CRITICS OCTOBER 13, 2010
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Bill McKibben has penned a more-in-sorrow-than-anger piece (“Hot Mess”) in the current issue of the magazine, shaking his head at conservatives’ failure to adopt his position on global warming. (It is an almost exact recapitulation of Al Gore’s argument in TNR a few months ago, to which I also replied). In the simplest terms, McKibben leaps from the proposition that CO2 accumulations are very likely to cause global warming to the assertion that the projected amount of warming will cause enough damage to justify a worldwide program of emissions mitigation that he says will be “most difficult thing we’ve ever done.” Where is his evidence?
According to the currently governing Fourth Assessment Report produced by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), under a reasonable set of assumptions for global economic and population growth (Scenario A1B), the world should expect to warm by about 3°C over roughly the next century (Table SPM.3). Even in the most extreme IPCC marker scenario (A1F1), the best estimate is that we should expect warming of about 4°C over roughly the next century. How bad would that be? Also according to the IPCC (page 17), a global increase in temperature of 4°C should cause the world to have about a 1 to 5 percent lower economic output than it would otherwise have. So, if we do not take measures to ameliorate global warming, the world should expect sometime in the twenty-second century to be about 3 percent poorer than it otherwise would be (though still vastly richer per capita than today).
This is the crux of problem with McKibben’s argument: According to the IPCC, the expected economic costs of global warming are about 3 percent of GDP more than 100 years from now. This is pretty far from the rhetoric of global devastation that McKibben, and so many others, use.
McKibben can use all the scare terms he wants, but this is not a prima facie case that we should want governments to reengineer the energy sector of the global economy coercively around the primary goal of lowering these projected future damages at the expense of, for example, more rapid worldwide economic growth. And, as I explained in my detailed reply to Gore, even the argument that “Yes, but future damages might be even worse than current forecasts” is a real stretch—at a minimum, it is the basis for a non-obvious technical debate that doesn’t fall into the “let’s shake our heads at these dumb-ass Republicans” category.
One of the great strengths of TNR, in my opinion as an outsider, is that it has made a habit of facing up the strongest arguments of its ideological opponents. McKibben does the opposite. Like Gore’s piece, “Hot Mess” is comfort food for liberals.
11 comments
Yep. And as I said in my response to McKibben's piece, the unspoken corrollaryb to his attack on the GOP's head-in-sand response to the reality of anthropogenic global warming is the Democrats' nearly equally as egregious understatement of the wrenching magnitude of the change in our society and economy required to significantly alter the pace or degree of global warming. In this short piece you place proper emphasis on the question as to the likely consequences of global warming. Jumping up and down shouting that in contrast to the stupid/evil Republicans you KNOW that global warming is real and that it's a TRAGEDY that cap-and-trade didn't make it through the Senate this year, when at the same time you have failed utterly to make any assessment of the relative costs of action vs inaction is pure silliness. At the same time, though, I wouldn't take the IPCC's assessment as anything like the last word on likely consequences a century from now. Climate systems are rife with mathematical non-linearities, i.e. tipping points. Any risk assessment needs to take into account the probability that the global climate system contains one or more positive feed-back loops and that once we reach a certain unknown threshold value for atmospheric [CO2] global climate change might be extreme, abrupt and irreversible. There exist climate change scenarios with a non-zero probability of occurrence that are very bad indeed, like, that would render large swathes of the planet literally uninhabitable by humans. (See Brad Plumer's Vine post on wet bulb temperature.) If there is even a small chance of such an apocalyptic scenario coming to pass, it must be taken into account and be given greater weight in the risk/benefit equation.
- AaronW
October 13, 2010 at 1:06am
My comment to Manzi's prior post pointed out how many of the same folks who support the so-called one percent doctrine in national defense (i.e., a one percent risk of a catastrophic attack would justify an all-out preemptive strike, no matter the cost in lives and treasure), say we do nothing to avert a much higher risk of catostrophic climate change. The reason, I suspect, is that it's easy to visualize the consequences of, for example, detonation of a nuclear bomb in a crowded city (we have the awful pictures to remind us), whereas it's next to impossible to visualize the consequences of a 4 degrees C rise in global temperatures, which may explain why Manzi focuses almost exclusively on the economic consequences (one can imagine the response if the damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was measured solely by the economic costs). This isn't so much a criticism of Manzi, but rather an observation of irrational human behavior.
