Carbon Tax vs emissions trading vs direct action

It is hard to discuss tax policy, or indeed anything without agreeing on premises.
There is an equivalence between a carbon tax and emissions trading with a fixed price. There is also an equivalence between a carbon tax with a variable price that is set to match the market price of emissions in an international emissions trading scheme, and being part of that emissions trading scheme.

Any scheme can be "gamed" in the sense that the European scheme allocated or grandfathered too many credits, to appease emitters and to bribe them to get in the scheme, and then allowed financial pressures of the debt crisis to further water down the scheme.

In Australia, the scheme seems scheduled to be gamed by lobbying from industrials for the tax to be scrapped. Either way, instead of acceptance, and long term plans to avoid the price efficiently by moving away from carbon intensive industries, plans are on hold on a wait and see with the hedge on what one can bet the future scheme to be. Hold back plans for renewables in the hope of a fat grant from the new "direct action" plan, rather than do what makes sense now, with the energy prices as they are with the carbon tax and assuming they will stay at the relative level.

Avoid the tax by switching to low carbon, or avoid the tax by switching the Government? I prefer the first. Grudging acceptance that the tax may effectively be there for a while. Even the thought that it will be gone soon changes the behaviour of industrials to bet on a low effective carbon price.

Still water flowing down the Murray Darling and out the mouth

The perceived wisdom that drought and a closed Murray Darling system is the new normal continues to be challenged by reality. From my reckoning and the following graph of the Murray river flow rate at lock one, the closest proxy of what is flowing to the sea from the system, 15,000 GigaLitres (or 30 Sydney Harbours) of fresh water has flowed to the sea since September 2010.



This link to see more live river data flows if you are interested.

I had predicted at around January that more water would flow out of the mouth than the total official storage of the whole of the Murray Darling before it stopped again. The total official storage is around 22,000 GL so I could yet be right. I figure that one more year of this kind of thing and we will be wanting to redact our thinking and declare that (the 10 years from 2000 to 2010) was just a freak drought the likes of which we would never see again in our lifetime. It is plausible that we may want to keep strategic dams along the Murray at half capacity to hedge our bets with catastrophic lower Murray floods now possible if we get a repeat of the inflows of last year. Namely the Menindee lakes, Hume and Lake Victoria could moderate catastrophic inflows to just the major flood mark at Renmark and below if they are pre-emptively emptied.

Anthropogenic Global Warming

I have so much in my head at the moment, and a great desire to write it down, but it is completely incoherent.

For the global warming debate, I feel it is important to demonstrate my non-partisan take on it. One easy way to do this is to show an example of a policy belief of mine usually associated with the far left (Green party or left wing of the Labour Party) and a contrasting belief that is associated near the other extreme (National party or One Nation or Right wing of the Liberal Party).

This is not because I want to present myself in the middle ground, but that what I believe to be true takes up a point in idea space far away from the political left-right line that at the moment takes up all the discussion space in virtually every forum I visit.

For instance, I am vehemently against solar PV tarriffs above the wholesale market rate for electricity.

I am also very in favour of a Carbon Tax.

I steer away from arguments that question whether global warming is "real" or not. To me it is like a question of whether I believe in God or not. I perceive both these questions to be a device to flatten my beliefs and squeeze them down onto the political continuum line from their proper place in multiple dimensions - with an aim to push me with denial or acceptance of various assertions one way or another to the correlated viewpoints of (in this case) the left or right of politics.

There is no "references" I can point to in regards to this basic philosophical idea, but it should be simple enough for the casual reader to understand.

The question remains as to how I can convince someone to my same viewpoint. It is much easier to convince someone that solar PV tarriffs are bad because Global Warming is bunk than it is because it makes the energy market dysfunctional. It is also easier to convince people that we should have a Carbon Tax because AGW is real and a threat, than it is because it moves tax reform down a sensible direction (broad based, flat, easy to administer, can replace messier taxes or even carbon trading)

Another question may be why I think minor structural detail of the laws which underpin the energy market are more important than the global risks of catastrophe or conversely wasting our time, money and energy on a non-catastrophe.

The answer is to me, that the underpinning structural detail is absolutely vital both to succeed in whatever aims that voters think is important with regards to energy usage, and to not waste any time, money or energy in that achievement. Laws which make markets act in functional ways are a net profit to society, laws which don't, are a net loss - pure and simple.

