What are your current beliefs on climate change? Specifically, would you defer to the view that greenhouse gas forcing is the main source of long-term climate change? How long-term? Would you defer to the IPCC range for climate sensitivity estimates?
Based on asking UCSD scientists when I’ve met them at parties, I’d parrot them and say human emissions are maybe about 1⁄2 of the source of long term climate change. I would not defer to the IPCC or to anybody without giving them careful reads. The issue is too politicized to trust anyone merely because of fancy or scientific sounding titles.
What were your beliefs on climate change when you first came across the subject, and how did your views evolve (if at all) on further reading (if you did any)? (Obviously, your initial views wouldn’t have included beliefs about terms like “greenhouse gas forcing” or “climate sensitivity”).
When I first heard of global warming I thought it was ludicrous because I could remember a number of years ago reading about the coming ice age and all the evidence for that. The idea that we should bring CO2 emissions to a halt is ludicrous to me even in the face of real climate change because there are so many cheaper ways to cool the earth than to stop emitting CO2. The idea that we should stop emitting CO2 because it is emissions of CO2 that got us here is simplistic, and, I suspect, essentially reflecting a religious impulse of “purity,” the same kind of thing that leads to strange dietary restrictions and proscriptions against associating with menstruating women. I was very influenced by Michael Crichton (a denier, more or less, but a damn smart one) and I accept the steady stream of obviously real experts who say we have nowhere near enough reason to think that trillion dollar changes like stopping burning fossil fuels is likely to be any more effective than solutions that cost a millionth as much. A good source of these experts is to look at the guests on “econtalk” hosted by Russ Roberts.
What are some surprising things you learned when reading up about climate change that led you to question your beliefs (regardless of whether you changed them)? For instance, perhaps reading about Climategate caused you to critically examine your deference to expert consensus on the issue, but you eventually concluded that the expert consensus was still right.
I was surprised that there is still no measurable ocean level change even as every hurricane or blizzard that passes by is claimed to be a sign of the changes that have already occurred. I was surprised to learn that there are easily worked out things that can be done that could cool the earth at a cost of a few billion US$ or less. I was surprised to learn that glaciers really are melting.
If you read my recent posts linked above, did the posts contain information that was new to you? Did any of this information surprise you? Do you think it’s valuable to carry out this sort of exercise in order to better understand the climate change debate?
I started reading them, they seemed OK, just didn’t have the energy to get through them at the moment.
other comments
The real question is not “what is really happening” but “what is the best thing to do now.” Intelligent study is certainly a thing to do now and fortunately there is no shortage of that, even though the politicization will make it really hard to dig through and find reasonable descriptions of results as they are developed.
I am also fascinated by the idea that a slow rise in sea level is described as a catastrophe. It is not. The sea has always eroded the coast and houses and other structures last a finite time in many of these places. Oh Well. When I suggest that a sea level rise slow enough that “we can walk away from it” is not particularly frightening, I am warned that poor countries with no hills could see millions die… of drowning? It is not clear. The hypothesis is that since they are poor they can’t figure out how to move somewhere else. So the solution is to turn off all the engines in the world to help keep Bangladesh above sea level? It would be simpler and cheaper to buy a few million square miles in Africa an pay to move all interested Bangladeshi’s there. Oh but that is not politically realistic? But turning off all the engines is?
The usage of fossil fuels has not only NOT declined worldwide, it continues to grow as fast as it has ever grown. No matter at what rate renewable energy comes on line, more fossil fuel energy comes on line faster. ” Solving” CO2 by having Americans and Europeans buy Tesla’s is like “solving” population growth by having American’s and Europeans use condoms. In each case, if you do not change what China, India, and Africa are doing you are for all intents and purposes doing nothing but rendering the US and Europe less important and powerful in the future of earth.
I am also fascinated by the idea that a slow rise in sea level is described as a catastrophe. It is not. The sea has always eroded the coast and houses and other structures last a finite time in many of these places. Oh Well. When I suggest that a sea level rise slow enough that “we can walk away from it” is not particularly frightening, I am warned that poor countries with no hills could see millions die… of drowning? It is not clear. The hypothesis is that since they are poor they can’t figure out how to move somewhere else. So the solution is to turn off all the engines in the world to help keep Bangladesh above sea level? It would be simpler and cheaper to buy a few million square miles in Africa an pay to move all interested Bangladeshi’s there. Oh but that is not politically realistic? But turning off all the engines is?
I’d say abandoning entire coastal regions is pretty damn catastrophic, even if it’s an orderly retreat and nobody drowns. That’s still billions (trillions?) of dollars worth of real estate vanishing under the waves, not to mention the immense cultural loss.
Then again, median estimates for sea level rise never end up more than about a metre. If this simulation is to be believed, it won’t encroach on coastlines that much. How expensive would it be to build giant levee systems to keep the water out of Bangladesh, like the Netherlands?
