tisdag 8 november 2011

Is the Economical Crisis a Climate Crisis?

Two facts fly in our faces today:
  1. EU is in a deep economical crisis.
  2. EU has the most ambitious plan for reduction of CO2 emissions.
Is there a connection? Many questions present themselves:
  • Has the financial market already adjusted to the new reality of a carbon-free society projected by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to 2050?
  • Would the economical crisis evaporate if EU leaders gave up their plans for a Great Transformation?
  • Was the climate crisis invented to give clever EU political leaders a mission to lead the World into a new future?
  • Is the economicial crisis triggered by the climate crisis now driving the same clever EU politicians out of business ?

2 kommentarer:

  1. It is all interconnected, I would say.

    Our memory is short...
    Former eastern Europe still remembers though....
    And Václav Klaus knows that it is easy to slip back into poverty by man-made policies.

    We in the rich world have forgotten that only 150 years ago we were indeed very "careful" with our energy-consumption.
    We had to.
    Most of us could not afford to keep warm or to be well fed. Local production was almost all there was.
    Of course, the posh Al Gores & Co of that time were doing more than alright. But the majority were suffering.
    Seems to me that we, more or less knowingly, are heading back to those dark ages again at full speed.

    SvaraRadera
  2. I would recommend you to read something that more sanely talks about the domains of causation that leads to big shocks of system failure as the one seen in a major scale financial crisis. Or maybe one is better off to talk about our non-ability to understand and quantify these domains.

    My recommendation is The Black Swan written by Nassim Taleb.

    Over all, the book is a really sane treatise on our epistemological (what we can know) shortcomings in domains of complex systems (like economical systems).

    I read the first edition a couple of years ago and I ordered the second edition a couple of months ago. It's been standing untouched on my shelf up until yesterday when I re-read the book and also read the essay included in the second edition. And boy did it hit hard, it became obvious to me that I didn't understand the full implications of these ideas until this reread (sometimes an idea needs a couple of years to really sink in :) ).

    I would now like to argue that whether your radiation model is right or wrong in the context of global climate change is an undecidable question. Your model is simply to simplistic to have anything to say on the issue. Or put in other words, a platonification as the one you do is such an oversimplification that we can not state any predicted outcomes from it with certainty. If you would like to understand this argument better you should read the book.

    And just so we are clear, the same goes with the climate models that they are using in the fields today.

    Sincerely,
    Dol (a new-born ultra skeptical empiricist)

    SvaraRadera