As American consciousness of global warming has increased and a consensus that we need to do something about it has emerged my confidence that we will actual address the problem has waned. Fundamentally global warming is a scientific, engineering and economic problem which requires a solution on those levels. Indeed, dealing with domestic CO2 emissions isn’t that hard of a problem. A CO2 tax would be an easy and (relative to GDP) a fairly inexpensive way to solve the problem. Admittedly there is a real worry that this would drive industries to the third world where they would be subject to less stringent emissions controls but this is one situation where an appropriate use of tariffs could address. In my opinion an optimal solution would be to offer developing countries tariff free export to the US and other participating industrialized countries in return for imposing taxes on CO2 emissions.

Unfortunately greater environmental awareness doesn’t seem to have increased support for sane policies like this one jot. Just in the last few days McCain announced his proposal for a gas tax holiday. Lest you think that this is only a proposal that caters to the trucks and guns crowd consider the fact that no democratic candidates would dare to propose an increased gas tax for fear of the public backlash. It doesn’t seem to matter that such a tax could be made revenue neutral and could even favor the poor people since people respond viscerally to expensive gasoline.

Instead of responding rationally to the global warming issue people, especially those claiming to be environmentally conscious, instead lash out at conspicuous consumption. It is somehow considered a moral hazard to buy a gas guzzling car, take plane flights, run an air conditioner or engage in other activities that have a salient link the emissions. This of course ignores the fact that the money people save as a result of these various conservation measures goes into buying other products which themselves likely have a large carbon footprint. All the tips about how to save electricity/gas or reuse items instead of throwing them out are particularly silly. After all if I save gas that reduces the price for other consumers who may then use more. Of course these factors are likely not 1-1 but it illustrates the point that urging people to avoid activities that seem wasteful is not only a waste of utility (moral guilt doesn’t discriminate between the people for whom running their air conditioning isn’t a big deal and those who get great utility from it) but it isn’t a very effective way of accomplishing the goal.

Unfortunately this attitude that environmentalism is really about eliminating consumer excess seems to be on the lips of every environmental activist I meet lately. They remark about how we will look back on our wasteful product packaging and huge trucks as gross and wasteful. Well hopefully we will look back on them as being inefficient in terms of carbon but there is absolutely no reason we shouldn’t expect the future to eventually provide cheaper energy, more disposable cruft, more gadgets and less need for conspicuous recycling (automated sorting) while making a smaller environmental impact. Even if this isn’t possible surely we ought to aim to improve our standard of living while saving the environment.

I don’t know where this idea that environmentalism is some sort of personal virtue of frugality came from but it’s not only a bunch of bunk but it’s hurting the environment. Not only does this attitude alienate many people who might get on board with a more pragmatic engineering/economic approach to the environment but it also competes with real solutions. People are willing to make a limited amount of sacrifices and if you tell them that they are being good people for enduring daily inconveniences like turning off their AC or buying a car they don’t like as much they won’t be as eager to ’sacrifice’ again by voting up the gas tax.

One person suggested that I look to the IPCC report on global climate change. Now the IPCC 2001 report does have a a report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability but this report reaches no real conclusions, instead couching it’s conclusions in statements like the following.

Even though increased CO2 concentration can stimulate crop growth and yield, that benefit may not always overcome the adverse effects of excessive heat and drought.

This is exactly the way that the IPCC should report on the economic issue. Their credibility depends on only endorsing the strongest most clear cut scientific consensus and it is far more important for them to maintain this credibility than to give clear economic guidance. While the models they propose are useful they don’t truly provide much guidance for someone who is trying to quantify the costs to a future richer society of dealing with climate change at that time compared to the costs of various solutions implemented now.

Moreover, I’m not sure this is something that is best addressed by an organization like the IPCC since I suspect that actual policy choices may be primarily determined by the risk of low probability but extreme events like large scale wars breaking out or the extreme end of the climate predictions turning out to be accurate. Certainly what we need first is much more publicly visible work by economists to boil down the conclusions of various climate models to approximate costs and benefits using reasonable assumptions. At this point what is needed isn’t precise answers but merely order of magnitude calculations to get a sense of what magnitude response is required.

