With Climate Change, Is It Garbage In, Trillions Out?

[rangerrebew]

     

With Climate Change, Is It Garbage In, Trillions Out?

By Bruce Everett

One basic principle of computer modeling is “garbage in, garbage out”.  In other words, you can’t model phenomena you don’t understand. Nonetheless, politicians often use bad models to give a veneer of legitimacy to weak ideas.

Climate policy is essentially a debate over models. The general circulation models used to evaluate climate are unable to make useful predictions. Poor models don’t do much harm in an academic setting, but the Biden administration proposes reshaping our economy at a cost of trillions of taxpayer dollars based on their output.

Even though these climate models don’t work on a planetary scale, Richard Newell of Resources for the Future and Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists happily announced at a recent National Academy of Sciences (NAS) podcast that these same models will now be used to evaluate community-scale impacts. In reality, this claim reflects nothing more than a political imperative to mix social justice with climate policies. The administration’s new “Justice 40” program will require 40 percent of the benefits of federal investments to benefit “disadvantaged communities.”

Good motives are nice, but effective policy requires both judgment and common sense. The main impact of atmospheric CO2 is to promote plant growth and drought resistance. NASA studies document the “greening” of many areas, including the Sahara Desert, due to increased levels of CO2.  If we want to help the world’s poor, improving food production would be a great start. Climate “damage” from CO2 emissions is a modeling artifice lacking empirical support. Saddling America’s poorest communities with expensive and unreliable electric power, transportation and home heating is hardly a formula for social progress.

https://co2coalition.org/2021/05/05/with-climate-change-is-it-garbage-in-trillions-out/

[DefiantMassRINO]

Though, I may not agree with some of its assertions, I found this article to be thought provoking.

Climate Change and Capitalism: A Political Marxist View.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-07-11/climate-change-and-capitalism-a-political-marxist-view/

I found the opening most interesting:

Viewed from the perspective of geological history, our current climatic and economic conditions are unusual. For most of the last 60 million years, the climate has been wildly unstable. It was only 10,000 years ago that it settled into its current stable state, and within this period that the Holocene emerged, during which human societies shifted their relationship with nature though agriculture, and then creating complex settled socio-economic forms, including capitalism.

From my perspective, the climate is changing; it has always been changing; it has never stopped changing.  The climate is dynamic and subject to forces beyond our knowledge and understanding - Solar, Volcanic, Astronomic, Magnetic, etc.  There are natural cycles that may span hundreds, thousands, or millions of years.

My beef with Big Climate Change is that it's foundation is that mankind is the singular cause of global climate change.  As such, Big Climate Change advocates that a class of unelected, self-annointed political and academic elites take command and control of society and economy.  But, have they ever considered that they may be wrong or only partially correct?

Mankind has become the dominant species (for now) on Earth because its ability to evolve, to adapt, and to modify its environment.  The Klamath Reclamation Project (https://anderstomlinson.com/tule-lake/farming/reclamation/) is a prime example.  It reclaimed desert for agriculture.  Now there's drought and insufficient precipitation to provide water to all parties that want it.

Do we de-industrialize and become less economically competitive in the hopes that this will make it rain again in Northern California / Southern Oregon for now and for always?  Do we abandon the Project and let the desert reclaim the land?  Or do we adapt?  Do we look to history and geology for a better understanding of drought and precipitation history in the region?  Do we innovate and invest - build more reservoirs, build desalination plants, build waste water treatment and purification plants, improve water use efficiency standards, possibly diversify into crops that are less water intensive?

The Global Climate Change approach to mis-identifying and not solving "problems" causes harm and dislocation among the unwashed masses while concentrating power and wealth in the unelected, self-annointed elitist class that is accountable to only itself.

Though a democratic, capitalist approach built upon innovation, investment, and competition may not make it rain, it may lead to better sustainable adaptations or provide opporunities to the dislocated unwashed masses.

Big Climate Change is too Stalinist for my liking, and history proved Stalin wrong.