Superfreakonomics vs Realclimate vs THE Economist

My recent ideas on Climate Change have been challenged from two different directions. A Superfreakonomics chapter championing geo-engineering and Realclimates attack of it.

Geo-engineering as a "Fix" or even a quick-fix didn't particularly appeal to me in the past because it comes up against the same Geopolitical issues of responsibility and duty that reductions of carbon has.

However, I have had a great respect for freakonomics in teasing out facts and relationships that are counterintuitive, because they demonstrate something new, interesting and almost always useful knowledge.

What I really liked about the chapter was that Levitt & Dubner definitely showed the nuanced nature of their convictions, because they steered away from cliched views and had plenty of solid scientific foundation to their arguments.

Although western societies do not have a tradition of scientific weather-making, the RMP (of China) have that tradition. For instance in the Beijing games they used rockets to prevent storms from interrupting events. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that they will be the first to try some of these geo-engineering feats - perhaps under the guise of something else.

Levitt and Dubner, I believe use the axiom that modifying behaviour will not work. For this they are hammered.

I actually believe the near impenetrable issues with global agreements to reduce GHG's are equivalent to the near impenetrable issues of agreements to use (or agreements not to scupper unilateral efforts) to use geo-engineering.

In a big way changing behaviour is a type of Geo-engineering. Realclimate authors use the axiom that it is better to try to reverse back to a recent known state than to move quickly to a totally new regime that optimises, say average temperature.

I think the point is probably moot, as for both behavioural geo-engineering and the standard sort, way more "metering" of all relevant GHG's is a prerequisite for internalising the externality of warming, whether the overall rise in temperature or whatever is found to be insignificant or not. All engineering is reliant on absolutely rock-solid repeatable scientific foundation. "metering" as well as actual weather/climate numerically predictive science is a prerequisite for humans' incentive programs to help humanity. The science is decades away from that. Both Realclimate and superfreakonomics is in some way guessing and perhaps betting on what the future helpful programs will be.

As for which "side" I am taking in this case : I am siding somewhat with Superfreakonomics because at least it has something new to say and not as Cliched as the Realclimates riposte.

As far as the Economist is concerned, it seems to have sided with RealClimate.

Pricing Signals

There are really not enough of these in the world. Consider these situations:

1) Person who is on a phone plan does not have a direct cost feedback even if the bill goes up to alarming 6 figure sums.

2) A farmer gets their bill for water, but doesn't know how much their neighbours could have gained by buying it, nor if he could have gained more money selling it than keeping it.

3) Consumers cannot gauge how much petrol is costing them for the car air-conditioner or to get to the petrol station with the cheaper petrol.

4) Polluting coal burning power stations don't know how much local residents would be willing to pay to shut it down or modernise it. Nor how long they would be willing to put up with blackouts to achieve that.

5) Consumers considering whether to hang up their worn clothes or put them in the wash + dryer + ironing. What is the cost/benefit analysis.

At what resolution do pricing signals benefit cost/benefit analysis the most. Would a computer that could make calculations about every single activity throughout your day and have an indicator go off regarding your most inefficient activity be useful?

Would it tell me that (buying and) drinking a can of orange softdrink is the most inefficient because a) it costs a fair amount per calorie
b) They are empty calories that could actually reduce your life expectancy.
c) Sugars will stick to and damage your teeth leading to much higher dental bills.
d) contains preservative 211 which is dodgy at the best of times.
e) contains no caffeine so is ineffective at improving concentration.
f) actually dehydrates you to some extent.
g) is energy intensive to create, can, store and refrigerate, compared to alternatives such as coffee or water.

Suffice to say that any improved pricing signals about anything we care about is a net benefit to resource allocation. Whether it is the environmental cost of the ghg's associated with activity or the amount of money an STD call costs, if there is an efficient market to generate a price which reflects all known information and demand, resources WILL be allocated better. Thus money spent on strategic pre-fire season burn-offs in the outback of Australia may be way, way more efficient than investing the same amount in solar panels or planting trees. Being that people will spend the money anyway, pricing signals cut the wastage for everyone's benefit.

The main danger is not that we will be less efficient ignoring/underutilising cheap fossil fuels, but that we will completely ignore cost/benefit analysis and spend the money in a way which makes us feel good, or which buys our vote without even being in line with the goal central to what the money is being spent on. Thus European countries may use the money on pointless subsidies, Americans may give tax breaks on hand-picked industries. Thus, without even giving themselves a chance at meeting self-imposed targets, they are busy regulating in a way which will reduce their growth prospects.