I’d say abandoning entire coastal regions is pretty damn catastrophic, even if it’s an orderly retreat and nobody drowns. That’s still billions (trillions?) of dollars worth of real estate vanishing under the waves, not to mention the immense cultural loss.
The real estate itself: as much ocean-front real estate is created by sea-level rise as is destroyed, approximately. So at this point, it is only the improvements upon the real estate which are lost. With sea level creeping slowly up, these losses should be minimal. Structures have various economically useful lifetimes ranging from years to many decades depending on the structure.
And it should be noted that sea levels have been rising for longer than human civilization has existed. Loss of real estate and improvements because of natural shifts in land vs water levels is nothing new.
as much ocean-front real estate is created by sea-level rise as is destroyed, approximately.
There isn’t a substantial change in the amount of ocean-front real estate, but there is a substantial change in the total amount of real estate. Super-crude model: you have a square island of side 1 unit; rising sea level reduces the side by 0.01 units of length, which by coincidence is also how near the sea something needs to be to be “ocean-front”. Before, the total amount of land is 1 unit and the total amount of sea-front land is 0.0396 units. After, the total amount of land is 0.9801 units and the total amount of sea-front land is 0.0392 units. So the total amount has gone down by ~2x as much relatively, and by ~50x as much in absolute terms.
From wikipedia we see that a 1% decrease in above sea level land area happens with about a 10 m sea level rise. In your example above you work with a 2% decrease in area, so you are developing numbers associated with a 20 m rise in sea level.
Predictions are for 0.2 to 0.6 m sea level rise in 100 years. This causes a 0.02% to 0.06% reduction in land area, associated with a 0.01% to 0.03% reduction in coastline.
So, pulling some numbers out of my rear end, let’s suppose that 5% of the world’s GDP comes from “land-based” activities in some sense, and let’s suppose that losing coastal land is 10% as bad as losing average land (e.g. because most farms aren’t right on the coast or near enough it to be badly affected by this change). Then losing 0.04% of the land would reduce “gross world product” by 0.05 x 0.1 x 0.0004 = 0.000002 = 2 x 10^-6 of its value, or about 2 x 10^-6 x $10^14 ~= $0.2B annually. That’s a lot of money but seems likely to be a lot smaller than, e.g., the impact on agriculture of temperature changes, or the cost of serious mitigation efforts.
(I’d guess that the costs would be relatively much greater for poorer countries, more of whose economic activity is agricultural.)
The economic impact depends mostly on the loss of homes and other buildings, not farmland. A good fraction of the world’s wealth is tied up in buildings, and those tend to be concentrated near coastlines. But levees can be built in many areas, and some buildings in other areas might be worth putting on stilts. So the costs of levees, stilts, and abandoned structures are what you most need to examine, I think, to assess the economic cost of sea-level rise.
What, that’s close to nothing! $0.03 per person per year.
And the effect is even smaller than that. Higher sea level pushes the atmosphere up as well, which means we are improving land at higher elevations by having more air on it. This will reduce the net loss of valuable land.
If the most effective charities can save a life for $2k, that’s enough to save 100k lives/year. But of course there are plenty of other things it’s small in comparison to; I mentioned a couple of relevant ones.
improving land at higher elevations
I think this is likely to be a much smaller effect. The great majority of land is no more than ~1000m above sea level.
If the most effective charities can save a life for $2k, that’s enough to save 100k lives/year.
The most effective charities can save a life for $2k today (where by “today” I mean ‘a couple years ago’) because there’s lots of low-hanging fruit, but I doubt this will continue to apply much longer.
Clever, yes. However, it also comes with the opening up of relatively low lands that were previously covered by ice. AND, I have read that a significant fraction of sea level rise is due to the ocean water expanding since slightly warmer water is not as dense as slightly cooler water, which would serve to push the atmosphere up.
I think if you totted it all up, you would see a small loss of value in the land area available, but much smaller loss in value than in land area lost. That is, the remaining land would have higher value per hectare on average for a few reasons.
I have read that a significant fraction of sea level rise is due to the ocean water expanding since slightly warmer water is not as dense as slightly cooler water, which would serve to push the atmosphere up.
The air is warming too, and the expansion of the air will make it less dense, which utterly swamps the effect from the expansion of the water.
That is, the remaining land would have higher value per hectare on average for a few reasons.
Really? I see that the other way around.
Beaches are valuable, and it will take a lot of time or money to make them at their new sites.
Estuaries provide a lot of ecological services and are basically flat. Having them be at the wrong depth will screw up those services.
Many cities (concentrated value) are right down on the water, and it will be muy expensive to save them and enough of their outlying areas that they remain convenient (which was a large part of why they were cities in the first place).
