Voodoo Economists 4: The idiocy of crowds or, rather, the idiocy of (crowded) debates
Once again, three climate activists who are not terribly good at debating agreed to participate in a decidedly unscientific format against people who mostly make stuff up. And what a shock, it had a bad outcome — although this one seems to be partly a result of gaming the vote as much as anything else.
In 2007, it was the now-infamous climate science debate, broadcast by NPR on the proposition “Global warming is not a crisis” (see Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 2: Why deniers out-debate “smart talkers”). The pro-science side lost to the anti-science make-stuff-up side (Michael Crichton, Richard Lindzen, Philip Stott) on that one.
So you can imagine what happened when the debate proposition moved over to economics, “Major Reductions in Carbon Emissions Are Not Worth the Money” — especially with the ‘pro’ (i.e. delayer) side handled by three world-class economist-loving liars make-stuff-uppers: Bjorn Lomborg, Peter Huber, and Stott (details here, transcript here and, for true masochists, NPR audio here).
NOTE #1 TO ALL PRO-CLIMATE-ACTION DEBATERS: It is very hard to win a staged debate with people who make stuff up. It is next to impossible to do so if they are skilled debaters. And you are guaranteed to lose if it isn’t a one-on-one debate. Why? The only way to out-debate somebody who makes stuff up is to call them out on it. And if they keep doing it, you have to keep calling them out. Even the most skilled debater has difficulty publicly questioning the honesty and integrity of opponent again and again (which is why you rarely see anyone attempt it). But you’ll never convince an audience that multiple ‘experts’ are making stuff up.
The final result of this absurdly unscientific and meaningless activity was preordained. It was also so bogus that even the organization that put on the pointless debate actually acknowledged in its own press release (here) that part of the audience (the conservatives, of course) gamed the system:
The audience … initially didn’t favor the motion, with 49 percent opposed, 35 percent undecided and only 16 percent supporting it….
The sentiments of the crowd changed after the debate, with 48 percent still for paying to cut carbon while 42 percent now convinced it wasn’t worth the price. (Ten percent said they were still undecided.) After the debate, participants decried the format as no way to get at ideas and Huber had an inkling why his side succeeded: strategic voting. In other words, many of those already convinced that cutting carbon is a boondoggle pretended to be undecided.
When an organization staging a debate puts out a press release that openly undercuts the results, you have to wonder why a serious media outlet like NPR would even bother covering it.
As for the debate itself, Lomborg is one of the craftiest people I’ve ever debated. His knowledge of climate science is encyclopedic, which is the biggest clue that he is a compulsive liar. His biggest trick is that he hides behind the IPCC report, but he thoroughly mischaracterizes it and simply ignores the parts he doesn’t agree with:
We’ve entrusted the UN Climate Panel, the so-called IPCC, with its thousands of scientists, to outline the most likely climate consequences. They do not support Tickell, or any of the other, more alarmist writings of recent times.
Actually, the IPCC does (see “Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly“). And, of course, the 2007 IPCC report is almost certainly a serious understatement of what is likely to happen on the business as usual path (see “Hadley Center: Catastrophic 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path“). And, even more pathetically, as Lomborg well knows, the entire thrust of the IPCC report is to argue that the cost of inaction is much higher than the cost of action (which the IPCC puts at about 0.11% of GDP a year for stabilizing at 450 ppm).
What the IPCC does tell us is, yes, sea levels will rise, somewhere between six and 24 inches over the coming century. Such a rise is entirely manageable, and not dissimilar to the about 12 inches we barely noticed, have risen over the last 150 years.
Lomborg knows that he is misstating what the IPCC said (see “Debunking Bj¸rn Lomborg — Part II, Misrepresenting Sea Level Rise“) and that the IPCC explicitly says it is omitting ice dynamics that could lead to much higher rates of sea level rise. Most important, Lomborg knows that the scientific literature since the IPCC report (whose analysis is based on reseach only through about 2oo5) is all on the side of much more alarming rates of sea level rise of the kind Tickell warns about (see “Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100“). Heck, even the Bush Administration acknowledged as much last month in a major report reviewing the scientific literature of the last few years (see US Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections).
