I'd be much more inclined to read this if you weren't so political yourself. The bias you portray I figure is the baseline for your thesis vs an objective one. On a glance it looks like you are cherry picking data points followed then by your smart rear end bias. A bias which is annoying to read through and usually wastes readers time and no better than a left wing bias touting the other side.
I'd have to read your econ articles but from this I gather your title should be the "Partisan Economist". But if it works for your personal success then I guess that's all that matters.
Do you apply that same standard to the other side? The alarmists, the catastrophists, the fear mongers? If so, I wonder where you do get your climate knowledge. I'd like to find purely objective neutral analysis too.
But as courts show, and as markets have always shown, adversaries arguing back and forth arrive at the truth more assuredly than so-called objective neutral parties whose only skin in the game is bigger budgets and more power.
Me too. I’ve been following the temperature data since 1978. It is and as far as I can tell, has always been corrupted. You point out in your post, some of the real problems with the data itself. If the data lies, all claims about it contain zero knowledge. I’ll be following you.
If you TRULY applied that standard to the other side, then you would read almost nothing.
So, no due respect, I simply do not believe you.
Which the first sentence of your last paragraph makes clear.
Do you truly not recognize that “the scientific docs” on this subject are all massively biased, in terms of what gets published in the journals? And at this point even what gets submitted, given the known biases of the editors?
That's the thing though, I do apply the standard to the other side. That is why I feel like a man with no party.... That is why opinion articles run rampant and true journalism is fewer and farther between the propaganda.
Yes, I understand the dynamic of white papers. Who is funding them, what authors are serial publishers, what methodologies are used, how isolated is the data, margins of error, etc.
This is why I verify sources....And then yes, form my own opinions...
I've done quite well in the markets. I think it's because of my attempts to have an objective bias when investing like I do in politics. Not a biased one.
In order to be successful though, I have to also consider other people's biased investments.
It’s good that you apply skepticism of bias to both sides, and fine that you feel the need to boast about your success in the market to demonstrate your bona fides.
But you started this whole thread with the statement “I'd be much more inclined to read this if you weren't so political yourself. The bias you portray I figure is the baseline for your thesis vs an objective one.”
So you were the one to announce that you aren’t inclined to read something merely because the author has a clear political bias about economics. You were the one to claim he probably cherry picks. You were the one to state you do read the “scientific docs”.
So your claim comes across as entirely one-sided, most especially with the first part that you are “not inclined to read this.”
"The bias you portray I figure is the baseline for your thesis vs an objective one.”
No, it is not. It's simply a comment to the author and audience that I recognize the emotional partisanship at glance. Do I need to copy and paste the catch phrases and purposely placed triggering comments?
Yes, I don't like to waste time reading overtly partisan opinion articles so after glancing I quit. I still haven't read it. I try to read scientific docs.
Yes, partisans tend to cherry pick data to support their biases.
In markets repeated success is based on objectivity is my point. I would be boasting if I was taking time to explain that in details or labor it. Objectivity that gives clarity to making sound decisions.
Partisanship does not lend to making sound decisions. Try to be a partisan in the markets. It may work in certain situations, but will it result in repeated success?
Let's try to focus on non partisan, non opinion, articles.
I'm convinced I've enjoyed the comment section more than I would reading how he doesn't like Greta. Why is she even mentioned?.....Oh, politics.
The bias you snivel about merely contradicts the bias you personally have. If you want to contribute, why not post concrete evidence disputing the claims made? It’s a rhetorical question, you can’t, so you just blather rubbish. I assume you have the digital equivalent of a rack of rubber stamps loaded with dumb ass comments like yours.
You make a good point regarding partisanship. We all have biases, certainly we both do.
Other than that, you are making claims about someone you do not know at all. Me. That from a single comment by me. You must be psychic or something.
You should also consider finding out what the psychological term "projection" means. Sigmund and Anne Freud more or less came up with the term as part of his work on defense mechanism. Both are a bit of a slog, but reading hard stuff makes one better informed.
FYI I'm a 'Conservative' as Sir Roger Scruton defines the term. There are no 'Conservatives' in any party that calls itself a Conservative Party.
My bad, shadow projection. And I need to work better on integrating others no doubt.
Yes, I have a bias too like the rest of us. In life and in the markets. My market process, successes, are similar to how I apply strategy to other aspects of life. A constant exercise of challenging myself and finding out why I am wrong. Not why I am right. What is an unchallenged bias? I'd say blind faith.
Agree on reading. But there is only so much time. I need lesser political bias for more substance.
I will be watching some interviews of Sir Roger Scruton I picked out. I'm curious.
The word conservative when used with the modern Republican party is surely a paradox.
Thanks for this reply. You may be interested in looking at the concept of inversion. Charlie Munger made great use of this idea as part of his analysis of companies that Berkshire Hathaway invested in.
I probably have a reading advantage to you because I am a geezer. I’ve been reading for 65 years. I love to read and estimate that I have read in the range of 10,000 books of all sorts in my life so far.
I am certain that you will enjoy Scruton. There is some great stuff on YouTube of speeches and conversations with Douglas Murray.
And thank you. Always a pleasure to butt heads but then reconcile or redirect the energy of our perceived differences and animosities. Especially in the current political climate. I like to hope we are all getting exhausted of this vitriol....Maybe the next radical step in American politics is coming together?....
Not a probably on the reading, but most definitely. However, as competitive as I am though, maybe I can catch you!
One of my favorite words, tsundoku. That is me. I homeschooled my kids through elementary, so I used that as an excuse to collect them. I've had to install custom bookshelves along the ceiling, and even inside of interior walls to make space.
At 42 now and after a few years under my belt, starting around the age of 27, being engaged in self-development and considerable post schooling education I've done a pretty decent job of turning my former knucklehead self into a better more successful person for it. You think my original comment was snarky you shoulda knew me back then...
I read a lot, just still not good at going from cover to cover. I battle with my attention span over too many interests, 3 robust and active teenagers, and too many irons in the fire.
I gotta say even though I just gave this author a hard time without even reading the article, Substack has great content, and I do enjoy these comment sections.
I'll leave this climate change stuff alone here and try the authors market driven articles as they may not be as political.
As if I need to make this response any longer. For your generation the Munger & Buffet market strategies worked very well as they should have. About as sound doctrine as you can get in the investment world I agree.
But I'm not going that route necessarily. I'm not trying to compound interest today. I'm not trying to engage in large cap value or passive or index funds. I'm not trying to build a dividend portfolio right now. I fear that investment world is changing and disappearing.
How the heck should I feel confident in the risk of leaving so much of my retirement in considerably over valued stocks because of the passive income bubble. You follow Michael Green? Most definitely recommend if not.
I am doing well beyond my expectations with small cap value in beaten down, unloved, not covered, misunderstood companies that may very well become a large part of the future. I've been multibagging quite a few in a row now.
Being voracious reader and researcher like yourself, it gives me an edge I feel in this investment space which AI and regular masses are not even trying to attempt. Even when they do, they aren't good at deciphering it seems.
I will also follow up on the concept of inversion as you say. Not familiar right off hand.
Sorry for the longwinded response and thanks again.
Everybody sensible has always know that we just need to tax net CO2 emissions by the right amount (trajectory of right amounts). The public is averse to visible taxes, however, so we had to accept kludges. And most of the kluges implied taxes of more than the right amount.
Now that has blown up. Dancing on the grave of all the old wrong ideas does not really help.
Let's get down to second (not nth) best policies until our environmentalist friends persuade the public to accept the least cost solution.
“Everybody sensible has always know [sic] that we just need to tax net CO2 emissions by the right amount”
Simply incorrect.
First, we should only do this if “climate change” is an existential risk.
Second, it does little good to do this unless the vast majority of countries do something similar.
I *will* concede, however, that if your goal is to reduce the amount of carbon emissions in a country, this is surely about the least worst policy compared to most others advocated by the leftists and well-meaning centrists who want to “do something”.