The link shows (just eyeballing the plot) about 80% of the earth’s land area being fairly uniformly distributed between 0 and 1000m above sea level. If we assume (a bit too simply, but it probably isn’t very far off) that a 10m rise in sea level will simply turn everything between 0 and 10m above sea level into no-longer-land, that suggests about (10m/1000m)*80% ~= 0.8% of the land would go away. Doesn’t seem too far out.
(How bad is the oversimplification mentioned above? It’s too pessimistic because some land below sea level might remain usable, as with the Netherlands. It’s too optimistic because some land still above sea level might become much less usable, e.g. by turning into little islands. My guess is that both these effects are quite small and they’re similar in size.)
but there is a substantial change in the total amount of real estate.
Substantial..?
Plug in the numbers for the size of the North American continent and for the expected sea level rise by 2100, for example, into your super-crude model.
I probably shouldn’t have said “substantial” since what I really meant was “not cancelled out in the way mwengler describes”.
I don’t think I can actually do the calculation without an estimate of the typical gradient of coastal land in the US (i.e., the conversion factor from sea level rise to shrinkage) but let’s make a crude guess and see what happens. So, North America has an area of about 25M km^2 so our square is about 5000km on a side. Expected sea level rise by 2100 is about 0.5m (I’ve seen wildly inconsistent figures for this, though). Let’s suppose that sea-level land has a typical gradient of 1 in 50, so that a 0.5m rise means a 25m shrinkage in the usable land. Then the total amount of land lost would be about 20000km x 25m = 20km x 25km = 500 km^2, roughly comparable to the area of San Francisco.
This is probably an underestimate: North America is wigglier than our square model (so more coast relative to its area) and I suspect that actually coastal land is flatter than 1 in 50.
So it’s a small fraction of the total area (as of course was obvious from the outset) but personally I’d consider it a substantial loss if an area the size of San Francisco fell into the sea.
And it should be noted that sea levels have been rising for longer than human civilization has existed. Loss of real estate and improvements because of natural shifts in land vs water levels is nothing new.
I would like to add that at any particular piece of the coast it is NOT the global ocean level rise that determines its fate. The edges of continents generally sink or rise, depending on what a particular tectonic plate is doing and what is the area’s recent geological history (e.g. the Hudson Bay area is still rising having been freed from the weight of the glaciers after the last Ice Age ended, but the areas of coastal Maryland or Louisiana are geologically subsiding). There are also things like the silting up of river estuaries, rearrangement of barrier islands by hurricanes, etc. etc.
I agree, sea level is rising and has been rising for 1000s of years. What lead me to say it is not rising is my recollection from reading Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, published 2004. I remember his claim as something like there is no evidence of sea level rise recently. I may be misremembering it or he may have made the claim, maybe he claimed there is no evidence for off-trend sea level rise, of accelerated sea level rise.
When I first heard of global warming I thought it was ludicrous because I could remember a number of years ago reading about the coming ice age and all the evidence for that.
(Not saying you still believe this, but note): To the extent that was predicted at all and was not simply popular press inflation of a contrarian viewpoint, it was due to aerosol air pollution, which drastically reduced starting in the 1970s.
if you do not change what China, India, and Africa are doing you are for all intents and purposes doing nothing but rendering the US and Europe less important and powerful in the future of earth.
1) Germany has been putting a lot of effort into this. How’s their economy doing, again? Seems all right.
2) Fossil fuels are inherently limited, [edit:] and[/edit] you don’t need a very long term before relying on them begins to seem like a false economy. Fossil fuels as a whole may still be growing as fast as ever, but oil’s growth has slowed down. Even if global warming weren’t happening at all, we’d be better off getting ourselves significantly freer of oil over the next decade or two.
3) IF they don’t change… well, it’s not as if these are entirely independent. If we put in real efforts, we’ll have a lot better standing to demand that they change. Our doing nothing has been their excuse to do nothing for nearly 20 years.
4) As you alluded, there are cheap and VERY expensive ways of mitigating CO2 release.
2) Fossil fuels are inherently limited, [edit:] and[/edit] you don’t need a very long term before relying on them begins to seem like a false economy. Fossil fuels as a whole may still be growing as fast as ever, but oil’s growth has slowed down. Even if global warming weren’t happening at all, we’d be better off getting ourselves significantly freer of oil over the next decade or two.
In a free market, so long as the interest rates are not too high, depleting fossil fuel reserves would raise fossil fuel prices decreasing fossil fuel consumption, with no need for government and/or collective action. (Arguably that’s already happening; I also suspect that it’s a major part of the reason of the Great Stagnation since the mid-early 1970s, especially given that people pointing it out like to measure it in terms of metrics such as energy consumption per capita.) So all we have to do is realize we’re in a hole and stop digging.