Tickell spoke next, but pretty much let Lomborg get away with this nonsense. He should simply have said that Lomborg’s comments were factually wrong, that they were at odds with every recent study. Instead, he talked about what happened 55 million years ago, but as a stand-alone argument, I just don’t think that’s compelling to people. It was, after all, 55 million years ago.
I do not want to waste a lot of time criticizing allies or debunking somebody who has been debunked as much as Lomborg (see “Lomborg skewers the facts, again” and Debunking Bj¸rn Lomborg — Part III, He’s a Real Nowhere Man).
But Lomborg was mistakenly labeled an economist by the debate organizers (see here), and he repeatedly cites economists to defend his do-nothing approach:
We must save the world, yes. And here’s how. At The Copenhagen Consensus Project last year, a panel of the world’s most distinguished economists looked at a wealth of research of all the major problems in the world, and the possible solutions to them. And they showed us where we can do the most good.
They agreed that global warming’s real, and they were unanimous that the best way to tackle it is by investing much more in research and development in low carbon energy technologies. The economists also found that carbon emission cuts, tonight’s motion, would be the poorest use of our money.
They confirmed that we can do so much more good elsewhere, that we need to ease our preoccupation with cutting carbon, and focusing much more on fixing the real problems of the here and now. This is about saving everyone’s world.
Now citing a bunch of distinguished economists as evidence that we shouldn’t spend serious money mitigating greenhouse gas emissins now (as opposed to delaying for an unspecified amount of time) is like … citing a bunch of ‘distinguished’ right-wingers on the same point [see, for instance, Voodoo economists, Part 2: Robert Mendelsohn says global warming is “a good thing for Canada” and Voodoo Economists, Part 3: MIT and NBER (and Tol and Nordhaus) — the right wing deniers love your work. Ask yourself “why?”].
You can read about the Copenhagen consensus and its flaws at Wikipedia here. Lomborg conceived and organized, hand-picking the largely anti-Kyoto group of economists to get the outcome he wanted, but that wasn’t tough since these are (friggin’) economists!
As The Economist (!) magazine itself wrote of the effort that it co-sponsered (!):
… there is little reason to suppose that politicians or the wider public will go along with a consensus reached among a group of economists, a tribe renowned in the wider world for its desiccated view of human welfare.
Ouch!
Even The Economist magazine sees economists as having a view of human welfare that is “drained of emotional or intellectual vitality,” as Merriam-Webster defines the word. I don’t even think the word ironic does justice to that. I’m gonna have to make up a word — hyper-irony or meta-irony or irony squared or maybe irony factorial (irony!).
The Copenhagen consensus of economists doesn’t prove that combating climate change is the poorest use of our money. It proves that if you want to combat climate change, funding economists is the poorest use of our money.
For the record, here is the list of Lomborg-loving desiccants that should once and for all disprove the “wisdom of crowds” theory — Nobelists (!) are asterisked:
- Jagdish Bhagwati
- Robert Fogel*
- Bruno Frey
- Justin Yifu Lin
- Douglass North*
- Thomas Schelling*
- Vernon L. Smith*
- Nancy Stokey
Compared to Peter Huber, Bjorn Lomborg is Sir Thomas More. I’m not certain that any energy analyst in the world has been so conclusively debunked as Huber.
Huber and Mark Mills simply made up a bunch of numbers involving the energy used by key components of the Internet (like routers) to argue in Forbes magazine back in 1999 (here) that already the Internet used 8% of U.S. electricity — and that the electricity consumption of the Internet was rising so quickly that:
It’s now reasonable to project that half of the electric grid will be powering the digital-Internet economy within the next decade.
It’s 2009, boys — how is that prediction looking now? [Pause for laughter, indefinitely.]
