Twilight of the Climate Change Movement
Mario Loyola
Don’t be fooled by the post-Paris fanfare: The climate change movement faces big trouble ahead.
The
UN’s climate summit in Paris at the end of 2015 concluded with a bang.
The world’s governments promised sweeping cuts in carbon emissions. Rich
countries promised to help poor ones with
$100 billion per year
in climate assistance. President Obama quickly declared the agreement
“the best chance we have to save the one planet we’ve got.” The
consensus quickly jelled that this was a major, historic achievement.
Then came the fizzle: The agreement is non-binding. Secretary of State John Kerry asserted on NBC’s
Meet the Press
that compliance would be enforced through the “powerful weapon” of
public shaming, apparently implying a policy of verbal confrontation
toward states that fall short. The Danish scientist
Bjørn Lomborg, a prominent critic of the top-down international conference approach to climate change, called the Paris agreement the “
costliest in history”
if implemented. According to Lomborg, the agreement would “reduce
temperatures by 2100 by just 0.05 degrees Celsius (0.09 degrees
Fahrenheit)…. This is simply cynical political theater, meant to
convince us that our leaders are taking serious action…a phenomenally
expensive but almost empty gesture.” NASA scientist Jim Hansen, one of
the earliest proponents of the idea that global warming is man-made,
slammed the deal as “half-assed and half-baked,” a “fake,” and a
“fraud.”Hansen’s assessment is probably close to the mark—and he
and his fellow alarmists have only themselves to blame.
While those who
flatly deny the possibility of any global warming can be readily brushed
aside, the alarmists have been much too quick to dismiss legitimate
questions about precisely what the evidence shows. Indeed, they have
frequently treated such questions as heresies to be persecuted, adopting
an even more virulently anti-scientific mindset than the one they
accuse others of.Meanwhile, on the policy side, the alarmists’
call for worldwide economic controls, including caps on fossil fuels,
are largely recycled from previous scientific doomsday fads, such as the
oil scarcity scare of the late 1970s.
Despite the enormous costs these
policies would impose, especially on poor countries, they would do
virtually nothing to stop anthropogenic climate change, let alone
protect anyone from relentless natural climate change that is
one of our planet’s most prominent and inescapable features. They are
also distracting attention both from investments that would make society
less vulnerable to climate change, and from a more pressing crisis,
namely the extinction of a large fraction of the world’s plant and
animal species due to widespread modification of natural habitat.Don’t
be fooled by the fanfare in Paris: The climate change movement faces
big trouble ahead. Its principal propositions contain two major
fallacies that can only become more glaring with time.
First, in stark
contrast to popular belief and to the public statements of government
officials and many scientists, the science on which the dire predictions
of man-made climate change is based is nowhere near the level of
understanding or certainty that popular discourse commonly ascribes to
it. Second, and relatedly, the movement’s embrace of an absolute form of
the precautionary principle distorts rational cost-benefit analysis, or
throws it out the window altogether.
As the costs of
decarbonization start to hit home, and the public demands greater
certainty about the benefits to be gained, the public—and particularly
those industries that are hardest hit—will invest in scientific
research, in the hopes of achieving a more granular cost-benefit
analysis. Something similar is happening to proposed listings under the
Endangered Species Act—where major economic interests are threatened,
they have responded with
enormous investments in scientific research
in order to show either that the species in question is not in danger,
or that it can be protected by measures far short of the often draconian
prohibitions imposed pursuant to the Act.
These factors will
almost certainly produce a more nuanced and less messianic view of the
climate problem, with solutions aimed to maximize “bang for the buck” at
the margins, where climate threats are most grave, rather than
reordering human society in order to “save” a planet that, in the grand
scheme of things, is quite indifferent to the state of the climate at
any given time.
All sides of the climate change debate have a huge
incentive to generate more and better climate science: the alarmists
and their more skeptical colleagues all want to prove their points. As
our scientific understanding improves, many of the propositions we hear
today will have to be modified, and many will be refuted, as has always
happened in the history of science. The scientific community may at
times be powerfully resistant to revision of its received wisdoms; it
took an entire generation for medical professionals to accept the germ
theory of disease, despite the fact that the evidence in its favor
generated by Pasteur and Koch was clear from the start. But better
science wins out in the end.
The greater clarity that better
science will bring will open up new opportunities to solve environmental
problems both known and unknown, and not a moment too soon. The human
race faces challenges that cannot effectively be met at a local or even a
national level. These challenges will not be met by a wholesale
reordering of human society from the top down, as many of the more
authoritarian-minded environmentalists wish. Any attempt to impose
command-economy solutions on a global scale will fall far short or
outright fail, as the Paris agreement and its precursors show. The right
strategy for confronting environmental challenges will have to be based
on rational market incentives, rational cost-benefit analysis, and a
broad-based consensus about the vital importance of efficient markets.
