Daniel Reeves, co-founder of Beeminder, thinks the book Climate Shock is extraordinarily convincing. He also apparently has a great deal of respect for my intellectual integrity. The upshot: Reeves has bet me at 2:1 odds that reading Climate Shock will convince me to support markedly greater government action to mitigate climate change.
As we discussed the bet, I warned Reeves that:
I feel bad to pretend I’m more open-minded than I really am. The honest truth is that I would probably have to spend a couple years studying climatology before I felt capable of directly reviewing the evidence.
And I think Reeves knows me well enough to be aware of my libertarian presumption.
But he still wants to make the bet.
Here, then, are the terms we’ve worked out. Consider this an acceptance.
1. Bryan reads Climate Shock. But feel free to skip the parts about short-term extreme weather events — that’s probably least compelling and least relevant to the long-term cost/benefit analysis.
2. Danny puts up $500 to Bryan’s $250 on Bryan doing a 180 on some important policy question related to climate change, such as supporting carbon pricing or subsidizing clean energy or carbon capture tech. (Merely increasing Bryan’s support for repeal of existing government policies doesn’t count).
3. Bryan automatically loses the bet if he doesn’t finish the book by January 1, 2022.
I have to say, this is an extremely flattering bet, since Reeves is trusting me to adjudicate the result myself. I’ll do my best not to disappoint him!
READER COMMENTS
robc
Sep 14 2021 at 11:02am
Can I get a piece of the action?
I could reasonably read the book, agree with all the science and projections in it and still not support increased government action on deontological grounds.
This has got to be the easiest bet Bryan has ever taken.
BC
Sep 14 2021 at 2:46pm
Caplan is not an absolutist on government intervention even when fundamental liberties are at stake. He has stated many times that he merely has a presumption against intervention but, if the case for intervention were compelling enough, then he would support it. Most often, though, he finds that people greatly exaggerate the need for intervention, the likely effectiveness of the intervention relative to non-intervention, or some combination. So, this bet will be a good test of whether the case for intervention truly meets the high bar needed to clear the presumption against it or whether it’s merely a plausible-sounding idea to those inclined to find it plausible.
Jonathan S
Sep 14 2021 at 3:29pm
Yes, Bryan has admitted that he is not an absolutist on liberties, but in the context of extreme examples like fending off an asteroid hitting earth. Bryan’s critique of policies during this pandemic has shown that a 1-2% mortality rate does not justify government policies overriding liberty. I think Bryan would need to be convinced that climate change would have a very high mortality rate or be extremely costly (Great Depression or worse?). During his discussions of this book, I’m hoping Bryan can give us an approximate idea of the cutoff that he thinks government is justified to override liberty for utility (when in conflict).
Jose Pablo
Sep 14 2021 at 10:23pm
You mean “override actual liberty for an expectation of utility”.
Taking into account the government track record on getting the intended results, this is a very grim course of action. You can be sure that “the expectation of utility” is never going to materialize.
It reminds me of the Reason’s interview to Coase:
Reason: What’s an example of bad regulation?
Coase: I can’t remember one that’s good. Regulation of transport, regulation of agriculture–agriculture is a zoning is z. You know, you go from a to z, they are all bad. There were so many studies, and the result was quite universal: The effects were bad.
When thinking about the government “overriding liberty for utility” picture in your mind “rent control”, “tariffs” and “minimum wages”.
Good luck if this is the kind of stuff than stands between humanity and global warming.
Thomas Leske
Sep 14 2021 at 11:14am
Daniel Reeves will probably loose the bet, because the book seems to be way off mainstream.
Bjørn Lomborg points out that non-arbitrary estimates of climate damages equal 1-3% of BIP in the year 2100, when people probably will be four times richer. (So maybe they will just watch robots fixing the dikes):
https://twitter.com/BjornLomborg/status/1433104672278163458
The IPCC position on tipping points also is not alarming:
https://judithcurry.com/2019/02/07/climate-hypochondria-and-tribalism-vs-winning/
Matthias
Sep 14 2021 at 7:37pm
Wikipedia also has a pag, and talks of something like 10% to 20% of GDP.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_change
That’s about the same order of magnitude as moving from an advanced country like Singapore to a comparative backwater like the UK.