Electricity demand growth has been singularly unexceptional since the explosion of traffic on the Interent. If anything, the Interent is a net energy saver, as I and others have shown (see “Ignore the media hype and keep Googling — The energy impact of web searches is very LOW“). Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has an entire website devoted to a point-by-point technical debunking of Huber and Mills.
I am loathe to quote Huber’s lies at all, but his core argument — that there’s nothing we can possibly do to stop the developing country’s from burning every lump of coal, that developing countries will never embrace renewables and that rich countries shouldn’t either — must be addressed:
In fact, it betrays a profound ignorance about how difficult it is to get huge amounts of energy out of these very dilute, thin forms of fuel, like sun and wind. Renewable technologies are not moving down the same plummeting cost curves that we’ve seen in our laptops and our cell phones.
When you replace conventional with renewable everything gets bigger, not smaller — much, much bigger — and costs get higher, not lower. China and India won’t trade three cent coal for fifteen cent wind or thirty cent solar.
And if we force those expensive technologies on ourselves, we will certainly end up doing more harm than good.
There are lies, damn lies, and Peter Huber’s remarks.
Everything he said is made up. It is incredibly well documented that renewables have been moving down the cost curves for over two decades. See, for instance, the International Energy Agency report, Experience Curves for Energy Technology Policy. Yes, in the last few years, that price drop has stalled, because of incredible 30% growth year after year (driven in large part by dropping prices) and generally soaring commodity prices that have caused coal and nuclear power plants costs to double in cost or more (see “Power plants costs double since 2000 — Efficiency anyone?“).
Anybody have the cost curves for laptops and cell phones over the past two decades? They stopped “plummeting” in cost quite some time ago.
And “three cent coal” vs. fifteen cent wind or thirty cent solar is crap, true voodoo economics. It is comparing the cost of coal electricity from fully paid off coal plants with power from new renewables — and then arbitrarily doubling the price of power from the best new wind and solar thermal baseload. Or, rather, he is quoting the wind price from a decade ago and ignoring concentrated solar thermal and only quoting the high end for solar PV. Huber is stuck in the 1990s, the last time he was right about anything.
For the record, a Moody’s analysis from last May put the cost of new coal at over 11 cents per kWh using a relatively optimist capital cost (see here).
You might think it surprising that Huber would peddle such amateur, easily debunked stuff, but it is quite effective in a debate, if you don’t get called on it. The next speaker, Adam Werbach, never rebutted it. Our side typically doesn’t, which is why their side keeps lying making stuff up.
NOTE #2 TO ALL PRO-CLIMATE-ACTION DEBATERS: The most effective way to win a debate (i.e. persuade an audience to your point of view) is to find one or more clear factual errors in your opponent’s remarks and beat over the head with them. Doing that a couple of times is infinitely more effective than sticking with your spiel and ignoring what they said, which is the equivalent to the audience of agreeing with them. If you can make them backpedal on one key point, the audience will tend to dismiss everything they said.
Compared to Philip Stott (“biogeographer / revivalist preacher”), Peter Huber is Albert Einstein:
Let me therefore start, by science, I’m not going to say much on science… It’s actually not very much about the science, it’s always been about economic and political choice.
No, it’s always been very much about the science about the fact that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases will have devastating consequences for life on this planet, including ours.
The deniers and delayers like to pretend they aren’t going to dispute the science, but they must or else they would lose every debate. That’s why Lomborg does. And Stott, too:
But I just want you to have one image, and it’s a very serious scientific image, I want you to think of the world… I want you to think of the world from inner Siberia, to Greenland, then to Singapore, and then come to the Arab states and to Sahara. What, ladies and gentlemen, is the temperature range I have just covered. It is from minus 20 degrees C, to nearly 50 degrees C, a range of 70 degrees C, in which humanity has adapted and learnt to live. [APPLAUSE] We are talking about, ignoring the extremes that Oliver said, a prediction of 2 to 3 degrees C, what a funk! [LAUGHTER, [APPLAUSE]
I’m very serious, what a funk! Humanity lives successfully from Greenland to Singapore to Saudi Arabia. 70 degrees C. And what is more, the carbon reductions will not produce an outcome that is predictable. Climate is the most complex, coupled, nonlinear, chaotic system known to man. Of course there are human influences in it, nobody denies that. But what outcome will they get, by fiddling with one variable at the margins. I’m sorry, it’s scientific nonsense. And a very serious nonsense. [APPLAUSE]
Classic rhetorical trick, as befits a revivalist preacher: Say you aren’t going to spend time taking on the science, and then do so anyway.
