Saturday
Dec112010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Cancun deal
Dec 11, 2010 Climate: WG3 A number of people have asked for a dedicated thread for discussing the deal at Cancun. I'm out tonight, so behave yourselves while I'm away.
Reader Comments (171)
@ Don Pablo
Apart from those two paragraphs, the rest of the article was a ghastly prehistoric monotone which would have been at home somewhere around 2007. The good Lord has to realize that the world under his feet has moved.
This is slightly O/T but might be of interest.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/weigel/archive/2010/12/13/cuccinelli-wins-a-round.aspx
(Guess this must count as all the natural-gas funded law training being put to good use).
I am reminded of the PSU 'inquiry' on Michael Mann. "Michael Mann was asked by Jones to delete emails relating to AR4. In our inquiry, Mann brought with him a zip file. The zip file was full of emails. The emails were related to AR4. We therefore, did not see any need to investigate".
Can you believe that a state university fed everyone this BS and called it an inquiry?
James P,
Thanks for the comment re Dr Panglos above and for putting in the link..I wish that I knew how to do that.
Peter Walsh
All's for the best in this (potentially) best of all possible worlds....provided we don't weaken and let the naysayers grab victory.
Frosty, Brent
Would it be at all accurate to characterize the peak of oil production as the intersection of gradually increasing production limited by extraction and processing capacity, the increasing difficulty, inefficiencies, and cost of extraction, the insufficient growth in processing capacity, and the more rapidly increasing growth of demand. Would it also be accurate to suggest that we have no idea what will happen to demand if price wars fail to mediate the difference?
Don Pablo,
"In short, nothing will be done. No country's government is going to pump billions of dollars into this cesspool arrangement and remain in office."
Indeed no sensible government would do that. I have a sickening feeling that in the UK we have three parties as realistic options to vote for and they are all equally sold on CAGW and determined to lead the way on climate change. Whichever crowd we are likely to have in office will pump billions of dollars into what you so aptly describe as "this cesspool arrangement".
j ferguson It won't be that simple if you are looking for price indicators, the economy is effectively a ponzi scheme built on the notion of continued growth - price is relative, it will be better to think in terms of affordability as the deflationary collapse progresses, price may come down with demand destruction, yet still be less affordable.
This is why corpgov speak refers to "peak demand" in it's literature, so you have to think of demand as what people can afford to pay, in relative terms, i.e. with 20 or 30 % unemployment and rising relative costs of necessities food etc. during a deflationary collapse.
The big picture is quite complicated, I recommend Chris Martensons crash course (free) or tracking down Fiona Foss (stoneleigh from http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/) there is a recording of a recent lecture tour she did worth tracking down on one of the 'transition' sites - which is probably the best example of the deflationists case on the web, with the best advice I've heard to date.
Sorry mentioned the wrong name above :^)
Link to the audio of the above mention lecture by Nicole Foss
Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil
For Peter Walsh --> Creating Hyperlinks
cosmic
Whichever crowd we are likely to have in office will pump billions of dollars into what you so aptly describe as "this cesspool arrangement".
I agree that even as recently as a year ago that may have happened. But with the average punter in the US, Ireland and UK freezing in the dark because he can't pay for fuel or electricity because of the "carbon" tax, not to mention the "global warming" we are suffering under, I somehow believe that the "options" have been limited. Now if they were to give the money to their home district (aka "earmarks" or "pork") that would be one thing, but to send it to Bolivia so their workers can retire with full pay at age 58, I don't think so. That was the "cesspool arrangement" I was thinking of.
Frosty
Thanks for the info on creating hyperlinks. Much appreciated.
I will study and try to follow info.
Regards
Peter Walsh
P.S. , I may have to ask my wife's 14 year old nephew, but I promise, I will get there.
PPS,
I absolutely love the interaction between contributors.
PMW
Don Pablo,
The costs are hidden in Feed In Tariffs on electricity bills and general inflation. The Climate Change Act was passed with a handful of dissenters. Much of this is underwritten by EU legislation (which our representatives have been enthusiastic supporters of) and would take a definite effort of will to ignore, a will which I feel is lacking, as the government is being sucked into supporting the Euro and is fully committed to the EU.
The scams have done localised damage, such as mothballing the Redcar steel plant to have Tata shift production to India. Even that seems to have caused no real anger.
The leader of the present government appears to be fully bought into CAGW. The LibDems are completely sold on it. If the Labour Party have anything to say it's probably that the Coalition isn't doing enough to tackle climate change.