- rayward
October 13, 2010 at 8:40am
Manzi gives climate-change deniers 1000x too much credit. The heart and soul of climate-change denial in the U.S. is not a concern about the costs to address the problem. If we could get to the point where the typical American conservative was merely questioning the scope of the problem, that would be enormous progress. Instead, climate-change denial is rarely based on anything more sophisticated than the belief that if one can name a place where it snowed last winter, then 'global warming' is a myth. Maybe conservatives elites have finally left behind the original crude bases for their denials, but their foot soldiers sure haven't.
- Fishpeddler
October 13, 2010 at 9:06am
Another problem with the skeptics-of-action (as opposed to the skeptics-of-there's a problem) is that in addition to insisting that the costs of inaction do not rise to what action would cost, they insist on the worst-case scenario on costs for action. Bolstering that case, they point to the cost of current technology for specific actions. However, this ignores the effect that undertaking action has on bringing about new technology. For instance, if some entrepreneur were to develop a technology that allows industry to cut carbon emissions at a rate of $15/ton, it likely would not sell very well, thus investors today would not seek to produce it. However, if regulations/taxation to impose a $20/ton cost on emitting carbon, such a technology would sell very well which would set entrepreneurs today off on a race to find, making it more likely that within a few decades we would have it, none of which seems to matter to Manzi. As for the costs of inaction, Manzi also insists of assessing the cost of losing the polar ice sheets to $0 because the IPCC says nothing about it in its models, even the IPCC says it leaves it out only because it cannot quantify the probability of rate of loss. Make no mistake, loss of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets would mean every coastal city in the world gone. Is that a tolerable cost to Manzi?
- sighthnd
October 13, 2010 at 9:47am
Manzi is wrong to believe that the world will suffer a decrease of 3% GDP proportionally. The poorest, least developed countries in Africa and south-east Asia will bear the most suffering, and in such a gradual way that the 'shifting baselines' phenomenon is likely to take place. Furthermore, you think 3 % GDP is not a high enough amount? Here in the U.S. we talk about 3 % GDP growth differences as the difference between disaster and reasonable growth. Check the projections of how much a cap and trade bill would cost (very little, especially if the funds collected from selling licenses are spent wisely).
- candela
October 13, 2010 at 10:54am
Something I don't understand about the "it costs too much to do anything about it" argument: what gives us the right to decide? If we were to dump trash on someone's lawn, we don't get to argue with them about whether it looks bad enough to warrant cleaning it up. Their property rights trump any inconvenience to us. Likewise, if our actions are screwing with the weather such that it has a strong chance of destroying the livelihood of others, we don't get to decide whether we need to do something about it, THEY do.
- Fishpeddler
October 13, 2010 at 11:54am
What I find a little disturbing about Manzi's response is the way the central argument devolves to whether "we should want governments to re-engineer the energy sector of the global economy coercively around the primary goal of lowering these projected future damages at the expense of, for example, more rapid worldwide economic growth" without any recognition that energy production and consumption is also where some crucial issues such as health, national security, and economic vitality all meet. It's not merely a matter of opting for climate protection OR economic growth, but a question as to whether general health might be improved, oil-related foreign policy crises defused, and an innovative energy technology sector nurtured if we begin to move away from oil. If even two of the four goals (if you include economic growth) are achievable -- and I think it could be three of the four -- it would seem that recognizing climate change as a potential danger, and acting accordingly, brings some other worthwhile objectives closer. The criticism of Republicans is really that they appear to not want to reach these goals: they would rather toss overboard better health, reduced tension with the Arab world, and ongoing energy innovation for the fairly slim chance that our system as it is will generate "rapid worldwide economic growth."
- ironyroad
October 13, 2010 at 3:03pm
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/06/how-to-destroy-almost-half-planet-for.html Right, only 3% of GDP. I mean, who cares?
- ClumsyMohel
October 13, 2010 at 5:07pm
Good point, clumsy. After criticizing McKibben for not "facing up" to critics, one would think Manzi would have responded to Silver's important analysis of what a 5% loss of GDP might mean.
- mozier
October 14, 2010 at 10:34am
4 degrees Celsius = 39.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Q: "How bad would that be?" A: Pretty bad.
- amanfed
October 14, 2010 at 2:40pm
amanfed, you forgot to subtract 32. (freezing temp of H2O is defined as 32F, 0C). An incremental increase of 4C = 7.2F, not 39.2F. If average global temperature increased by 39F, it would mean the certain end of Homo sapiens and most other animal and plant species as well.
- AaronW
October 14, 2010 at 8:40pm