This line of argument is a standard denier talking point, but it is laughably weak. The issue is not whether humanity can adapt to wide-ranging local climates around the planet, but what 5.5°C planetary warming (or more) — not “a prediction of 2 to 3 degrees C” local warming — would do.
Even 3°C warming this century takes the planet back temperatures last seen when we were ice free and sea levels were 80 meters higher. Even 3°C warming this century wipes out 40% to 70% of all species, according to the IPCC.
The fact that the climate is complex, coupled, nonlinear, and chaotic is precisely the reason we can’t risk warming above 2°C. The response to this is easy. Repeat one of his words. Yes, the climate is “nonlinear.” That’s why all the latest science says we are close to tipping points, close to set off amplifying feedbacks that will greatly increase the rate of warming. We must act now to avoid the catastrophic nonlinear response.
Stott’s mocking attack minimizing the threat of climate change works only if his opponent doesn’t bother rebutting it. My friend and former colleague Hunter Lovins did not — as I suspect Stott knew, since that is not her thing.
NOTE #3 TO ALL PRO-CLIMATE-ACTION DEBATERS: The central debating tactic of the deniers and delayers is to raise arguments they know you are unprepared — or unwilling — to rebut. When they debate climate scientists, they typically raise points outside of that scientists’ area of expertise and/or focus on issues of cost, which they know climate scientists are very reluctant to talk about (since scientists are by and large trained not to opine on matters outside of their disciplin). When they debate people knowledgeable about cost issues, they talk about the science. Either way, they score unanswered points and spread their disinformaton.
MY FINAL PLEA: If you aren’t prepared to defend both the science and the solutions/cost side of the issue, please, do us all a favor and turn down any debates you are offered. You aren’t helping the cause of preserving a livable climate. Quite the reverse. And if you are going to debate professional debaters and make-stuff-uppers like Lomborg, Huber, and Stott, please do some homework. Review their core, repeated arguments and be prepared to rebut them very hard. Or stay home.
Bonus suggestion: If you are debating an economist, remember that The Economist itself said that economists have a view of human welfare that is desiccated, “drained of emotional or intellectual vitality.” Let ’em try to rebut that!
UPDATE: Do read Bill McKibben’s comments below.
I wonder to what extent the problem is congenital – that those who accept science are more likely to also believe in the Enlightenment Myth, that people are rational and care about reason and only need to be rationally educated. If so, it’s no wonder they’re sitting ducks in a debate with those who have no such scruples and delusions.
More on Lomborg:
http://futureatrisk.blogspot.com/2009/01/blog-post.html
The book “Priceless” [not all economists are voodoo economists :) ] describes the flaws in the reasoning of many of these economists and people like Lomborg.
Russ makes a good point regarding the pro-science side’s mistake in assuming that folks will act rationally and actually acknowledge and process facts contrary to their existing beliefs. Social science has pretty conclusively demonstrated that the situation is actually the reverse, with pre-existing ideological commitments leading to selective processing which accepts supportive information and rejects facts to the contrary.
Speaking of which, I believe that Lomborg is also blatantly misrepresenting the actual conclusions of the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus sub-panel of economists that examined the climate change question, headed by Gary Yohe, also a participant in the IPCC panel. I just re-read the executive summary, and their actual recommendation was a combination of mitigation, adaption and R&D. Yohe had a very strong article in The Guardian accusing Lomborg of misrepresenting the paper’s conclusions — Yohe stated that immediate action was required to address climate change and noted that “in the midst of this momentum and clarity, one voice [Lomborg] has stood out as a persistent naysayer”. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/22/climatechange.carbonemissions?gusrc=rss&feed=environment
Gwynne Dyer could be our Michael Crichton.
http://www.gwynnedyer.com/
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/podcast.html
http://thetyee.ca/Books/2009/01/06/ClimateWars/
I don’t worry much about long debates.
