Les Jones

Bray's survey was ridiculous.

http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/index.html?find=Peiser&plugin=find&path=

Peiser's paper is less blatently absurd, but still appears to be rather sloppy.

http://chriscmooney.com/blog.asp?Id=1781

Thanks, Steve.

The survey does seem ridiculous. I wouldn't trust an onl!ne survey for much of anything, and I sure wouldn't expect a scientific publication to pick it up.

I can't believe people are publishing papers on what portion of climate scientists believe what. That's not science. At best it's sociology.

It also amuses me when people call "pro-global-warming science" unscientific. Of course it's unscientific. They're trying to predict the future. That's not science, it's odds-making, which is not to say it is unimportant. We're all rolling the big air pollution dice, and it's moronic to pretend there are no consequences to altering the chemistry of our atmosphere, so we should be assessing the risks involved.

Tim Barnett at Scripps Institution of Oceanography recently published a study that's much more scientific. He analyzed ocean temperatures at varying depths over the past several decades, with sampling done in all major oceans. He observed obvious warming trends, most drastic at low-to-medium depths, but he also attempted to reconstruct the historical trends using state-of-the-art models. Instead of trying to model the future, he tried to model the recent past and compare it with real observations. He was able to tease apart effects from volcanic eruptions, El Nino, etc., and he concluded that man-made changes account for most of the observed trends. It was impossible to duplicate the real data without including fuel combustion in the equations.

That's a pretty controlled experiment by climate science standards.

Out of curiosity, any idea what the estimated costs of climate change might be?

hellbent:

I've looked into cost estimates here and here; though three years old, U.S. labor unions produced a frequently cited paper here.

Those first two are cost estimates of the Kyoto protocol. The last one is a little closer to what I'm looking for. What's it going to cost to shift agriculture from the Midwest to the Canadian prairies and the Alaskan tundra? What will it cost to move people out of areas that experience drought? I'm not looking for costs of regulatory measures; I'm looking for costs of actual climate change.

You can't estimate those costs with lines on a graph. This is risk analysis. You're looking at areas on a graph, an upper bound and a lower bound and everything in between. Graphs that just show a mean value are inadequate. We need to know best-case-scenario predictions and worst-case-scenario predictions and estimate the odds of each.

What if the Arctic Ocean becomes a useful shipping route? What if the Great Plains become desert? You can't compress all that to a line on a graph, not if you're trying to be honest.

The bottom line here is that we don't really know how bad it could get. What if Miami floods, or New Orleans? What do we do with millions of refugees fleeing a Bangladesh inundated with seawater? How do we shift our agricultural production from one place to another as temperature and rainfall patterns change?

What is the cost of the warming and climatic changes we have already put in motion, even if we do nothing at all to mitigate and compensate for them? I'm not asking the question you answered. I want to know what it's going to cost us to just keep doing what we're doing. You can't answer that with discrete numbers and lines, because no one knows exactly how our actions will impact the climate. All we can do is guess, and guesses always have upper and lower bounds. Don't give me no lines.

hellbent:

1) I've run across a few other articles or studies about the benefits of global warming, the vast majority of them more than five years old:

--NCPA, Cure to Global Warming Could Be Worse Than the Disease.

--Emerging Future, Global warming has benefits as well as costs.

--Cooler Heads Coalition, The Benefits of Global Warming.

--Jeff Bennett, University of NSW, Assessing the Non-Market Benefits and Costs of Global Warming (framework only).

--Thomas Gale Moore, Hoover Institution, Health and Amenity Effects of Global Warming.

--Id., Special Report: Global Warming Benefits May Exceed Risks.

--John Baden, The global warming myth and its selfish defenders.

2) I've not relied on numbers from any of the foregoing, both because the studies seem well past their sell-by date and the huge variation in temperature increase predictions (depending on the computer model used) makes any benefit calculation mostly guesswork.

In this respect, I fully agree that climate change assessment needs less science and more statistics. The recent paper by James Hansen -- and critiques by Patrick Michaels and Luboš Motl -- might provide additional insight.

By the way, JunkScience has an amusing Kyoto cost counter.