Obama urges Carbon Tax

I have heard some legitemate arguments against global warming being man made, and more importmantly I have heard some good arguments against trying to fix it. Here are 3 things I know to be true: first, the enviroment is extremely complex and humans don't have a good track record trying to fix enviromental problems; second, the is a lot of support in the scientific community for things like cap and trade; third, and most importantly, I don't know enough, no one does. So assuming the Earth is heating up (which there is a lot of evidence in support, this tends to be the one thing people agree on) the question becomes is it man made, if so what do we do about it? If not what do we do about? FInally, what is the consequence of inaction?

While those questions tend to have long confusing answers, economics tend to be relatively more concrete. The goal of any business is to make a profit, if there is competition this is done best by trying to reduce costs as much as possible. This cost cutting proccess is done with short run profits in mind, which means that most companies create negative externalities that should be regulated by the goverment to hopefully avoid a collapse in that market (or some other negative side effect, an eviromental disaster comes to mind).

So with all of the above in mind, while I may not be entirely convinced about global warming, I do believe there must be some negative side effect of all the CO2 we pump into the air. Which is why I support some kind of cap-and-trade system.

EDIT: Kurai you made a comment about costs I think you will find this map interesting http://www.538host.com/waxman.PNG it is a state by state breakdown of the average cost per family of the cap and trade legislation that was passed by the house. (The person who created it, is a staistics guru, eh tends to have a liberal bent but his math is solid)

 

alright, thanks kerwyn. I agree about businesses being out to make money. I hope, if this bill is passed by the senate, too, that it will do more harm than good x3

Is that how much it will increase with the cap on trade bill? or how much people are currently spending?

 

I'm confused as to how that map shows only Wyoming and Alaska being particularly hard hit and Virginia and West Virginia as being lightly affected. Virginia and W. Virginia are both heavy coal producers and would, in theory, be in trouble with this legislation.

In any case I think whether global warming is man-made or not (which I believe it is, the projected temperature increases are far too fast to be naturally occurring) this measure is still needed. If we can be more efficient and cleaner in our emissions why shouldn't we? The government could easily mandate that by 2050 no one can be using coal but they're not. Instead they're saying that emissions must be reduced by 17% by 2020. I think that's more than reasonable.

I intend to reduce my own emissions by as much as economically feasible NOW so why shouldn't America's businesses and polluting industries do the same?

Actually I don't know how much more efficient I can make myself. I hardly drive because I bike to school, I don't leave lights on, I don't use plastic... My most expensive areas are A/C and electricity consumption from my PC. I could live off wind turbines lol.

 

you can build your own model on a computer, using all the relevant laws of physics, all the constants and so on. Then you can guess things like how much greenstuff, like plants, is on earth and stuff like that. That we will call unknow variables. Ofcourse your guess is a good asumption and not a crazy guess.
And also you add how warm the sun is. Stuff like that

Then you can let the super computer run it through, and lets say your graph fits to what happened 10% of the times, lets say in a period of 100 years. Then your model is not so good, and cannot be used to estimate what happens in the future.

But then you change the unknown variables and lets say this time your model fits with what happened 85% of the time. Then clearly this model gives a better estimate of what will happen in the future.

Then if you think 85% is not enough high number you just adjust the unknown variables till the model fits to your demands. Thats how modelling works.

So lets say in a 100 years span the temperature on earth climbed 10 times. Thus our model should also have 10 climbs in temperature. So lets say we only found one climb in our temperature, then we can say it only fits 10% of the time. So its the correlation between the trend in reality and the trend in the model we are watching for and not a precise match.

 

If you're talking about temperature change models what I'm talking about is the projected change in temperature that has been projected for the next 50 years.

IMO the models are pretty accurate since they began in 1996 and have correctly projected the temperature increases we're seeing in the north and south poles to within a small margin. Let me see if I can find those studies.

*EDIT*

I can't find the specific article I'm thinking of. I believe I read about it in U.S. News & World Report a couple years back. Same place I read about some serious issues in the U.S. recycling industry because of the recent economic problems. If anything that's messed up that a recycler can go out of business because of lack of government subsidies for recycling.

Anyway this one is pretty good too and shows the projected temperature change in the arctic until 2090. This type of projection coupled with the actual change in temperature experienced there in the last 20 years is significant enough to tell me there is a real problem not attributable only to natural temperature fluctuations.

http://nordpil.com/go/portfolio/mapsgraphics/arctic-projections/

Also here's a good source for the changes in temperature in the arctic over the last couple of decades and some other models that are more specific to the next 10 to 20 years.

http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/