We need to deliver messages within 20 seconds. Billboard and bumpersticker phrases carry the message best.
Denialists have succeeded in sabotaging the simple statements by doubt and lies.
CO2 causes global warming.
Carbon fuels cause global warming.
Coal kills.
Arguing with these guys can feel like the proverbial wrestling of a pig in the mud. It’s dirty, sometimes painful and always hard work and the whole time the slippery ol pig seems to like it.
Now that the tide is turning on climate debate though, and I feel it is, pro-climate action people have to ask ourselves at least three questions:
1) To what extent should we continue to keep on taking them on and to what extent should we divert our valuable time, energy and talent to getting real action rolling?
I’m not saying ignore them, but maybe not focus so much on them?
2) To what extent does labelling them and continuing to argue them help their cause?
The mindset we’re up against is on personification and demonification. They often make it about their team’s all-stars vs other teams’ all-stars. So if we choose to demonize some anti-action debaters, we can run the risk of raising their stature in their circles.
3) Given how the solutions to the climate problem can make all of our lives so much better, shouldn’t we switch the focus of our debates to solutions and common ground?
Depending on how it’s done, reducing emissions can lead us to be more free (as individuals and as a country), with more options in our lifestyle and in product choices. If we get on with it and succeed, we will be richer, healthier, more secure and have more domestic, non-outsourceable jobs. There is also the potential to have fewer resource conflicts and a political system which is less driven by lobbies from those resource industries. Why not focus on all this opportunity and common ground? The core of their resistance is likely about perceived reductions in their wealth, freedom, etc. By focusing on rebutting that, we might actually be addressing the elephant in the room too.
You are losing the debate in the court of public opinion. A Pew research center poll shows that global warming ranks dead last, just behind “trade issues” among voters when asked about priorities for the Obama administration and the 111th congress. “Trade Issues” – that’s gotta hurt Joe.
http://people-press.org/report/485/economy-top-policy-priority
In October 2008 ecoAmerica, a consortium of environmental groups, conducted the American Climate Values survey, which found similar results. Although the environmentalists tried to spin it, their own internals showed that people are already skeptical. Only 18% expresssed strong agreement that global warming is real. And even those who are inclined to believe in AGW theory think that economic issues should trump all else.
That is surprising, since the popular culture (even Miley Cyrus now), mainstream media, educational institutions, and nearly all politicians toe the party line on AGW theory. You hardly ever hear an opposing view, yet most Americans aren’t on board.
It seems that the more shrill the debate and the more name-calling you do, the more dire consequences you predict, and the more things you blame on global warming – only makes the public more skeptical – not less.
For that I say – way to go Joe!
[JR: Yeah, my blog drives public opinion. Seriously dude! We’ve had 8 years of denial and disinformation coming from on top, and Republicans eat it up the polls make clear. What does that have to do with the scientific reality of global warming?]
I want to repeat what Joe said: don’t debate these guys unless you’re prepared to do the work to win, because otherwise it hurts the cause. I’ve debated both Huber and Lomborg, who is much the tougher, but really not that hard to take down if you do the work. Here’s the link to our debate (he got 40 minutes and I got 20 to respond, but it was plenty–his arguments, once you go after them, are very flimsy)–bill
http://middarchive.middlebury.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/diglectarc&CISOPTR=168
Another thorough evisceration. I hope I never get on the wrong side of Joe.
Russ:
> I wonder to what extent the problem is congenital…
I’ve got to admit that it’s impossible for me to grasp how people like Lomborg function. He knows he’s lying, but carries on regardless. Is it money? The attention?
