Comments (17)

• Neal W.

  Arthur DeVany has also used his insights as an economist for his skepticism of man-made climate change.

  www.arthurdevany.com

  Unfortunately, most of his blog posts about climate change now require a subscription to view.

  Published: October 14, 2008 9:00 AM

• Person

  Ah, okay, but if there were a disaster on the way due to excessive CO2 concentration, then that would justify the atrocity of having property rights in scarce resources like the atmosphere, right?

  Wait, it wouldn't? Then I must admit confusion here.

  Published: October 14, 2008 10:29 AM

• fundamentalist

  Very interesting and informative!

  Published: October 14, 2008 10:32 AM

• magnus

  "They really are simulations, trying to boil down the entire earth (including a crude version of the oceans) into a form that a computer can handle. Even so, there are still several components with uncertain effects (such as whether aerosols released into the atmosphere by human activity on net caused the globe to be warmer or cooler in the 1970s), and thus the climate modelers have some freedom in their approaches; they are not completely constrained by the laws of physics, since they have to cut some corners in order for the computer to be able to process the model."

  Neither climatologists nor economists, as a rule, have the slightest inkling of the level of computational complexity required to model these processes. To say they computational demands are astronomical would be an understatement.

  Juergen Schmidhuber and the folks at the Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale are doing some good work in the area of computational complexity.

  I had high hopes for the Santa Fe Institute, but they seem to have been hampered by an unnecessary politicization, at least when it comes to computational analyses of human behavior.

  Published: October 14, 2008 10:55 AM

• Harvey

  "Even a bad model is better than no model"... really? A bad model gives a feelling of certainty that is not correct. There are always people with vested interests to serve who will seize on it to support their cause.

  Published: October 14, 2008 1:31 PM

• Harvey

  "Even a bad model is better than no model"... really? A bad model gives a feelling of certainty that is not correct. There are always people with vested interests to serve who will seize on it to support their cause.

  Published: October 14, 2008 1:31 PM

• Jacob Steelman

  Having worked extensively with engineers as well as financial professionals who use models I can tell you models are biased inherently. Models are created and used by professionals who have been retained or work for organizations (for profit as well as non-profit) who have their own self interest to promote. Seldom are they altruistically donated to mankind for mankind's own good. Thus inherent in the model are built in assumptions designed to promote certain agendas of the client or customer who has sponsored development of the model. Being mathematical formulas the developer of the model knows how to tweak the model to obtain the desired result. Subsequent users of the model, not desiring to re-invent the model, merely adopt the existing model for utilization in their own organizations. So while subsequent users may tweak the model for their own purposes the inherent bias generally remain embedded in the core of the model (the black box as it often is referred) onto which may be bolted the subsequent tweakings. It is not uncommon for subsequent users of the model to be only vaguely familiar with the "contents" of the black box. Thus it is in this way that the results of the model (with its inherent bias and flaws) is spread as representing objective and unbiased truth and is adopted by academics and other professionals innocently or with knowledge of the bias and flaws.

  Published: October 14, 2008 2:56 PM

• jesse

  person-

  let me get this straight- in the interest of debunking the author's claims in this article, you link to a debate that you lost?

  Published: October 14, 2008 3:40 PM

• Danny Shahar

  Really great article! One thing that comes to mind is that the Misesian-style objections to the mathematicization of human action seemed to be based on differences in kind between the individual actions in question. The objections to proscription of variables in climate models and insufficient handling of intracellular processes, on the other hand, seem to be based more on a lack of scientific knowledge or computer processing power which might be, in principle, resolvable. Might this explain why Austrian thinkers were able to actually reject the Keynesian models, where reasonable climate change skeptics today might be forced to take a more tolerant stance towards the existing models?

  Published: October 14, 2008 4:16 PM

• nicholas gray

  'Alwarmist, and alwarmism' - my two contributions to the english language. Alarmist warmists need a single word to describe them, and most of them are militant in their solutions, so the vaguely Al-Quada-like beginning will also be apt.
  Only use it on your worst enemies, like 'Al-Gore'

  Published: October 14, 2008 6:28 PM

• nick gray

  P.S. I forgot to add- Britain's weather has been bad. They are back to their old, wet, summers. This was NOT predicted by any paper! Five years ago, they had a hot summer, and alwarmists were declaring that this would be standard from now on. Now the newspapers are moaning about the cold weather.
  Here in Australia, we had a winter that was cooler and wetter than the previous year, and New Zealand is trying to get us to holiday over there by talking about how they'd had more snow this year!
  Anyone else got any weather stories?

  Published: October 14, 2008 6:55 PM

• Walt D.