Andrew_FL
Sep 14 2021 at 10:02pm
Is that sarcasm
Just in case it’s not, lol wikipedia
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Sep 14 2021 at 8:27pm
But if low-cost methods are available to reduce and reverse CO2 increase (and I think the dead-weight loss of a tax on net CO2 emissions would have a pretty small dead weight loss), would it not be better to watch the robots doing something more productive?
Jose Pablo
Sep 14 2021 at 10:57pm
The main point is not the impact of climate damage. Honestly speaking I don’t think we have a clue.
The problem is that we are even more clueless about the effects of the measures proposed or being taken.
I.e The EU net-zero pledge will, very likely, have no effect. The EU-28 (not even the EU any longer) represent less than 9% of the total emissions. This will have no effect on the global warming problem.
Even if USA would cease to emit CO2 (totally, net-zero in 2050) this reduction will be fully offset by the increase in India’s emission if the people of this country “just” goes from their actual (very modest) 1.91 t per person to the 5.6 t per person that emit the very virtous people of the UK, one of the best in the developed world (and that is assuming no population increase in India between now and 2050)
The brilliant Huemer’s paragraph on In Praise of Passivity, fully applies:
“But there is at least one way of distinguishing the desire for X from the desire to perceive oneself as promoting X. This is to observe the subject’s efforts at finding out what promotes X. The basic insight here is that the desire [to perceive oneself as promoting X] is satisfied as long as one does something that one believes will promote X, whereas the desire for X will be satisfied only if one successfully promotes X. Thus, only the person seeking X itself needs accurate beliefs about what promotes X; one who merely desires the sense of promoting X needs strong beliefs (so that she will have a strong sense of promoting X) but not necessarily true beliefs on this score”.
Daniel Reeves
Sep 15 2021 at 12:19am
This sounds like, roughly, “it’s kind of hopeless because it’s a big hairy collective action problem and also people are kind of hypocritical and care more about virtue-signaling than solving the real problem”. Big hairy collective action problems are sometimes solved by governments (like in the admittedly much easier case of banning CFCs) and sometimes made worse by governments (sounds like the commentariat here is already overflowing with examples of this).
As for hypocrisy and such, I guess I’d say let’s focus on the cost/benefit analysis for candidate policies.
Mark Z
Sep 15 2021 at 2:58am
A national government can’t really solve a collective action problem among other nations. Aggressive state action by the US could pass cost benefit analysis, but at <15% of global co2 emissions and declining (proportionally) steadily, it seems unlikely that US policy would make the difference in averting catastrophe.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Sep 15 2021 at 7:28am
Do you really think we are “clueless” abut the effects of a tax on net emissions of CO2? That the effectiveness of any particular trajectory of tax rates and their dead-weight losses are uncertain, sure; but “clueless?”
Jose Pablo
Sep 15 2021 at 7:26pm
No. We are “clueless” about the “practical” effects of “a reduction of X% in global emissions between now and 2050”.
There is a huge distance from “knowing” that human activity is affecting global temperatures and “knowing” how to assess the “differential economic impact between emitting around 43 billion tons per year (actual levels) and emitting, let’s say, around 30 b tons per year (a 1/3 reduction)”. We have no clue, really. When we talk about “cost-benefit” analysis regarding this issue, we fool ourselves thinking that we can, even, guess the “costs” much less the “benefits.”
And, in any case, we don’t “know” “the effects of a tax on net emissions of CO2” the same way that we know “how to land a spacecraft in Mars”. And certainly, we do not know how to impose a “tax” without a fiscal authority (they are national, the tax should be global) that designs and enforces it. Any example?
Do we even know how much CO2 is each country “really” emitting? How is that measured? By whom?
