"The Bet"

I recently started what I thought would be a small skirmish on Twitter with an old friend and fellow PhD econ student from my Texas Tech days. This is by no means the first, nor last, time we'll do this; It's a funny way for us to catch up. The topic at hand was whether or not CO2 should be taxed. The spat then escalated into a 140 character at a time debate on whether or not CO2 is actually a pollutant leading to global climate change. 

One of the most useful subtweets in this debate was the so-called libertarian bet proposal by Kaz (@chris78701). After a crazy start to teaching this Fall semester I am finally putting together my `bet' as well as addressing some other ideas that came up in the Twitter conversation.

• I am 100% certain that CO2 is a chemical compound that leads to the `greenhouse effect'. We've actually known this since 1903 when Svante Arrhenius won the Nobel prize in chemistry.
• I am 98% sure that the recent warming is mostly due to the dramatic increase in atmospheric CO2 levels that are a result of increased energy consumption. I say mostly because there are of course other anthropogenic factors at play including deforestation which has the same warming effect but is not caused by more energy consumption per se (by the way, we've been causing climate change through deforestation for a lot longer than we've burned fossil fuels)
  • Related: I dogged other people for not providing peer reviewed support for their arguments (and haven't received one yet). Here are two that I find useful for both sides of the argument. 1) Here is a rigorous paper that takes the (very) few papers that do exist in the literature that reject human-induced climate change and tests them on their merit. Spoiler alert, they don't hold up. 2) Richard Tol has been one of my favorite economists for some time because he approaches the issue of climate change with the level of skepticism I hope to maintain. Here is his 2014 paper outlining the literature and the incorrect `97% consensus' among climate scientists. He finds that the true consensus is closer to 91%. 
•  I am 55% sure that global warming will be net-positive for some communities due to the "greening" effect. This was a weird argument that popped up in opposition of a CO2 tax. Still, though, it is true that some areas (especially in the American southeast) will benefit from global climate change because they will have longer growing seasons, more rain, or both. However, just because local production increases doesn't mean that worldwide impacts are not felt locally. As Michael Webber thoroughly explains in his book, access to water has caused wars, ended empires, you name it. So, will a longer growing season in the midst of (even worse) fighting in the middle east or a war with China be net-positive? Maybe.

That's all for now as I have to prep for class. Cheers.