In a letter in The Australian Tom Biegler claims JoNova didn’t look at cost benefit studies:
Joanne Nova [Wasting money on Climate betrays the sick] bemoans the lack of cost-benefit analysis to support a price on carbon. She didn’t look very far. The energy economics literature is awash with estimates of the cost of both climate change and abatement measures. They disagree of course, but so would cost-benefit analyses of medical research expenditures, which Nova ignores.
A world where governments spent our money purely on the basis of cost-benefit assessments might look appealing but it’s not going to happen. Priorities reflect what voters want, annoying as that may be. It’s a small price to pay for our wonderful democracy that lets us keep arguing and trying to change each other’s minds.
Tom Biegler, St Kilda East, Vic
My reply sent to The Australian yesterday:
Tom Biegler thinks I’ve ignored cost benefit analysis of climate change abatement. No sir. There are no cost benefit analysis that start with checking the science. No institute or government committee has been paid to audit the IPCC, the BOM or CSIRO’s findings. All the reports assume that the UN favored climate models are right. And those climate models assume that humidity and clouds amplify CO2’s effect by a whopping factor of three, but their results don’t fit measurements of the real world by 28,000,000 weather balloons, 30 years of satellites, or 3,000 ocean buoys. Hence, if CO2 has a minor effect, the cost benefit of cutting carbon is easy to work out: it’s all cost, and no benefit.
Joanne Nova
The cost benefit studies assume the world will warm, and assume that CO2 plays a major role, so there has never been a cost-benefit study that analyzed the “benefits” of cutting CO2 by starting with the science.
But in hindsight, what was I thinking?!
We can show the cost-benefit studies are barking mad even if the “science” was right. Let’s assume the UN committee and their 75 favourite scientists are 100% correct, and that all their projections are spot-on. There are still exactly no benefits to the Australian community in lowering Australian emissions with solar panels, pink batts, or 2 billion fluorescent globes. Let’s all say it together… If we abandon Australia entirely, and reduce our CO2 emissions by 100%, we prevent 0.0154C of global warming*.
How can anyone justify taking one dollar from medical research to fund that?
*By 2050. See Carbon Tax Australia? Welcome to Futility Island for details.
PS: If you are new to this line of thinking, or this site — the page to start is here.
“If we abandon Australia entirely, and reduce our CO2 emissions by 100%, we prevent 0.0154C of global warming”.
I’d like to see Tom Biegler’s response to that one. My guess is it’ll be mostly blather that infers something about a warm fuzzy feeling we’ll get by “doing the right thing”.
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Cost-benefit Analysis of the “Free Set Top Boxes”
1. So Gran & Gramps forget about the hospital waiting times by watching Tele.
2. So Gran & Gramps children and their children and their childrens children can watch TV at Birthday Parties.
3. So medical success stories of the 1970’s and 1980’s can be replayed.
4. Just in case a program is screened on AGW.
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Huh!
Cost benefit analysis.
Let’s again look at a typical coal fired power plant, and for the sake of continuity, I’ll stay with Bayswater that I’ve mentioned in earlier comments.
It burns 8 million tons of coal each year.
Using the average multiplier of 2.86 tons of CO2 per ton of coal burned, that’s 23 million tons of CO2.
At the Government’s Garnaut recommendation of $26 per ton cost on CO2 emissions, that comes to $600 Million each and every year.
Let’s actually go with our wildest dream and pretend that a Concentrating solar plant can actually replace that sort of power, and let’s find a big one, say, Abengoa’s Solana Plant at Gila Bend in Arizona, coming in at 280MW Nameplate Capacity. It’s cost is $1.4 Billion, so at only 280MW, we’ll need 10 of them. (9.4 in reality, but 10 covers it)
So, there’s $14 Billion straight up.
Just that one Abengoa Plant will be 10 years from thought bubble to delivering power, and you need 10 of them.
So, taking that 10 years into account, it means that Bayswater will need to stay on stream for that 10 years, but that’s OK. The government will get $6 Billion just from the CO2 emissions alone.
Needless to say, one of those Solar Plants is way too expensive, let alone 10 of them.
To replace every large scale coal fired plant in Australia, you would need around 120 of those Solar Plants.
See the stupidity in all of that? Forget the cost, because they just cannot deliver that scale of power anyway.
So, a cost benefit analysis shows us that those coal fired plants will just HAVE to stay on line, a captive source of endless money, and let me tell you, only a small part of it will be going to Renewables.
