How to Fight Global Warming

Thank you Arnold for seeing clearly that the problem is not anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, but climate instability. With incentives to achieve society’s real goal – climate stability – we’d channel human ingenuity far more effectively. Kyoto is about spending vast amounts of resources and political capital on what a group of bureaucrats using 1990s science once thought would be the best way of stopping climate change. Now even these guys admit it’s not going to achieve anything. We need diverse, adaptive approaches that can respond to our rapidly expanding knowledge of all the scientific relationships.

And of course none of the proposed “solutions” could have unwanted side effects. Nah. We know far too much about the mechanisms of climate change to fall for that!
But, say, why exactly is a “stable climate” desirable? What calculation exactly was it that established beyond dispute what the correct temperature of the earth is and why we have to maintain it at that level, within one degree, forever, or die miserably?

I have no idea how to reduce heat absorption, but one can imagine a number of possible approaches to climate engineering: putting reflectors out into space; using some physical or chemical process to “wash” carbon out of the atmosphere; or coming up with a way to reduce concentrations of water vapor (the most abundant greenhouse gas) in the atmosphere.

Let’s put the scientists right on this! Then they can cure the hunger problem, think about how much that will boost the global economy right? Then we’ll just have them scientists cure aids! How did we never think about this?

Approaches to climate engineering the global warming problem away, as far as I’ve seen, are little more than infantile promising ideas. Depending primarily on solutions that don’t exist yet and may not within a reasonable time frame seems wreckless. One must utilize tools available to fix a problem, rather than putting blind faith in those that could be developed.

Shouldn’t this post have been titled “I Have No Idea How to Fight Global Warming”? Because you’re really just waving your hands in the air to no great effect. Yes, it’s true that if we could fix the problem it wouldn’t be a problem anymore, but this is not the brilliant insight you seem to think it is.

Those who have been studying this for a lot longer than you (think Nordhaus, Cline, Manne, etc) have a name for this. It’s called the engineering solution. And it is given the attention it deserves – almost none. Useful only as an upper-bound estimate of the value of averting climate change (almost without cost), the “engineering solution” is a strange thing to advocate as an economist.

It is the equivalent of abandoning incentives and decentralization in return for a big project that solves the “problem” in a centrally directed way, with insensitivity to price mechanisms.

And the man-made versus natural warming comments will probably prevent anyone serious from even considering what you write regarding climate change. Just an FYI

Predictions of catastrophic temperature increases produced by anthropogenic CO2 have been challenged by many scientists. For those who choose to disregard this fact and prepare for the worst, I’m certain rhere is an abundant supply of Y2K bunkers for rent.

Mark Kleiman on exactly this topic.

Blogging has been light, and will remain so through Sunday; I’m at a conference on energy and terrorism sponsored by the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment.

In today’s discussion about energy policy and global warming, Tom Schelling made a logical point that was new to me — though apparently it has been made in some of the technical literature — and seemed tremendously important.

The global temperature depends on how much radiation gets to the Earth from the Sun, and how much the Earth radiates back into space. If in fact (1) human activities are reducing the rate at which energy leaves the planet — which seems very likely — and (2) the resulting temperature increase and associated changes in climate and weather patterns will be disastrous — which seems plausible but is not certain — it is not the case that our only options for dealing with that problem involve reducing our contribution to the greenhouse effect. The alternative would be to take more actions that decrease incoming energy.

It turns out that the aerosols and particulates we emit tend to increase the reflectance (albedo) of the planet; if in fact there was more warming early in the 20th century than later in the century, the reason may be that late in the century we put more sulfur oxides into the atmosphere. That was a bad idea in terms of acid rain, but perhaps it moderated the warming effect.

So, Schelling asked, how much would it cost to increase the Earth’s albedo by enough to offset the damage from increased greenhouse-gas emissions? The necessary change involves a fraction of a percent of incident solar energy, not enough to be observable without precise instruments. Some apparently minor changes might do the trick: slightly degrading the performance of jet aircraft engines could put more carbon black into the statosphere. A higher-tech solution would be to put lots of reflective mylar in low-earth orbit; a lower-tech solution would be to scatter lots of ping-pong balls in tropical waters; an extremely cute solution, if practicable, would be to stimulate the formation of cirrus clouds over parts of the Pacific Ocean.

Of course any and all of these might turn out to have unwanted side effects. But any attempt to massively reduce greenhouse gas production would be certain to have big unwanted side effects. And, as Schelling pointed out, if we can find cheap means of increasing the albedo we avoid some horrendous diplomatic problems along with huge economic sacrifices.

It seems to me that, in political terms, those who want to resist calls for controls on GHG emissions would be better off pushing low-cost albedo-increasing measures than trying to deny that anthropogenic global warming is real or trying to pretend that letting the global temperature rise another couple of degrees Celsius represents a prudent risk.