Almost the whole of the political class is bought into CAGW and there's enormous inertia in them. The BBC blows the trumpet for climate change, the Met Office has been turned into a propaganda service for climate change.
People are steadily getting fed up with it, but so much money is being wasted on so much other nonsense that Bolivian pensions are likely to produce a shrug of the shoulders. So not enough people are angry yet.
Sooner or later it's got to stop, but with Huhne as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate change, that looks like being some little time off.
When people were talking about ClimateGate as being the turning point, that was true, but overlooked the tremendous political and financial inertia invested in the scam.
I get the impression that the US never bought into the scam as completely and democracy is more responsive there. In the UK, I believe the mainstream politicians are off in their own dreamland of Green jobs, decarbonising the economy and leading the way on Global Warming by coughing up our tax money and damaging the economy in the process.
I wish I could feel as optimistic as you that there will be a mass outbreak of sanity in government circles here. Rolling power cuts will eventually do it, but at what cost?
this comment from the BBC RB thread struck a cord -
113. At 5:47pm on 12 Dec 2010, JaneBasingstoke wrote:
@andrew9999
@PAWB46
@rossglory
@bowmanthebard
@GeoffWard
I think the debate would have been very different if Feynman was still alive.
I think that much of the science would be unchanged, but that the public would have ended up being much more aware of the uncertainties and caveats. And that a much higher proportion of professional scientists, both climate scientists and non-climate scientists, would be AGW sceptics.
I think that an IPCC like today's would have been effectively boycotted by many of the scientists on the grounds that they agreed with Feynman on the importance of doubt, and the importance of communicating that doubt properly. And I think the IPCC is an accidental conspiracy to hide those uncertainties and caveats from the public.
It is not a deliberate conspiracy. But politicians live in a simplistic world of black and white. So rather than give someone the job of ensuring all the caveats and uncertainties are explained properly, they ask for the simplest possible explanation of what might happen. Keeping the IPCC literature simple naturally reduces the opportunity to communicate caveats and uncertainties properly. And then non-scientist politicians simplify it some more. They misunderstand, ignore or downplay the doubts even further.
Communicating that doubt effectively would have killed the IPCC. The IPCC is basically a buck passing mechanism in disguise, scientists accept responsibility for any unpopular policies associated with the work of the IPCC, regardless of whether the problems associated with those policies are a sensible response to their work. If scientists are not prepared to accept this responsibility then politicians can't act.
Without Feynman we've had some cheating.
The scientists make the doubt clear to the more scientifically literate public, and many of the scientists are not natural communicators so many genuinely believe this communication will reach all the public. Others think they can communicate the doubt to the public by other means. But scientists aren't allowed to communicate that doubt properly in the more simplistic IPCC literature. And they don't have sufficient resources to balance this lack of communication of doubt elsewhere, especially when they keep getting diverted to defending their science from AGW sceptics.
So the scientists get to pretend they're communicating the doubt properly to everyone and the politicians get to ignore inconvenient doubt.
Cheating.
And here sites like RealClimate and Skepticalscience and other scientific warmist sites have made a severe tactical error.
Sites like RealClimate get their priorities wrong. They concentrate on tackling unfair and nonsensical criticisms of mainstream science. This is understandable, some of the criticism has got personal, but they need a moratorium on tackling this material. Other people's nonsense and other people's unfairness towards them is only made worse by them attempting to fix it directly. Instead they need to tackle their own flaws first.
And the biggest flaw is the lack of communication of doubt, which is partly the scientists fault for not making it central to the IPCC's message. Not being central to the IPCC's message allowed politicians to downsize doubt. This downsizing of doubt hands victory on a platter to Big Carbon and Free Market right wing libertarian types. So warmists have to reclaim doubt. Only when the man in the street and the warmist activists are both fully au fait with all the doubts can warmist scientists begin to look at tackling nonsense or unfair criticism from their opponents.
It was not always this way, but warmists in the debate have become like the North Wind. We are trying to blow a coat off a man by making him colder.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Wind_and_the_Sun
I think the sceptics are justified in banging on about Feynman and claiming him for their own.
Feynman would have found any attempts to look at the question on his own frustrated by the sheer workload. He'd have kicked up merry h*** about the way the scientists were communicating their ideas. Look at some of the criticisms Lovelock and Hansen have made of the IPCC, and multiply the fuss made by 100x.