A price on Carbon is a forerunner to an ETS, and the intent of that is to raise even greater amounts than a price on Carbon. (Dioxide)
On top of that an ETS lowers the cap each year, and if the Coal fired plant has to burn the coal it does to produce that electricity, then lowering the cap will only mean one thing ….. more money coming in for the Government. in the form of fines for CO2 over run plus the same cost for what they do burn.
Cost benefit analysis. Pshaaaw!
They know where they can get the most money.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the ‘Environment’.
It’s just about the money.
Sorry to take so much space here!
Tony.
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In my infrequent comments on this site I urge fellow visitors to ponder the analysis of Dr John Nicol. Dr Nicol uses what he describes as 3rd year level physics to demonstrate that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration cannot drive global temperatures in the manner described by Gore/IPCC. This is pretty fundamental to the whole “carbon is pollution” argument that our government is promoting. Surely someone out there has the requisite training in physics to test Nicol’s analysis? If Nicol is right then maybe we can be spared the embarrassment of Flannery,Garnaut et al pretending to be experts in areas well outside those where they have genuine and recognised expertise. Of course if we demolish the “demon carbon” then we might free up some of the expertise needed to devise strategies to cope with what Nature throws at us. And we will have all that energy production capability of coal-fired power stations to help us implement the strategies.
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Good to see at least one Aussie (oops, sorry Jo, two)has got his/her head screwed on, Tony. Good comment.
It’s hard to believe that those that govern us are so obtuse.
It will be interesting to see how the Bishop gets on this week.
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Carbon Tax is not about benefits, it’s about votes- and money. So blow the cost.
Ken
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Through clever language manipulation, exaggeration, obfuscation and lots of money the alarmists have constructed a very elaborate, many layered pile.
Cutting through this deliberately constructed tangle within the necessary limits of a letter to the editor is impossible.
Getting past ‘the science is settled’ meme (how can science based, at best, on a partly informed guess be settled?) is a challenge and besides can divert the focus of the argument into interminable fruitless wrangling à la ‘how many angels…?’ etc.
On the other hand, arguing cost/benefit on the basis of IPCC ‘science’ gives the impression it’s accepted that ‘the science is settled’.
I can understand your frustration Jo.
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The cost benefit analysis for mitigation has already been done. It stands at 96c in every dollar is wasted, under the best case scenario.
When you put that against opportunity cost the story isn’t pretty!
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Jo,
A good cost benefit study would be on how much countries waste on bad research.
How about how many jobs were lost to policy changes?
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Cost benefit is simple for a politician. What benefit is this to me and the taxpayers will pay the cost. See, it’s easy.
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Tom Beigler is a fuel cell researcher and nuclear power spruiker. He is hardly a disinterested observer.
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Re David:
May 10th, 2011 at 3:08 pm
See http://blogs.news.com.au/couriermail/andrewbolt/index.php/couriermail/comments/this_governments_latest_disaster_explained_before_it_happens/
A new set is cheaper!
Who runs the shopping list in that household?
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“it’s all cost, and no benefit”
Spot on.
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@RobJM: #8
“The cost benefit analysis for mitigation has already been done. It stands at 96c in every dollar is wasted, under the best case scenario”
Tell me more RobJM, I haven’t heard this before.
I have seen some pretty wild mitigation scenario’s come out of the UNFCCC, like the one they did for Guyana, which emits 1.5 million tonnes CO2-e per year , being compensated $350 million per year ($233 per tonne of CO2-e emmissions).
COST: $350 million USD
BENEFIT: 1.5 million tonnes reduction in CO2-e emissions.
ANALYSIS: This is equivalent to China stopping emissions for TWO HOURS.
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Jo, there is a benefit and a cost but the logic is reversed. The benefit is to the people inclined to re-distribute other peoples’ hard earned assets. By exposing this, there is a chance that voters will take care of the problem.
Of course the challenge is that it will take years of consistent de-programming before we (or our children) will be free from the efforts of those re-distributors.
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I have to disagree with you Jo … they have done the cost benefit analysis.
The people bear all the cost, and the politicians get all the benefit.
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The steel industry gets it too:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/opinion/carbon-cloud-looms-over-steel/story-e6frg9if-1226053582685
Note the last few lines:
There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch … the world still needs steel and aluminium and LNG and all those other commodities that require CO2 emissions to be manufactured. Taxing our industry into oblivion merely sends those industries overseas to countries where no such lunacy has gripped the political system.
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Bulldust @ 17
Taxing our industry into oblivion merely sends those industries overseas to countries where no such lunacy has gripped the political system.
Do you think, perhaps, maybe, that’s the point – to destroy the industrialised West and redistribute the wealth to the ‘developing nations’?
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There has been substantial analysis effectively demonstrating that on the net a warmer world would be a better world, with more food, healthier people and a longer lifespan. The cost benefit of reversing a net positive is by definition negative.
