’s 99% or more of it’s energy from hydro as an existence proof that most (or – let’s be honest – nearly all) developing countries have the potential to derive a large fraction of their energy from “alternative” sources strikes me as being just a tad misleading. Not unless you can point to vast amounts of currently untapped hydro, that is.

Well, yeah. And sure it would have a lot more force if we completed the phase out of our own coal fired generation, but basically yes, that’s what we’d tell them.

And they’ll rightly continue to ignore you, on the grounds that meeting the clear and present need to raise the living standards of their desperately poor populations through development and industrialization powered by cheap, coal-fired electricity is more important than whatever unclear future benefit you think they will get from avoiding coal.

Why should I abstain from coal just to curb greenhouse emissions? Especially since the guys telling me I’ve to do so for the good of the planet didn’t have any problems with releasing a little CO2 into the atmosphere when it came to their own comfort?

Because aid money.

Not unless you can point to vast amounts of currently untapped hydro, that is.

You forgot “in developing nations.” Okay, Done.

You know, it’s another one of those things that should be inherently obvious. Like Richard Tol’s claim that the average migrant moves some place warmer. For intra-EU migration that’s true, but it’s pretty obvious that globally, it isn’t.

Africa has vast untapped hydroelectric potential. How could it not be so? Who would make arguments based on the idea that there is no potential for additional hydropower in Africa?

Large projects on the Congo alone could supply electricity to the entire continent. But you’d still have transmission problems. Widely distributed micro hydro projects is probably a better solution, but it requires knowledge of the geography – IOW it’s harder to do.

Regardless, yes there are indeed vast untapped potentials of hydroelectric generation throughout Africa. Probably Central America as well.

So even if the population of Africa were not increasing, and all feasible hydropower were tapped, it would only provide a small fraction of first-world levels of energy use. And of course the population of Africa IS increasing.

That’s economically feasible based on current technology and conditions. Anyways my argument is that renewables like hydro be used to bridge that development period. If Africa develops to the point where their per capita electricity consumption is the same as the current EU average, then I’d be a lot more comfortable with the idea of them building nuke plants. Although by 2050 we may be using Kumbayah turbines powered by the chanting of Lefties.

“The contribution being “you can take a nuclear power station – not even a particularly modern one – hit it with ten metres of tsunami, take out all its backup power and push its core into meltdown, and you still won’t see a single death from radiation sickness”.”

I’d just like to add that every f*cking bit of the what didn’t happen was do to Evul Guvmint requirements for safety and survivability.