I made a mistake. And it’s a good thing. Following up on my Running on Empty post, I wanted to give a more finely-grained analysis of climate costs relative to GDP growth, so I returned to my sources to see who their sources were and how they did their calculations. Watson et al., compiled their […]
A little over a year ago, Robert Watson, former chair of the IPCC, and two co-authors published a report titled “The Economic Case for Climate Action in the United States.” Based on trends over the past few decades, the authors estimated the current total annual cost in the U.S. of losses from weather events intensified […]
Jargon is a heck of a drug: If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. The discourse of global warming/climate change is lousy with jargon. This rampant obfuscation gives science […]
I read the IPCC summary for policy makers so you don’t have to. You may have heard that CO2 emissions have to fall by 45% by 2030 to avoid the possibility of overshooting 1.5°C global warming. Actually emissions must decline by 45% from 2010 levels, which are already substantially lower than 2018 levels. The strategies […]
2018 Arctic sea ice minimum As I may possibly have mentioned once or twice before, I am a total nerd. One of the web sites I watch is NSIDC’s site tracking arctic sea ice. To be honest, I’m a little surprised that it is still functioning, since the Trump Administration believes that climate change is […]
Is the Ecological Salvation of the Human Species at Hand? In “De-growth vs a Green New Deal,” Robert Pollin relies on the same blurring of distinctions that Robert Solow employed 46 years earlier in his condemnation of The Limits to Growth as “bad science.” Nicholaus Georgescu-Roegen pointed out Solow’s obfuscation in the article that inspired the term […]
Next Friday could be a very bad day somewhere along the East Coast I think I may have mentioned once or twice that I am a nerd, right? So, last year during hurricane season I got hooked on a site called Tropical Tidbits. The neat thing about this site — well, from a nerdy point of […]
The July-August issue of New Left Review published an essay by Robert Pollin titled “De-growth vs. Green New Deal” in which he outlines his objections to what Peter Dorman affectionately refers to as “a suicide cult masquerading as a political position.” I have written a response to Pollin’s article, that I have submitted to NLR, […]
From a Department of Energy report entitled Revolution… Now; The Future Arrives for Five Clean Energy Technologies – 2016 Update a nifty graph: (click to embiggen) If the graph is remotely accurate, these are large cost reductions. Accompanying the graph is this verbage: Decades of investments by the federal government and industry in five key […]
Updated: Renewable Germany bailing out Nuclear France I just read the following in an article by a Mr. Bill McKibben and thought it to be an interesting perspective on why climate change/global warming is being so vigorously denied. If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past […]