Strategies that distort rational cost-benefit analysis (or the science
on which it is based) to suit an anti-market agenda will not work and
can only maintain the illusion of legitimacy for so long before they are
discredited.
A Brief History of the Pleistocene Ice Age
It’s
an amusing irony that fears of global warming have arisen during what
is technically an ice age, namely the Pleistocene Ice Age, which
began about 2.6 million years ago.
A geological “ice age” typically lasts millions of years and is
characterized by cycles of glaciation, during which glaciers grow and
oceans recede, punctuated by warmer interglacial periods, in which
glaciers recede and oceans rise—such as the current Holocene
interglacial, in which human civilization has flourished.During
glacial periods, the northern hemisphere becomes substantially covered
in glaciers, typically several kilometers thick. An abundance of data
(from isotopes in ice sheets and the ocean floor, to the fossil record)
enables us to reconstruct much of its history. During glaciations,
average temperatures typically drop about 20 degrees Celsius below
today’s, and sea levels drop about 400 feet below where they are now.
During the coldest points in those glacial periods, an adventurous
animal can walk from England across Europe and Asia to North America
without getting its feet wet. This almost certainly explains the Asian
origins of native American populations, which are thought to have
crossed the current Bering Strait on foot in repeated waves between
80,000 and 12,000 years ago.
The last glacial period ended
starting about 18,000 years ago, the height of the Wisconsonian
glaciation, when the first of several dramatic warming trends began.
Average temperatures
rose and fell and rose again by 20 degrees Celsius
in barely 5,000 years, less than the time between Sumerian civilization
and the present day. Sea levels, which lag temperature swings by long
periods of time, rose
300 feet between 15,000 and 8,000 years ago. That’s an average of more than one meter
per century.
Among humans, sedentary agriculture first arose when temperatures
stabilized near current levels about 12,000 years ago. There was at
least one settled community that reached a population of 8,000
inhabitants in Turkey
some 9,500 years ago. At the dawn of civilization, man would have experienced floods on a biblical scale.
In
fact, major environmental changes have happened in time scales that are
readily understandable in terms of human history. The Baltic Sea, for
example is typically a
freshwater glacial-runoff lake
that disappears completely during glacial periods. When the North Sea
finally rose high enough to breach the land bridge between Denmark and
Sweden there were already large settled communities practicing
agriculture. The saltwater ecology along the western edge of the Baltic
Sea is not much older than the first pyramids.Before the
interglacial period began 18,000 years ago, most of North America was
buried under a vast sheet of ice. That glacial period (“ice age” in
common parlance) lasted more than 100,000 years, though with significant
variations in temperature, glacier cover, and sea levels—mini-cycles
referred to as “stadials” and “interstadials.” During that time,
anatomically modern humans spread throughout the world across land
bridges that connected most of the continents. Our ancestors dominated
the warmer climes and competed with Neanderthals for food across the
tundra and ice of Europe.The warm interglacial period before that
glacial period only lasted from 145,000 to 127,000 years ago. At their
maximum, temperatures were significantly warmer than today, with ocean
levels about thirty feet higher. Evidence in the form of algae fossils
suggests that during at least some part of this period, the Arctic Ocean
was completely free of ice cover, during the summer months if not year
round. Only Antarctica retained its vast ice sheets and glaciers.
This repeating
cycle of 100,000-year glaciations and 10,000 to 20,000 year interglacials
has been fairly consistent over the past 2.6 million years. The planet
has trundled through the entire cycle dozens of times. If the pattern
holds, we are due for another major glaciation sometime in the next
several thousand years: The northern hemisphere will again become
substantially covered in glaciers, ocean levels will fall hundreds of
feet, and the earth’s overall production of plant biomass will fall
substantially below what the current human population needs to feed
itself. That will pose some ticklish technological challenges even for
our hyper-adaptable species. Hopefully, such changes will be incremental
enough to allow for adaptation.
It’s impossible to say when (or
even whether) this next “ice age” will come, partly because the
scientific theories of what drives these epochal glacial cycles are all
underdetermined - that is, theories explain part of the climate variation
but not all of it. For example, the start of interglacial periods seems
correlated to variations in the earth’s orbit. But the extent of orbital
“eccentricity” does not fully explain the amount of warming that
occurs, implying that other factors and feedback amplifiers are also
involved.