My latest Environmental turn-around

My current global warming/climate change opinion can be summed up as the opposite of what I had summed up previously as my opinion, although in truth there is no facts previously accepted that I no longer hold true nor visa versa.

To sum up: Previously I believed this: Anthropogenic Global Warming is a fact but we shouldn't do anything about it.

Now - I believe that Global Warming is a scientific assertion with little predictive value. However, it has high *proscriptive* value ie. there is value of various kinds in acting against Green House Gases.

The issue to me is that the value of science to predict is that you can adjust what you do to optimise for that prediction. If you know a cyclone is heading your way, you can batten down the hatches - the three to ten day forecasts of cyclones is very valuable. The prediction that my house might be threatened by a storm surge in ten years time is valueless both in a future discounting sense, and in a probability sense.

The idea that there is proscriptive "value" in what climate scientists say comes from the fact that there is benefit in being able to say, "all other things being equal, it is unequivocally better to reduce ghg's!"
This is the same proscriptive value as economists saying "We should reduce trade barriers" among the many correctly proscriptive things experts say in their fields without being able to valuably predict the future (eg. what stocks will go up.)
We do not know how many generations it will take to see the benefits of doing so. It is entirely possible that the next several generations will suffer more by attempting, or even succeeding in a large way to reduce ghg's. It is not a thing that can be predicted. Nor can things that actually make a significant difference - costs associated with actual extreme wheather events. We will be lucky to even have right the most basic easiest question of the next 40 years - will global average temperatures go up steadily, go down steadily, go up and down like a yo-yo or what? Most bets are that it will go up but with several peaks and troughs on the way to confuse things and correctly make a mockery of experts' authority on the matter.

Individual action and carbon emmissions

From getup

Dear friend,

We thought long and hard about sending you this email, because we like to promote the idea that our individual actions make a difference. But we have to be honest about the Government's current climate policy.

Under their current proposal, action you take at home to reduce energy - like changing to efficient light bulbs and appliances or installing solar hot water - will not reduce Australia's total greenhouse emissions further than the Government's weak target of 5-15%. It will even make it cheaper for industry to increase their own emissions.


I may have got into this in detail in my other posts, but I think I am hearing the penny drop for climate activists. I reiterate what I said in other posts, that individual actions, even without the Rudd proposal mentioned above, do not proportionally reduce overall emmissions, because of the rebound effect and that individual actions tend to absolve guilt without being optimised for a nation-wide reduction of any amount.

However, like with water allocations, reducing carbon emmissions further comes down to a simple buying of emmission allocations, and then not using them. It actually sounds simpler than worrying about whether your net emmissions are going up because you use the money you saved on electricity to buy toys for your kids (WHICH ONE IS MORE CARBON INTENSIVE???) I think that in a decade, if the Murray floods again, and the Government has bought all these water allocations, it could make a mint selling them again.

It is not enough to grow trees one must also sequester!

The trouble with letting wilderness grow untouched by humankind is that sooner or later, it is going to burn (Not if you are in a rainforest). What is the point of growing trees to capture carbon, wilderness areas to encourage wildlife when it's going to eventually burn, sending uncontrolled black carbon and carbon dioxide into the air and killing vast swathes of native wildlife. Why not graze away the underbush with suitable farm animals, sequester large swathes of trees (eg. turn it into furniture, etc.) to make fire breaks, and contract Australia's army to make choices on various risk-reduction controls to take it out of the hands of NIMBY-minded councils and state governments.

