The irony is delicious. Environmentalists are opposed to trash that is nonbiodegradable. Ideally, they want trash to be recycled. As a second- best, they’d like it to be incinerated with scrubber smokestacks to make sure that pollutants don’t reach the air. Yet what is the effect of that? Recycling plastic means less demand for the oil from which it is made, lower gasoline prices, more oil being burned instead of turned into plastic, and hence more gasoline. Scrubber smokestacks make sure that the old plastic is efficiently and completely converted to carbon dioxide instead of more complicated chemicals.

To reduce the amount of carbon dioxide and reduce global warming, one has to make sure that carbon is converted into some inert form. Biodegradable wrapping won’t fit the bill— the bio’s that degrade it (bacteria, fungus, termites, whatever) turn it into carbon dioxide eventually. Plastic, on the other hand, does just fine, especially if you bury it deep enough in a landfill that sunlight can’t degrade it. Even if it isn’t buried, though, it’s better than something biodegradable.

So, every time you throw a pop bottle out of your car window onto the country lane, you’re helping stop global warming.

I’ll add an related point about recycling: I bet the benefits from it in terms of landfill expense saved are overstated. Landfills are expensive because of the need to avoid leakage of pollutants. Dirty diapers are one of the biggest problems, because we don’t want all that bacteria leaking out into the water supply. We don’t recycle diapers, though. What do we recycle? The parts of trash which aren’t poisonous— bottles, cans, and paper. Those products aren’t what create the landfill expense. In fact, if we separate them out, we could send them to a special, dirt-cheap, landfill that is just a big hole in the ground. No need for geological studies or special containment.

1. Temperature increases have been concentrated in the interiors of Asia and North America in winter. This is significant, because if increased carbon dioxide is the cause, warming would be strongest where there is the least water vapor– interior land masses with cold dry air. That’s a lot stronger evidence than just the correlation with increased CO2 levels. (Has anyone applied sophisticated time series techniques to that correlation, by the way? Maybe non-economists don’t know those techniques.)

2. There is some possibility of a catastrophic cycle of increased warming, turning the Earth into another Venus. Posner has emphasized this, I hear, in his book. That is much more serious than a few degrees of extra heat, even if less probable.

That these two things get so little play makes me wonder about the judgement of the pro-action people. But it means they may be even more correct than they think, too.

I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that the world has been and will be getting warmer thanks in some part to an increase in man-made atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. I acknowledge this in the same way I’m confident that the equatorial radius of Saturn is about 60,000 kilometers: not because I’ve measured it myself, but out of a deep reserve of faith in the methods of the scientific community, above all its reputation for transparency and open-mindedness.

But that faith is tested when leading climate scientists won’t share the data they use to estimate temperatures past and present and thus construct all-important trend lines. This was true of climatologist Michael Mann, who refused to disclose the algorithm behind his massively influential “hockey stick” graph, which purported to demonstrate a sharp uptick in global temperatures over the past century. (The accuracy of the graph was seriously discredited by Mr. McIntyre and his colleague Ross McKitrick.) This was true also of Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who reportedly turned down one request for information with the remark, “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

A controversial plan to dump iron dust into the open ocean near the Galapagos Islands to induce the growth of phytoplankton met with opposition from an environmental group today.

The plan, from a company called Planktos, Inc., seeks to grow the tiny creatures in an attempt to suck up excess atmospheric carbon dioxide. …

Russ George, the CEO of Planktos, Inc., counters that the very reason why the Galapagos Islands have the rich array of life that they do is because of the iron that drains from the islands into the ocean.

?The Galapagos bloom is one of the most famous features on the planet,? George said.

He says that the Galapagos bloom is much larger than the one his group will be creating, and will actually serve as a control for their experiment, which will be conducted several hundred miles west of the island chain. George adds that they will be putting far less iron into the ocean than what comes from the Galapagos to create the famous bloom. ….

Far from harming marine life, George says, the plans of iron enrichment will actually revitalize phytoplankton, whose numbers have been steadily dropping over the last couple decades, as was reported in a Dec. 7 paper in the journal Nature.

?The plant life in the ocean is collapsing at a rate of 1 percent per year,? the same amount of decline as is seen in terrestrial rainforests, George said.

But the total amount of decline in phytoplankton biomass is equivalent to the disappearance of all the rainforests on Earth, George said, and which he describes as ?an absolute cataclysmic state of collapse.?