I’m assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that people who read this are familiar with the idea that we are approaching peak oil, and can expect it within the next 20 years, perhaps less, so they know how to appropriately fill in the blank on ‘very long term’, which we would have been filling in rather differently 200 years ago.
If you seriously didn’t know this, well, now you know the implicit part of my argument.
I’m assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that people who read this are familiar with the idea that we are approaching peak oil
I can’t speak for everyone who reads this, of course, but as to myself, I am familiar with the idea that we are approaching peak oil—moreover, we have been approaching it for the last 40 years and, if anything, we seem to be farther away from it than we used to be. So, given the very consistent, I might even say systemic failures of peak oil forecasts, I have to be quite sceptical about the current one as well.
200 years ago, of course, oil was just a useless nuisance. People were concerned about coal. Notably, there is still lots and lots of coal around.
1) The prediction of peak US production was basically right on the mark. Other national predictions have been accurate too.
2) The failures of peak oil predictions have been primarily from the willingness to get to less and less accessible reserves at progressively rising monetary cost (see: dramatic increases in the price of oil) and, recently, (non-AGW) environmental and even health costs.
3) Until recently, few alternatives have been available, so whatever the consequences to getting more oil, we HAD to accept them. Electric cars were jokes. This is rapidly ceasing to be the case.
4) I am aware there are vast coal reserves. However, last I checked, no one uses coal for transportation anymore except by going through the power grid (electric trains), so I’m not sure how that actually addresses my earlier comment.
Note: I am indeed falling back from my naively phrased claim in my previous post here. However, this doesn’t impact the usage in the post before that.
3) Until recently, few alternatives have been available, so whatever the consequences to getting more oil, we HAD to accept them. Electric cars were jokes. This is rapidly ceasing to be the case.
There are things for which there still are no alternatives to fossil fuels and there will likely never be: for example, how the hell are you going to power long-haul aircraft?
Hydrocarbon fuels don’t need to be fossil; there are methods you can use to convert biomass into synthetic fuel, though outside of ethanol and the odd biodiesel project synthetic fuels usually use coal as a feedstock right now. It’d be more expensive, though.
Commercial aviation is just barely economically viable today, and fuel getting much more expensive would it make all but impossible for airlines to make any net profit. But yeah, this might change in the future.
Despite incredible growth, airlines have not come close to returning the cost of capital, with profit margins of less than 1% on average over that period. In 2012 they made profits of only $4 for every passenger carried. Why has a booming business failed to prosper?
army1987′s point is ill-posed and makes little sense in a supply-demand framework—the more interesting question is how much ticket prices would have to rise if fuel got much more expensive, since obviously they would rise & airlines wouldn’t simply stop flying entirely.
I think you’re confusing the quoted sentence and “I think airline tickets are expensive”.
It is more likely that he is ‘confusing’ the quoted sentence and the findings from analysis of business failures (and marginal successes) in the industry in question compared with other industries and various analyses about the market forces that produce that result. This is still not quite the same thing as “commercial aviation is just barely economically viable today” but far closer than “I think airline tickets are expensive”.
(I agree with Lumifer that Army’s conclusion does not follow. Tripling the cost of fuel would still result in a viable albeit far, far smaller commercial aviation market.)
The cost of fuel seems to account for about 20% of the cost of the ticket on a US domestic flight (source). Given that international flights have higher fees, I expect the fuel cost percentage to be even smaller for them.
For example I took a look at a New York—London return economy ticket which costs about $1050 now. Out of that amount $250 are government taxes and fees (NOT including the sales tax).
And yet airlines lost money for most of the past decade. So these 3 billion passengers aren’t paying them that much. (And I don’t think it just doesn’t occur to airlines to raise prices; presumably they wouldn’t get as many passengers if they did.) Even more recently, it looks like the average net profit per passenger (average, not marginal) is of the order of $5.
Which divided by 3 billion would be $5.77/passenger in 2010, $2.50/passenger in 2011, $2.03/passenger in 2012, $3.53/passenger in 2013, and $6/passenger in 2014. What did you think I meant by “of the order of $5”?
Yes, we agree on the numbers, we’re just throwing connotations at each other :-)
$5 is a small number so you’re pointing to this. $somebillions is a large number and I’m pointing to that.
I am still pretty sure commercial aviation is perfectly viable economically, it’s just that certain peculiarities of the business make it hard to make lots of money in it. However it’s not going anywhere and, say, doubling the fuel prices will not make it go away either.
and there will likely never be: for example, how the hell are you going to power long-haul aircraft?
So, um, are you saying there never will be anything with the energy density as good or better than jet fuel..? That’s probably true for the next 10-20 years, but “never” is an awfully audacious claim.
Believe it or not, this was seriously considered during the Cold War. Some manned prototypes even flew with their reactors going (albeit not to power the plane), though the problem of shielding wasn’t adequately solved before progress in ICBMs made nuclear-powered bombers pointless.