I think Feynman would have been an AGW sceptic because it would have been beyond his resources to examine the issue properly, and Feynman always put doubt first. Even if he'd agreed with warmist scientists about AGW he'd have been on the AGW sceptic side for much of the debate, because the doubt has been downplayed and Feynman always put doubt first and always put Truth before politics.
Complain about this comment
cosmic
I wish I could feel as optimistic as you that there will be a mass outbreak of sanity in government circles here. Rolling power cuts will eventually do it, but at what cost?
A year ago, you would have been right. Then came Climategate, thousands of pissed people like you and me, and dozens of blogs. You are ignoring the power of the blog. Come an election, the opposition will play on the transfer of billions to Bolivia so they can retire at 58 while the average punter here has to work on and on and on. And the opposition will know because you and all the rest of us will know and tell them about it.
The BBC excelled themselves this morning on the Today programme. In the space of 20 minutes they had three warmists discussing Cancun (including Richard Black) and the author of The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who really does have interesting things to say about computer modelling, or would have had if they'd made the connection...
Frosty, Thank you. I hadn't expected a price point since that would be unknowable now and relative in any case to an economic situation that can only be imagined.
Plenty to munch on here.
j ferguson Dec 14, 2010 at 2:25 PM
If you want a different viewpoint , it's worth reading Jeff Rubin's recent book
http://www.jeffrubinssmallerworld.com/about-the-book/
I'm not up on it but I understand Rubin is sniping at Nicole Foss
Best to look at all sides and make up your own mind.
I'm not endorsing Rubin's view per se. In fact I have some significant differences.
Rubin tries to play the recent crash in effect as a result of people worrying about peak oil. I don't see it that way. At a high level for a bunch of reasons I expected a financial dislocation (still to be continued of course ), then cards played as a "Green New Deal" as the supposed solution.
Rubin (true to economists creed) gives the impression that "oil price" is simply a function of physical supply and demand.
I disagree with such an interpretation for "paper bbls" futures determined prices
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/message/116114
Although I think someone like Matt Simmons made a significant contribution to trying to address the physicals situation, I was really uncomfortable when he got increasing shrill about price.
I personally think Matt got frustrated and adopted the same "scare em" tactics as the
warmers.
However the worst screamer about price was I think Jeff Rubin. Even after the market was well on it's way down from $147, his newspaper columns were still screeching about heading for $200 as I recall.
Now at the time, I hadn't followed his previous work, and was only judging by my impression from his news columns. It wasn't clear to me what calls(wrt timeframe) he was really making.
I've since read his book , so I now understand his position.
He was the former chief economist of CIBC Worldmarkets. He should have been clearer IMO about what timeframe he was talking about
I hope no one interpreted his shrill news columns as short term trading advice or they could've lost a pile of money.
cheers
brent
@James P. Very perceptive comment about Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Today programme in close proximity to the regular rent-a-catastrophists. Interesting that NNT is also a fan of Freakonomics' Levitt and Dubner - two others who have expressed heretical views on CAGW...
Another glaring 'elephant in the room' example re: Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In this interview, Will Self writes admiringly about Taleb, and in particular the fact that he has the guts to say 'I don't know'. Yet Self is a classic true believer in CAGW, to judge from his staunch defence of someone from CRU who was appearing alongside him on Andrew Neil's Daily Politics show, and a piece he did on coastal erosion for the Culture Show, in which, with numbing predictability he linked this eternal phenomenon to 'climate change'. It would appear that 'we just don't know what is going on' except when it comes to climate change. Cognitive dissonance at its most stark...
Maurice Strong: Our Man in Rio (and San Francisco, too)
World Environment Day was celebrated June 5 in San Francisco, the first time it was held in the U.S. The event commemorates the anniversary of the first World Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972. The organizer of that meeting, Maurice Strong, has been an energy-sector CEO, an adviser to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and the convener of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. He sees his new project, the Earth Council Alliance, which coalesced out of more than 100 Earth Councils around the world, as a vehicle for international cooperation and political pressure for the environment. Strong was interviewed June 3, 2005
snip
Do you think we’re reaching the peak of oil production? Do you foresee an abandonment of our oil-based energy economy, and if so, will we take that step because we’re “running out” of oil or because of global warming?