Could this be causing global warming more than human emissions?
]]> http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/07/27/galapagos-iron-tests-and-global-warming/feed/ 1 http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/04/12/global-warming-and-the-ocean/ http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/04/12/global-warming-and-the-ocean/#comments Fri, 13 Apr 2007 02:40:46 +0000 admin http://www.rasmusen.org/x/2007/04/12/global-warming-and-the-ocean/

I’m always frustrated by the difficulty of getting the basic models and facts of global warming. What happens to carbon dioxide in the ocean is important. Lots of carbon dioxide is dissolved in the ocean, and lots is taken up by ocean plants. The ocean is not saturated with carbone dioxide, unlike nitrogen and oxygen. So, will the ocean soak up some large fraction of the carbon dioxide man is putting into the atmosphere?

Apparently it has been taking up something on the order of one half of it, but the writing gets unclear. Peter Dietze is a global warming skeptic who says that the IPCC and others assume some kind of nonlinear oceanic take-up when they should use a linear one. My impression is that the IPCC model for some reason limits the take-up to the surface layer of the ocean. I don’t know why that should be, especially since the colder water in the depths can dissolve more gases. There’s a lot of ocean, so why can’t it soak up all of our carbon dioxide just through diffusion?

Another ocean question involves the biological transfer between surface and depths. One global warming solution that has been proposed is to add iron to the polar oceans, because iron, not carbon dioxide, is the input limiting growth. Some field experiments have already been done on this. See here

and “The Siren Call of the Seas”. What is the limiting factor in the deeps? Is it also iron? What happens to carbonaceous shells and skeletons when surface creatures die? Does that carbon exit the system? How about the iron and other minerals in surface creatures that die and float down? Is it carried back up in the polar seas by rising cold-water currents?

Also, what would be the effect of the warming of Siberia and Canada on plant life? There would be a longer growing season perhaps– it might depend on sunshine instead of heat— but there might be fewer trees and more bushes.

The CDIAC site says that my breathing is not a net contributor to carbon dioxide because I do not emit more than I eat in the form of plant and animal food, and those plants and animals’ carbon came from the atmosphere ultimately. That is wrong. My breathing does add carbon dioxide; it’s just that my other activities ultimately subtract the same amount. If, however, I stopped eating, we could take the food I eat and bury it and that would reduce greenhouse gases far more than if I had just stopped driving.

Later that day: Come to think of it, let’s check the numbers. First, gasoline. One gallon is 8 pints, which is 8 pounds of water. Water is H20, Oxygen basically. Gasoline is various C-H compounds, Carbon basically, which is lighter than oxygen (hence oil floats on water). Thus,one gallon has, say, 6 pounds of carbon, which combines with 2 parts Oxygen to make CO2— 6+8+8=22 pounds, pretty close to 19.6.

Now check breathing. 1 kilogram of C02 per day is about 2 pounds which is about .8 pounds of carbon per day. I have to get all that carbon by eating, and much of my food is water, not carbon. I suppose I eat about 4 pounds of food per day, of which 1 pound is carbon, so that matches up pretty well.

If taxes simply increase, that is of course more distortionary than our present system, but presumably if we imposed a carbon tax we would reduce the income tax to keep revenue constant. Then the two questions are (a) how distortionary is a carbon tax compared to a tax on labor, rents, and capital income, and (b) if the carbon tax is more distortionary in general, does its lack of progressivity and loopholes nonetheless make it less distortionary?

Of course, it could be that carbon is a luxury good, in which case a carbon tax is progressive in effect even if it is flat as applied. Or, it could be regressive in effect, which would increase its efficiency even more by reducing the tax effect on the marginal dollar.

Sunspot activity has reached a thousand-year high, according to European astronomy institutions. Solar radiation is reducing Mars’s southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red Planet. Back on Earth, a NASA study reports that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades, and environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg, citing a 1997 atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, observes that “the increase in direct solar irradiation over the past 30 years is responsible for about 40 percent of the observed global warming.”

… Half of the past century’s warming occurred before 1940, when the human population and its industrial base were far smaller than now.

To continue:

According to “Climate Change and Its Impacts,” a study published last spring by the National Center for Policy Analysis, the ice mass in Greenland has grown, and “average summer temperatures at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased 4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the late 1980s.” British environmental analyst Lord Christopher Monckton says that from 1993 through 2003 the Greenland ice sheet “grew an average extra thickness of 2 inches a year,” and that in the past 30 years the mass of the Antarctic ice sheet has grown as well….

While Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” warns of up to 20 feet of sea-level increase, the IPCC has halved its estimate of the rise in sea level by the end of this century, to 17 inches from 36. It has reduced its estimate of the impact of global greenhouse-gas emissions on global climate by more than one-third, because, it says, pollutant particles reflect sunlight back into space and this has a cooling effect.