From YaleEnviroment360, Sept 10, 2018
will we be able to verify the Paris climate accord? Right now, science is not up to the task, say the people in charge of assessing our annual emissions of CO2. There is, they say, no sure way of independently verifying whether national governments are telling the truth about their own emissions or of knowing by how much global anthropogenic emissions are actually increasing.
And that is distinctly alarming, given the contradiction between reports that anthropogenic emissions have stopped rising and atmospheric measurements showing that annual increases in CO2 levels have reached record levels
Sure, the increase in the incentives to cheat that a global tax on CO2 will create, will do wonders for the accuracy of this “national” measures.
And that’s just the things we know that we don’t know …
Jose Pablo
Sep 15 2021 at 7:39pm
Regarding the “accuracy of the measures” and the “incentives to cheat” it is useful to remember that one third of the emissions came from China and Russia … or so they say.
Christophe Biocca
Sep 15 2021 at 11:25am
You can work around “there are many countries that can’t coerce each other” with tit-for-tat strategies.
Say the US/Eurozone declare they’ll impose a carbon tax of $5/ton + the global average tax on carbon, capped at whatever they think is the actual social cost of carbon. Now every country that does not have a carbon tax (or has a very low one) has an additional incentive to adopt one or increase it: they get more reductions in warming for each dollar of carbon tax they impose on their citizenry.
The low-complexity variant of this is to get all the signatories of the feel-good goal-without-mechanism treaties to instead all agree on a small carbon tax (low enough to get everyone on board), then ratchet it up as long as enough countries remain on board.
Note that this only works if countries all roughly agree that 1. coordinated reductions are better than no reductions, 2. no reductions are better than being the only one to reduce and everyone else free-riding, and 3. carbon taxes are sufficient and nothing else is needed or more efficient. In practice almost everyone either disagrees with 1. or with both 2. & 3.
Jonathan S
Sep 14 2021 at 11:17am
This is definitely Bryan’s most unique bet to date.
Reeves is basically giving Bryan $500 to promote and discuss the book?
Daniel Reeves
Sep 14 2021 at 12:39pm
I really do think the book is uniquely convincing and has exactly what Bryan has complained about other climate activism missing: actual risk and cost/benefit analysis. The odds I offered may not be strictly rational except that I have a lot of value for even a small chance of changing Bryan’s mind on this (not to mention the honor of being officially entered into the bet wiki).
Jonathan S
Sep 14 2021 at 1:35pm
I think Bryan is open to climate change being a bigger deal than he currently understands. However, I think the bigger obstacle is convincing an anarchist that government would be a viable solutions, and not make matters worse.
I saw an AMA with Bryan on Reddit that the only open bet he expects to lose is his Bauman global warming pause bet. He also mentioned that climate scientists, etc. are not good at cost-benefit analysis. We shall see!
Daniel Reeves
Sep 14 2021 at 2:15pm
Yeah, there’s not really any ambiguity left that Bryan is going to lose that bet with Yoram Bauman. That’s actually how my discussion with Bryan started. I made a graph that makes it visually clear how much global temperatures would have to drop in order for Bryan to win:
The orange line is average temperature from 2000-2014. Bryan bet that temperatures in 2015-2029 would not be much higher than that; specifically, that they’d be below the green line. The average so far, 2015-2021, is shown by the red line. The continuation of the red line shows what they’ll have to be below from now to 2029 for Bryan to win the bet.
(Source: Graphed in Mathematica from NOAA data. Using NASA’s independently collected data or Europe’s Copernicus data all yield graphs that look qualitatively the same.)
Daniel Reeves
Sep 14 2021 at 2:17pm
Doh, looks like the inline image got eaten. Here’s a link:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/9928/133309675-9020ce82-50fe-4cb6-8493-197a131330fa.png
Aaron
Sep 14 2021 at 2:49pm
Since Bryan is an anarchist, I wonder what the threshold for this bet is.