I do not agree that CO2 not being an “existential risk” (it is not) has anything to do with which policies we use to reduce the costs (they are not negligible) of CO2 accumulation. Taxation is just the lowest cost, but whatever works (at non-excessive cost) politically.
Absent existential risk, we should only take action if the benefits to society of the action outweigh the economic costs.
Basic cost-benefit analysis. Which is sadly lacking in most discussions of this topic.
Surely, e.g. you would not advocate spending $1 trillion dollars in order to improve air quality in such a way that it would save on average 1 life per year.
Absent existential risk, addressing carbon emissions is no different.
So it is decidedly *not* merely a question of the lowest cost method of addressing carbon emissions. It is a question of only choosing policies where the benefits are highly likely to outweigh the costs.
Respectfully, the position that carbon emissions must be addressed regardless of the costs and benefits is a leftist one, not a centrist one.
Most proposals are for rebating the collection but from an economic point of view using the excise on C content of fuels to replace say the corporate income tax would raise the net benefit considerably
I did not realize that anyone still thinks that CO2 accumulation has near zero costs and so that reducing net emissions thereof was not an object of policy. I agree that t he size of the cost is ill defined, but I’m not the one to estimate it or persuade anyone else that it is non-zero.
“I did not realize that anyone still thinks that CO2 accumulation has near zero costs and so that reducing net emissions thereof was not an object of policy.‘
David Friedman might not be correct, but he’s a pretty smart guy who knows something about estimating economic costs.
Alex Friedman in his excellent book “Fossil Future” covers many of the same ideas.
Friedman is far from the only one, of course. But he is one of the few to explicitly note the costs might not even be negative, let alone that the costs to humanity of addressing “climate change” are likely far less than the net benefits.
There are many of us in the camp that short of existential risk, the costs of almost all proposed mitigation public policy prescriptions are *very* likely to exceed the benefits.
In purest principle, this does not alter my position for a tax on net emissions, it would just lower the estimate of the tax rate. I’d like to see te USG put some serous resources into developing the geophysical-economic model that would cost out (benefit out :)) different levels of CO2 accumulation.
“I’d like to see te [sic] USG put some serous resources into developing the geophysical-economic model that would cost out (benefit out :)) different levels of CO2 accumulation.”
One of my points is that absent existential risk AND a material chance that the policy would materially reduce said existential risk, it is incredibly unlikely that there is fact meaningful actual benefits to any such carbon reduction policies.
I AM a bit puzzle abut your continuing to refer to existential risk. The variance in the costs of CO2 accumulation would be part of any assented, "Existential" risk woud be one extreme of a distribution of costs
Carbon is light. It is supposed to be in the atmosphere.
It only isn't because it can form heavier molecules that sink down to where they are thermally cracked back to the lighter forms, which then float back up.
The basic unknown and really hard to estimate is the deposited in the seafloor per area of sea floor subducted.
A basic element of petroleum engineering is looking for formations that trap the stuff on the way back up.
There has always been a lot of natural seepage, and the volume in volcanic emissions is pretty high.
Whether the special human carbon claim holds at all must depend on quality of modeling, and on the people doing the modeling. We have information on both of those, that raise reasonable doubts from outside of the field.
The smallest period of temperature involves the sun, the second smallest period of temperature involves the sun. Now, maybe we could know that we cannot get more periods from the Earth's orbit, I am not an astrodynamicist. The sun is a very slightly variable star. (There are some actual claims that we can predict from the solar models a colder future. I have the same basic fluid mechanics doubts about the electrohydronyamics models of the sun that I do about the climate science models of the earth.) There's a basic problem with whether we can really exclude the hypotheses of a third, fourth, or fifth period of variation that is only the sun.
Then there are the obvious issues with tectonic plate movements and those intermediate scale weather and climate phenomena.
Again, this would require a bunch of very careful and maybe provably impossible work by people who can be trusted to sort the hypothesis of noise with serious problem from the hypothesis of pure noise.
One hundred or so years ago, one of the early meteorological researchers did a numerical modeling experiment, and ran into at least three different prohibitive problems with his approach. One of those is the same 'mesh size' problem that shows up in conventional fluid mechanics simulation within engineering. Current and recent generation climate models are doing a bunch of assuming cleverly in an attempt to get away from the numerical challenges in mainstream CFD.
There is zero reason to think that 'everyone' thinks that all academic fields are improving over time. Some academic fields have kicked out enough of the unwashed that they have verifiably gotten worse.
Two problems here. First, the whole argument is relative to a stawman--the extreme claims of some activists. Of course, climate change is a problem but it evolves very slowly and unpredictably and attempts by the press to pin specific events on it clearly go overboard. Second, it makes no sense to rely solely on the market to fix things when there are huge externalities. The individual carbon user bears virtually none of the environmental cost of his actions.
The article doesn't say that we must "solely" rely on markets, so that seems to be a straw man argument right there.
Second, the argument that even though recent predictions (by "extremists") didn't quite match the reality of what happened but this doesn't preclude future cataclysmic events is highly problematic. First, because many persons in the "mainstream" parroted those views by those "extremists" in a bid to drive immediate action. So much so that if people didn't agree with immediate, drastic actions they were going to be labeled as complicit in causing the predicted dire consequences (that so happened not to materialize before or in the near future).
Third, you do not distinguish between climate change and the consequences of climate change on global economic, health, and national security. I'll grant you that climate change may be unpredictable. However, if you want to debate the impacts from a several degree increase in temperatures versus just one nuclear bomb being launched (and likely chain of events to follow), let's do that.
Count me in on the crowd that would favor building nuclear power plants (like China) while reducing the threat of nuclear bombs as a better approach than some of the ideas put forth so far.
Why is climate change a problem? It's not "of course". It must be proven. And what degree of problem do you rate it as, if it evolves very slowly and unpredictably? I'd say tomorrow's commute traffic is a bigger problem. If that's what you're saying, I apologize, but I'm tired of all this alarm over something which is less of a problem than tomorrow's commute traffic.
It is not a scientific fact that climate change is a problem; that is a value judgement competing with many alternative scenarios with their own implications. Decarbonizing by denying fossil fuel energy to poor nations is a devastating problem to those people living there. Disrupting reliable energy to our economy can be argued to be a bigger problem to overall well being than allowing more carbon-based energy--especially when China and India ensure that our disruptions will do little to reduce the global carbon dioxide levels. The science has been corrupted by a political environment, encouraged by the scientific academies and institutions, which bring more $ based on alarmism. Even so, the actual output of that science is far less alarming than what is reported in the media, which has its own progressive priorities driving their narratives. There are multiple levels of distortion of the issue by the time you read it in your paper, your website or on your news program. Finally many of those who lecture us in the most sanctimonious manner on CO2 have led the way in closing nuclear power plants--an insane approach if you're worried about CO2--and flying private jets to their climate confabs. I can't hear what they say because it is drowned out by the volume from what they do.
That the earth is currently warming is [about as close as you get to] a scientific fact.
That humans are responsible for much/most of the warming is, I agree, the strong scientific consensus, is true, if not quite a *fact*.
However, that it is a *problem* - and in particular a problem requiring extreme, heavy-handed government action that will leave us all poorer and the world’s poorest billions, many of who lack low cost reliable, highly available power, much worse off - is anything but a *fact*.
The data actually says it isn't warming. The problem starts with, how does one know what the "average" temperature of the earth is. Digging deep into the data, one finds an incredible amount of corruption in the data sets.
So, what I always ask someone who imagines the earth is going to get too warm as a result of too much CO2 is:
Yikes, gee why didn't anyone tell me? If I understand you, there must have been a time when the recent past when the temperature of the earth and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere were both perfect. When was that time?