Then there’s Project Pluto, though that would have been less a conventional aircraft and more a terrifying drone bomber built around an unshielded nuclear ramjet the size of a bus:
The engine also acted as a secondary weapon for the missile: direct neutron radiation from the virtually unshielded reactor would sicken, injure, and/or kill living things beneath the flight path; the stream of fallout left in its wake would poison enemy territory; and its strategically selected crash site would receive intense radioactive contamination. In addition, the sonic waves given off by its passage would damage ground installations.
You are trying too hard :-) Your first point says that the predictions were correct and then the second point tries to explain the failures :-D
Re (2) and (3) peak oil people didn’t claim that oil will become too expensive or inconvenient to extract—the claim was that the oil will run out, full stop.
Re (4) we were talking about fossil fuels in general, not only about what’s used for transportation. But in any case, you can convert coal and natural gas to liquid fuel. The technology is well-known.
Paragraph 1: You said it was completely systematically wrong. I pointed out that it wasn’t systematically wrong and then explained the cases where it was.
Paragraph 2: Peak oil is not an ABRUPT EXHAUSTION, but the time of greatest production.
Paragraph 3: Go back. This was in response to my claim specifically about oil.
Based on asking UCSD scientists when I’ve met them at parties, I’d parrot them and say human emissions are maybe about 1⁄2 of the source of long term climate change. I would not defer to the IPCC or to anybody without giving them careful reads. The issue is too politicized to trust anyone merely because of fancy or scientific sounding titles.
When I first heard of global warming I thought it was ludicrous because I could remember a number of years ago reading about the coming ice age and all the evidence for that. The idea that we should bring CO2 emissions to a halt is ludicrous to me even in the face of real climate change because there are so many cheaper ways to cool the earth than to stop emitting CO2. The idea that we should stop emitting CO2 because it is emissions of CO2 that got us here is simplistic, and, I suspect, essentially reflecting a religious impulse of “purity,” the same kind of thing that leads to strange dietary restrictions and proscriptions against associating with menstruating women. I was very influenced by Michael Crichton (a denier, more or less, but a damn smart one) and I accept the steady stream of obviously real experts who say we have nowhere near enough reason to think that trillion dollar changes like stopping burning fossil fuels is likely to be any more effective than solutions that cost a millionth as much. A good source of these experts is to look at the guests on “econtalk” hosted by Russ Roberts.
I was surprised that there is still no measurable ocean level change even as every hurricane or blizzard that passes by is claimed to be a sign of the changes that have already occurred. I was surprised to learn that there are easily worked out things that can be done that could cool the earth at a cost of a few billion US$ or less. I was surprised to learn that glaciers really are melting.
I started reading them, they seemed OK, just didn’t have the energy to get through them at the moment.
The real question is not “what is really happening” but “what is the best thing to do now.” Intelligent study is certainly a thing to do now and fortunately there is no shortage of that, even though the politicization will make it really hard to dig through and find reasonable descriptions of results as they are developed.
I am also fascinated by the idea that a slow rise in sea level is described as a catastrophe. It is not. The sea has always eroded the coast and houses and other structures last a finite time in many of these places. Oh Well. When I suggest that a sea level rise slow enough that “we can walk away from it” is not particularly frightening, I am warned that poor countries with no hills could see millions die… of drowning? It is not clear. The hypothesis is that since they are poor they can’t figure out how to move somewhere else. So the solution is to turn off all the engines in the world to help keep Bangladesh above sea level? It would be simpler and cheaper to buy a few million square miles in Africa an pay to move all interested Bangladeshi’s there. Oh but that is not politically realistic? But turning off all the engines is?
The usage of fossil fuels has not only NOT declined worldwide, it continues to grow as fast as it has ever grown. No matter at what rate renewable energy comes on line, more fossil fuel energy comes on line faster. ” Solving” CO2 by having Americans and Europeans buy Tesla’s is like “solving” population growth by having American’s and Europeans use condoms. In each case, if you do not change what China, India, and Africa are doing you are for all intents and purposes doing nothing but rendering the US and Europe less important and powerful in the future of earth.
I’d say abandoning entire coastal regions is pretty damn catastrophic, even if it’s an orderly retreat and nobody drowns. That’s still billions (trillions?) of dollars worth of real estate vanishing under the waves, not to mention the immense cultural loss.
Then again, median estimates for sea level rise never end up more than about a metre. If this simulation is to be believed, it won’t encroach on coastlines that much. How expensive would it be to build giant levee systems to keep the water out of Bangladesh, like the Netherlands?
The real estate itself: as much ocean-front real estate is created by sea-level rise as is destroyed, approximately. So at this point, it is only the improvements upon the real estate which are lost. With sea level creeping slowly up, these losses should be minimal. Structures have various economically useful lifetimes ranging from years to many decades depending on the structure.