OtherJoe:
> Makes me wonder why you have an open comments section.
It’s open to scientifically literate, non-trolling commentary. Without firm moderation the idiots soon descend and swamp rational, useful conversation amongst those of us who have accepted reality and want to discuss the science / implications.
For a good example of what happens without that moderation, take a look at the comments at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hansen-obama?commentpage=1 It’s a torrent of stupidity that drowned out any intelligent discourse. And that’s often the tactic from the Denial pitchfork lynch mob – they know they can’t win the argument, so they just drown it out with “Al Gore! Volcanoes! Sunspots! Vikings grew grapes! Mars is warming! NWO!”
> All of this makes me question your understanding and motives.
If you’re unable to determine Joe’s motives, I suggest you haven’t read enough of his output: passionate analysis of climate change issues and exposing of Delayers, Deniers and Liars that are happily advocating action that will make much of the planet inhabitable for future generations. And all of it scrupulously referenced.
Your meandering mega-paragraph didn’t cite anything specific, so it’s difficult to judge what you think Joe is doing wrong.
P.S. Anyone who missed it first time around, the Richard Littlemore vs. Little Lord Monckton was an embarrassing example of what happens when you go in unprepared or simply lacking in debate skills – Monckton comprehensively beat Littlemore with a good ol’ Gish Gallop of make-it-up-as-you-go-along.
http://libertynewscentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/monckton-vs-littlemore-debate-audio.html
DavidONE — I had to take down OtherJoe’s comment. Sentences like “All of this makes me question your understanding and motives” are for the comment section of other websites.
In February 1998, after 3 times turning down the offer to debate Fred Palmer, then of Western Fuels Association and the hilariously named Greening Earth Society, I relented and debated him. Now he’s making the world safe for coal emissions at Peabody Coal, or at least he was last I heard.
It was an audience of 400-500, totally Fred’s crowd, the board members of the local distribution electric cooperatives in Minnesota, the annual meeting of the association. He had a good $1000 pinstripe suit, and made sure people knew he had worked for liberal congressman Mo Udall. I was not at all sure I had made the right call.
But I had decided to debate him, and to do just what Bill McKibben and Joe suggested. I studied everything he had written, said, argued in any public forum, and I methodically planned my 20 minutes statement, and 20 minute rebuttal to deal with each idiocy of his argument.
After the debate, many people told me I kicked his ass (which I had) and we published a poster of the 10 most outrageous things he argued (“Tomatoes grow great in greenhouses of 1000 ppm CO2, I say bring it on.”)
It seems surreal to me that the idea of a global warming debate is still current, because it seemed vaguely absurd and preposterous when I did it in 1998.
bill mckibben:
> http://middarchive.middlebury.edu/ cdm4/ item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/ diglectarc&CISOPTR=168
For anyone else who wants to watch this and skip past Lomborg’s 40 minute spin, Bill’s excellent response starts at 51 minutes.
The only way I could find to skip through the horrible RealPlayer format is as follows:
1. install http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternative.htm and select the option for Media Player Classic
2. open http://middarchive.middlebury.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/diglectarc&CISOPTR=168&filename=169.url in Media Player Classic
3. click Play… Go to… 51 minutes
From the amount of stuttering and stumbling in Lomborg’s reaction to Bill’s 20 minutes, I’d say he knew that he’d been comprehensively exposed. Good stuff.
Having debated several skeptics of Phd pedigree, a bevy of coal execs, as well as sociopath Chris Horner, and given them all a decent shellacking, I feel qualified to comment.
The advantage that deniers have is a small number of easily memorized “truthy” nuggets of b.s., that in some cases sound like “common sense”, because one has to have done a fair bit of reading to understand where the flim-flam is.
That’s why I started my series “Climate Denial Crock of the Week” on YouTube, to provide pithy, graphically rich, 5 minute or less responses to the greatest hits of climate denial. This is a serious exercise in counter propoganda, people. Please use them.