While I agree there is an issue with reliable temperature records, the satellite records starting in 1979 should be good. That happens to coincide with the end of a several decade period of cooling (remember the Newsweek cover in the 70s worrying about cooling)—and warming is found in those records since then. Also there are other signs of warming including different plant behaviors from climate change in that time. But what has happened since then in itself isn’t terribly alarming, it’s the projections of feedback amplification and “tipping points” that drives alarmism, and that seems pretty speculative still.
I mostly agree with you. However I wonder what the satellite data from say 1979 to 1995 was calibrated to. It had to be to earth stations. Which then leaves us with, how accurate was the data from earth stations?
I don’t think it really matters, the earth has self-regulated its temperature for a really long time. That it may not be a perfect temperature for humans to live in is not all that relevant. Homo homo sapiens (us) have only been around for a few hundred thousands of years.
Sorry, but the overwhelming consensus of scientists is that it is.
Including the scientists who agree with you and me that leftist public policy prescriptions to address it are bad ideas.
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
And while I agree that “warming is occurring” is not quite an absolute fact, if you are going to claim that this is the case you need to demonstrate your case, not simply assert it.
[To be 100% clear, it is not to me that you need to demonstrate that case, but to the scientific community. Which to repeat includes those who are the opposite of leftist political activists.]
Andy old bean, a consensus of scientists agree on nothing. ‘Scientists’ are specialists in their own fields, not every field. A Nobel Prize winner in chemistry is not likely to have investigated the temperature statistics. The 95 or 98 percent of ‘scientists’ agree that temperatures are rising has been proven wrong in the literature. I’m a bit embarrassed for you that you don’t know this.
If you like, I can refer you to articles and videos that demonstrate this. The problem for most of us, is that we want to believe that something is right but are not willing to investigate if the claim made is actually true.
As I have said elsewhere, I have been investigating the historical temperature data since the 1970’s. In those days I had to go to the university library and examine temperature data on microfiche. I was amazed at the incredible variances in hi/lo readings from the same stations all around the world. I saw variances in readings when a particular colonial official in a place in Africa or Asia was replaced by a new colonial official. Parallax effect. Time of day when thermometers were reset were gigantic factors.
There is a stunning lack of data from the Southern Hemisphere, why, because no one lives there. The population today of the Northern Hemisphere is 87% of the world total, of the South 13%, it was a larger difference 150 years ago. No people, no temperature data.
Think a bit more critically when you consider your beliefs.
The end of mankind has been predicted with regularity since Thomas Malthus.
What actual science assures us above all else is that the natural order is a trend towards equilibrium. This is the exact opposite of what climate alarmists have argued, which is that if radical social engineering is not done NOW, the earth will continue to heat up no matter what.
Thermodynamics tells us that sustained warming trends can only be the result of naturally occurring phenomenon. Arguing otherwise is science illiteracy and always has been.
Here is ChatGPT comparing "Climate Turning Point" to "Monetary-Fiscal Interactions" in response to the query:
Would or would not the opponents of either argument use the rationale in the other argument?
Short answer: yep—opponents on each topic can (and often do) borrow the other essay’s playbook. Here’s how the cross-rationales line up, plus where the analogy breaks.
How they’d borrow each other’s logic
Cochrane’s climate stance (“avoid alarmism; favor innovation/adaptation; don’t overspend now for distant uncertain harms”) Borrow fiscal-essay logic of preemptive discipline + option value “Delay is dangerous. Climate has fat tails and possible tipping points. Like rebuilding fiscal capacity before a crisis, we must cut emissions now to keep future options open. Waiting risks a sudden, costly loss of control (carbon budget exhaustion), and credibility matters—promises later won’t be believed.”
Cochrane’s fiscal stance (“rebuild fiscal space now; monetary policy can’t do it alone; inaction risks a sudden crisis”) Borrow climate-essay logic of alarmism skepticism + market-led adaptation “Debt ‘crisis’ talk is overblown. Models are uncertain; alarmism backfires. Let growth and innovation shrink debt ratios. With r≈g over time, we don’t need painful consolidations now. Don’t sacrifice prosperity for a forecast that might not bite; adjust gradually if and when costs show up.”
Why those cross-moves are tempting
Both issues feature long horizons, deep uncertainty, and potentially huge downside—perfect soil for importing the other side’s rhetoric.
Each has a powerful credibility narrative: “act now or you lose room to maneuver later.”
Where the analogy doesn’t fully carry
Externalities vs. budget constraint
Climate risk is a global externality with diffuse causality; the fiscal problem is a national intertemporal budget identity. One is softer (values/coordination), the other is hard arithmetic.
Irreversibility profiles
Climate has physical irreversibilities/tipping risks; fiscal risks are financial/political and usually reversible (though abrupt).
Control levers
Climate mitigation needs global coordination; fiscal repair can, in principle, be done unilaterally via taxes/spending/reform.
Measurement & feedback
Fiscal strain shows up quickly in rates/auctions/spreads; climate benefits of policy are lagged and noisy, which fuels the “don’t overspend yet” argument.
Bottom line
Would they? Yes.
Climate-action advocates can flip Cochrane’s fiscal logic into: “precaution + credibility ⇒ act early on emissions.”
Deficit doves can flip Cochrane’s climate logic into: “alarmism is costly; let growth/innovation handle debt gradually.”
Should you buy the import? Only with the caveats above. The rhetorical shapes fit; the underlying mechanics differ.
You do have some good economic insights and I really appreciate how much you publish for free. That's pretty rare these days.
But seriously? You can't hide your glee at being able to 'legitimately' write a straw-man hit piece against climate change policies.
I'll just correct some fundamental basics before I go.
"The pandemic taught people that there might be other more pressing existential threats than a degree of heat in 100 years"
The NASA global temperature anomaly is 1 degree since 1980 (45 years) and the trend is obviously not linear. Annual global emissions are many times greater than in 1980 (so we should expect concomitant accelerated warming).
You don't mention anything about tipping points, so your article comes off as if you'd written something like "they said China couldn't build out 80 new biotech labs in 20 years without causing a global pandemic, what retards they all were" in 2018.
There's a hilarious bit where you quote some kind of equivalence between global climate a measured CO2 levels in an actual greenhouse. Was that bit tongue-in-cheek?
To be clear, the last time the earth had over 400ppm of CO2 average temperatures were 3C warmer than today, and up to 14C warmer at the poles (ie no north pole, minimal south pole). There almost certainly wasn't anything like an AMOC (North Atlantic drift), so where I'm from in Britain was glaciated and would have had an extremely short, dry growing season. AMOC collapse would cause the single largest loss of life since the mid-20th century, and that's only 1 of tens of massively impactful tipping points that current CO2 and temperature levels make more likely than not.
Yes, we should try and get global consensus and do everything possible to prevent this reality.
------
I totally agree that some of the focus on climate led to some extremely dumb decisions around other pressing conservation and development needs. However, if some governments and organisations want to pay lip service to climate lobbies and find 'quick fixes' and so they do extremely nonsensical CO2e accounting that lets people tick a box to pay $10 to apparently offset all the CO2 of an entire transatlantic flight by 'preventing future deforestation', if they want to do that, that is a failure of politics, not of climate science and its warnings for us.
It was as warm or warmer during the Medieval and Roman warming periods. So much for being extreme today.
There was a 10-20 year leveling off period recently. You are right -- it is obviously not linear.
What tipping points? The many that have been predicted to occur before now, and did not? The ones that were going to turn the planet into Venus and evidently did not? It was far warmer in the dinosaur ages, and obviously did not tip past any point of no return.
Tipping points are the last refuge of those with weak arguments. We have had MUCH higher levels of CO2 in the past and considerably higher temperatures with no tipping points occurring.
And, if you are going to make a desperate tipping point argument, here's a more plausible one in the opposite direction: We are overdue for a renewed ice age. A drop in temperatures of just a few degrees would be devastating in a way that a small rise would not. If you think humans are causing recent warming, we may be the only thing holding back an ice age.