And it should be noted that sea levels have been rising for longer than human civilization has existed. Loss of real estate and improvements because of natural shifts in land vs water levels is nothing new.
There isn’t a substantial change in the amount of ocean-front real estate, but there is a substantial change in the total amount of real estate. Super-crude model: you have a square island of side 1 unit; rising sea level reduces the side by 0.01 units of length, which by coincidence is also how near the sea something needs to be to be “ocean-front”. Before, the total amount of land is 1 unit and the total amount of sea-front land is 0.0396 units. After, the total amount of land is 0.9801 units and the total amount of sea-front land is 0.0392 units. So the total amount has gone down by ~2x as much relatively, and by ~50x as much in absolute terms.
Cool idea using numbers!
From wikipedia we see that a 1% decrease in above sea level land area happens with about a 10 m sea level rise. In your example above you work with a 2% decrease in area, so you are developing numbers associated with a 20 m rise in sea level.
Predictions are for 0.2 to 0.6 m sea level rise in 100 years. This causes a 0.02% to 0.06% reduction in land area, associated with a 0.01% to 0.03% reduction in coastline.
So, pulling some numbers out of my rear end, let’s suppose that 5% of the world’s GDP comes from “land-based” activities in some sense, and let’s suppose that losing coastal land is 10% as bad as losing average land (e.g. because most farms aren’t right on the coast or near enough it to be badly affected by this change). Then losing 0.04% of the land would reduce “gross world product” by 0.05 x 0.1 x 0.0004 = 0.000002 = 2 x 10^-6 of its value, or about 2 x 10^-6 x $10^14 ~= $0.2B annually. That’s a lot of money but seems likely to be a lot smaller than, e.g., the impact on agriculture of temperature changes, or the cost of serious mitigation efforts.
(I’d guess that the costs would be relatively much greater for poorer countries, more of whose economic activity is agricultural.)
The economic impact depends mostly on the loss of homes and other buildings, not farmland. A good fraction of the world’s wealth is tied up in buildings, and those tend to be concentrated near coastlines. But levees can be built in many areas, and some buildings in other areas might be worth putting on stilts. So the costs of levees, stilts, and abandoned structures are what you most need to examine, I think, to assess the economic cost of sea-level rise.
What, that’s close to nothing! $0.03 per person per year.
And the effect is even smaller than that. Higher sea level pushes the atmosphere up as well, which means we are improving land at higher elevations by having more air on it. This will reduce the net loss of valuable land.
If the most effective charities can save a life for $2k, that’s enough to save 100k lives/year. But of course there are plenty of other things it’s small in comparison to; I mentioned a couple of relevant ones.
I think this is likely to be a much smaller effect. The great majority of land is no more than ~1000m above sea level.
The most effective charities can save a life for $2k today (where by “today” I mean ‘a couple years ago’) because there’s lots of low-hanging fruit, but I doubt this will continue to apply much longer.
Higher sea level from ice falling into the water results in the air being lowered since the ice became denser in the process.
Clever, yes. However, it also comes with the opening up of relatively low lands that were previously covered by ice. AND, I have read that a significant fraction of sea level rise is due to the ocean water expanding since slightly warmer water is not as dense as slightly cooler water, which would serve to push the atmosphere up.
I think if you totted it all up, you would see a small loss of value in the land area available, but much smaller loss in value than in land area lost. That is, the remaining land would have higher value per hectare on average for a few reasons.
The air is warming too, and the expansion of the air will make it less dense, which utterly swamps the effect from the expansion of the water.
Really? I see that the other way around.
Beaches are valuable, and it will take a lot of time or money to make them at their new sites.
Estuaries provide a lot of ecological services and are basically flat. Having them be at the wrong depth will screw up those services.
Many cities (concentrated value) are right down on the water, and it will be muy expensive to save them and enough of their outlying areas that they remain convenient (which was a large part of why they were cities in the first place).
I am sorry, I don’t see anything like these numbers in your link.
I digitized the elevation distribution figure and took the slope right around sea level.
The link shows (just eyeballing the plot) about 80% of the earth’s land area being fairly uniformly distributed between 0 and 1000m above sea level. If we assume (a bit too simply, but it probably isn’t very far off) that a 10m rise in sea level will simply turn everything between 0 and 10m above sea level into no-longer-land, that suggests about (10m/1000m)*80% ~= 0.8% of the land would go away. Doesn’t seem too far out.
(How bad is the oversimplification mentioned above? It’s too pessimistic because some land below sea level might remain usable, as with the Netherlands. It’s too optimistic because some land still above sea level might become much less usable, e.g. by turning into little islands. My guess is that both these effects are quite small and they’re similar in size.)
Substantial..?
Plug in the numbers for the size of the North American continent and for the expected sea level rise by 2100, for example, into your super-crude model.
