Reply To: Wealth of Nations, and Economics of Abundance

[Brian H]

Duke Leto wrote:
…
Problem is that in this analogy, with the economic cost benefit analysis, you are calculating in an assumed ROI for research when you have no rational reason for thinking that there will be one for any given situation. You don’t know if it’s 5 to 1 we’ll hit something like FF or a runaraound against the photosynthetic ceiling, or 100 to 1. Or a million to 1. You also don’t know whether the threat of AGW is as bad as it is being represented.
…

I acknowledge this is an unfair attack on a strawman caricature of your argument, but I’m still in a bad mood about being a Stalinist.

Straw everywhere, indeed! We de facto make those kinds of ROI decisions all the time. AGW, or even a full-blown Ice Age, would be, e.g., as nothing compared to a 10-mi diameter asteroid hit. The odds are smallish, and declining (the population of candidate objects has gradually been dropping over geological time spans), but the penalty for being wrong or unlucky is almost infinite. Yet we don’t go on crash asteroid detection/deflection priorities.

And “any given situation” is not an issue: research is being pushed in many directions, sometimes wrongheadedly, sometimes not. IMO, an example of the former is $100M to the Bussard group, and zero to FF. There’s enough money for many initiatives to be at least piloted. (Even with asteroid deflection, there are steadily gathering clumps of ideas and projects; at some point the perceptible odds of doing something workable will reach action potential.)

Fundamentally, economics is ruled by opinion about what’s “worth it” and what isn’t, after all.

P.S.;
I understand derivatives just fine. My math aptitude is well up in the top 1/10 of 1%, and I handled the Euclidean ‘Pons Asinorum’ with ease at age 12 or so.

P.P.S. “Did the temperature changes in the past operate as FAST as they are now and does this indicate the appearance of a powerful new force in global climate? I fail to see how anyone can not answer yes to those two questions.”
You got your positives and negatives jumbled. Personally, my answers are “probably” and “probably not”. CO2 trails warming. As a forcing agent, it is a damp squib.

Slope notwithstanding, C02-GW cannot explain how there could have been a cooler planet during hundreds of millions of years when CO2 was in the 2,000-7,000 ppm range, vs ~300 ppm now. (Hint: CO2 is a narrow, partial, absorber of the IR spectrum, and its saturated maximum absorption level is reached at rather low concentrations. Thereafter, changes are due to other factors, notably water with its much broader range.)