See the most recent installment here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0JsdSDa_bM
A piece of ammunition that we need and that I cannot seem to find is how many megawatts of power generation or power savings can be generated in specific periods of time compared to proposed “clean coal” or nuclear plants.
What is the timeframe for installation of a megawatt or gigawatt of ground-loop geothermal energy savings? At what cost? If we repeat that question and insert the various alternative energy production or savings strategies I think solutions will become clear.
Alternative energy solutions can be installed and producing power and in some cases have paid back investments before nuclear power plants get out of the paperwork or a new coal plant gets built and it’s carbon capture (fat chance) systems certified.
I just can’t find the relevant bits of information.
Joe – As a person with a reasonably comprehensive science and engineering education, I find nothing to debate about with regard to the diagnosis that human generated emissions of CO2 (and other gases) are causing long term harm to the planet and must be reduced back to within the rate at which normal biological processes like photosynthesis can prevent the ever increasing concentration. I look at the problem as a differential equation where the source term is overwhelming the destruction term and which needs to be adjusted to rebalance the equation.
It is clear enough to me that we need to take the necessary actions now in order to prevent an uncertain, but most probably very uncomfortable situation where the earth’s ability to sustain human society as we know it falters.
In other words, I am a believer, not a denier.
Though I have no dispute with you on the diagnosis, my problem comes on the prescription side.
Having been around the block a few times, I have had the opportunity to immerse myself in detailed knowledge about a number of the technologies that you discuss as the medicine to solve the disease. You avoid the use of the most powerful and effective medicine I know – atomic fission. In the above, you accuse the deniers of being stuck in the 1990s with regard to solar thermal, industrial scale wind and solar photovoltaic, but it seems to me that you got stuck in the 1960s with regard to atomic fission.
Unfortunately, most of the “nuclear industry” has made the same error and is marketing plants that have some useful improvements over the ones that they built in the 1960s, but are roughly equivalent to attempting to introduce very nice vacuum tubes for high fidelity sound rather than using MEMS to tackle the same problem. There are a number of proven, but quite different ways to apply fission the old problem of supplying useful, reliable, electricity in as clean a way as possible, but the “nuclear industry” is reluctant to do anything that upsets their existing business models. That is understandable, most of the rest of the energy industry has the same attitude.
Fission based systems like Hyperion’s Power Module, NuScale’s simple and small BWR, and Toshiba’s 4S recognize that enormous light water reactors have cost and schedule limitations that make them inappropriate for many of the applications where emission-free electricity or heat are needed. There are a wide range of other possibilities like the Liquid Fluoride Thermal Reactor (LFTR), the Integral Fast Reactor, and even a number of different versions of pebble bed reactors (I kind of like the Chinese plan that is moving up from their well demonstrated HTR-10.)
James Hansen, Steve Kirsch, Steven Chu, James Lovelock, Stewart Brand, Patrick Moore and many other well qualified people who are just as concerned as you are about reversing climate change have done their homework and recognized that fission is a vital tool in the society reconstruction effort that is required.
Clean air, clean water, lower cost, reliable energy for a greater number of people, reversal of climate damage, are all potential benefits of a renewed atomic industry that really takes lessons from the past and applies what we have learned in the 60 years since the very basic physical process of fission was discovered.
Humans – including some very capable physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and inventors – have been refining their ability to collect intermittent and diffuse energy flows from the sun and wind for tens of thousands of years. Our ancestors have never been terribly happy with the overall results from combustion and have often faced resource challenges that encouraged focused efforts for an alternative. We approached the asymptote for their ultimate capability quite some time ago. (That is not to deny the fact that there are still improvements to be made, nothing is ever perfect, from the rate of likely improvement and the distance from where we are to perfection is getting vanishingly small.)
There is a darned good reason that so many scientists and engineers are excited about fission – the energy release per unit mass is 2 million times more than oil combustion if you ignore the mass of oxygen required. If you include oxygen the comparison is more like 6 million to 1. That opens up a whole new world of ‘S’ curve improvements that are possible, yet we have only made a modest effort to move up the very first ramp and are still debating issues that should have been overcome by moving on to the next higher improvement opportunity.