Bryan has to abandon anarchism entirely and adopt a worldview in which it is preferable to have a government.
Bryan only has to accept that, given that we already have a government which already does lots of things, it should also do something to actively fight climate change.
#1 seems like a nearly impossible threshold. #2 is at least plausibly attainable.
Daniel Reeves
Sep 14 2021 at 12:34pm
Hi everyone! I’m pretty excited to have a bet with Bryan! You probably all know about Bryan’s perfect betting record and especially the utterly bonkers story of Bryan winning his Brexit bet [1]. So my family and I have been joking that since the universe clearly reshapes itself to ensure Bryan wins all his bets, I should’ve bet something like “climate change is real” so Bryan could bet against that and thus literally save the world.
[1] In case not, it’s soooo good: That bet was back in 2008, with Bryan arguing against some crazy ideologue who was convinced that the EU was about to fall apart. The bet was operationalized as “no major EU member officially withdraws by 2020-Jan-01”. Then in 2016 Brexit happened and it looked like Bryan lost (on a technicality, since Brexit is not in fact precipitating a collapse of the EU). Then the universe, not wanting to spoil Bryan’s perfect betting record, somehow conspired to drag Brexit out for four years, finally becoming official *30 days* after Bryan officially won the bet. Gobsmacking!
zeke5123
Sep 14 2021 at 12:37pm
So, what you are saying is that global warming won’t happen by the time predicted, but 30 days later an asteroid will hit the Earth?
Henri Hein
Sep 14 2021 at 12:53pm
Hats off to a good sport! This will be interesting to follow.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Sep 14 2021 at 8:23pm
If the book does not contain a cost estimate of the scenarios you discuss, maybe you could include then in the next edition. Even better would be if you included the full cost-benefit analysis of your preferred policy set to mitigate those costs.
AJ
Sep 14 2021 at 12:43pm
Does he not know Bryan at all? Libertarians are just as stubborn in their views as everyone else, so I’m really surprised he thinks there is a chance Bryan will change his mind.
Metamorf
Sep 14 2021 at 12:44pm
Not a good bet, since there’s no way to determine the outcome objectively. What’s really at stake in the bet, then, isn’t the book or the climate debate, but just Bryan. The outcomes then are:
1. Bryan doesn’t change his mind, and says he doesn’t — thus winning the bet, honestly.
2. Bryan doesn’t change his mind, but says he does (in an effort not to appear greedy, inflexible, etc.) — thus losing the bet, but dishonestly.
3. Bryan changes his mind, and says he does — thus losing the bet, honestly.
4. Bryan changes his mind, but says he doesn’t — thus winning the bet, but dishonestly.
The most moral outcomes (assuming honesty as a virtue) are 1 and 3, but only 3 isn’t open to a suspicion of self-serving. Outcome 2 is interesting as a possible example of wishing to appear virtuous trumping actual virtue.
Todd Kreider
Sep 14 2021 at 1:24pm
Much of Weitzman’s later work was based on a faulty part of the 2007 IPCC report which through giving much too much weight to one grim model’s forecast showed a 10 percent chance of 2100 being “really bad” although that was debatable at the time and assumes no technological change out to 2100.
But that error in the 2007 report was corrected in the 2014 IPCC report, which shows under a 1 percent chance of the “really bad” climate happening. Despite this, Weitzman did not correct this large error.
William Connolley
Sep 14 2021 at 5:25pm
There’s a review by Tol (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/690865) which I think says the same, but in a little more detail.
Daniel Reeves
Sep 14 2021 at 6:20pm
Thanks for that link! I’m now interested in checking out William Nordhaus’s books (but which to start with?) who sounds like he agrees with Climate Shock but plugs some holes in the case it makes?
Todd Kreider
Sep 14 2021 at 7:04pm
I remember Matt Ridley discussed this 2007 IPCC report error on his blog with a later correction in the 2014 report but can’t find it. I remember Ridley said that the IPCC somehow accidently counted a bad case scenario/model twice which led to a 10% chance of a very hot Earth in 2100 but when that hot scenario/model was counted only once along with a few other lower ones, the likelihood of that very hot future dropped to “well under 1 percent.”
