Just seems to be the day for the environment.
Via Papa this piece in Foreign Policy. Carl Pope of the Sierra Club gets slapped around by Bjorn Lomborg.
More Environmental Stuff.
6 responses
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More green looniness here. If anyone else out there would care to check the artist’s math, the volume of the West Antarctic ice sheet is about 3.3 million cubic kilometers, or 3.3E+18 liters. I reckon that he’s overestimated the value of his work by a factor of nearly 10,000 million.
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It’s evident that this Pope character simply does not understand the notion of opportunity cost (which, after the Law of Supply and Demand, is the one thing anyone with any pretensions to speaking about economics should know.) Arguing with someone with such a flawed worldview is generally unproductive—you’re just talking past each other.
Paul, that estimate of the volume of the Antarctic ice sheet is completely reasonable. It’s certainly not out by 10 billion. The surface area of the planet is 4 π 6378000^2 m^2 ~ 5 × 10^14 m^2 ~ 500 million km^2. A sheet of ice covering the whole planet to a depth of 1 km would be 5 × 10^17 m^3 = 5 × 10^20 dm^3. Antarctica is about 14 million km^2 = 1.4 × 10^13 m^2. Assume an average of 200m ice cover (which hardly seems unreasonable) and you have a volume of 2.8 × 10^15 m^3 ~ 3 × 10^18 dm^3. An overestimate by a factor of 10^10 would mean that the true figure would be ~ 3 × 10^8 dm^3. That’s a cube of ice less than 70m on a side. I imagine people put more ice than that in drinks every day. -
Ah, but the volume I quoted was not Hill’s estimate; it was the actual volume of the WAIS. If we accept his high figure of £9 trillion for the cost of that sheet melting, then the portion attributable to his 2-liter bottle is (£9E+12)*(2)/(3.3E+18). Call it 1/2000 of a penny. Or if we divide Hill’s £42,500 into £9 trillion and multiply by 2 liters, we can say his numbers imply your 70m cube as the volume of the entire icecap.
Or we could forget all about the big numbers and imagine the thief emptying the bottle into the Channel instead of drinking it. Even a reporter should realize that he wouldn’t have caused £42,500 of damage. -
Oh, I see. Then you’re absolutely right. Apologies. And that Ozzie ‘artist’ is pretty innumerate, agreed.
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No no no.
You are missing the whole point.
A bottle of water can be ‘worth’ £3 or £42,000 on the same basis that a dead shark can be worth £6,000,000 or £1,000,000 or simply be just some garbage that you have to pay the council to come and dispose of.
It all depends on whether you can find someone with sufficient taste and discrimination (silly enough?) to pay the price.
http://www.stuckism.com/SharkSpot.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/12/23/nshark23.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/12/23/ixhome.html -
Phew what a scorcher!
The weather in Edinburgh is fairly typical for July – low pressure, light winds and scattered showers. Looking at photos of childhood holidays on various east coast beaches, they show similar weather and a marked reluctance by yours truly to
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