Put differently, if humans were capable of increasing the earth’s temperature by the amounts the IPCC predicts – we should do everything in our power to do so. Unfortunately we are not nearly so powerful as the warmists beleive.
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Totally off topic but interesting…
YOUR Budget Response – Make your comment here
What a great idea, you can make your comment on the budget, just click on the blue link below
http://budgetresponse.com.au/
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[…] JoNova ignores cost benefit studies. What studies? […]
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Cost benefit studies — I didn’t know they even knew how to spell it.
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Blast from the Past – Only 50 days till Doomsday
Gordon Brown 2009
Published Date: 20 October 2009
By Jenny Fyall
GORDON Brown has warned there are fewer than 50 days left for world leaders to set a course of action to save the planet from devastating climate change.
The Prime Minister said there would be a global “catastrophe” if action to tackle climate change was not agreed at United Nations talks in Copenhagen in December. He also insisted “there is no plan B”.
Over 500 days and still waiting!
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Here is the link ……
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/latestnews/Brown-Fifty-days–to.5747301.jp
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finally seeing that they are out of step??
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biegler is not only a nuclear spruiker, he was fulltime with CSIRO and from what i’ve seen online maintained connection after 1996:
Dr Tom Biegler
… he spent most of his research career in CSIRO working on fuel cell electrocatalysis, electrochemistry of sulphide minerals, and electrowinning and refining of metals. He became Chief of the CSIRO Division of Mineral Chemistry (later Mineral Products) in 1985. After retiring from CSIRO in 1996, he consulted on fuel cell commercialisation. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy.
http://www.sciencealert.com.au/opinions/20091805-19128.html
surely Biegler should show mention his own CSIRO connection when he gets his letters published in the MSM!
2010: Australian: Climate-spinning politicians have no excuse
Letter from Tom Biegler, St Kilda East, Vic
A 2006 CSIRO report explicitly addresses confidence levels for different aspects of climate prediction. Uncertainty varies with the complexity of the relevant science. That greenhouse gases keep the planet warm is certain. That man-made increases in those gases have contributed to making it warmer over the past century is close to certain. At the uncertain end of the spectrum are predictions about ice caps melting and extreme weather events. This is pretty much what the Royal Society is saying four years later.
It is hardly surprising that many people do not grasp these concepts. Most of us are not well equipped to appreciate uncertainty, probability and risk. Nor is it surprising that some want to take snippets of the whole picture to support their personal causes. That’s what people do. But political leaders have no such excuse. When they ignore, or exaggerate climate change they show themselves to be poorly advised, opportunistic or just plain pig-headed.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/climate-spinning-politicians-have-no-excuse/story-fn558imw-1225933529883
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UN Agenda 21 & Maurice Strong
http://www.sovereignindependent.com/?p=18097
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Damian Allen:
When you reposted Patrick Kelly’s post from [CanDo],@21 it would have been a help if you had included his link to Jenny Fyall’s article.
For those that are interested in Jenny’s full story here is the link.
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My apologies, Damion, I missed your post with the link at 22.
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FYI: It appears the National Health and Medical Research Council has greater concern for ‘the environment’ than people’s health….
http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/article/2011/05/11/331061_national-news.html
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At least Tom Beigler is a real scientist. Philip Machanick of Taringa has repeatedly claimed to be a scientist in letters the national press. He is fact a computer programmer at UQ and a perennial (unsuccessful) Greens candidate.
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This is probably the plainest speaking and open-science based site for undeerstanding climate/CO2 issues.
http://scienceofdoom.com/
Enjoy.
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re: Macha:
May 11th, 2011 at 1:47 pm
This is probably the plainest speaking and open-science based site for undeerstanding climate/CO2 issues.
http://scienceofdoom.com/
Actually it’s pseudo-scientific pro-AGW claptrap masquerading as scepticism. The author simply uses lots of equations copied from textbooks to baffle with BS.
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Lomborg’s recent talk in Melbourne is available here.
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For a while now I have lost interest in the science of Global Warming as that no longer seems relevant to where we are at in this process.
I have just been able to listen to a YouTube clip talking about the demoralisation of America by the KGB.
YouTube – 2012 Plan. Listen Close Former KGB Agent Explains the Brainwashing of America 1980’s LINEUP BATTER
It is about five minutes long and explains a lot of what we are now seeing in American society.
At one point he says, “Thanks to the moral decline” and in another, “Americans did it to Americans”, but it was inspired and set in motion by the KGB.
If you apply the lesson from that disclosure to the current ‘debate’ about Global Warming you will gain insight into just how bad things have become, imho.