Strategic analysis of Global warming

From Marconomica Principle #5 I've grouped entities strategically as countries. In the global scale, it is countries leaders making the commitments on behalf of all their citizens. The Dillemma's leaders of democracies face is that signed committments get votes now, but may lose them votes if they fail to achieve them later, or if it ends up costing more than voters are willing to pay. The over-riding strategic concern must be "the tragedy of the commons". I have imagined scenarios in which generalised fears cause emmissions to accelerate, with every country more or less blaming every other country. Individual countries obviously try to make any committments at such a long term as to ensure they won't lose personally by failing. As the long term committment nears maturity, the gap between the committment and reality will be so wide that no Government would accept responsibility. The proposed targets are framed in such a way that it is only the end result that is being argued over - not anything in between that will necessarily have to happen to get there (eg goals within an electoral term window). Examples that perhaps ought to be copied if we were serious about it, have their own horrors associated. For instance, Russia is the only Kyoto ratifier to obviously achieve their goal. Clearly, having an economy tank is an obvious way to reduce emissions, but no environmentalist is seriously suggesting it (except Peter Garrett before he became a politician:)). Also examples of rich countries with a very low carbon intensity exist (France), but this contradicts heavily with environmentalists hatred of Hydro and Nuclear power (and hatred of France). Having all but strategically ruled out strategies with proven records, my prediction is of a 10% increase in emmissions in developed countries by 2020 (from 2000 figures)

Worm Farm

One of the things that I did back in 1999 was to buy and use a worm farm. My main motivation was to use the worm casts in the garden. Also to have less smelly garbage in the bin. If I had calculated whether this reduced or increased green house gases, my thought would be that it was much of a mulchness. Whether my food scraps rotted slowly in my wormfarm and garden, or in a landfill was not much different. In fact I would have thought that in a landfill the carbon would be buried deep underground to become coal in the distant future ie - sequestered. However, recent studies have shown that in a typical landfill and typical worm-farm, the worm farm would absorb the CH4 very well, and the landfill not at all. So it would seem that I was inadvertently helping the environment... Not so fast. As I recall at about the same time, we had a child and to give ourselves more time for gardening, we switched from reusable to disposable nappies exclusively. So instead of nappy-waste going down the drain and into sewage treatment plants to fertilise golf courses etc; it was ending up in the landfill generating methane. Besides which, I never really had enough worms to absorb all foodscraps, so plenty still goes in the bin. And the worm casts in my garden? Myriad tomato, rockmelon, pumpkin and pawpaw seedlings pop up from the casts. I never know whether to try to cultivate them, or to pull them out to leave room for the plants I'm trying to fertilise with the casts.

What our energy policy should be

There has been a lot of talk about what our energy policy should include. Running themes are global warming, energy security, privatisation of utilities, subsidies and taxes.

- Global Warming: (*disclaimer: Carbon strategy should be about one countries standing and reputation to achieve things cheaply while others spend heaps with nothing to show for it. Therefore other countries (and global) failure is as much a positive as meeting domestic targets*)A dual strategy of long term goals, GHG metering and measuring in the short term. I see no economic harm in signing treaties that are not binding, such as Kyoto. We should also not fear "exporting" our emissions to third world countries. This will help them develop in a market-friendly way, and they may be better able to adjust to sea rises etc. with less fatalities/burdens. (We should be) Reducing subsidies on carbon intensive energy sources but not be tempted to waste money on new subsidies (on solar/wind). Subsidies are way less efficient than direct investments in the carbon market. When the carbon market becomes more trustworthy, this will be the cheapest way to meet targets. Carbon taxes and reducing fossil fuel subsidies will be the cheapest way to reduce emissions in the long term.

- Energy Security: The absolute highest security must surround all fissile materials handled in Australia. The biggest security risk to the world is nuclear blackmail and mega-terrorism. With such a bright future for nuclear, one must not forget its security-risk implications which dwarf its cost per KW as an associated input cost. As far as energy imports go, ethanol from Brazil is preferable to oil from the middle-east, and subsidies should not be used to favour domestic energy sources, but only to favour lower risk sources if at all.

- Privatisation of Utilities: Retail energy supply should definitely be privatised, but associated infrastructure MUST remain Nationalised (NB. price controls on infrastructure access count as near-nationalised). Privatised energy supply is the only way to account for demand/supply unbalances fairly (if this unfairly punishes the poor, the poor should be singled out and helped. No point rewarding the rich with cheaper power just to marginally help the poor)

It's the one-dimensional political continuum

Back when I was researching what was meant by "left" and "right" in politics, I realised that peoples political views are highly correlated, and that the position on a one-dimensional line that you reside in determines the kind of political authorities and peers one believes and therefore debates tend to try to push a swinging voter one direction or the other along the line, ignoring all possible tangents.
This is especially true for the global warming debate, the imaginary line having alarmist, environmentally conscious, act locally kind of view on one end, and highly "skeptic", globalisation friendly, optimists on the other end. Unfortunately, the skeptic end is associated with some rather dodgy pseudo-scientific arguments that global warming is natural, cyclical and unrelated to human activity, as described in the "Great Global Warming Swindle" show I watched part of the other day. This rather annoys multi-dimensional thinkers like myself, and that is why I tend to debate along the action axis, debating which actions are sensible and which are not in terms of energy and environmental policy.