As the last dregs of mainstream conservative denial of global warming disappear it is natural to turn our attention to the likely costs of global warming and the solutions we should pursue. Recently (thanks to The Volokh Conspiracy) I came across this article challenging the wisdom of doing anything to combat global warming and then today the same blog linked to this op-ed urging us to consider geoengineering solutions to global warming (like injecting sulfur into the atmosphere) when more prosaic solutions don’t act quickly enough to save species and environments.

Now the first article I linked is a perfect example of the harms of painting global warming as a warm and fuzzy liberal ecological cause. Clearly the writer of this article takes umbrage at this attitude and thus has an ax to grind against the idea of taking steps to avert global warming. But this doesn’t mean his points aren’t valid. Just because global warming is happening doesn’t mean it’s worthwhile to do something about it. We need some estimate of the harms and the costs.

The standard answer would have us believe that the costs are so great it would be utterly foolish to think it wasn’t worth fixing. Perhaps, but if the costs are this extreme doesn’t that mean we need to be taking geoengineering solutions seriously rather than waiting for the slow progress of international diplomacy? Sure, any form of geoengineering posses the risk of unforeseen consequences but so too does allowing the polar ice cap to melt. Frankly, I have no idea what the relative risks and harms under discussion are here and little confidence that what I hear from the media is unaffected by the pro-natural, anti-technology bias that often infects environmentalism. Most media I have seen on the subject treats the existence of global warming itself as the controversy and takes claims about what we should do if it exists for granted.

So here is the question: Does anyone know any good unbiased economic studies that have been done about the costs of global warming? What would be ideal is the same sort of economic consensus that we see among climate scientists about global warming itself. Naive attempts to estimate cost by simply calculating crop land lost or property that would be flooded don’t count. I’ve seen several such studies masquerading as cost benefit estimates about global warming but few bother to be as diligent in listing potential benefits as they are in listing harms and I haven’t seen any that appropriately consider the mitigation measures (levies, dikes, international aid) that would likely to be taken in response to global warming.

My gut instinct is to think that it’s unlikely that global warming is so costly as to require immediate drastic conservation efforts but not so drastic as to make research into geoengineering solutions very important. As a practical matter I understand why lobbying groups may not want to praise geoengineering solutions until we have working international controls on CO2 emissions but as an individual I’d like to know what actually makes sense. Ultimately though I really have no clue and don’t even know where I would look to get a clue.

So lately I keep ending up in arguments with climate change skeptics on various Internet forums. Invariably they offer an analogy Galileo or Einstein who overturned the received view and then demand that some list of crackpot theories be taken seriously. Of course these analogies gloss over many differences and ignore the fact that these events are the rare exception not the rule. But what really makes me mad is their presumption that they are entitled to evaluate the evidence for anthropogenic global warming based only on what they digest from the mass media.

Yes, scientific theories should be compared on the basis of evidence not polls or consensus but that’s what scientists have been doing in journals and conferences for decades. If you want to see the evidence for anthropogenic climate change it is all there but it is just idiotic to think you can usefully evaluate the evidence if you can’t even be bothered to go read it. So if like most of us you don’t have the time to become an expert in climate science the only debate it is reasonable to have is which experts are more credible but that isn’t much of a contest.

This attempt to evaluate decades of climate research based on paragraphs they’ve read in the newspaper is obviously an error but it also reflects a flaw in our scientific outreach. Most scientific outreach adopts a posture of evenhandedly presenting the public with the evidence and asking them to weigh the arguments whether it’s ESP or intelligent design that is being debunked. Many publications about climate change adopt the same tone or at least don’t dispute that presumption when people bring it to the table.

Unfortunately with a topic as complex as climate change no attempt at education brief enough to hold a viewers attention can possibly hope to rule out the crackpot theories. Unlike in evolution or O-ring failure there isn’t any emotionally salient smoking gun in climate change research. Instead there is the accumulation of hundreds of pieces of evidence from tree rings to ice cores, to satellite measurements, to simulation data, each of which requires complex statistical gyrations to correctly interpret. Sure the real argument for evolution or space disasters may be equally complex but there is nothing about confidence intervals or time series analysis that seems as compelling to the layperson as intermediate fossils or brittle O-rings in ice water. Worse even if the readers were prepared to take these expert interpretations for granted the length and complexity of the articles that debunk crackpot theories (like you can find over at realclimate.org) is far beyond the attention span and understanding of the average reader.