It is true, and at least somewhat alarming, that the current atmospheric carbon dioxide level of
400 parts per million
(ppm) is far higher than at any time in the past 800,000 years, almost
entirely as a result of humans burning fossil fuels. What we hear less
often, however, is that during the first 1.8 million years of the
Pleistocene Ice Age, carbon dioxide levels
were significantly higher than that.
Major glaciation occurred a dozen or more times, without taking much
notice at all of what should have been a much stronger greenhouse
effect. And for 245 million years before that, carbon dioxide levels
were vastly higher. So carbon dioxide levels are the highest they’ve
been in 800,000 years, but they’re also among the lowest they’ve been in
245 million years. Compared with that 245 million-year record,
pre-industrial carbon dioxide concentrations of 280 ppm were perhaps
perilously close to the level, around 150 ppm, below which plants cannot
grow. It’s always possible to have too much of a good thing, but it
bears recalling that carbon dioxide has
vital benefits.
Plant photosynthesis, which sustains virtually all life on earth,
requires an abundance of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide.
Heretical Questions
In
political discourse, it is often necessary to simplify complex policy
matters in order to make them accessible for public debate. But too much
simplification can have the effect of stifling public discourse, as in
this unfortunate State of the Union statement by President Obama: “The
debate is over. Climate change is real.” Of course climate change is
real. The climate is always changing. Only the most foolish of the
President’s critics believe otherwise, and it doesn’t help his cause to
demonstrate that he can be just as foolish.
The evidence is
overwhelming that the planet has been warming off and on for several
centuries. There is also compelling evidence that at least some
significant part of this warming is attributable to carbon dioxide from
the burning of fossil fuels since the mid-20th century. There
is good scientific reason to believe that increasing concentrations of
greenhouse gases almost certainly constitute a net contribution to
global warming. But crucial questions remain about the relative
importance of natural factors that influence climate. One of these is
the sequestration of carbon dioxide by biomass on land and in the
oceans. Another concerns cloud cover, which reflects a large amount of
solar radiation back into space, and which earlier models of climate
change did not take into account (because it’s very hard to get right).
The simple climate models of ten or twenty years ago are now showing
their age amid a flood of new data, and the far more complex, uncertain,
and varied picture those data illustrate. The President is therefore
wrong in the sense that, for the most crucial scientific questions, the
debate is just beginning.
The questions begin with the fact that while there is
some
correlation between temperature trends over the recent past and
“anthropogenic” (or human-caused) carbon dioxide, the correlation is not
very strong. The shape of the warming curve does not track the shape of
the curve for increased carbon dioxide concentrations. For example,
About 40 percent of the warming since 1900 happened in the first half of
the 20
th century, when “anthropogenic” carbon dioxide was
insignificant. That warming could not have been caused by human
behavior. Then, from 1945 to 1975, just as major amounts of carbon
dioxide from burning fossil fuels start to appear in the atmosphere,
there was a major “hiatus” during which global average surface
temperatures held steady or actually dropped slightly—again, no
correlation. From 1975 to 2000 there appears to have been very rapid
warming. But then, as anthropogenic carbon dioxide levels continued to
increase, another hiatus in temperatures appears to have set in with the
strong El Niño year in 1998. While there are major discrepancies among
different data sets, and new data are still being collected, the
IPCC’s latest report
concedes that the rate of warming since 2000 has been substantially
less than predicted by climate models in response to rising levels of
carbon dioxide.
The public debate is dominated by simplistic claims that “climate change is man-made,” which might lead one to think that all
of the current warming trend is man-made. But nearly all climate
scientists accept that many factors influence temperatures, including
major shifts in patterns of ocean circulation (such as the very strong
El Niño, largely responsible for the warm Christmas Day 2015
temperatures in North America), variations in the earth’s orbit,
variations in solar activity, and volcanic activity. The “attribution
statement” in the IPCC’s latest assessment report is carefully couched:
“It is extremely likely that more than half of the
observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to
2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in GHG [greenhouse gases]
and other anthropogenic forces together.”
The distinction between
“more than half” (the IPCC summary’s of scientific literature) and “all”
or “nearly all” is crucial from the point of view of public policy. If
only about half the observed warming is due to human activity, the
cost-benefit analysis of currently proposed policies becomes far more
dubious, and reveals another problem: As much as half the current
warming trend (whatever that is) could be due to natural causes, and
current policies will do nothing to address that.