I probably shouldn’t have said “substantial” since what I really meant was “not cancelled out in the way mwengler describes”.
I don’t think I can actually do the calculation without an estimate of the typical gradient of coastal land in the US (i.e., the conversion factor from sea level rise to shrinkage) but let’s make a crude guess and see what happens. So, North America has an area of about 25M km^2 so our square is about 5000km on a side. Expected sea level rise by 2100 is about 0.5m (I’ve seen wildly inconsistent figures for this, though). Let’s suppose that sea-level land has a typical gradient of 1 in 50, so that a 0.5m rise means a 25m shrinkage in the usable land. Then the total amount of land lost would be about 20000km x 25m = 20km x 25km = 500 km^2, roughly comparable to the area of San Francisco.
This is probably an underestimate: North America is wigglier than our square model (so more coast relative to its area) and I suspect that actually coastal land is flatter than 1 in 50.
So it’s a small fraction of the total area (as of course was obvious from the outset) but personally I’d consider it a substantial loss if an area the size of San Francisco fell into the sea.
I would like to add that at any particular piece of the coast it is NOT the global ocean level rise that determines its fate. The edges of continents generally sink or rise, depending on what a particular tectonic plate is doing and what is the area’s recent geological history (e.g. the Hudson Bay area is still rising having been freed from the weight of the glaciers after the last Ice Age ended, but the areas of coastal Maryland or Louisiana are geologically subsiding). There are also things like the silting up of river estuaries, rearrangement of barrier islands by hurricanes, etc. etc.
There seems to be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise
I agree, sea level is rising and has been rising for 1000s of years. What lead me to say it is not rising is my recollection from reading Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, published 2004. I remember his claim as something like there is no evidence of sea level rise recently. I may be misremembering it or he may have made the claim, maybe he claimed there is no evidence for off-trend sea level rise, of accelerated sea level rise.
Whatever he claimed, I agree sea level is rising.
(Not saying you still believe this, but note): To the extent that was predicted at all and was not simply popular press inflation of a contrarian viewpoint, it was due to aerosol air pollution, which drastically reduced starting in the 1970s.
1) Germany has been putting a lot of effort into this. How’s their economy doing, again? Seems all right.
2) Fossil fuels are inherently limited, [edit:] and[/edit] you don’t need a very long term before relying on them begins to seem like a false economy. Fossil fuels as a whole may still be growing as fast as ever, but oil’s growth has slowed down. Even if global warming weren’t happening at all, we’d be better off getting ourselves significantly freer of oil over the next decade or two.
3) IF they don’t change… well, it’s not as if these are entirely independent. If we put in real efforts, we’ll have a lot better standing to demand that they change. Our doing nothing has been their excuse to do nothing for nearly 20 years.
4) As you alluded, there are cheap and VERY expensive ways of mitigating CO2 release.
In a free market, so long as the interest rates are not too high, depleting fossil fuel reserves would raise fossil fuel prices decreasing fossil fuel consumption, with no need for government and/or collective action. (Arguably that’s already happening; I also suspect that it’s a major part of the reason of the Great Stagnation since the mid-early 1970s, especially given that people pointing it out like to measure it in terms of metrics such as energy consumption per capita.) So all we have to do is realize we’re in a hole and stop digging.
That argument would apply just as well 200 years ago, right?
I’m assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that people who read this are familiar with the idea that we are approaching peak oil, and can expect it within the next 20 years, perhaps less, so they know how to appropriately fill in the blank on ‘very long term’, which we would have been filling in rather differently 200 years ago.
If you seriously didn’t know this, well, now you know the implicit part of my argument.
I can’t speak for everyone who reads this, of course, but as to myself, I am familiar with the idea that we are approaching peak oil—moreover, we have been approaching it for the last 40 years and, if anything, we seem to be farther away from it than we used to be. So, given the very consistent, I might even say systemic failures of peak oil forecasts, I have to be quite sceptical about the current one as well.
200 years ago, of course, oil was just a useless nuisance. People were concerned about coal. Notably, there is still lots and lots of coal around.
1) The prediction of peak US production was basically right on the mark. Other national predictions have been accurate too.
2) The failures of peak oil predictions have been primarily from the willingness to get to less and less accessible reserves at progressively rising monetary cost (see: dramatic increases in the price of oil) and, recently, (non-AGW) environmental and even health costs.
3) Until recently, few alternatives have been available, so whatever the consequences to getting more oil, we HAD to accept them. Electric cars were jokes. This is rapidly ceasing to be the case.
4) I am aware there are vast coal reserves. However, last I checked, no one uses coal for transportation anymore except by going through the power grid (electric trains), so I’m not sure how that actually addresses my earlier comment.
Note: I am indeed falling back from my naively phrased claim in my previous post here. However, this doesn’t impact the usage in the post before that.