Younger Dryas - Why can't it happen again?

Apparently, the most likely theory of the cause of the younger dryas involves a comet impact. The Younger Dryas is a rapid cooling event of about 13K years ago, going against the trend of moving into the current interglacial period. The reckoning is that a comet caused a catastrophic melt event which rapidly sent fresh water into the northern polar region: This caused a severe disruption of the thermo-haline current, plunging the Northern hemisphere back into ice age temperatures. Extra snow and ice cover caused an albedo effect which somewhat affected the temperature of the whole Earth somewhat, giving a thousand year pause to the interglacial warming, which even more suddenly corrected globally to a warm temperature consistent with the interglacial.

Climate scientists are almost unanimous in stating that a similarly triggered iceage could not happen due to the ice melt in greenland etc. due to global warming. The two prongs of this argument are 1) that the melting is too slow to give enough fresh water to similarly disrupt the currents, and 2) the base climatic conditions are too different - ie. there are less chance that there would be enough snow/ice cover to affect the albedo enough.

Most of the fearmongering however is that the icemelt and northern polar warming is going to be much more than had been calculated just a few short years ago, and quicker than anything since the younger dryas. That, to me, means that if Europe has a sudden cooling event (whithin the next 40 years), climate scientists could still claim that they were correct.

Finally back over 20 degrees celcius

Since Wednesday here in Townsville, the temperature has dipped below 20' C and on thursday we had our lowest EVER maximum of 13.9' C. Today the maximum was back up to 20' C. I blame all those internal migrants from Melbourne bringing their depressing cold rainy weather. On the other hand, I could blame global warming for triggering a severe antarctic blast that permeated all the way to the tropics, as temperatures differentials suck away the cold air.

The Polar Bear "species" is 100% safe from global warming

Environmental "scientists", I believe have been guilty of Species Inflation with regards to polar bears. One of the things that evolutionary and genetic science has given us is a "tight" definition of a species. Ignoring the look, habitat and lifestyle and just concentrating on the genetics, polar bears are a sub-species of the brown bear. Focusing on the plight of the white bears is just racism.

Threat plus opportunity = zero net cost (approx)

Tourism in Greenland is evidence that Global Warming brings opportunity in equal measure to threat.

Where's the figures?

This article states confidently that Australia's emissions grow at twice the rate of other rich countries but was there a link to the data? Does any bloody news service that rants about global warming ever make the data demonstrating latest trends that they mention available? Nope. Where does this place Australia in its notional Kyoto targets that we didn't sign? Until the latest (but not linked) figures we appeared on target. I am quite for the concept of exporting emmissions to exempt developing countries like Indonesia etc. This may invoke a much more rapid transfer of real wealth to the third world, as we tax our Carbon highly, and they can remain exempt gaining a competitive advantage. And the nice thing about competitive advantage is that it isn't a "freebie" like aid, grants, tarriffs or oil resources. They still have to work hard and competitively to take advantage of the advantage.

On the latest posturing of "players" in the "global warming" game, there appears little prospect of (global) emmissions reductions for at least a couple of decades. Plus the moral hazard is just too great. I reckon if (global) emmissions are at 120% of current emmissions by 2030, we will be doing well. The only thing left to guesswork is who everyone is going to blame.

If we were serious about cooling the globe(1)

Putting myself in a position of someone who really cared if we could reverse global warming as soon as possible(2), I would note that because there are a lot of positive feedbacks in the system, and that the momentum is what is important for positive feedbacks (3), actions that have good short term results are more urgent than those with long term results. Residence times for CH4 are approximated to 10 years, while those for CO2 are 100 years. CO2 captured or gathered from the atmosphere is valueless, is complicated to sequester and per volume has much less carbon credit. CH4 is a useful and valuable fuel, is easy to dispose of and is much more potent warmer per volume. Branson's prize might be very easily won by capturing ambient CH4 equivalent to the required CO2 capture.