In short the reason the layperson should believe in global warming is simply because the best experts we know are strongly convinced it is true. However, when we don’t say this upfront but instead pretend to present them with the evidence many of them think they smell something fishy and become skeptical. Ironically though these same people are happy to frequently trust experts in areas they don’t understand with their very life. Only a few crazies are told by their doctor that they have a tumor and insist the doctor prove it isn’t just an imbalance of chi or demand to evaluate the biopsy themselves. Rather when people are unsure of a diagnosis they turn for a second or third opinion and only the crazies would hold out against the kind of consensus we see in climate science.

As much as I personally dislike the practice I can’t deny that much of this is due to the way doctors handle patients. A good doctor will keep his patient in the loop but he doesn’t try and lay out a case for his diagnosis only to explain what was behind it and lay out the patients options. Since the doctor presents the diagnosis as the product of their expertise most people trust them but if they laid out their evidence as if making an argument to an equal people would presume that they were in a position to question that result themselves.

I think global warming advocacy would do well to learn from this example. Climate scientists and the mainstream media should continue to give details about climate science but make it clear that they are only explanations not arguments. By making it explicit that the real debate occurs in the scientific journals and we are asking everyone who doesn’t read them to trust the experts we would do much to convince the doubters. Obviously, especially at this late state, it is not a silver bullet. There are a whole host of reasons people are more inclined to believe their doctor about a tumor than a climate scientists about global warming but it would be a start.

When it was time to use my most recent audible.com book credit I decided to get Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” on audiobook. Not because I think it is a worthwhile read — I think it’s a simplistic prophecy of doom meant to sell books — but because a lot of people are talking about it and I wanted to be able to knowledgeably argue against them. Once I finish listening to the book I will post my thoughts about it, though having listened to three quarters of the book I doubt Diamond is suddenly going to abandon simplistic emotionally moving analogies and descriptions for the messy complicated details which would be accurate predictors of future events. However, even if I think it is misleading to suggest we can draw conclusions from vague conclusions about radically different societies (not in culture but in absolute level of technological prowess) their are lots of interesting facts and stories in the book. Information that can provide some insight into policy questions even if it is insufficient to make informed predictions about broad future trends .

One thing which “Collapse” really made clear to me is the ease and size of trade in pollution. In particular the movement of polluting industries and processes from first world countries which ban them to places like China which are happy to take the pollution in return for economic development. While this is exactly what one would expect from economic theory it is interesting to see that in the real world neither activism nor public relations concerns prevent it from happening. This effect has significant consequences for world wide environmental policies and raises the troubling specter that treaties and protections which don’t mandate third world compliance may actually make problems worse.

In particular hearing real examples of polluting technologies being moved to countries like China makes me think the problems with Kyoto are more than just pro-industry excuses. Since compliance with Kyoto is entirely voluntary for the third world (it is just a suggestion) it seems there is every reason to believe industries emitting lots of greenhouse gases will simply relocate to places like China. If these countries are willing to accept industries whose pollution will be locally concentrated why would they balk at those who emit greenhouse gases? Disturbingly the overall effect of moving emissions to places like China could be more pollution not less since industries relocating to the third world wouldn’t have to comply with even the relatively week pre-Kyoto environmental requirements, i.e., they could avoid implementing even relatively cheap anti-pollution technologies.

At the very least I think this gives strong reason to be skeptical Kyoto or similar first world only treaties will be effective in combating worldwide environmental concerns. Such treaties may still be valuable as a stealth form of developmental aid to the third world but the environmental harm wrecked by industries moving to the third world to avoid environmental restrictions must be balanced against this benefit. Unfortunately the political will to craft environmental treaties that both prevent industries from escaping to non-signatory nations which will be fair to the third world just doesn’t seem to exist. Developing countries like China justly demand the same chance to become developed that the first world had and accepting stringent emissions requirements without significant compensation would substantially inhibit their development. The only palatable solution would seem to be massive compensation from the first world in return for environmental compliance but just getting voter support for measures to combat global warming is hard enough much less getting people to support paying massive sums to encourage third world compliance.

Even if curtailing emissions is the most effective way to deal with global warming it seems entirely possible that political reality might make this impossible. Therefore prudence suggests we need to continue researching engineering solutions which could avert global warming even if emissions continue. I very much doubt people will be willing to pay the costs necessary to fairly curtail emissions until they start experiencing significant hardship from global warming and at that point it will be too late to stop emissions.