Respectfully - and to be clear I am on the right on this topic, and think the likelihood of such a tipping point is quite low - tipping points are the *only* valid argument the leftists possibly have on this subject.
Because for anything but surpassing such a tipping point, their public policy prescriptions are of course absurd and immoral.
They need to make the arguments for why a tipping point is at minimum distinctly possible. And then what policies can materially avoid reaching said tipping point.
And they have not done so.
And surely on the second piece they have not come close to doing so with their actual public policy proposals.
I don't disagree. They have failed to make a good argument for anything but a remote theoretical possibility of tipping points and their other arguments for drastic and coercive climate policies fail completely.
If the *limited* their argument to be about tipping points and that we shouldn’t take the risk of same, I could at least respect them, and might continue to take their argument seriously and at face value.
Since they don’t, they betray their hypocrisy - or simply blatant political purpose - as most of them do when they oppose nuclear energy while crying AGWC.
Just because we were wrong about the coming ice age and the population bomb and global warming and NYC being underwater and no snow in London and “only 10 years left” in 1998…
You are sort of correct. The fundamental equation is the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity. It posits that the global mean temperature increases by 3 degrees Celsius for each doubling of the atmospheric concentration of CO2. A bit of elementary algebra will show that equation is logarithmic. E.g. T2 = T1 + (ECS × (log2 (C2/C1))).
A logarithmic function is the mathematical inverse of an exponential relationship. I reaches infinity more slowly than a polynomial relationship. The We are about halfway towards the first doubling. there is not enough fossil fuel in the world to create a second doubling.
"To be clear, the last time the earth had over 400ppm of CO2 average temperatures were 3C warmer ... Britain was glaciated"
The polar ice will melt or Britain will be glaciated. Not both.
That mischaracterizes his view. Do you understand anything about the cost of preventive actions, the growth of wealth and capability over time, and discounting over time? You are also using the bullshit "boiling" language. You climate panickers are going to kill every last one us. (I can say that if you can talk about boiling.)
I assume you understand those things super goodly. Could you explain to me e.g. how to compute the current value of a future collapse of the Greenland ice sheet?
Unless you start your responses with a stolen land acknowledgment and confirm that you are triple masked and have gotten your 9th booster how can anyone take you seriously?
We can sorta map all of the unknown physical variables onto a single axis.
One end of the line is unconditionally stable, and no matter what academia says, nothing we do will matter.
The other end of the line is unconditionally unstable, and the earth will metaphorically explode, and there is no utility to anything remaining on earth. There is zero value in saving what cannot be saved.
That middle section is where all of the possibility is for stabilizing the alleged instability that we 'introduced'.
There are two basic problems.
One is that climate science can speculate about assumptions that move us away from stability, but there is a limit to how powerful those can be without overshooting to 'it does not matter'.
The second is that we are supposedly implementing the 'feedback circuit' of our stabilizing control system in human behavior. The problem is that nobody who thinks this is possible shows even the slightest clue that they have any broad understanding of human behavior.
You need to pay people for what it costs them. And, yes, you can pay some people in ideas or in social status, or something, and they will eat large costs. The stabilization 'feedback' needs expensive behavior modification from a wide range of cultures and occupations. You won't have one set of ideas or social status that is good for all of those persons.
The broadest currency is conventional money, and that means you need to generate that in some way, and not screw up the basic underlying generation of value, such as in food for people to eat.
If the treaty of regimes can only implement the control by mass starvation, it is uncertain that they will maintain power by force of arms. It is much easier for them to simply cheat on the treaty. The problem there is either some regime is left holding the bag, and trying to starve their population harder, or nobody is giving more than lip service.
I wonder if an editor at the NYT will be fired to publishing that piece illuminating the fraudulent, manipulative nature of climate porn.
"Prince Charles — now king of Britain — described it as “literally the last-chance saloon.”" Literally? I don't think climate is literally a bar which is the last place you can get a drink before crossing a border.
Also, activists and media have been declaring "climate crisis" for way longer than 20 years. I've been following it since the 1990s.
I live in Montana and every weekend I am in Glacier National Park doing wildlife photography with my wife. By way of background my undergrad degree is in Geography/Climatology from the University of Wisconsin and I also have a Masters from Harvard in another discipline.
In St Mary, MT on the East side of the park is a weather station. It is part of 114 similar weather stations that were deliberately set up to offset the existing regular 1,000 plus weather stations in the U.S. - 90% of which have had siting violations. These violations being that the stations are too close to roads, parking lots, buildings, asphalt pavement and lots of other urban heat island objects thus causing false readings.
The weather station in St Mary, MT is part of the Climate Reference Network of the NOAA. They have been gathering data for 20 years. Guess how much statistical increase in temperature they have found? No building, asphalt etc. - just grizzly bears, elk and such outside the fence. No human tampering.
As a geography/climatology student, I learned to follow the evidence. The evidence I have seen is that CO2 is going up and weather data properly collected shows that temperatures are in fact not rising.
I also look at people's behavior, especially those people telling me for decades that we are about to die unless we do such and such and so and so.. I know and everyone here knows that China and India are the greatest user of burning coal for electricity production.
You know what? I have never seen them or heard about them or anyone else ever protesting outside a Communist Chinese embassy or Consulate anywhere in the world about their ostensible destruction of the planet these last decades by burning billions of tons of coal.
Now, why do suppose that is? I can make the connection. Can you?
One way to look at environmental economics is to say that environmental protection is a luxury public good that only wealthy free market economies can afford. Compare, e.g., East Germany with West Germany. That is, not surprisingly, an unpopular point of view.
We basically had the Star Trek future, in the sixties, with that round of mechanizing away agricultural labor.
That would have prevented the sorts of food scarcity that allows for opportunistic regimes, and basically forever ended the possibility of a NSDAP like faction being able to panic people until it obtained power.
Various interested parties could not tolerate that lack of possibility, and so environmentalism was created to impoverish us.
Yet we are still too well fed, and too uninterested in an endless parade of tumbrels.
So Academics are still paid to do entirely backwards research into how we need to cut off our arms and legs, and eat our seed corn.
I'd be much more inclined to read this if you weren't so political yourself. The bias you portray I figure is the baseline for your thesis vs an objective one. On a glance it looks like you are cherry picking data points followed then by your smart rear end bias. A bias which is annoying to read through and usually wastes readers time and no better than a left wing bias touting the other side.
I'd have to read your econ articles but from this I gather your title should be the "Partisan Economist". But if it works for your personal success then I guess that's all that matters.
Do you apply that same standard to the other side? The alarmists, the catastrophists, the fear mongers? If so, I wonder where you do get your climate knowledge. I'd like to find purely objective neutral analysis too.
But as courts show, and as markets have always shown, adversaries arguing back and forth arrive at the truth more assuredly than so-called objective neutral parties whose only skin in the game is bigger budgets and more power.
Yes.
“A bias which is annoying to read through and usually wastes readers time and no better than a left wing bias touting the other side.”
That comment lets you know the left wing bias is just as bad and no better.
I try to read scientific docs not opinion articles. After which I form my own opinions.
Me too. I’ve been following the temperature data since 1978. It is and as far as I can tell, has always been corrupted. You point out in your post, some of the real problems with the data itself. If the data lies, all claims about it contain zero knowledge. I’ll be following you.
If you TRULY applied that standard to the other side, then you would read almost nothing.
So, no due respect, I simply do not believe you.
Which the first sentence of your last paragraph makes clear.
Do you truly not recognize that “the scientific docs” on this subject are all massively biased, in terms of what gets published in the journals? And at this point even what gets submitted, given the known biases of the editors?
That's the thing though, I do apply the standard to the other side. That is why I feel like a man with no party.... That is why opinion articles run rampant and true journalism is fewer and farther between the propaganda.
Yes, I understand the dynamic of white papers. Who is funding them, what authors are serial publishers, what methodologies are used, how isolated is the data, margins of error, etc.