The IPCC confirms its 2001 conclusion that global warming will have little effect on the number of typhoons or hurricanes the world will experience, but it does not note that there has been a steady decrease in the number of global hurricane days since 1970–from 600 to 400 days, according to Georgia Tech atmospheric scientist Peter Webster.

The IPCC does not explain why from 1940 to 1975, while carbon dioxide emissions were rising, global temperatures were falling, nor does it admit that its 2001 “hockey stick” graph showing a dramatic temperature increase beginning in 1970s had omitted the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming temperature changes, apparently in order to make the new global warming increases appear more dramatic.

And then there’s the DDT coda:

In a 2000 issue of Nature Medicine magazine, four international scientists observed that “in less than two decades, spraying of houses with DDT reduced Sri Lanka’s malaria burden from 2.8 million cases and 7,000 deaths [in 1948] to 17 cases and no deaths” in 1963. Then came Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” invigorating environmentalism and leading to outright bans of DDT in some countries. When Sri Lanka ended the use of DDT in 1968, instead of 17 malaria cases it had 480,000.

p.s. See Tim Lambert’s post, linked in the first comment below, for skepticism about many of Dupont’s claims. I did a little checking on the DDT one, and here’s what I came up with:

I should know better than to take a politician’s claims at face value. They are as suspect as the environmentalist claims.

A 1975 Time magazine article says that DDT did eradicate malaria in Ceylon, but that the island stopped using it, thinking the problem was licked, and malaria had returned by 1975. Another source says

The ban on DDT was considered the first major victory for the environmentalist movement in the U.S. The effect of the ban in other nations was less salutary, however. In Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) DDT spraying had reduced malaria cases from 2.8 million in 1948 to 17 in 1963. After spraying was stopped in 1964, malaria cases began to rise again and reached 2.5 million in 1969.33 The same pattern was repeated in many other tropical— and usually impoverished—regions of the world. In Zanzibar the prevalence of malaria among the populace dropped from 70 percent in 1958 to 5 percent in 1964. By 1984 it was back up to between 50 and 60 percent. The chief malaria expert for the U.S. Agency for International Development said that malaria would have been 98 percent eradicated had DDT continued to be used.34

Tim Lambert has a thorough
older post that tells the story better, with lots of linked sources and info on the unreliability of some sources.

What seems to be clear is that DDT eradicated malaria and that after Ceylon stopped using it— at times and for reasons variously reported—malaria came back. But Lambert says malathion worked just as well (if perhaps more expensively) and got rid of it again.

1980 11.71
1981 11.88
1982 11.08
1983 13.19
1984 11.3
1985 12.73
1986 12.39
1987 12.89
1988 12.11
1989 11.83
1990 12.32
1991 13.38
1992 12.18
1993 11.68
1994 11.97
1995 12.43
1996 10.91
1997 10.9
1998 13.64
1999 13.17
2000 12.06
2001 11.74
2002 12.76
2003 11.22
2004 12.26
2005 12.58

The yearly averages are:
Year Average
1996 0.205
1997 0.462
1998 0.817
1999 0.487
2000 0.361
2001 0.553
2002 0.661
2003 0.641
2004 0.612
2005 0.745
2006 0.658

The monthly numbers are

Year Month 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Average

1996 0.14 0.307 0.079 -0.007 0.266 0.278 0.27 0.298 0.161 0.186 0.124 0.352 0.205

1997 0.351 0.519 0.299 0.199 0.284 0.527 0.457 0.45 0.6 0.521 0.559 0.776 0.462

1998 0.723 1.352 0.779 0.942 0.871 0.847 0.932 0.888 0.66 0.7 0.373 0.736 0.817

1999 0.693 0.928 0.343 0.344 0.396 0.441 0.456 0.425 0.561 0.437 0.272 0.552 0.487

2000 0.22 0.652 0.524 0.707 0.323 0.343 0.292 0.425 0.39 0.221 0.052 0.188 0.361

2001 0.616 0.495 0.658 0.521 0.528 0.472 0.529 0.742 0.514 0.526 0.671 0.366 0.553

2002 0.945 0.997 0.884 0.683 0.593 0.527 0.679 0.548 0.652 0.454 0.616 0.351 0.661

2003 0.813 0.555 0.436 0.524 0.746 0.764 0.524 0.579 0.642 0.661 0.605 0.842 0.641

2004 0.737 0.909 0.817 0.718 0.222 0.545 0.335 0.421 0.473 0.798 0.84 0.53 0.612

2005 0.774 0.555 0.769 0.894 0.668 0.829 0.795 0.629 0.746 0.859 0.881 0.542 0.745

2006 0.673 0.739 0.639 0.541 0.272 0.647 0.79 0.655 0.615 0.945 0.723 missing 0.658

1. For resources which will be reinvested, use the rate of return on capital, adjusting for taxes, risk, and the like.

2. For resources which will otherwise be consumed within the current generation, use the market rate of interest, again with adjustments. That rate reflects time preference within a life.