It’s quite clear that the world’s oil reserves are not going to last forever. It’s also clear that the fossil-fuel era is far from over. So there’s no question that we’re going to continue to rely on fossil fuels for some time. But it’s also true that we may see a new era in which fossil fuels play a diminishing role. It’s not going to happen suddenly. But there’s still a lot of oil around, especially in the Athabasca tar sands of Canada, which has almost as much oil as the whole of Saudi Arabia, and the oil sands of Venezuela. So it’s too early to write off the petroleum economy. It is not too early to start to make the transition to an energy economy that relies less and less on oil and gas. And indeed coal is the main source of energy in China. It’s a big source in the U.S. and India and other big energy-consuming countries. But we can’t wait until fossil fuels run out. Coal is going to last for centuries. Because of the environmental constraints we have to move quite quickly and rapidly now to try to develop alternatives, and also to reduce the environmental impacts of using fossil fuels.
http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2632
Brent, sorry I didn't check back sooner, just realised the conversation was ongoing :)
I find myself agreeing with you, I remember Rubins high price proclamations ongoing as the price was clearly dropping from the 147 peak.
I still think Nicole Foss has the edge, she addresses the hyperinflation scenario well by demonstrating the magnitude of the required deflation which will come first. I have to agree with her that this will effectively be demand destruction, and only when increasing (local) demand from exporters and developing countries takes up that slack will prices move - ultimately causing another round of deflation.
Hence I think it will be a 2 steps forward 3 steps back kind of deflation.
Only when the global system has capitulated via deflation, will we see hyperinflation.
Nicole frames this beginning now, with between 2-5 yrs for currency collapse, and hyperinflation around 10 yrs out.
Rubin doesn't seem to see the big picture IMO, he's stuck in his Keynesian endless growth paradigm, and I think we can throw that textbook out the window on the downslope.
Frosty,
Thanks for the links to Nicole's presentations. I haven't studied them yet but will. I actually haven't been a TOD regular so I'm not up on everything from there.
I should mention, and have been remiss in not doing so, that I'm a bit of an oddball perhaps in how I use info. I never put FWIW with any links or articles (or Jeff Rubin's book) I post but that's what one should always assume.
I used to get my shorts really in a twist about the spin, misdirection, and misinformation which envelops us, but I was just wasting my anger on something I as one of the sheeple cannot change. So my conundrum, was how to inform myself when enveloped by spin that is truly Orwellian.
The only option that seemed open was to accept that everything was spin, and to unspin the spin myself. There's just no substitute for taking personal responsibility for ones own thoughts and it cannot be delegated.
(It may probably seem otherwise at times, largely because I'm a notoriously poor communicator, however I really don't believe anyone should care in the least what I think. )
I'm a bit of a newshound, but what I actually do is treat everything as raw data. I never just accept stuff at face value , but am always heavily interpreting and assessing and reading between a lot of lines.
Good propaganda must contain some partial truths and commonly accepted beliefs. That's what sets the hook. Then there's the deception .
So i go about vacuuming up as much raw data as I can, then try to ferret out those partial truths to form my own opinion, and assess a bigger picture for myself.
To my intense chagrin, one has to treat supposed science the same way, because there is so much that is just Junk. I used to call it sceance, and I still like that name better, however I was delighted when Ravetz turned up on the WUWT thread to finally understand there actually was a formal name. I.E. "post normal science" :)
With all the above caveats in mind. (I.e FWIW etc) I found it worthwhile to understand Richard Koo's views as a central banker involved in Latin America debt crisis, Japan, and now our current crisis
http://csis.org/multimedia/video-economic-outlook-discussion-richard-koo
http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-koo-austerity-2010-7?slop=1#slideshow-start
cheers
brent
Brent, Frosty,
Again many thanks for the thoughts. and the links.
Brent, I'm much the same. I cam across peak oil whilst researching oil company stocks in the 00's when I was daytrading - the 9/11 thing contaminated debate on the net for a couple of years so I steered clear of the peak sites until about 02. I've been researching peak/economy ever since, though I only follow a couple of sites for news nowadays, collapsenet and urbansurvival which do a great job filtering out the dross, and it saves hours of research time than doing it longhand .
We sold up in 04 and moved rural with some land, best move we ever made. We hedged for total collapse of the system using Argentina as the example, if it doesn't all the better but I'm not confident it will last through the deflation let alone going hyerinflation.
j ferguson: it's nice to see the spark of investigative thinking. Trying to talk about this stuff with family and friends over the last 10 yrs I've often felt like the weirdest person in the room, I have ordered copies of the Nicole Foss presentation on DVD for my immediate family, it's my last attempt, but it will clear my conscience.
If you're not familiar with the subject matter, the DVD is streamed from the site (pay) where you'll get a better grasp seeing the slides & visuals, see what you think after listening.
the blog is also worth reading http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/ as the presentation is built on the writings there.