An Extreme Climate Contrarian

David Siegel writes,

Andy May, a retired petrophysicist and data scientist has convinced me that 99.9 percent of the thermal energy coming from the sun (including the greenhouse effect) and stored by the earth’s surface as heat goes into the oceans, not into the land or air. The oceans contain more than 99.9 percent of the thermal energy on the surface of the Earth, and their average temperature is only 4° to 5°C (40°F). On a calorie basis, the land stores essentially no heat, and the atmosphere stores less than 0.1 percent of the heat coming in. Oceans store the rest.

The implication is that if you want to measure “global warming,” surface temperatures and atmospheric temperatures are not the way to do it. Sounds plausible when they say it, but for all I know this is a couple of Internet cranks who could be persuasively debunked by someone knowledgeable.

Climate Contrarianism

From Peter J. Wallison and Benjamin Zycher.

There has been no upward trend in the number of “hot” days between 1895 and 2017; 11 of the 12 years with the highest number of such days occurred before 1960. Since 2005, NOAA has maintained the U.S. Climate Reference Network, comprising 114 meticulously maintained temperature stations spaced more or less uniformly across the lower 48 states, along with 21 stations in Alaska and two stations in Hawaii. They are placed to avoid heat-island effects and other such distortions as much as possible. The reported data show no increase in average temperatures over the available 2005-2020 period.

Fusion power in my lifetime?

Matt Ridley writes,

We are probably less than 15 years away from seeing a fusion power station begin to contribute to the grid.

Also, Tyler Cowen points to an MIT news article.

Developing the new magnet is seen as the greatest technological hurdle to making that happen; its successful operation now opens the door to demonstrating fusion in a lab on Earth, which has been pursued for decades with limited progress. With the magnet technology now successfully demonstrated, the MIT-CFS collaboration is on track to build the world’s first fusion device that can create and confine a plasma that produces more energy than it consumes. That demonstration device, called SPARC, is targeted for completion in 2025.

In the informal Zoom meetup I had with readers about ten days ago, I asked what they were optimistic about. One of them mentioned that machine learning was helping to solve problems in engineering that were nearly impossible to solve without it. One example he gave was fusion power. Fusion power is not practical now, because the amount of energy needed to generate fusion power currently exceeds the power that can be usefully extracted from it. But scientists and engineers are gradually improving the ratio of energy output to energy input.

Noah Smith on various topics

Talking with Eric Torenberg, Noah Smith says “The Fed will not stick to any rules that it officially adopts.” (minute 32) “The Fed will always exercise discretion.”

If I had more time, I would annotate this podcast. Instead, I will make a few other comments.

1. He claims that we don’t restrict supply in health care, and instead the problem is that prices are too high. If the government took over health insurance and drove down prices, all would be well. This is wrong, for reasons I won’t get into here. The analysis I offered in Crisis of Abundance still holds.

2. He claims that the government is not responsible for supply restrictions in higher ed. If Harvard wanted to expand one hundred-fold, it could. But that would dilute its brand. That seems right. But I would say that policy acts as if getting everyone a low-end college degree is like getting everyone into Harvard.

3. He relates productivity growth to energy technology. And a lot of the productivity boom of the 1930s was due to widespread use of oil instead of coal. To me, this seems like possible support for a PSST interpretation of the Great Depression. A lot of jobs, particularly in the agriculture sector, got destroyed by machine substitution (gasoline-powered tractors, for example). And it took a long time to reconfigure the economy to get to full employment.

4. Along these lines, he thinks that improved battery technology is revolutionary.

5. He thinks that MMTers are “meme warriors” and they are correct that the fiscal budget constraint is inflation. That is, the government can spend as much as it wants until its paper causes inflation. This is reasonable. The question is how much we want government to spend and how much we should worry about inflation. On those issues, I differ quite a bit from MMTers.

Environmentalism wastes resources

John Tierney writes,

single-use plastic bags aren’t the worst environmental choice at the supermarket—they’re the best. High-density polyethylene bags are a marvel of economic, engineering and environmental efficiency. They’re cheap, convenient, waterproof, strong enough to hold groceries but thin and light enough to make and transport using scant energy, water or other resources. Though they’re called single-use, most people reuse them, typically as trash-can liners. When governments ban them, consumers buy thicker substitutes with a bigger carbon footprint.

Recycling wastes resources

Michael Munger writes,

For recycling to be a socially commendable activity, it has to pass one of two tests: the profit test, or the net environmental-savings test. If something passes the profit test, it’s likely already being done.

[for the environmental-savings test] it must cost less to dispose of recycled material than to put the stuff in a landfill.

He argues that recycling aluminum cans passes the environmental’savings test, but recycling glass (and many other things) does not.

Finally,

The real problem, as I see it, is that the recycling industry is selling indulgences, giving people the moral license to pollute because “Hey, I recycle!” To the extent that a lot of recycling is harmful to the environment, this is a double whammy: recycling is largely fake, but it enables people to feel okay about doing other things that pollute.

Pointer from Don Boudreaux.

The climate-change scapegoat

A site calling itself Issues and Insights reports,

Lake Erie and Lake Superior — two of the five that make up the Great Lakes — broke records for water levels this May. Lakes Michigan and Huron could follow suit.

Naturally, climate change is getting the blame. “We are undoubtedly observing the effects of a warming climate in the Great Lakes,” says Richard Rood, a University of Michigan climate scientist.

But just a few years ago, climate scientists were insisting that a warming climate would cause water levels to decline.

They go on to cite several examples from a few years ago of scientists pointing to low lake levels as a phenomenon explained by climate change.

If I were a climate scientist, I would be saying something like, “People, just pay attention to the Greenland ice sheet. That’s what matters, not weather blips. If you keep scapegoating anthropogenic climate change for every weather blip, you’re just going going to lose credibility.”

A green bad deal

Timothy Taylor finds a paper by Michael Greenstone and Ishan Nath on the cost of renewable energy mandates for utilities.

this study finds that the cost of reducing carbon emissions through an RPS policy is more than $130 per ton of carbon abated and as much as $460 per ton of carbon abated—significantly higher than conventional estimates of the social and economic costs of carbon emissions. For example, the central estimate of the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) tallied by the Obama Administration is approximately $50 per ton in today’s dollars.

It is plausible to me that when all of the general-equilibrium repercussions are in, the increase in cost leads to an overall increase in carbon emissions. For example, suppose that due to higher electricity costs in your home state in the U.S., you end up moving your plant to a place where the electricity comes from coal.

Question from a commenter: carbon tax

A couple of weeks ago, he wrote,

I have a question on the carbon tax issue.

Assume for the moment that the tax imposed accurately reflected the social cost. By the standard theory of Pigouvian taxes, do we actually care whether emissions go down? As long as everyone incorporates the social costs in to their decisions, we’ve internalized the externality, yes?

If demand isn’t very elastic in the range of the tax, then no reduction in emissions (or too low to measure) is the “correct” result, right?

1. I suspect that the main reason a carbon tax tends to have no effect in practice is that it takes a lot of political will and bureaucratic effort to make it really bite. It’s difficult to avoid grandfathering and other concessions.

2. If you drink the climate-change Kool-Aid, then the social cost of carbon emissions is ginormous. If you also believe that demand is inelastic, then you either have to implement quantity rationing (there is a classic paper by Martin Weitzman on “prices vs. quantities” that would justify this) or go for a very high tax.

3. If you believe that demand is inelastic for a very wide range of price+tax, then it suggests that the social cost of reducing carbon emission is ginormous. Then the policy issue becomes a kind of irresistable force vs. immovable object situation.