This is why I verify sources....And then yes, form my own opinions...
I've done quite well in the markets. I think it's because of my attempts to have an objective bias when investing like I do in politics. Not a biased one.
In order to be successful though, I have to also consider other people's biased investments.
It’s good that you apply skepticism of bias to both sides, and fine that you feel the need to boast about your success in the market to demonstrate your bona fides.
But you started this whole thread with the statement “I'd be much more inclined to read this if you weren't so political yourself. The bias you portray I figure is the baseline for your thesis vs an objective one.”
So you were the one to announce that you aren’t inclined to read something merely because the author has a clear political bias about economics. You were the one to claim he probably cherry picks. You were the one to state you do read the “scientific docs”.
So your claim comes across as entirely one-sided, most especially with the first part that you are “not inclined to read this.”
"The bias you portray I figure is the baseline for your thesis vs an objective one.”
No, it is not. It's simply a comment to the author and audience that I recognize the emotional partisanship at glance. Do I need to copy and paste the catch phrases and purposely placed triggering comments?
Yes, I don't like to waste time reading overtly partisan opinion articles so after glancing I quit. I still haven't read it. I try to read scientific docs.
Yes, partisans tend to cherry pick data to support their biases.
In markets repeated success is based on objectivity is my point. I would be boasting if I was taking time to explain that in details or labor it. Objectivity that gives clarity to making sound decisions.
Partisanship does not lend to making sound decisions. Try to be a partisan in the markets. It may work in certain situations, but will it result in repeated success?
Let's try to focus on non partisan, non opinion, articles.
I'm convinced I've enjoyed the comment section more than I would reading how he doesn't like Greta. Why is she even mentioned?.....Oh, politics.
The bias you snivel about merely contradicts the bias you personally have. If you want to contribute, why not post concrete evidence disputing the claims made? It’s a rhetorical question, you can’t, so you just blather rubbish. I assume you have the digital equivalent of a rack of rubber stamps loaded with dumb ass comments like yours.
No need to project yourself onto to me.
Simply highlighting the partisanship rhetoric and how it serves no one. Except for a person like yourself I guess.
I am merely declaring such bias runs rampant on both sides.
Any non fool should know better that attempting to reason with such partisan folks does not get you very far.
Just look at what I’m dealing with, with you. Case in point. Unlikely to get deep into a great, enlightening discussion with you or the author.
Any non fool would recognize that this issue is much larger than a comment section in order to hash it out.
Continue on with your sad life and keep throwing darts at your Greta Thunberg posters.
You make a good point regarding partisanship. We all have biases, certainly we both do.
Other than that, you are making claims about someone you do not know at all. Me. That from a single comment by me. You must be psychic or something.
You should also consider finding out what the psychological term "projection" means. Sigmund and Anne Freud more or less came up with the term as part of his work on defense mechanism. Both are a bit of a slog, but reading hard stuff makes one better informed.
FYI I'm a 'Conservative' as Sir Roger Scruton defines the term. There are no 'Conservatives' in any party that calls itself a Conservative Party.
My bad, shadow projection. And I need to work better on integrating others no doubt.
Yes, I have a bias too like the rest of us. In life and in the markets. My market process, successes, are similar to how I apply strategy to other aspects of life. A constant exercise of challenging myself and finding out why I am wrong. Not why I am right. What is an unchallenged bias? I'd say blind faith.
Agree on reading. But there is only so much time. I need lesser political bias for more substance.
I will be watching some interviews of Sir Roger Scruton I picked out. I'm curious.
The word conservative when used with the modern Republican party is surely a paradox.
Thanks
Thanks for this reply. You may be interested in looking at the concept of inversion. Charlie Munger made great use of this idea as part of his analysis of companies that Berkshire Hathaway invested in.
I probably have a reading advantage to you because I am a geezer. I’ve been reading for 65 years. I love to read and estimate that I have read in the range of 10,000 books of all sorts in my life so far.
I am certain that you will enjoy Scruton. There is some great stuff on YouTube of speeches and conversations with Douglas Murray.
And thank you. Always a pleasure to butt heads but then reconcile or redirect the energy of our perceived differences and animosities. Especially in the current political climate. I like to hope we are all getting exhausted of this vitriol....Maybe the next radical step in American politics is coming together?....
Not a probably on the reading, but most definitely. However, as competitive as I am though, maybe I can catch you!
One of my favorite words, tsundoku. That is me. I homeschooled my kids through elementary, so I used that as an excuse to collect them. I've had to install custom bookshelves along the ceiling, and even inside of interior walls to make space.
At 42 now and after a few years under my belt, starting around the age of 27, being engaged in self-development and considerable post schooling education I've done a pretty decent job of turning my former knucklehead self into a better more successful person for it. You think my original comment was snarky you shoulda knew me back then...
I read a lot, just still not good at going from cover to cover. I battle with my attention span over too many interests, 3 robust and active teenagers, and too many irons in the fire.
I gotta say even though I just gave this author a hard time without even reading the article, Substack has great content, and I do enjoy these comment sections.
I'll leave this climate change stuff alone here and try the authors market driven articles as they may not be as political.
As if I need to make this response any longer. For your generation the Munger & Buffet market strategies worked very well as they should have. About as sound doctrine as you can get in the investment world I agree.
But I'm not going that route necessarily. I'm not trying to compound interest today. I'm not trying to engage in large cap value or passive or index funds. I'm not trying to build a dividend portfolio right now. I fear that investment world is changing and disappearing.
How the heck should I feel confident in the risk of leaving so much of my retirement in considerably over valued stocks because of the passive income bubble. You follow Michael Green? Most definitely recommend if not.
I am doing well beyond my expectations with small cap value in beaten down, unloved, not covered, misunderstood companies that may very well become a large part of the future. I've been multibagging quite a few in a row now.
Being voracious reader and researcher like yourself, it gives me an edge I feel in this investment space which AI and regular masses are not even trying to attempt. Even when they do, they aren't good at deciphering it seems.
I will also follow up on the concept of inversion as you say. Not familiar right off hand.
Sorry for the longwinded response and thanks again.
Everybody sensible has always know that we just need to tax net CO2 emissions by the right amount (trajectory of right amounts). The public is averse to visible taxes, however, so we had to accept kludges. And most of the kluges implied taxes of more than the right amount.
Now that has blown up. Dancing on the grave of all the old wrong ideas does not really help.
Let's get down to second (not nth) best policies until our environmentalist friends persuade the public to accept the least cost solution.
“Everybody sensible has always know [sic] that we just need to tax net CO2 emissions by the right amount”
Simply incorrect.
First, we should only do this if “climate change” is an existential risk.
Second, it does little good to do this unless the vast majority of countries do something similar.
I *will* concede, however, that if your goal is to reduce the amount of carbon emissions in a country, this is surely about the least worst policy compared to most others advocated by the leftists and well-meaning centrists who want to “do something”.
I do not agree that CO2 not being an “existential risk” (it is not) has anything to do with which policies we use to reduce the costs (they are not negligible) of CO2 accumulation. Taxation is just the lowest cost, but whatever works (at non-excessive cost) politically.
Absent existential risk, we should only take action if the benefits to society of the action outweigh the economic costs.
Basic cost-benefit analysis. Which is sadly lacking in most discussions of this topic.
Surely, e.g. you would not advocate spending $1 trillion dollars in order to improve air quality in such a way that it would save on average 1 life per year.
Absent existential risk, addressing carbon emissions is no different.
So it is decidedly *not* merely a question of the lowest cost method of addressing carbon emissions. It is a question of only choosing policies where the benefits are highly likely to outweigh the costs.
Respectfully, the position that carbon emissions must be addressed regardless of the costs and benefits is a leftist one, not a centrist one.
It sounds like you agree with me. :) We should take action when the benefits exceed costs and taxation of CO2 emissions is the least cost policy.
No.
We should take action only if the costs exceed the benefits.