The conclusion is obvious - It would be very effective if CH4 was treated like CFC's. ie completely separate target than CO2. Tight emmission standards and it being treated like a serious pollutant could dramatically reduce it, in a relatively short timeframe. Targets, as well as reflecting what kind of world we want in the future, should reflect what is reasonably possible. Our addiction to CO2 emmissions will take excruciatingly high Carbon taxes to reduce substantially (even though the net cost to society will be negligible - see Tobacco taxes). Even though best estimates by the latest climate models show that anthropogenic CH4 has only contributed a fraction to the net warming power, it is conceivable that we could reduce emmissions form both anthropogenic and natural sources, so the cooling power of capture may be much greater than the warming fraction these climate scientists are promoting.

(1) It would pay to reiterate that I believe that if the consequences of global warming are very severe, this is a fair punishment for our collective sins and we should take it on the chin.

(2) An alternative theory is that climatologists would prefer a "perfect storm" of warming first - to prove their point and to convert the masses from the fear factor.

(3) One point that climatologists fail to make is that a same positive feedback causing accelerated warming on a warming trend, will actually help cool quicker on a cooling trend.

No more mr. pigeonhole on climate change

Browsing through Realclimate I have found a pigeon-holeing term for people like me and dr. clam. "Action-denialist" being someone who believes there is GW and it is anthropogenic but need take no remedial action (with our own marginal differences{*} ). Also there is plenty of blogs which are following up on the jumps the GW conformists are asking us to take such as: ten questions. I would like to nuance my stance lest I be pigeon-holed as an action denier or be accused of attacking the fringes; by putting aside that I believe no remedial action is necessary, take it as given that people and countries are going to take some sort of action, and convincing people that some actions are worse than useless and expensive, while other actions are virtually free (and with the proviso that any change has winners and losers) that there will be more winners than losers given certain actions. There is a vaccuum out there being filled by GW ideologues, and my ideologies should be sucked into it in its place!

* - The difference being that Dr.Clam will not talk as if he believes action should be taken, while I don't care if casual observers get that impression.

Dissecting articles from Realclimate.org

WSJ Editorial Board: Head Still Buried in the Sand
Filed under: Climate Science RC Forum— group @ 8:38 am
While the rest of the world has basically accepted the conclusion of the latest IPCC report, one small village still holds out against the tide - the Wall Street Journal editorial board. This contrasts sharply with the news section of the paper which is actually pretty good. They had a front-page piece on business responses to global warming issues which not only pointed out that business was taking an interest in carbon reduction, but the article more or less took as a given that the problem was real. However, as we have pointed out before, the editorial pages operate in a universe all their own.

I will start with their latest headline piece - It is very typical anyhow. As far as the title goes, using a metaphor is a form of "proof by ridicule". What exactly they are trying to prove is not obvious to start with, but the means they are using is attacking an opinion piece. To falsify a scientific statement you must use science, to falsify an opinion you must use ridicule. Fairly obvious, but they are not really showing their hand.

The first sentence uses the terms "village" and "Tide". I am not sure if this is subliminally pushing the "sea is rising" fear triggers, but is the tide public opinion? Public opinion of what? The tide is of pro-environmentalism and the village is of dissenting opinions published in news & magazines. Almost all magazines (including "the Economist") have stopped publishing dissenting views (whether they be scientists or whatever). I am not really sure why that is, but for instance, the Economist has not recently written anything at all from Bjorn Lomborg, while a couple of years ago, they backed him up in almost everything he said.

The third sentence mentions business responses and interest, and the taking as a given that the PROBLEM is REAL (by the front page article). The science demonstrates beyond reasonable doubt that there is global warming and that humans are the predominant factor. That it is a "problem" is a much less scientifically tested assertion. Proving that there is global warming and that it is caused by humans does not prove that there is a problem in itself. Also, there is the assertion that it is the most significant environmental problem. This assumes a prioritised list, but prioritised lists have been rejected as presumptious.

The fourth sentence is again criticising the opinion piece, and again ridiculing it. I have found this type of tactic in operation with groups of evangelical christians. It was exceedingly effective when used in groups of majority christians and a minority of uncommitted youths. They would ridicule (say) evolution, and attack the inconsistencies of darwinism and any proven errors any Darwinist has ever made. It is difficult for an uncommitted person to resist this kind of peer pressure. I think this is what is happening in Realclimate. There are a majority of readers which are "converted" and a minority of uncommitted and recalcitrant, which is a perfect environment for winning over the uncommitted.