3. If we are comparing different consumption units across the generations, there is no time preference in the economically meaningful sense. (Prior to 1962, I was not impatiently waiting to have been born.) Use zero, noting this is an ethical rather than economic choice.

Depending on the configuration of the variables, the correct “net” discount rate usually will be above zero but below the current market rate.

That sounds right to me, except for the last paragraph. If we are thinking of building a bridge that will benefit people $101 in 90 years and cost $100 now, we shouldn’t build it. If we want to help those people in 90 years, we would do better to invest the $100 in other things and give them the return of $800 or whatever it would be by then.

On the other hand, if it is a question of whether to having a war now that will kill 100 people in order to avoid a war in 90 years that will kill 101 people, it seems as if we ought to have the war now.

That might not be a good example, though. Suppose we today would prefer to pay 1 billion dollars to avoid that war, and that billion dollars could be invested to be worth 800 billion dollars in 90 years. Then we ought to have the war later, and have the present generation invest the billion dollars.

In any case, global warming policy is an investment decision, and hence should use the market rate of interest. If we have a choice to cut our consumption by $500 billion now to reduce CO2 emissions and avoid $550 billion in climate losses in 90 years, we shouldn’t do it. Instead, if we want to help the future we should cut our onsumption by $400 billion now and invest it in general capital, which would yield far more in 90 years.

PS: I see that I misunderstood Prof. Cowen. In another post he says,

4. The resources that would have gone into consumption are harder to discount, especially if we are comparing those resources across the generations, and if the change in question is “large” rather than “small.” I tend to favor a very low or zero discount rate in these settings, if only because there is no pure time preference across the generations. (Before you are born, you are not sitting around impatiently, waiting, unless of course you are a character in Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird.) In any case this is predominantly an ethical question, and no correct answer follows directly from examining marginal analysis and market prices.

If the change is “small” for the affected people, in the precise sense of not much affecting their marginal utility of wealth, we should discount by the market rate of interest, adjusted for risk, taxes, transactions costs, etc.

It seems he is not doing the thought experiment of alternative ways to help the future. He is comparing keeping things the way they are now (with investment being assumed to help the future generation) versus the suggested policy change.

I think this lends argument to plans such as getting ready to put soot into the atmosphere to make it more opaque— but for waiting to do so until the bad effects are noticeable. If we were to be restricted to CO2-emission-reducing policies, it makes for a complicated and interesting tradeoff between restricting now, possibly uselessly, and restricting later, when adjustment costs are higher.

Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early ’70s, increased again until the ’90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.

There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas–albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system.

I find the global warming debate very hard to follow. There is lots of garbage published, and the respectable writers are not all that trustworthy, from what I can see. It is hard even to figure out the basic facts, and the models seem to be highly speculative and presented with too much confidence. I’m reminded of medical studies, with their dubious statistics and careless disregard of alternative causes.

One thing I wonder about is the actual pattern of temperature change over time. I know it’s not been a uniform increase in temperature over the 20th century– the temperature actually fell for 20 or so years in mid-century. That’s OK, if what we’re interested in is long-term trends, though it should remind us that the year-to-year variation in average temperature is greater than the century-to-century variation. But what I’d also like to pin down is (1) How does the temperature increase vary by continent and ocean? and (2) How much of the increase is in the summer and how much in the winter?

What I’ve heard is that global temperatures are not increasing. Rather, the average global temperature is increasing, because temperatures in some places and during some seasons are increasing. To wit, winter temperatures in central North America and Asia are increasing. I’d like to know if this is true, and temperatures at other times of year and in other places are not.

This is a big deal. When we worry about global warming, most of us are worrying about increases in summer temperatures, especially in the tropics, where life could become unbearable, or in the polar regions, where the ice would melt. We don’t worry about North Dakota winters having fewer below-zero days.

A Cato article shows the pattern of warming. Figure 48.1 above shows that the big increases in temperature have been in the Great Plains, Finland, and Siberia. Figure 48.3 shows that in the US since the 60′s it has been in the winter. It looks like the per-decade farenheit temperature increase by three-month group has been : JFM:.55, AMJ +.12, JAS +.08, OND -.11. Farneheit per decade. Extrapolating, in 50 years the US temperature would be about 3 degrees warmer in the winter and half a degree in the summer.