I am dubious that there are any material benefits to any policies - including a carbon tax - that have been proposed that exceed the costs.
Now if you wanted to replace some other taxes with carbon taxes I might be amenable. Maybe, though doubtful in real life.
Most proposals are for rebating the collection but from an economic point of view using the excise on C content of fuels to replace say the corporate income tax would raise the net benefit considerably
I did not realize that anyone still thinks that CO2 accumulation has near zero costs and so that reducing net emissions thereof was not an object of policy. I agree that t he size of the cost is ill defined, but I’m not the one to estimate it or persuade anyone else that it is non-zero.
“I did not realize that anyone still thinks that CO2 accumulation has near zero costs and so that reducing net emissions thereof was not an object of policy.‘
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/climate-facts-i-didnt-know
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/my-first-post-done-again
David Friedman might not be correct, but he’s a pretty smart guy who knows something about estimating economic costs.
Alex Friedman in his excellent book “Fossil Future” covers many of the same ideas.
Friedman is far from the only one, of course. But he is one of the few to explicitly note the costs might not even be negative, let alone that the costs to humanity of addressing “climate change” are likely far less than the net benefits.
There are many of us in the camp that short of existential risk, the costs of almost all proposed mitigation public policy prescriptions are *very* likely to exceed the benefits.
OK Now I know there is someone.
In purest principle, this does not alter my position for a tax on net emissions, it would just lower the estimate of the tax rate. I’d like to see te USG put some serous resources into developing the geophysical-economic model that would cost out (benefit out :)) different levels of CO2 accumulation.
“I’d like to see te [sic] USG put some serous resources into developing the geophysical-economic model that would cost out (benefit out :)) different levels of CO2 accumulation.”
One of my points is that absent existential risk AND a material chance that the policy would materially reduce said existential risk, it is incredibly unlikely that there is fact meaningful actual benefits to any such carbon reduction policies.
That is what you think and I think the opposite.
I AM a bit puzzle abut your continuing to refer to existential risk. The variance in the costs of CO2 accumulation would be part of any assented, "Existential" risk woud be one extreme of a distribution of costs
Look at the periodic table.
Carbon is light. It is supposed to be in the atmosphere.
It only isn't because it can form heavier molecules that sink down to where they are thermally cracked back to the lighter forms, which then float back up.
The basic unknown and really hard to estimate is the deposited in the seafloor per area of sea floor subducted.
A basic element of petroleum engineering is looking for formations that trap the stuff on the way back up.
There has always been a lot of natural seepage, and the volume in volcanic emissions is pretty high.
Whether the special human carbon claim holds at all must depend on quality of modeling, and on the people doing the modeling. We have information on both of those, that raise reasonable doubts from outside of the field.
The smallest period of temperature involves the sun, the second smallest period of temperature involves the sun. Now, maybe we could know that we cannot get more periods from the Earth's orbit, I am not an astrodynamicist. The sun is a very slightly variable star. (There are some actual claims that we can predict from the solar models a colder future. I have the same basic fluid mechanics doubts about the electrohydronyamics models of the sun that I do about the climate science models of the earth.) There's a basic problem with whether we can really exclude the hypotheses of a third, fourth, or fifth period of variation that is only the sun.
Then there are the obvious issues with tectonic plate movements and those intermediate scale weather and climate phenomena.
Again, this would require a bunch of very careful and maybe provably impossible work by people who can be trusted to sort the hypothesis of noise with serious problem from the hypothesis of pure noise.
One hundred or so years ago, one of the early meteorological researchers did a numerical modeling experiment, and ran into at least three different prohibitive problems with his approach. One of those is the same 'mesh size' problem that shows up in conventional fluid mechanics simulation within engineering. Current and recent generation climate models are doing a bunch of assuming cleverly in an attempt to get away from the numerical challenges in mainstream CFD.
There is zero reason to think that 'everyone' thinks that all academic fields are improving over time. Some academic fields have kicked out enough of the unwashed that they have verifiably gotten worse.
Two problems here. First, the whole argument is relative to a stawman--the extreme claims of some activists. Of course, climate change is a problem but it evolves very slowly and unpredictably and attempts by the press to pin specific events on it clearly go overboard. Second, it makes no sense to rely solely on the market to fix things when there are huge externalities. The individual carbon user bears virtually none of the environmental cost of his actions.
The article doesn't say that we must "solely" rely on markets, so that seems to be a straw man argument right there.
Second, the argument that even though recent predictions (by "extremists") didn't quite match the reality of what happened but this doesn't preclude future cataclysmic events is highly problematic. First, because many persons in the "mainstream" parroted those views by those "extremists" in a bid to drive immediate action. So much so that if people didn't agree with immediate, drastic actions they were going to be labeled as complicit in causing the predicted dire consequences (that so happened not to materialize before or in the near future).
Third, you do not distinguish between climate change and the consequences of climate change on global economic, health, and national security. I'll grant you that climate change may be unpredictable. However, if you want to debate the impacts from a several degree increase in temperatures versus just one nuclear bomb being launched (and likely chain of events to follow), let's do that.
Count me in on the crowd that would favor building nuclear power plants (like China) while reducing the threat of nuclear bombs as a better approach than some of the ideas put forth so far.
Why is climate change a problem? It's not "of course". It must be proven. And what degree of problem do you rate it as, if it evolves very slowly and unpredictably? I'd say tomorrow's commute traffic is a bigger problem. If that's what you're saying, I apologize, but I'm tired of all this alarm over something which is less of a problem than tomorrow's commute traffic.
It is a scientific fact. In my neighborhood the water will be so high there will not be any land left.
It is not a scientific fact that climate change is a problem; that is a value judgement competing with many alternative scenarios with their own implications. Decarbonizing by denying fossil fuel energy to poor nations is a devastating problem to those people living there. Disrupting reliable energy to our economy can be argued to be a bigger problem to overall well being than allowing more carbon-based energy--especially when China and India ensure that our disruptions will do little to reduce the global carbon dioxide levels. The science has been corrupted by a political environment, encouraged by the scientific academies and institutions, which bring more $ based on alarmism. Even so, the actual output of that science is far less alarming than what is reported in the media, which has its own progressive priorities driving their narratives. There are multiple levels of distortion of the issue by the time you read it in your paper, your website or on your news program. Finally many of those who lecture us in the most sanctimonious manner on CO2 have led the way in closing nuclear power plants--an insane approach if you're worried about CO2--and flying private jets to their climate confabs. I can't hear what they say because it is drowned out by the volume from what they do.
That the earth is currently warming is [about as close as you get to] a scientific fact.
That humans are responsible for much/most of the warming is, I agree, the strong scientific consensus, is true, if not quite a *fact*.
However, that it is a *problem* - and in particular a problem requiring extreme, heavy-handed government action that will leave us all poorer and the world’s poorest billions, many of who lack low cost reliable, highly available power, much worse off - is anything but a *fact*.
The data actually says it isn't warming. The problem starts with, how does one know what the "average" temperature of the earth is. Digging deep into the data, one finds an incredible amount of corruption in the data sets.
So, what I always ask someone who imagines the earth is going to get too warm as a result of too much CO2 is:
Yikes, gee why didn't anyone tell me? If I understand you, there must have been a time when the recent past when the temperature of the earth and the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere were both perfect. When was that time?
While I agree there is an issue with reliable temperature records, the satellite records starting in 1979 should be good. That happens to coincide with the end of a several decade period of cooling (remember the Newsweek cover in the 70s worrying about cooling)—and warming is found in those records since then. Also there are other signs of warming including different plant behaviors from climate change in that time. But what has happened since then in itself isn’t terribly alarming, it’s the projections of feedback amplification and “tipping points” that drives alarmism, and that seems pretty speculative still.
I mostly agree with you. However I wonder what the satellite data from say 1979 to 1995 was calibrated to. It had to be to earth stations. Which then leaves us with, how accurate was the data from earth stations?
