Can engineers evaluate any kind of data? Here’s some more anecdotal evidence. When I came down with an extremely rare neurological syndrome, I did some research and made my own diagnosis. When I finally saw a Neurologist, he and I disagreed on the diagnosis (he was close). I did some more research, even going as far as reading medical journals. When I gave him the results showing that my diagnosis was correct, he immediately referred me to another Neurologist. The point here is that engineers can in fact research and effectively evaluate data outside of their specialties.
Climate data shows that the earth was warmer 1000 years ago than it is today. It was cooler 500 years ago. It also shows that the earth warmed from 1900 to 1945, cooled from 1945 to 1965, and has been warming since then. Applying Occam’s razor, global warming is not caused by people, but by…drum roll please…the Sun.
Science frequently finds the correct answer, but sometimes you have to wait for all the current scientists to retire to find it. Assuming the objectivity of scientists and engineers is just another way to make mistakes. Good scientists face reality and change their world-views based on facts, but this isn’t always how it works. Everyone should read “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas Kuhn. He shows that major paradigm shifts in science only occur when the current generation of scientists dies and new ones replace them. Anyone who has ever worked on a university campus would also have cause to question the objectivity of the scientific world. Scientists and engineers are humans, and subject to all the irrational personality traits of our species. It’s popular on CD to smugly denigrate politicians, but during my brief stint working at a university it was plain to me that the interpersonal relationship among professors pretty much mirrors that of 9-year-olds. I don’t see much evidence that scientists have any more integrity than anyone else in the world.
I assume that the truth of global warming will come out in one way or another. If anthropogenic global warming is really a problem, whether we figure it out today or in five years really won’t make much difference. It took us thousands of years of population growth and two hundred years of industrial revolution to get here and we won’t fix it in one presidential administration. I’m all in favor of letting the current brouhaha settle out and then addressing a problem that is clear, well-understood, and obvious. Right now, global warming strikes me as much more of a political bludgeon (both on the green “the only thing we need is to let 5 billion people die” side, and the “nuke the whales now” position) than scientific truth. The “truth” value of the current science is buried in the noise of the public posturing (both in the governmental and scientific worlds).
And lastly, Rutan is not the only one taking pot shots at climatologists for rigging data. I don’t have time to look for it now, but I read a similar essay by a meteorologist. I didn’t understand a large part of what I read – who knew dendrochronology could turn out to be so important? – but it was pretty interesting.
Not only politicians, but anyone with a bias and lots of money can influence scientists. Scientists backed by big business are just as biased, like in the case of Big Tobacco years back telling us smoking was in no way bad for your health.
The best solution would be to have all science funded anonymously, so the scientists wouldn’t know whether it was government or big business money funding their operations. That way, they can actually do their job without worrying about finding results which clash with the ideology of those who hired them, as I’m sure the real answer (as with most things in life) about climate change is somewhere between “humans have absolutely no impact on climate change” and “humans are the sole reason for global warming”.
It’s a known fact that 79.3% of all statistics are just made up. :rolleyes:
Indeed. This applies beyond aircraft as well. Excellent points all, Chris.
OK, so here’s a good question: How DO we solve the problem of energy independence? Sure, we could come up with a world-changing idea (think 'Mr. Fusion"), but in my experience things usually don’t change dramatically - instead they are changed incrementally.
Example: If every house in the USA changed a single 100W incandescent bulb that was used for 4 hours a day to a Compact Fluorescent, we would save over 34 Gigawatt-hours of electricity A DAY, representing 34 million pounds of coal*.
*DoE says about 50% of electricity in the USA is from coal. Sitesdisagree about how much coal is used for a kWh, but using 1 pount per kWh is a reasonable number and it makes the math easier…
This is the most ridiculous oversimplification of the data I’ve ever seen. I agree to your first point to an extent, but when the analysis is this shallow it makes it very hard to agree with.
I agree that mankind doesn’t cause climate change. A professor at MIT completely disproved that theory. Scientists are biased by money.
CO2 is a lost cause. It would take 33 years to drop the temperature 1 degree Fahrenheit is there was no CO2 emissions. CO2 is such a small volume of green house gases.
Just remember that bias works both ways. When one side says A, and the other says B, the truth is usually somewhere in the between.