I’ve listened to Nordhaus discuss climate change two or three times, the most recent on Michael Shermer’s show on youtube a couple of weeks ago, and I don’t think he understands the science part well at all.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Sep 14 2021 at 3:00pm
I’d like to see a distinction in the bet between
a) BC is not persuaded that as a result of net CO2 emissions (and methane, etc.) the climate will change in ways that create rising discounted present value costs (lower crop yields, wildfires, flooding from hurricanes, sea level rise, etc.)
From
b) BC is not persuaded that any policy actually implemented supposedly to reduce these costs would have be effective enough to offset the costs of the policy itself (slower growth, less investment, loss of consumer surplus from changing consumption patterns, etc.)
Just from the name, the book seems aimed at a) whereas I suspect that b) is the place that BC may be harder to persuade.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Sep 14 2021 at 3:07pm
Win or lose I’d like to see BC’s cost benefit analysis after reading the book.
If someone other than BC were offered that bet and wanted to cheat, they would just stipulate all of the costs argued by the book and assume that the government policies aimed at reducing the costs were all designed by Greta Thunberg.
Kevin Dick
Sep 14 2021 at 5:44pm
Paying $500 to get Bryan to opine on the topic of your choice seems like a good deal if you care a lot about that topic. So the bet is just a free roll.
CSK
Sep 14 2021 at 8:36pm
My thought as well. Would Bryan have accepted the offer to review the book for $500 if it hadn’t been a bet?
David Henderson
Sep 14 2021 at 10:05pm
Here’s why I think Bryan will win:
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2015/12/regulation-v38n4-9_7.pdf#page=21
Daniel Reeves
Sep 15 2021 at 2:17am
Thank you for joining the debate! I’m no expert and it’s been a while since I’ve read the book now but I believe you’re missing important parts of Climate Shock’s arguments in this review/rebuttal. For example, you say that the year 2100 is far enough away that we can postpone emissions reduction. Climate Shock gives a nice bathtub analogy for why that’s not the case. I think your review ignores that argument? Similarly, you seize on their admission that what they call geoengineering (stratospheric aerosol injection) would cheaply and quickly cool the earth but I don’t think you engage with Climate Shock’s arguments for why that would be so dangerous. Like how it doesn’t change ocean acidity or other effects of higher CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
I’m not done digesting your review and I think you have fair points in it but so far they strike me as relative quibbles compared to the major points about urgency and about the viability/safety of cheap mitigations.
I guess, to be blunt, it feels like you skimmed the book looking for excuses to dismiss it. But I confess that that’s what I’ve done with your rebuttal so far! So I intend to read it more thoroughly and see if I stand by that assessment.
David Henderson
Sep 15 2021 at 1:48pm
You wrote:
You’re welcome, Daniel.
You write:
I don’t recall that argument. I’ll check it and see what my marginal notes said. Do you happen to have the page number(s) or is it easy to find in the index?
You write:
I’m not sure why you use the verb “seize.” It was a big part of their argument. I actually did engage with one important argument for why it would be so dangerous. I’ll check the others.
You write:
I actually dealt with the urgency argument and so it’s hard to see my points as “quibbles.”
You write:
I assure you that I didn’t. As I always do when I review a book, I read every page and every footnote and, as I point out in the review, the footnotes mattered because in some of them they hedge on some of their major points without giving the reader any indication that the footnotes would do that. Question for you: did you read the footnotes?
You wrote:
Good.
Daniel Reeves
Sep 15 2021 at 4:37pm
Sure! I have a digital copy so it’s easy to grep. Quoting a footnote: “See ‘The Bathtub Problem’ beginning on page 15 of chapter 1 and the ‘Bathtub’ entry of page 30 in chapter 2.”