By denying the potential for fission to address the disease we both recognize, you open yourself up to the kinds of questions that I will not ask at the risk of you deleting my comment. (BTW – I am most certainly not a conservative or any other kind of troll.)
[JR: Who is denying the potential? I’ve probably related a bigger potential for the industry then 99% of people who look at the issue. I’m just trying to spell out the costs in as transparent a way as possible. Could there be some as yet non-commercial technology that could achieve ‘S’ curve improvements? Sure. And you could win the lottery. But this is a very mature technology, and there aren’t many examples of such improvements in very mature technologies.]
Joe:
How can you say
But this is a very mature technology, and there aren’t many examples of such improvements in very mature technologies.
and mean fission, while not applying the same statement to solar, wind and geothermal power. Humans did not even know that fission existed as a reaction when my dear mother, who is still very much alive, was born.
[JR: Easy. It’s called experience curves. Nukes have 20% market share. Wind has a 1% share, PV has 0.1% share, solar thermal baseload even less. Wind’s ability to drop sharply from here is more limited than PV than solar thermal. But nuke, well, that would be ahistorical.]
My father was an adult when Fermi proved that a self-sustaining chain reaction was possible and he was 29 when Strauss made the prediction to an audience of science writers that
“It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.”
We are still operating the plants designed soon after that prediction was made and have not built any new ones since the dawning of the personal computer age and the implementation of CAD/CAM, a revolution in materials science, and countless other relevant technical changes.
In great contrast, humans have known that there was energy in the sun and wind for many millennia. We have many generations of improvements in the technologies used to capture those forces.
Joe – I think you have a real misunderstanding of technology if you believe that market share defines whether or not there is any room for drastic improvement in technology.
For example, “computers” as a technology had a near 100% market share of business personnel accounting systems as far back as the early 1950s, yet most people would agree that there have been a few technology advances since then. Magnetic hard drives (Clayton Christensen’s favorite example industry) have had a rather large portion of the permanent computer storage market since about 1985; how much technical improvement do you think there has been in those devices since then?
(My first hard drive was a 10 MB device that cost me $500 and I was darned happy to get it. My last hard drive purchased was a 500 GB device that cost just $140 and I am getting ready to order a new one because that one is constraining my video production work.)
Technical improvement asymptotes have NOTHING to do with market share.
[JR: Nice try, except it wasn’t. If you’re going to persist in taking my comments, which I have elaborated on at length many times on this blog, out of context, this isn’t the blog for you.
I was explicitly talking energy technology experience curves here. If nuclear power, ever had an experience curve it stopped four decades ago. And yes, energy technology experience curves are driven by market share. If you don’t know that, then I’m afraid it’s you who don’t understand energy technology.]
Joe – I realize this is getting far a field from your original post, but do you consider solar thermal to be a different technology from solar photovoltaic?
If so, do you recognize that brayton cycle gas turbines are a different technology from steam turbines?
Finally, do you realize that “nuclear” (specifically nuclear fission) is a broad category? It has as many potential variations – all with their own experience curves – as chemical combustion.
The technology that has a 20% share of the US electricity production market is one particular category of fission power plants – large, light water reactors with steam plant secondary systems that use a once through then out fuel system. There are other choices, none of which has any real market share, yet.
You speak of the “scientific reality of global warming”. Since we have experienced significant cooling the last several years, how does the observational record support this “reality” ?
[JR: We have experience record warming during the last several years, which is why the 2000s will easily be the hottest decade in the history of temperature records. You really need to move beyond the denier talking points and look at the actual data and science.]
Again, the observational record seems to be relevent to “actual data”. Is there something wrong with the satellite data of the last several years and it’s decidedly downward slope ? If so, what is/are its flaw(s)?
JR –> what is your source that claims the 2000s will be the hottest decade at least as far as we have human records? What temperatures are they? Surface temps? Land? Sea? Atmospheric?
grax