Using the Cato Carbon Simulator
Climate MAGICC New York will probably be like Florida 15 years from now. —St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1989)
One thing lukewarmers tend to do is crunch a lot of numbers. We want to know if mitigating global warming by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases is worth the cost. We’d like to know how the price of adaptation will vary under different scenarios of warming. To facilitate this sort of inquiry, we’ve adapted for your use the very same model the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employs in calculating the effect of various policy proposals on climate.
They call it “Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas– Induced Climate Change.” If you play the acronym game you’ll note that that renders it MAGICC. Its creator, Tom Wigley, from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, came up with the name and acronym; we didn’t. You’ll find our MAGICC emulator at:
All you have to do is choose among three fields of information:
1. The CO2 emissions reduction amount— calculated from the 2005 baseline— that will take place by the year 2050 and remain in place thereafter.
2. The region of the globe that will take part in the emissions reduction plan— the United States, for example, or for the more optimistic, all industrialized nations of the world.
3. The climate sensitivity, or how much you believe global average temperature will increase as a result of doubling the preindustrial atmospheric CO2 concentration. EPA’s guess is 3.0 ° C. But, as noted earlier, a growing collection of reports from the recent scientific literature puts the value between 1.5 ° C and 2.0 ° C. Not wanting to leave hotheads out of the fun, we include an option of selecting an extremely high climate sensitivity value of 4.5 ° C.
Once you make your selections, the calculator returns the amount of global temperature rise averted by 2050 and
Choose a 100 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by the United States along with EPA’s sensitivity value of 3.0 ° C. Hit “Submit.”
The amount of temperature savings that results is 0.052 ° C by 2050 and 0.137 ° C by 2100.
We’ll explain why we extend the temperatures to three significant digits in the Appendix to this volume. Now that you have your answer, you should know that you have chosen the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 “most likely” value for climate sensitivity, disregarding recent scientific literature. That 2013 report declines to choose a “most likely” value, which is probably a good idea given how things are turning out. As you see, a dramatic cessation of economic activities that create CO2 emissions reduces the amount of global warming a little more than 0.10 ° C out of a projected rise of 2.619 ° C between 2010 and 2100. Some people (and some libertarians) who haven’t thought things through are going around Washington, D.C., advocating for a tax on CO2 as the best way to reduce emissions. But, as MAGICC shows, why bother?
How high would the tax have to be to discourage all emissions? Once they’re able to establish that, how will they sell the idea that a rise in global temperature of 2.482 ° C is vastly preferable to a rise of 2.619 ° C? To explore other alternatives, use our handy-dandy MAGICC emulator. If you are a fan of futility, you should have fun. MAGICC also brings to light the futility of U.S. climate policy given that China’s emissions are going to be approximately 2.5 times ours by the time China’s energy demand stabilizes and given that India has just announced that it is going to open the largest coal mine on Earth.
Patrick J. Michaels & Paul C. Knappenberger. Lukewarming: The New Climate Science That Changes Everything (Kindle Locations 2743-2757). CATO Institute.
We should revisit occasionally what the proper role of government is. As the constitution was a good sense of direction, we need a core set of principles to add in order to deal with the future.
So many want to engineer society, remove risk, assist certain groups, rather than let individuals thrive and raise communities. Why?
Is Democracy where we all "get it good and hard" or is it the best means to a free society?
Should we roll with the special interests, or make the government achieve its proper role, what is that role, and how to do this?
When do deficits and governments become too large?
Government is becoming more elitist while trying to sell corrections to problems it created, what makes this possible?
This could also be inserted into the field above, or erased
Currently as a society, we are having a most difficult time discussing political issues. What is driving this? And why a rebirth in political culture would be a good thing.
Are "markets" dead as some would conjecture? Or is free enterprise what got us here?
At the heart of economics there are several possible economic schools of thought, the essence of these schools of thought and how they relate to our lives.
