Precise Guesswork (Howard Hayden)

Excerpt from The Energy Advocate, November 2016 (Vol. 21, No. 4) A paid subscription newsletter, presented with permission of the publisher.

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Precise Guesswork

By Howard Hayden Following the paradigm of the people who are always trying to make problems out of solutions to problems, somebody somewhere has invented a concept called the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC), and the administration has decided to hang a number on it [1,2]: The purpose of the “social cost of carbon” (SCC) estimates presented here is to allow agencies to incorporate the social benefits of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into cost-benefit analyses of regulatory actions that impact cumulative global emissions. [2] In a case dealing largely with the refrigeration industry, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Department of Energy, which had set the cost at $36 of international damage per metric ton of CO2 [3]. The court basically deferred to the Department of Energy: “We conclude that DOE acted in a manner worthy of our deference,” wrote Senior Judge Kenneth Ripple. He continued, “This is not a close call … “We are convinced that DOE's engineering analysis, including its use of an analytical model, was neither arbitrary nor capricious” [3]. Nor, evidently, was it worthy of scrutiny.

Jacob Goldstein, reporter for National Public Radio, says [4], To get the number right, you have to guess more than just how much warmer the Earth is going to get. You have to guess which cities get Page 1

flooded and which cities build seawalls. You have to estimate how each degree of temperature change affects rice production in Indonesia and what'll happen to mosquitoes in Africa and how that will affect the spread of malaria. And you have to project all that out for centuries. It just seems impossible.

It is, in fact, more than seemingly impossible. It is literally impossible. Yes, you can use wild guesses (say, of flood damage) based on other guesses (such as the number and ferocity of hurricanes) based on other guesses (such as the relationship between hurricanes and temperature) based on other guesses (such as the relationship between CO2 and temperature), and make further guesses as to the monetary cost of said flood damage to obtain estimates of “social cost” of a metric ton of CO2. Your garbage-ingarbage-out computer will dutifully do whatever you tell it to do. Getting the number right is another matter.

Some things don’t require guesswork. Until data prove otherwise, sea rise is known to be about the thickness of a nickel per year, as it has been for the last 7,000 years. Facts notwithstanding, the SCC model-makers program their computers to assume that cities will have to build sea walls or suffer horrendous consequences.

Mosquitoes? Maybe the mosquitoes will take malaria back to Yakutsk, Siberia, where there were 16,328 cases in 1935 (but only 88 in 1959). One thing is certain. The SCC model-makers tell their computers that CO2 will warm the earth, and tell their computers that the incidence of malaria will increase. Guess what comes out of the computers.

Rice production depends far more on the successes of biologists than on putative global warming, and every model under the sun says that warming is least in equatorial regions, but rest assured that the SCC model-makers tell their computers that warming will decrease rice production in tropical places like Indonesia.

As the funny ads for GEICO say, “It’s what they do.”

And never mind that all climate models have failed to predict temperatures even a decade into the future correctly; they all overestimate temperature rise.

[1] Federal Register / Vol. 79, No. 60 / Friday, March 28, 2014 / Rules and Regulations [2] “Technical Support Document: Technical Update of the Social Cost of Carbon for Regulatory Impact Analysis Under Executive Order 12866 Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon, United States Government” May 2013 Revised November 2013 Page 2

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/infore g/technical-updatesocial-cost-of-carbon-for-regulator-impactanalysis.pdf [3] Zero Zone, Inc., et al.,v. United States Department Of Energy, et al., http://www.eenews.net/assets/2016/08/09/docu ment_gw_01.pdf [4] Federal Court Blocks Challenge To Social Cost Of Carbon, NPR.org , 8/17/2016

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