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Paul:
May 11th, 2011 at 8:10 pm
I saw that clip a couple of years ago. Absolutely amazing.
Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall Comrade Gorbachev told his worried Politburo colleagues that communism hadn’t collapsed but was merely being rebranded. The East German communists gradually took over West German politics and socialism is stronger globally than any time since the 1930s. Even the current POTUS and the Australian PM began their political careers as extremist left wing activists – conveniently brushed over by the MSN.
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@Paul:
May 11th, 2011 at 8:10 pm
There is a much longer 24 minute version of the video floating around.
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John Watt said on May 10th, 2011 at 4:53 pm:
In Theory and Experiment – Atmospheric Radiation I explain some of the things wrong with Dr. Nicol’s paper (assuming this is the same paper that John Watt is referring to).
Mainly Dr. Nicol appears unaware of the standard equations that govern radiative transfer in the atmosphere. And the experimental results – spectral and total flux – demonstrate the solutions to the standard equations are correct.
Like many “debunkings” they appeal to people who haven’t read a textbook on atmospheric physics.
To disprove the textbook requires reading it first. Then understanding. Then explaining what is wrong with it. Or at least demonstrating that the experimental results differ from the theory.
(I have no comment on policy or cost-benefit analysis).
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bananabender kindly claims on May 11th, 2011 at 6:41 pm:
I invite readers to review bananabender’ contribution to Do Trenberth and Kiehl understand the First Law of Thermodynamics? – starting around here.
As you will see I have to resort to citing standard thermodynamics textbooks for simple relationships (between flux and temperature) when visitors invent their own theory that differs from 100 years of experimental and theoretical work.
Understandably, commenters who make stuff up get a little upset when presented with proof.
And it certainly baffled bananabender as you can see in the exchange that followed.
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Damian Allen @ #23
Would that be a candidate for WUWT Climate Fail Files, Damian?
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Colin @ 18:
I don’t attribute to malice that which is easily explained by political greed and economic ignorance.
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“ScienceofDoom”,
Thanks for the Propaganda and Lies………..
Stop wasting your time.
Nobody here is that Gulible !
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Re: Science of Doom.
Do I think that the discourse on radiative physics should be shut down? No.
Do I think that the national economy should be shut down based on radiative physics? A very loud and resounding NO!
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Tell me it isn’t that loser Science of Doom again.
Science of Doom, why don’t you go be a loser in North Korea or someplace where they need some more losers.
There are more than enough losers around without your loser input.
Thanks much!
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I have read some of the early experiments whereby the properties of radiative energy were investigated and the thing that I noticed above all else was the care that had to be taken to prevent other forms of energy-movement from occurring during the experiments.
In other words, the ‘laws of physics’, relating to radiation of energy, that they derived apply only in similar laboratory conditions.
In the real atmosphere there are other forms of energy movement at play all the time and radiation only comes to the fore at higher levels in the atmosphere above the troposphere. There, in the rarefied atmosphere, the amounts of carbon dioxide and of water vapour are almost irrelevantly small, and there is therefore virtually nothing to prevent the emission of radiation into the cold of outer space.
Any discussion of text-book theory that leaves those fundamental aspects of the world’s climate out of consideration is not only irrelevant but also quite deceptive.
As a quick check, look at any explanation of the ‘greenhouse effect’ from any ‘authoritative source’ and you will soon see that these fundamentals are ignored. Hence the widespread confusion and ignorance that perpetuates this grand hoax.
Here’s a simple experiment that anyone can conduct in their own backyard practically any day they like.
1) Observe the near-earth air temperature in the shade.
2) Observe the surface temperature.
3) Plot these temperatures on a graph with time as the x axis and temperatures as the y axis.
4) Repeat at as many intervals as you like over 24 hours or longer period.
What you will discover.
1) After the sun rises, surface temperatures begin to climb as radiation is absorbed.
2) At the same time near-surface air temperatures begin to rise at a much more moderate rate as convection currents replace warmed air with cooler air.
3) After mid-day, as the sun declines, this process begins to reverse, but with a time-lag.
4) In the early evening the atmosphere reaches near-equilibrium heat distribution and convection currents cease.
Conclusions.
1) Convection is the primary mechanism whereby heat from the surface is transported to the top of the troposphere.
2) Daytime near-earth air temperatures are mediated by the sun’s intensity, cloud cover and convection rather than the atmosphere’s ability to trap heat.
3) Nighttime temperatures are moderated by the atmosphere’s ability to trap heat. Still air is actually quite a good insulator. Even so, the amount of cloud cover has more of an effect on nighttime temperatures than the presence or absence of ‘heat trapping’ molecules in the air, of which water vapour is the chief component [95%].
