1. The economics of global warming, by Marty Weitzman, highly recommended, very technical but hits the mark on many difficult issues, via Greg Mankiw.
2. Wunderkind Jesse Shapiro
3. Is Montenegro the next Mediterranean tiger?
4. Economic Report of the President
I have been wondering why adolescent boys love Jean-Paul Sartre.
You probably have heard for Casino Royal, but pay attention to Montenegro School of Economics (http://www.psee.edu.cg.yu/) … Maja graduate there …
If you are interested just as tourist check this
http://www.visit-montenegro.com/
http://www.montenegrosmiles.com/
“To its enormous credit the Review supports very strongly the politically-unpalatable idea, which no politician anywhere wants to hear, that the world needs desperately to start confronting the reality that burning carbon is expensive because it has a significant externality cost that must be taken into account.†
I am sorry, but is he joking? There are plenty of politicians that love to hear this. Mainly on the left, but also on the right. Why wouldn’t they? Opportunity for more power, prestige, control, votes. Maybe voters didn’t want to hear this (although even here there seems to be psychological reasons some people are attracted to “end of the world† theories).
The following sentence? “(This should have been, but of course was not, the most central .inconvenient truth.of all in Al Gore.s fable about inconvenient climate-change truths.)†
Is Al Gore one of the politicians anywhere who didn’t want to hear that burring carbon is bad?
It was a good paper. But I don’t consider interest rates the main problem of the Stern report, it is the skewed cost benefit (I mean cost-cost) analysis.
No one has convinced me Global warming is automatically bad. Rise in sea levels is just a joke, 1-2 feet over 100 years, who cares (which is why charlatan Al gore gives his audience the impression that the sea level rise is 20 feet). The sea-level increased 0.7 feet the last 100 years. How many noticed? The costs of protecting the land (the maximum cost) is a fraction of tenth percent of world GDP.
What exactly are the rests of the costs? A few more storms, maybe some freshwater lost (and some gained). The
gulf-stream-turning stuff so far has no scintific backing, the gulf-stream is as strong as ever. Well? How
exactly is 3 degrees of warming going to “threaten the future of human civilization”? I kind of feel left-out from the religious mass-hyseria. what am I suppose to fear exctly?
Back to Stern. Why does he refuse to include the benefits of warmer weather? People with high willingness to pay live in cold regions. Global warming, if the theory is correct, should be mainly global moderating, as most of the warming will be in cold places, in the winder, and the night.
What intellectual climate do we live in where Stern gets away with including the costs of more old people dying from heat waves, but not the reduction of old people dying from colds?
“massive wildlife extinction†
I will not dismiss you, but a few questions:
A) What kind of wildlife are we talking here? Do they have value for humans? In modern history we have not seen any valuable animals get extinct (as far as I know). Are we talking the usual nonsense, rare birds and insects that have no intrinsic value?
We know polar bears are thriving.
B) How expensive would it be to save most of these animals given a 3 degree rise in temperature? Can you do it 0,1% av world GDP? That is 50 billion dollars today, to rise to about 400 billion dollars per year around 2100, half the GDP of Africa today. Do you think that is enough to save your wildlife? Or should we spend 30-40 times as much in order to prevent warming?
“The costs of protecting the land (the maximum cost) is a fraction of tenth percent of world GDP”
What I mean is that much of the land is not even worth protecting. I also meant a fraction of a procent, or a few tenths of a procent, not “a fraction of a tenth” as I wrote. The massive system in Holland cost something like 10 billion dollars,
if I remember currectly.
Tino, kind of you not to dismiss me, and I can understand why you believe a course correction in economic affairs must produce a continuous “cost,” –because that’s the predominating cost-benefit understanding: i.e., you are NOT to consider that the productive capital will be employed elsewhere, in new creative forms, so there may be NO long-term cost. The confusion perhaps enters with the idea of “opportunity cost,” which was first defined as a cost of time, energy, money of YOURS, of doing one thing instead of another — then transferred as valid to the “cost” of a development foregone. Nonsense, I suspect.
But, (1) where did you get the idea that polar bears are “thriving?” They had better change coat color fast! And (2) as to your question “what kinds of wildlife,” that would be “nearly all,” except the hardiest and weediest species. I can post the lengthy ecological argument, (in fact I will separately: see next,) –but it may be easier to answer, if first, you please name ANY wildlife that you “value,” taking any meaning of the word.
Tino
I will dismiss you because of this “There are plenty of politicians that love to hear this. Mainly on the left, but also on the right. Why wouldn’t they? Opportunity for more power…† blah blah blah. I am SO tired of this conspiracy theory BS about how politicians are engaged in some grand global conspiracy to incredibly slowly use the environmental movement to get more power for, presumably, future political leaders.
How about some real evidence for this grand global coordination you speak of. You widely overestimate the competence and initiative of politicians, and badly misunderstand their incentive structures.
My point was the overwhelming majority of capital is simply not affected by temperature decreases.
happyjuggler0
(1) That article is invalidated by the new IPCC report, which will have a hundred times more references. Have a look through the entire roster of posts at RealClimate, which have covered its substantive points at length. I didn’t bother going past the page 3 inaccuracy — Richard Lindzen clearly agrees that additional carbon dioxide will have a large effect on the climate, he just also believes that there are rheostatic effects which will mitigate it. He hasn’t been able to move it past the status of conjecture with any climatology journal, though. And so on.
(1a) The p.15 borehole data are also in the more inclusive first chart at
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=7, along with Huang’s correction of the data. You realize of course that there are many major proxies, and this picture is quite advanced?
(2) It has in fact been suspected by ecologists since the late 1970′s that climate change will accelerate this accelerated extinction. Yes, the argument originally comes from theory. Also according to the theory, an “extinction debt” incurred by area-reduction is probabilistic, and can take a hundred years to be paid. So Simon and Wildavsky’s paper is misleading. All wildlife areas ever examined follow the species-area law, for all the regular reasons, so you will have to explain why it isn’t eventually going to happen.
As for real evidence, even the highly judicious listing policy of the IUCN Red List has begun to confirm it; see a brief summary of their reasoning, criteria, and vast findings at
http://www.iucn.org/themes/ssc/red_list_2004/GSAexecsumm_EN.htm
The fact that Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg couldn’t bother to learn the science astounds me, (actually I suppose it is their publishing editors who astound me,) but there it is.
Comments on this entry are closed.