Yeah, my first thoughts are challenges, rather than show-stoppers. I think the thing that kills a lot of this, though, is the assumption of a closed system. Once you bring in international players, this becomes a domestic tax. Consumers will buy products from China, and factories will relocate to India.
[...] science requires interpretation.
Indeed. The problem is that, despite the supporters protestations to the contrary, the science is not settled. You have to choose who you're going to trust: Jim Hansen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E._Hansen), or Richard Lindzen (http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen.htm)?
Based on the serious ethical lapses at HadCRUT and IPCC, I can no longer trust their conclusions. That leaves GISS (Hansen) as the only uncorrupted AGW-supporting climate model, and they don't look that good: at the very least, they don't apply their input adjustments consistently; at worst, they might be introducing selection bias through their choice of inputs. It's been very painful going -- having to learn a whole 'nother discipline in order to evaluate its biggest theory is as crunchy as it sounds.
The interesting thing is that my politics haven't changed much -- AGW isn't the linchpin for any of my environmental thinking. The things that are good ideas are still good ideas, because there was always more than one good reason to do them. The bad ideas are still bad ideas, because (like cap-and-trade) they didn't do anything positive in the first place.
Like not drilling for oil in the US: it's not like Americans don't cause oil to be drilled -- we just do it in places like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Venezuela where they don't care about the environment anywhere near as much as we do. Domestic environmental taxes won't end our consumption -- it'll just move the production to someplace with a worse environmental record. How is that a positive thing?
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Date: 2010-02-17 04:56 pm (UTC)[...] science requires interpretation.
Indeed. The problem is that, despite the supporters protestations to the contrary, the science is not settled. You have to choose who you're going to trust: Jim Hansen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E._Hansen), or Richard Lindzen (http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen.htm)?
Based on the serious ethical lapses at HadCRUT and IPCC, I can no longer trust their conclusions. That leaves GISS (Hansen) as the only uncorrupted AGW-supporting climate model, and they don't look that good: at the very least, they don't apply their input adjustments consistently; at worst, they might be introducing selection bias through their choice of inputs. It's been very painful going -- having to learn a whole 'nother discipline in order to evaluate its biggest theory is as crunchy as it sounds.
The interesting thing is that my politics haven't changed much -- AGW isn't the linchpin for any of my environmental thinking. The things that are good ideas are still good ideas, because there was always more than one good reason to do them. The bad ideas are still bad ideas, because (like cap-and-trade) they didn't do anything positive in the first place.
Like not drilling for oil in the US: it's not like Americans don't cause oil to be drilled -- we just do it in places like Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and Venezuela where they don't care about the environment anywhere near as much as we do. Domestic environmental taxes won't end our consumption -- it'll just move the production to someplace with a worse environmental record. How is that a positive thing?