I don’t think it really matters, the earth has self-regulated its temperature for a really long time. That it may not be a perfect temperature for humans to live in is not all that relevant. Homo homo sapiens (us) have only been around for a few hundred thousands of years.
“The data actually says it isn't warming.”
Sorry, but the overwhelming consensus of scientists is that it is.
Including the scientists who agree with you and me that leftist public policy prescriptions to address it are bad ideas.
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
And while I agree that “warming is occurring” is not quite an absolute fact, if you are going to claim that this is the case you need to demonstrate your case, not simply assert it.
[To be 100% clear, it is not to me that you need to demonstrate that case, but to the scientific community. Which to repeat includes those who are the opposite of leftist political activists.]
Andy old bean, a consensus of scientists agree on nothing. ‘Scientists’ are specialists in their own fields, not every field. A Nobel Prize winner in chemistry is not likely to have investigated the temperature statistics. The 95 or 98 percent of ‘scientists’ agree that temperatures are rising has been proven wrong in the literature. I’m a bit embarrassed for you that you don’t know this.
If you like, I can refer you to articles and videos that demonstrate this. The problem for most of us, is that we want to believe that something is right but are not willing to investigate if the claim made is actually true.
As I have said elsewhere, I have been investigating the historical temperature data since the 1970’s. In those days I had to go to the university library and examine temperature data on microfiche. I was amazed at the incredible variances in hi/lo readings from the same stations all around the world. I saw variances in readings when a particular colonial official in a place in Africa or Asia was replaced by a new colonial official. Parallax effect. Time of day when thermometers were reset were gigantic factors.
There is a stunning lack of data from the Southern Hemisphere, why, because no one lives there. The population today of the Northern Hemisphere is 87% of the world total, of the South 13%, it was a larger difference 150 years ago. No people, no temperature data.
Think a bit more critically when you consider your beliefs.
The end of mankind has been predicted with regularity since Thomas Malthus.
What actual science assures us above all else is that the natural order is a trend towards equilibrium. This is the exact opposite of what climate alarmists have argued, which is that if radical social engineering is not done NOW, the earth will continue to heat up no matter what.
Thermodynamics tells us that sustained warming trends can only be the result of naturally occurring phenomenon. Arguing otherwise is science illiteracy and always has been.
"The end of mankind has been predicted with regularity since Thomas Malthus"
More like the Book of Revelations. It is fundamentally a religious genre.
Here is ChatGPT comparing "Climate Turning Point" to "Monetary-Fiscal Interactions" in response to the query:
Would or would not the opponents of either argument use the rationale in the other argument?
Short answer: yep—opponents on each topic can (and often do) borrow the other essay’s playbook. Here’s how the cross-rationales line up, plus where the analogy breaks.
How they’d borrow each other’s logic
Cochrane’s climate stance (“avoid alarmism; favor innovation/adaptation; don’t overspend now for distant uncertain harms”) Borrow fiscal-essay logic of preemptive discipline + option value “Delay is dangerous. Climate has fat tails and possible tipping points. Like rebuilding fiscal capacity before a crisis, we must cut emissions now to keep future options open. Waiting risks a sudden, costly loss of control (carbon budget exhaustion), and credibility matters—promises later won’t be believed.”
Cochrane’s fiscal stance (“rebuild fiscal space now; monetary policy can’t do it alone; inaction risks a sudden crisis”) Borrow climate-essay logic of alarmism skepticism + market-led adaptation “Debt ‘crisis’ talk is overblown. Models are uncertain; alarmism backfires. Let growth and innovation shrink debt ratios. With r≈g over time, we don’t need painful consolidations now. Don’t sacrifice prosperity for a forecast that might not bite; adjust gradually if and when costs show up.”
Why those cross-moves are tempting
Both issues feature long horizons, deep uncertainty, and potentially huge downside—perfect soil for importing the other side’s rhetoric.
Each has a powerful credibility narrative: “act now or you lose room to maneuver later.”
Where the analogy doesn’t fully carry
Externalities vs. budget constraint
Climate risk is a global externality with diffuse causality; the fiscal problem is a national intertemporal budget identity. One is softer (values/coordination), the other is hard arithmetic.
Irreversibility profiles
Climate has physical irreversibilities/tipping risks; fiscal risks are financial/political and usually reversible (though abrupt).
Control levers
Climate mitigation needs global coordination; fiscal repair can, in principle, be done unilaterally via taxes/spending/reform.
Measurement & feedback
Fiscal strain shows up quickly in rates/auctions/spreads; climate benefits of policy are lagged and noisy, which fuels the “don’t overspend yet” argument.
Bottom line
Would they? Yes.
Climate-action advocates can flip Cochrane’s fiscal logic into: “precaution + credibility ⇒ act early on emissions.”
Deficit doves can flip Cochrane’s climate logic into: “alarmism is costly; let growth/innovation handle debt gradually.”
Should you buy the import? Only with the caveats above. The rhetorical shapes fit; the underlying mechanics differ.
Thank you John for this great article!
You do have some good economic insights and I really appreciate how much you publish for free. That's pretty rare these days.
But seriously? You can't hide your glee at being able to 'legitimately' write a straw-man hit piece against climate change policies.
I'll just correct some fundamental basics before I go.
"The pandemic taught people that there might be other more pressing existential threats than a degree of heat in 100 years"
The NASA global temperature anomaly is 1 degree since 1980 (45 years) and the trend is obviously not linear. Annual global emissions are many times greater than in 1980 (so we should expect concomitant accelerated warming).
You don't mention anything about tipping points, so your article comes off as if you'd written something like "they said China couldn't build out 80 new biotech labs in 20 years without causing a global pandemic, what retards they all were" in 2018.
There's a hilarious bit where you quote some kind of equivalence between global climate a measured CO2 levels in an actual greenhouse. Was that bit tongue-in-cheek?
To be clear, the last time the earth had over 400ppm of CO2 average temperatures were 3C warmer than today, and up to 14C warmer at the poles (ie no north pole, minimal south pole). There almost certainly wasn't anything like an AMOC (North Atlantic drift), so where I'm from in Britain was glaciated and would have had an extremely short, dry growing season. AMOC collapse would cause the single largest loss of life since the mid-20th century, and that's only 1 of tens of massively impactful tipping points that current CO2 and temperature levels make more likely than not.
Yes, we should try and get global consensus and do everything possible to prevent this reality.
------
I totally agree that some of the focus on climate led to some extremely dumb decisions around other pressing conservation and development needs. However, if some governments and organisations want to pay lip service to climate lobbies and find 'quick fixes' and so they do extremely nonsensical CO2e accounting that lets people tick a box to pay $10 to apparently offset all the CO2 of an entire transatlantic flight by 'preventing future deforestation', if they want to do that, that is a failure of politics, not of climate science and its warnings for us.
It was as warm or warmer during the Medieval and Roman warming periods. So much for being extreme today.
There was a 10-20 year leveling off period recently. You are right -- it is obviously not linear.
What tipping points? The many that have been predicted to occur before now, and did not? The ones that were going to turn the planet into Venus and evidently did not? It was far warmer in the dinosaur ages, and obviously did not tip past any point of no return.
Tipping points are the last refuge of those with weak arguments. We have had MUCH higher levels of CO2 in the past and considerably higher temperatures with no tipping points occurring.
And, if you are going to make a desperate tipping point argument, here's a more plausible one in the opposite direction: We are overdue for a renewed ice age. A drop in temperatures of just a few degrees would be devastating in a way that a small rise would not. If you think humans are causing recent warming, we may be the only thing holding back an ice age.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/how-humans-held-back-the-glaciers
The dinosaurs were in Alaska, basking in the warmth of the sun
Respectfully - and to be clear I am on the right on this topic, and think the likelihood of such a tipping point is quite low - tipping points are the *only* valid argument the leftists possibly have on this subject.