I’m not going dispute that changing the CO2 levels in the atmosphere would be very difficult at this point, but I recently came across a great Op-Ed piece in the New York Times about the folly of cap-and-trade at slowing CO2 emissions* while promoting a new idea called “fee and dividend”.
Carbon taxes in the form of "fee and dividend’ are genius: place a tax on carbon, then take 100% of this tax money, divide it equally among all tax-paying Americans, and cut them a rebate check each year. While the carbon tax would increase the price of goods, the rebate check would negate this increase (and if you’re “green”, you would actually profit off the system). This is lightyears better than “cap and trade”, as every American would see direct benefits from living more economically sustainable as it takes all the hidden, negative economic externalities** and directly builds them into the price of goods.
It would have the added benefit of being like a tax cut (“Woohoo! I just got a check for $3000!”) while financially encouraging consumers to make greener choices (“do I drive my SUV to the corner store a 1/2 mile away for a gallon of milk, or do I walk there enjoying some fresh air and exercise?”). Businesses would have the incentive to make their products/services more sustainable, because the consumers would demand greener products to try to profit off the carbon tax.
At the same time, people would start walking and biking more (weather permitted) for short trips. This would have the bonus of reducing pollution emissions from cars while actively increasing the physical fitness of America (which with 2/3 of the population overweight, needs a lot of exercise!). Plus, new sidewalks and bike paths are relatively inexpensive to implement quickly in suburbia.
Would this force people out of their cars? Certainly not. It’s kind of difficult to go to Ikea or Home Depot and bring anything of appreciable size home on a bike. But what it would do is create a system which which gives people more freedom of choice, as opposed to the current system which all but coerces every citizen to buy a car for any hope of getting from point A to point B.
The carbon fee and dividend is so simple. No carbon markets, no issues of who gets grandfathered in, no massive increases in energy costs with little to directly benefit consumers in the short term, no tax credits or bailouts to maybe encourage companies to maybe fund one green project, no screwing around with heavy and hard to enforce regulations. Since consumer spending makes up about 80% of the economy, just put in a carbon tax+rebate system and its market forces would cause the system to fix itself (by reducing our imported oil and pollution output) from the bottom-up far quicker than any other solution.
The idea of taxing CO2 is more like an umbrella tax on pollution. Sources which emit large quantities of CO2, such as burning fossil fuels, often release a whole host of other pollutants. These other pollutants, whether its particulates like soot or various chemicals, have been shown time and time again to have direct negative impacts on human health, particularly for children, pregnant woman, and the elderly. By reducing CO2 emissions (such as my switching from fossil fuels to renewable or nuclear energy), you’ll also reduce these other pollutants, thus increasing air quality and decreasing health related problems from pollution in a market-driven manner.
Artdutra04:
When I first read this yesterday I thought that it was one of the most brilliant things I’d heard all year. In the last few hours though I’ve started to put a bit more thought into it, and there are a few issues with said plan (or at the very least questiion.
1.) How would large corporations be factored into this sort of plan?
Would the pollution of a coal plant be taxed evenly by all of the factory workers?
Or will the owners of the corporation be the sole recipients of the tax?
Did the article specify?
2.) Why would the Federal government go through with this plan as opposed to cap-and-trade? More bluntly put, what would be the advantage of a plan that is totally revenue neutral as opposed to a plan which can be taxed for government revenue? Maybe I just being a bit too cynical here, but I just can’t see this sort of thing passing =\
Here’s a related question (somewhat =P): If the tempertures have been shown to increase drastically by natural means (last ice age to modern day) why is there any belief that this would not be the case nowadays?
I saw one issue right away with the plan: How are you going to figure out the amount of carbon being emitted by each person (factory/family/whatever your measuring unit is)? I know there are ways, but it’s going to be difficult to implement them without protest.
As an Environmental Engineer, I’m always confounded by the apparent futility of these discussions. I feel very strongly that we should all just take a look at our activities and make a consious decision to reduce our impact on the environment. You don’t have to go wild, you don’t have to be a major tree-hugger, just make little choices every day.
Two suggestions for today:
Unplug chargers (think cell phones and iPods) when not in use. Only 5% of the power drawn by a cell phone charger is used to charge the phone. The other 95% is wasted when it is left plugged into the wall.
Cut down on new wrapping paper. Wrap 6 of your holiday gifts in reused material like newspaper. By wrapping 6 gifts with found materials, you will reduce CO2 emissions by a total of 2 lbs and save a few dollars too!