  Nick
  
  The Farmer's Almanac has been ahead of the curve in predicting cooler weather - they use sunspot data, which apparently runs on a 22-year cycle. This year there have been very few sunspots. The result has been much colder weather. This has been a disaster for California farmers.

  Published: October 14, 2008 7:35 PM

• David Spellman

  The earth has been significantly warmer and colder at different times in the past. Laying aside the causes, life survived and thrived just fine.

  Even if we are warming the earth, it will not be the end of the world. Global warming is simply being used as a method of gaining political power and rent seeking by the sly.

  Published: October 14, 2008 8:22 PM

• TokyoTom

  Bob, where's the beef?

  Your parallels to problems with macroeconomic models are more forced than they need to be, and there's very little in your essay that explains how various climate models are structured, how estimates of climate "sensitivity" (the temperature change that can be expected from a doubling of CO2 (or CO2 equivalent) are derived, or the criticisms that Lindzen, Spencer and others have of the models.

  The key problem with modelling the climate is simple - the climate is enormously complex, and we have a very long way to go in figuring out what all of the components are, how they fit together, and how the whole thing actually runs, so there is great uncertainty associated in trying to match up the results of model runs (based on tinkering with various inputs) with the actual vagaries of climate (over short-term, intermediate or long-term scales).

  Lindzen and Spencer both argue that some of the premises of the models may be wrong, that we can have little confidence in what the model runs tell us, and that while there is clearly ongoing climate change it is difficult to determine either the degree to which such change may be attributable to man (as opposed to natural variance) or how much more climate change we can expect if GHG emissions continue to rise as China, India and others exploit the cheapest energy sources to increase personal wealth.

  No one is saying that the models have been deliberately oversimplified or that anyone has cut corners. The models have continued to grow in complexity as computing power has increased and as knowledge of climate science has improved. But the climate still remains enormously complex, and there is still significant dispute over the degree of positive and negative feedback inherent in the climate.

  Not withstanding such disputes, on the modelling front you have totally missed (1) the degree to which estimates of climate sensitivity have been narrowed down as a result of information based on the past climate and (2) the conclusions that we can draw about the relatively wide band of temperature increases that positive feedbacks may produce - the so-called "fat-tailed" distribution that Weitzman points out and even Jim Manzi at Cato feels justiifies government action. More on Manzi at my name above and on Weitzman at http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2007/12/14/the-social-cost-of-ignoring-carbon.aspx.

  This last point spills out into the realm of public policy discussion. Even with uncertain models, what we do know - including that GHG emissions are likely to continue increasing and including risks we face from climate change (and the bands of uncertainty about possible temperature increases) - has long been sufficient to justify public policy changes; we have been held up more over issues of domestic and international burden-sharing.

  This, of course, has been known for some time; the question now may be whether there remains time for libertarians to advance a positive agenda of efficiency via deregulation of energy markets, removal of subsidies, tax reform that encourages capital investment, support for private initiatives and preferences by those who are concerned about potential climate change, and constructive engagement with developing nations that aids their course along the environmental Kuznets curve.

  Austrians have long recognized that resources that are not owned or priced are over-exploited; while there are good reasons to oppose any new tax or regulatory policy at the federal level, we should also recognized that rebated carbon taxes would be far less damaging than a cap and trade program and a mess of government-directed investments in new "green" technologies.

  Published: October 15, 2008 8:45 AM

• Walt D.

  Tom:
  
  If you want a reference showing why the climate models don't work well, you might want to check here.
  
  http://ranger.uta.edu/~chqding/papers/accurate-arithmetics.pdf
  
  The scientists actually doing the simulations are well aware of the limitations of their models, and in fact make no attempt to hide them. It is the corrupt politicians an the UN, who want to collect rent, who are responsible for the hype.

  Published: October 15, 2008 12:18 PM

• TokyoTom

  Walt, thanks for the useful reference. Actually, I have plenty, and have pulled some of the more useful ones together for the interested reader (which hopefully will include Bob):

  http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/10/16/what-do-we-know-about-climate-models-and-climate-quot-sensitivity-quot-a-recent-bibliography.aspx

  Regards,

  Tom

  Published: October 16, 2008 6:37 AM

• fundamentalist

  On several news sites today: “Alaska town sues over global warming”. From USA Today: “The city of Kivalina and a federally recognized tribe, the Alaska Native village of Kivalina, sued ExxonMobil, eight other oil companies, 14 power companies and one coal company in a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco.” The villagers claim damages from rising oceans and late-forming ice that allow waves to erode village land. Relocation costs are estimated at $400 milliion.

  This is how man libertarians have advocated handling the global warming debate. It will be interesting to watch.
  

  Published: October 16, 2008 8:18 AM