So I say, Scienceofhope is a better description of the present reality than Scienceofdoom for men of good-will.
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Paul,
Atmospheric physics is a technical subject and can’t be summed up in a few lines.
If you read a textbook on atmospheric physics you find that convection is indeed very important and is the primary mechanism by which heat is transported from the surface to high up in the troposphere.
Perhaps this kind of information (reality about basic science) is not popular here?
For people who at least want to find out what is claimed by climate science, rather than reading strawmen and parodies of it – you know the address.
Brian G Valentine,
Thanks for summing up your approach to science. I remember you from your unsubstantiated claims on another blog. It’s good to see you playing to your strengths now.
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Thanks for your advice, but no thanks. I neither want nor need your web site to inform me on this subject which I have researched for years. The conclusion of any argument depends on the assumptions being made, and with your choice of alias it seems that your conclusions are foregone before you start.
My point is that simple observations are sufficient to falsify the simplistic claims of ‘Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming’ despite the Obfuscation that goes on in the name of ‘science’.
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ScienceofDoom:
May 12th, 2011 at 4:30 pm
Are you seriously suggetsing that anyone with any interest in this topic does not know what is claimed by climate science? After years of saturation bombardment by the MSM, and the near universal coverage of AIT and the IPCC’s propaganda, how could anyone who can read possibly be unaware of what “climate scientists” claim. The laughable thing is that you seem to believe your website offers anything we haven’t seen, and rebutted, many times.
No straw man could possibly be as transparently shallow and unconvincing as Gore, Pachauri, Hansen, Mann et al – this stuff is just impossible to parody!
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James Hansen is currently strutting his stuff here in New Zealand. He’s talking so much sci-fi he should be a novelist rather than the scientist he claims to be.
He’s suggesting that the polar ice-caps are likely to melt in his grand-children’s life-times, global extinctions, etc, etc.
The scary thing is that he is being taken seriously!
Paul
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Peter Wilson:
Yes I am claiming that. It’s easy to prove.
It appears that people learn their ideas of climate science from blogs rather than textbooks on climate science or papers on climate science.
So ridiculous claims get made by people writing on my blog, or other blogs like this one, and are easily falsified by an introductory textbook on climate science.
For example, Things Climate Science has Totally Missed? – Convection.
It’s not that I even have to claim that the textbook is correct. I just have to open the textbook to demonstrate that the “claimers” haven’t even opened one themselves.
Proving the textbook wrong requires reading it first, not claiming some fictional idea about climate science.
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The fact is that no textbooks deal with the subject of ‘Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming’ and that is because this is a politically motivated attempt to hoodwink the developed world. A proper progression of scientific ideas would not be to set up a central agency to investigate how to deal with a problem before there was any scientific evidence to indicate that there was a problem to deal with. Some real scientists have already commented on the unusual way that this topic has been approached.
In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that reading text books has very little to do with the debate and even the scientific evidence has very little to do with the debate. This is in fact a propaganda exercise on a grand scale and needs to be dealt with as such.
Hence, why not look at the propaganda machine itself to see what it teaches as to the radiative budget for the earth? What you will see there is radiation in and radiation out but no mention of the fact that most heat transport from the surface to the top of the troposphere is by means of convection, aided by the latent heat of vaporisation; no mention that the point at which there is equilibrium with incoming and outgoing radiation is above the troposphere; nada, nothing; just the silly idea that we have to have radiative balance at the surface. Phooey! Where is the ‘text-book’ science in that? Not there in plain sight, just left right out. That’s why this is propaganda and has nothing to do with text books or science.
I still remember the first time I watched “An Inconvenient Truth” and my astonishment is as great now as when I first saw it, that the only explanation that was given of the supposedly almighty “Green-house Effect” was supplied by a comic strip of Lisa Simpson explaining it to her brother, I think. And that was ‘it’! That is the level of understanding that is considered necessary to be convinced that AGW is a huge problem and needs to be fixed even at the cost of dismantling Western developed economies [because they have done irreparable damage to the common atmosphere].
So tell me I know nothing about text-book science and cannot therefore speak to this issue. I say, “Rubbish!” to that. Show me, instead, how text-book science leaves any room for the empty speculation about a green-house effect in the open atmosphere. You will not find that in any text-book.
Paul
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Paul, you could have stopped there. You nailed it in one sentence.
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manufactured them 1st time last night… whenever we pressed the top down the water in top of mold, my 13 yr old son developed the idea to seperate this again, pour excess out and about then place top piece back. Terry Allam
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