Reply To: Cap and Trade

[Brian H]

Breakable wrote: So you are still not convinced co2, is causing climate change?
Well I am not here to convince you. I am not convinced myself, I just choose to believe one side. I am not a scientist, but I think a definitive proof would be if we had a model that can predict climate changes for 10 years ahead with 1% accuracy. We don’t have that model. That means we can believe anything? Well if you want to doubt the most of scientific establishment, then yes. But then what about Big bang? Quantum mechanics? Evolution theory? Thermodynamics? Germ theory? Gravity? Newton physics? Calculus? Round earth? Reality? There are skeptics everywhere. All those explanations and predictions of the world around us are based on some Axiom that we have to accept without proof. They are build one on top each other, and if you pull out the bottom building blocks they just collapse. Faith is the root of all science. What you believe is what you can build upon. Proof just complements that belief.

The situation for Cap and Trade is even worse. We don’t have a perfect economic theory that can predict how Cap and Trade will affect the markets. We don’t even have a working one. Consensus is much harder to form when there is nothing to test on. There are skeptics and there are believers. I can find you Blogs from both sides on the net, but what good would it do – its just opinions.
One interesting point I could show you is some calculations I made about renewable energy. This is a very simplified chart of what would happen if energy was taxed 10% and this tax (plus any savings) would be used to build renewable energy sources which payback time is 20 years.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rh1gl1vIfbzoWublfQ7ORnQ&oid=4&output=image

Your comparisons are invidious. You obviously have not looked at the evidence and quality of the work on climate prediction involved in the GW and Cap-And-Trade work. The models can’t even be run on recent historical data and get the direction of change right, much less come within 1%, or 10%, or 50%. They’re off by more than 100%!! And they can’t predict, therefore, the climate or weather in 1 year, much less 10, or 20, or 50, or 100. It is in the nature of non-linear modelling that the errors increase exponentially and chaotically with time.

This has nothing like the science or accuracy associated with any of the science and math examples you gave. It is, in fact, impossible to get the “group” to come up with one even approximately accurate prediction. The core one, that the system would be driven by a hot spot in the atmosphere above the tropics, not only failed to appear, but was measured as a slight cooling. The response has been that, rarely, the thermometers used in radiosondes develop an error. Therefore it’s theoretically possible that the hundreds used in the sampling could all be in error. Therefore the inaccurate prediction can be ignored.

This is not science. I don’t know what to call it. But it wouldn’t be polite.

And CONSENSUS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SCIENCE! The data is not there. The Emperors have no clothes.

About your graph, the less said the better. Not one of the assumptions underlying it can be justified.