They do talk a lot about how cheap and easy it would be to bring global temperature down by injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. I said “seize” because of how your review focuses on that — even concludes with it — without the context of how dangerous it would be to actually implement that form of geoengineering.
I believe you successfully countered only the dumb arguments against geoengineering, like how hard it would be to agree on a temperature target, and didn’t touch the important arguments like ocean acidity and other ecosystem impacts.
I think the entirety of your argument against urgency was “the soonest this may be catastrophic is 90 years from now so what’s another decade or two?”. I refer again to the bathtub analogy to rebut that.
I retract that accusation and I believe you. As for whether I read the footnotes, it looks like I did but it’s been over two years so I’m not confident of how well I did.
But now, deep breath, I was ex ante hasty in my poor opinion of your review but I’ve now carefully read and reread it and I’m doubling down. Some specific responses:
Unspecified? They devote many pages to the danger of allowing atmospheric CO2 to increase while counteracting only the warming via reflected solar radiation.
Fair. Like I said to Bryan, the part about extreme weather events seemed least convincing.
This line of attack feels like it really misses the point. Wagner and Weitzman go to great lengths to describe the huge amounts of uncertainty surrounding the impacts of climate change. This is what’s so frustrating about climate skepticism. “It might turn out fine! The models are horrible! We don’t know anything!” Well, we are Bayesians. We put probabilities on everything no matter how deep our ignorance and we do what the math says to do. I think the math says to simultaneously (a) gather more information to refine the probability estimates and (b) reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Crude models and other forms of ignorance make our probability distributions more diffuse. Pointing out that diffuseness isn’t a rebuttal.
Aha, that’s what Bryan Caplan and Yoram Bauman’s bet was about. There has turned out to be no pause. See my other comments in the dialog with Jonathan S above, with link to the temperature graph.
Other commenters are pointing out updates and errors in the IPCC’s 2007 report that some of Climate Shock’s numbers are based on. I haven’t dug in on that but just want to emphasize that this update on the illusory pause in warming seems like a bigger deal.
Pat
Sep 15 2021 at 9:54am
I think climate change is overstated by at least a factor of 3, I think the models are garbage, I think it’s mostly an excuse to do things that liberals want to do anyway, and I support spending on developing carbon capture because it’s inexpensive, and likely to be the only way to deal with the problem on the off chance that liberals end up being right.
J Mann
Sep 15 2021 at 10:30am
Does increasing research subsidies for geoengineering count as a 180? Because I think that’s a no-brainer.
From the blurb on the Amazon page.
I agree that if the costs of global warming continue to increase, we’re very likely to see geo-engineering, and that research is a no-brainer so that if we find ourselves under pressure to act, we have more info on which methods are likely to be most effective and least risky. (I’ll call carbon sequestration geo-engineering for simplicity – depending on the costs, it may be the leading method.)
Jose Pablo
Sep 16 2021 at 11:12pm
“Merely increasing Bryan’s support for repeal of existing government policies doesn’t count).”
That’s a pity. Why this caveat? It is surprising considering what governments could achieve by “doing less”. They could, for instance:
a) stop subsidizing roads. Make the road users (not the taxpayers) pay for the roads.
b) stop subsidizing “local fuel”:
– Europe has been subsidizing coal mines in western Europe for 30 years. They will be subsidizing coal mines in Poland till 2049
– USA subsidies the “local fossil fuel” industry to the tune of $20 billion per year
– 5 countries: Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and India (collectively responsible for around half of CO2 emissions), subsidize fuel consumption to the tune of more than US$200 billion per year.
c) stop subsidizing agriculture (applies to USA, Europe and many more)
So, governments heavily subsidize the 3 most polluting industries. Introducing now a carbon tax (to finance these subsidies?) seems schizophrenic to me … or maybe governments are just doing what make sense for them to do with the incentives they have.
William Connolley
Sep 25 2021 at 12:07pm
In case it helps, my insightful review is now available: http://mustelid.blogspot.com/2021/09/book-review-climate-shlock.html
Comments are closed.