Why bother about a couple of watts or 2 lbs of CO2? Because your watts and my watts will add up! And it’s an attitude thing. If you do a few little things, you start looking for more little things and then bigger things. Those can add up. And then no matter the social-political-scientific mumbo-jumble, you’ll be part of the solution.
Corporations just pass the cost on to the consumer. The entire concept of a carbon tax rallies around the consumer, Main St, being the catalyst for change, as consumer spending makes up about 80% of the economy. Every price increase due to a carbon tax would be passed on to the consumer, and the consumer would be the one directly benefiting from the rebate check (and any profits if they reduce their use of carbon). Any increases in price that secondary producers in industry would incur from buying things from primary producers would again be passed onto the consumer.
Basically, it would take all the hidden costs of carbon/pollution that are currently buried in the system, and directly tie them into prices. Consumers would see this, and then use market forces to choose the cheapest/best product, which nine times out of ten would probably be the one that took less carbon to produce it (and thus, lower cost).
Because economically, cap-and-trade will do nothing to actually reduce pollution.
Think about it. By putting an industrial price on carbon, and allowing companies to “sell” carbon credits, you put a value on carbon which is directly tied to demand. Companies which reduce their pollution can sell credits to companies which don’t.
But what happens if all companies were to reduce their carbon footprint? The carbon markets would be flooded with supply, and the carbon market would completely collapse. There’s just no incentive for the entire economy as a whole to reduce the carbon output under cap and trade, except for the fact that carbon traders on Wall St would profit off price increases on Main St.
The point of environmental legislation should be to reduce pollution, not perpetuate it under false pretenses.
Let’s compare this to a carbon tax. Let’s say everyone reduces their carbon emissions, through greener measures. The amount of money collected by the carbon tax would be less, so the rebate everyone would receive would again be less. But this isn’t a problem, as the rebate (and potential to profit) is designed to get us “over the hump” to move from a fossil fuel economy to a greener industry. Once we’re on the other side of that hump, there will be a point where continuing to go greener will become a matter of declining return on investment. Economic market-forces would drive the system into a system equilibrium between cost of carbon and declining ROI.
Thus, there wouldn’t be any point to embark on any green action which lacked economic feasibility. So rather than set hard goals for pollution reduction, it would simply let the system itself work out the best possible reduction in pollution for the prices people are willing to pay. Depending on what the value of carbon is set at (let’s say it slowly increases over fifty years until it permanently plateaus), the economy will find the best solution on its own (and a slowly increasing tax over time would give enough time for engineers and scientists in R&D to come up with newer, better technology without breaking the bank).
That’s the beauty of the system, you don’t need to. We know scientifically that a ton of coal emits X amount of CO2 when burned, that oil emits Y amount of CO2 when burned, etc. Yes, there are technologies to scrub some of the harmful pollutants from the combustion process, but these are already covered by existing regulations.
Unplug chargers (think cell phones and iPods) when not in use. Only 5% of the power drawn by a cell phone charger is used to charge the phone. The other 95% is wasted when it is left plugged into the wall.
Even when there is nothing plugged into the charger? this is good info not only to save energy but to save money.
This may be how politics works, but it is not how science works. As an example take the “debates” over whether vaccines cause autism. Even though the science shows the that there is no link, the media will, or used to, find someone to support the other side. The presence of an opposing viewpoint does not affect an argument’s veracity.
Also, I have heard multiple times on the NPR station I listen to that a carbon tax and rebate would be more effective than a cap and trade system. The cap and trade system can be gamed because it rewards reductions in CO2, not the actual amount released, so some businesses might increase their emissions before implementation so that they can later “reduce” them.
Taxing carbon at a rate too low, however, could actually increase emissions, or decrease any current reductions, because it turns the problem of climate change from a social problem(save the planet for our children) to an economic problem(we need to save money be cutting our emissions). The analogy I heard was of a plate of ten cookies. If ten people each want ten cookies, and if the cookies are free people will be mindful and only take one cookie. If, however, the cookies are five cents each, then the first person to find the plate will buy all of them, since he or she thinks that by paying for them he or she does not think he or she is hurting anyone.
But it will only be a penny here or there, it will take many of us doing these little things to have a true impact!