WMC has received a copy of the JASON report. (Is JASON really an acronym? Wikipedia knows all and tells all. No. Then why is it all capitalized? Guess those JASONs like yelling their name.) “In other words, you can’t tell the JASON and Nierenberg reports apart. OCS is nonsense.” No big surprise there.

And since I was the first to see WMCs post, I got to leave the first pithy comment, using my new wikiskills. And since I have more than 20 wikiedits, I am now a wikiexpert,{fact} which means I have to wikify all my wikicomments. ~~~~

In other news, Jim Cramer is doing his best to scr*w me. “I’d do anything to preserve UBS“. How the cr*p is anyone suppose to play the stock market with the government fiddling with it all the time. (Really?) The money quote, “…was there just seven hundred billion dollars that [Lehman Brothers] had borrowed from everybody with no collateral? It does appear that way right now.”

I’ve pretty much given up on reading the rest of the Nierenberg report (1983). It’s long on words, and I’m short on time. After about 2/3 of the way through the synthesis, it gets pretty wishy-washy. I skimmed chapter 2, which was written by an economist, and it too seems wishy-washy. Although with the predictions of CO2 rise that they give for a “stringent tax” on CO2 starting in 2000 still resulting in CO2 concentration of 660 ppm in 2100, which is still in the “we’re all f—ed” range.

The “stringent tax” is described two ways in the text. In the caption to table 2.18, it is described as a “gradually increasing tax rising linearly from zero to $8 per ton [coal equivalent] between 2000 and 2020, from $8 to $68 per ton between 2020 and 2040, from $68 to $90 per ton between 2040 and 2060, and remaining at $90 per ton thereafter.” In the text, it describes the tax as “plac[ing] 60% surcharges on the prices of fossil fuels”. The “stringent tax” results in a reduced atmospheric CO2 concentration of about 120 ppm from the business as usual scenario over about 120 years.
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In From Chicken Little to Dr. Pangloss: William Nierenberg, Global Warming, and the Social Deconstruction of Scientific Knowledge, Oreskes et al, “quote” Dr. Revelle as saying the following in Chapter 8 of “Changing Climate”:

“Disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would have … far-reaching consequence,” Revelle concluded

What did Revelle actually write?

Disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would have such far-reaching consequences that both the possibility of its occurrence and the rate at which disintegration might proceed should be carefully researched. [emphasis added]

Talk about changing someone’s conclusion by selective quoting.
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Comprehensive study of projected impact on atmospheric levels of fossil fuel combustion, etc.

Below is an almost exact copy of Annex 3 of Changing Climate (1983) regarding who commissioned the report. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be exactly the same. The date was June 30, 1980; before Reagan took office. I’ll try to get a scanned copy up soon.
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