There are things for which there still are no alternatives to fossil fuels and there will likely never be: for example, how the hell are you going to power long-haul aircraft?
Hydrocarbon fuels don’t need to be fossil; there are methods you can use to convert biomass into synthetic fuel, though outside of ethanol and the odd biodiesel project synthetic fuels usually use coal as a feedstock right now. It’d be more expensive, though.
Commercial aviation is just barely economically viable today, and fuel getting much more expensive would it make all but impossible for airlines to make any net profit. But yeah, this might change in the future.
Have you seen how much of an international ticket price is taxes, etc.? Did you mean to say that airline margins are razor thin?
Yes.
[citation needed]
It’s pretty notorious. Airlines routinely go bankrupt and prompt articles like “The Economist explains: Why airlines make such meagre profits”
army1987′s point is ill-posed and makes little sense in a supply-demand framework—the more interesting question is how much ticket prices would have to rise if fuel got much more expensive, since obviously they would rise & airlines wouldn’t simply stop flying entirely.
There are no issues with economic viability of commercial aviation today. Consider what would happen were it to shut down.
I think you’re confusing the quoted sentence and “I think airline tickets are expensive”.
It is more likely that he is ‘confusing’ the quoted sentence and the findings from analysis of business failures (and marginal successes) in the industry in question compared with other industries and various analyses about the market forces that produce that result. This is still not quite the same thing as “commercial aviation is just barely economically viable today” but far closer than “I think airline tickets are expensive”.
(I agree with Lumifer that Army’s conclusion does not follow. Tripling the cost of fuel would still result in a viable albeit far, far smaller commercial aviation market.)
The cost of fuel seems to account for about 20% of the cost of the ticket on a US domestic flight (source). Given that international flights have higher fees, I expect the fuel cost percentage to be even smaller for them.
For example I took a look at a New York—London return economy ticket which costs about $1050 now. Out of that amount $250 are government taxes and fees (NOT including the sales tax).
I don’t; otherwise I just wouldn’t buy them. Where did you get that from my comment anyway?
But what I think is irrelevant. It’s the aggregate market demand that counts.
Let’s look at the aggregate market demand. The annual passenger total is about 3 billion people.
Doesn’t look “barely economically viable” to me. At all.
And yet airlines lost money for most of the past decade. So these 3 billion passengers aren’t paying them that much. (And I don’t think it just doesn’t occur to airlines to raise prices; presumably they wouldn’t get as many passengers if they did.) Even more recently, it looks like the average net profit per passenger (average, not marginal) is of the order of $5.
From the link in the parent post, about $600 billion.
Peanuts, I know.
From the link in the parent post, net profit for the last five years:
2010: $17.3 billion
2011: $7.5 billion
2012: $6.1 billion
2013 (est): $10.6 billion
2014 (fcast): $18.0 billion
Which divided by 3 billion would be $5.77/passenger in 2010, $2.50/passenger in 2011, $2.03/passenger in 2012, $3.53/passenger in 2013, and $6/passenger in 2014. What did you think I meant by “of the order of $5”?
Yes, we agree on the numbers, we’re just throwing connotations at each other :-)
$5 is a small number so you’re pointing to this. $somebillions is a large number and I’m pointing to that.
I am still pretty sure commercial aviation is perfectly viable economically, it’s just that certain peculiarities of the business make it hard to make lots of money in it. However it’s not going anywhere and, say, doubling the fuel prices will not make it go away either.
That has more to do with the fact that air travel is commoditized than the price of inputs.
So, um, are you saying there never will be anything with the energy density as good or better than jet fuel..? That’s probably true for the next 10-20 years, but “never” is an awfully audacious claim.
Nukes!
Believe it or not, this was seriously considered during the Cold War. Some manned prototypes even flew with their reactors going (albeit not to power the plane), though the problem of shielding wasn’t adequately solved before progress in ICBMs made nuclear-powered bombers pointless.
Then there’s Project Pluto, though that would have been less a conventional aircraft and more a terrifying drone bomber built around an unshielded nuclear ramjet the size of a bus:
You are trying too hard :-) Your first point says that the predictions were correct and then the second point tries to explain the failures :-D
Re (2) and (3) peak oil people didn’t claim that oil will become too expensive or inconvenient to extract—the claim was that the oil will run out, full stop.
Re (4) we were talking about fossil fuels in general, not only about what’s used for transportation. But in any case, you can convert coal and natural gas to liquid fuel. The technology is well-known.
Paragraph 1: You said it was completely systematically wrong. I pointed out that it wasn’t systematically wrong and then explained the cases where it was.
Paragraph 2: Peak oil is not an ABRUPT EXHAUSTION, but the time of greatest production.
Paragraph 3: Go back. This was in response to my claim specifically about oil.
Where do you think the energy to charge electric cars is coming from?
Elven magic.