Because for anything but surpassing such a tipping point, their public policy prescriptions are of course absurd and immoral.
They need to make the arguments for why a tipping point is at minimum distinctly possible. And then what policies can materially avoid reaching said tipping point.
And they have not done so.
And surely on the second piece they have not come close to doing so with their actual public policy proposals.
I don't disagree. They have failed to make a good argument for anything but a remote theoretical possibility of tipping points and their other arguments for drastic and coercive climate policies fail completely.
If the *limited* their argument to be about tipping points and that we shouldn’t take the risk of same, I could at least respect them, and might continue to take their argument seriously and at face value.
Since they don’t, they betray their hypocrisy - or simply blatant political purpose - as most of them do when they oppose nuclear energy while crying AGWC.
Just because we were wrong about the coming ice age and the population bomb and global warming and NYC being underwater and no snow in London and “only 10 years left” in 1998…
....doesnt mean no one should believe us now?
" the trend is obviously not linear. "
You are sort of correct. The fundamental equation is the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity. It posits that the global mean temperature increases by 3 degrees Celsius for each doubling of the atmospheric concentration of CO2. A bit of elementary algebra will show that equation is logarithmic. E.g. T2 = T1 + (ECS × (log2 (C2/C1))).
A logarithmic function is the mathematical inverse of an exponential relationship. I reaches infinity more slowly than a polynomial relationship. The We are about halfway towards the first doubling. there is not enough fossil fuel in the world to create a second doubling.
"To be clear, the last time the earth had over 400ppm of CO2 average temperatures were 3C warmer ... Britain was glaciated"
The polar ice will melt or Britain will be glaciated. Not both.
"John Kerry called the conference 'the last best hope for the world,' "
Okay, so that was only the last best one
Now we will have to turn to other hopes
granted the best ones are gone, but that still leaves a lot of really good ones
lucky us
newly formed religions have to have an apocalypse of some kind
and they require an individual who bestrides the globe like a colossus, someone who is equal to the apocalypse at hand, a prophet
obama and climate change work quite nicely for this purpose
race, gender, and climate change are untouchable, special
some of your readers will go absolutely nuts over this
if my children were readers, they would go 100% nuts
truth is a speed-bump
just swerve around it
John is one of those frogs that will happily boil in a pot because the temperature change is marginal at each point in time.
That mischaracterizes his view. Do you understand anything about the cost of preventive actions, the growth of wealth and capability over time, and discounting over time? You are also using the bullshit "boiling" language. You climate panickers are going to kill every last one us. (I can say that if you can talk about boiling.)
I assume you understand those things super goodly. Could you explain to me e.g. how to compute the current value of a future collapse of the Greenland ice sheet?
How do you compute the value of a new ice age? Or of billions in poverty and starvation because of foolish energy policies?
Is that your well thought out answer?
Unless you start your responses with a stolen land acknowledgment and confirm that you are triple masked and have gotten your 9th booster how can anyone take you seriously?
We can sorta map all of the unknown physical variables onto a single axis.
One end of the line is unconditionally stable, and no matter what academia says, nothing we do will matter.
The other end of the line is unconditionally unstable, and the earth will metaphorically explode, and there is no utility to anything remaining on earth. There is zero value in saving what cannot be saved.
That middle section is where all of the possibility is for stabilizing the alleged instability that we 'introduced'.
There are two basic problems.
One is that climate science can speculate about assumptions that move us away from stability, but there is a limit to how powerful those can be without overshooting to 'it does not matter'.
The second is that we are supposedly implementing the 'feedback circuit' of our stabilizing control system in human behavior. The problem is that nobody who thinks this is possible shows even the slightest clue that they have any broad understanding of human behavior.
You need to pay people for what it costs them. And, yes, you can pay some people in ideas or in social status, or something, and they will eat large costs. The stabilization 'feedback' needs expensive behavior modification from a wide range of cultures and occupations. You won't have one set of ideas or social status that is good for all of those persons.
The broadest currency is conventional money, and that means you need to generate that in some way, and not screw up the basic underlying generation of value, such as in food for people to eat.
If the treaty of regimes can only implement the control by mass starvation, it is uncertain that they will maintain power by force of arms. It is much easier for them to simply cheat on the treaty. The problem there is either some regime is left holding the bag, and trying to starve their population harder, or nobody is giving more than lip service.
I wonder if an editor at the NYT will be fired to publishing that piece illuminating the fraudulent, manipulative nature of climate porn.
"Prince Charles — now king of Britain — described it as “literally the last-chance saloon.”" Literally? I don't think climate is literally a bar which is the last place you can get a drink before crossing a border.
Also, activists and media have been declaring "climate crisis" for way longer than 20 years. I've been following it since the 1990s.
Possibly Charlie has been spending a bit too much time in saloons himself :)
You seem unaware that the definition of the word “literally” has changed in recent decades to also mean ”figuratively”.
In much the same way that the word “bad” in the 1970s was redefined to mean “good”
As a reformed objector to the current use of the word “literally”, I literally felt it my duty to inform you here… 😏
There is something so Malthusian and antihuman in this “climate scare” …
I live in Montana and every weekend I am in Glacier National Park doing wildlife photography with my wife. By way of background my undergrad degree is in Geography/Climatology from the University of Wisconsin and I also have a Masters from Harvard in another discipline.
In St Mary, MT on the East side of the park is a weather station. It is part of 114 similar weather stations that were deliberately set up to offset the existing regular 1,000 plus weather stations in the U.S. - 90% of which have had siting violations. These violations being that the stations are too close to roads, parking lots, buildings, asphalt pavement and lots of other urban heat island objects thus causing false readings.
The weather station in St Mary, MT is part of the Climate Reference Network of the NOAA. They have been gathering data for 20 years. Guess how much statistical increase in temperature they have found? No building, asphalt etc. - just grizzly bears, elk and such outside the fence. No human tampering.
You can read about it here
https://wattsupwiththat.com/u-s-surface-temperature/
You can read about the siting violations here:
https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/documents/2022_Surface_Station_Report.pdf
As a geography/climatology student, I learned to follow the evidence. The evidence I have seen is that CO2 is going up and weather data properly collected shows that temperatures are in fact not rising.
I also look at people's behavior, especially those people telling me for decades that we are about to die unless we do such and such and so and so.. I know and everyone here knows that China and India are the greatest user of burning coal for electricity production.
You know what? I have never seen them or heard about them or anyone else ever protesting outside a Communist Chinese embassy or Consulate anywhere in the world about their ostensible destruction of the planet these last decades by burning billions of tons of coal.
Now, why do suppose that is? I can make the connection. Can you?
Thank you fellow scientist
He’s not a scientist and certainly no climate scientist. But that doesn’t matter as long as he tells you what you want to hear.
I only need to be open minded and smarter than you.
That's easiest thing to do in the world in my case as even my ice machine is smarter than you.
Hasn't the World Land Mass stayed Constant since 1900?
This is satire, right? Because, if not, there are quite a few economists (including this one) who disagree.
Yes, The True Believer.
Eric Hoffer wrote about you, Margaret.
You’re probably still pushing for the mass sterilizations
One way to look at environmental economics is to say that environmental protection is a luxury public good that only wealthy free market economies can afford. Compare, e.g., East Germany with West Germany. That is, not surprisingly, an unpopular point of view.
It is not a public good.
We basically had the Star Trek future, in the sixties, with that round of mechanizing away agricultural labor.
That would have prevented the sorts of food scarcity that allows for opportunistic regimes, and basically forever ended the possibility of a NSDAP like faction being able to panic people until it obtained power.
Various interested parties could not tolerate that lack of possibility, and so environmentalism was created to impoverish us.
Yet we are still too well fed, and too uninterested in an endless parade of tumbrels.
So Academics are still paid to do entirely backwards research into how we need to cut off our arms and legs, and eat our seed corn.
My bingo card didn’t have DW-W as the bearer of this message! But then he was good on Covid and kids.