To see why, it’s
crucial to focus on this precise scientific question: How much do
temperatures actually increase when atmospheric carbon dioxide
increases? Scientists express this relationship as a measure of
“equilibrium climate sensitivity,” defined as how many degrees average
global temperature will increase as a result of doubling atmospheric
carbon dioxide. Virtually all the climate models used in the IPCC’s
worst-case predictions of dangerous global warming presume a worst-case
scenario equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) of 3.0 to 3.5 degrees
Celsius. But leading IPCC scientists have concluded that if humans were
responsible for all observed warming since 1971, the ECS would
be around 2.0 degrees Celsius. And if humans are only responsible for
about half of the observed warming, as the IPCC itself admits is quite
possible, that implies an ECS closer to 1.0 degrees Celsius.
A
reliable figure for ECS continues to elude our grasp, but with an ECS of
1.0 degrees Celsius, the case for sweeping reductions in carbon
emissions is greatly weakened. At that level of climate sensitivity,
even if carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase unabated,
temperatures would increase significantly less than the stated goal
of the IPCC’s, which is warming of no more than two degrees Celsius by
2100. (This may explain why the Paris agreement moved the goalposts to a
new goal of less than 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100). But in that case,
IPCC’s worst-case scenario would then be non-catastrophic by the IPCC’s own definition.
The
policy implications are dramatic. Under this scenario, which lies well
within the IPCC’s forecast, even dramatic reductions in carbon dioxide
emissions would have no measurable impact on temperatures. And the
natural factors responsible for as much as half the recently observed
warming would presumably continue warming the planet, oblivious to any
reduction in carbon emissions.The key point is this: The IPCC’s
latest “attribution statement” (extreme confidence that more than half
the observed warming is due to humans) would be correct even if ECS is
only 1.0 degrees Celsius and expected increases in carbon dioxide pose
essentially no risk of catastrophic climate change.
Far from
honing in on a reliable value for the crucial ECS metric, more recent
data have only increased the uncertainty surrounding it. As climate
scientist Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology points
out, while the IPCC’s AR4 report (2007) expressed an ECS “best estimate”
of 3.0 degrees Celsius, the AR5 report (2013) doesn’t express a “best
estimate” ECS at all. “The stated reason for not citing a best estimate
in the AR5,”
notes
Curry, “is the substantial discrepancy between observation-based
estimates of ECS (lower), versus estimates from climate models
(higher).”
This highlights an important self-correcting feature in
the development of climate science. Yes, it’s true that many major
journals reject articles that critique the current consensus, and that
funding priorities strongly reinforce the consensus. But even the strong
bias in favor of more dire findings, which has been introduced into
scientific inquiry by the pervasive politicization of the issue, cannot
readily invent false data. Every year produces more raw data than the
year before, and the discrepancies between the new data and the simple
climate models are increasing. Alarmists say that discrepancies are to
be expected, and models are meant to be refined. But they have boxed
themselves in with misleading claims to certain knowledge where in fact
considerable uncertainty remains. Uncertainty about risks is not
necessarily fatal to a policy of precaution, and but false claims to
certainty usually are, sooner or later. Witness the Iraq War and
Saddam’s non-existent WMD.A close look at more specific questions
reveals even deeper uncertainties. Antarctic sea ice has increased
steadily since the 1970s. The planet appears to have been warming,
generally though inconsistently, since the “Little Ice Age” of the late
18th century and early 19
th century, when George Washington
repeatedly recorded snowfall at Mount Vernon in early November. And even
the Little Ice Age appears to have been just a hiatus in a broader
warming trend that has lasted
about 400 years.
The early climate models of a few decades ago predicted that we had
already, or would soon, exceed the maximum temperatures of both the
Holocene Maximum 5,000 years ago and the Medieval Warming Period a
thousand years ago, when Vikings wrote of grapes growing in Vinland
(coastal North America and Newfoundland)—the two hottest periods of the
current interglacial. Those predictions have not been borne out by more
recent data: Average temperatures are still far short of both of those
(relatively recent) peaks.
The flood of new data has forced the
United Nations to revise downward its prognostications of ocean-level
increases. The worst-case sea level rise by 2100 was revised downward
from 3.7 meters in the first IPCC report to 1.2 to in the second, to 0.8
in the third, and to 0.6 in the fourth. The most recent IPCC assessment
report, AR5, expressed “medium confidence” that there is a least a 66
percent probability of sea levels rising from 0.45 meters to 0.82 meters
in a high-carbon-emissions scenario.
The prognostications of
extreme weather, which alarmists matter-of-factly blame on anthropogenic
climate change, have been increasingly discredited. Neither tornadoes
nor hurricanes have been more frequent or intense since 1950 than they
were in the half-century before—though we can’t know for sure because
precise data on tornados and cyclones is too recent. Likewise,
predictions of infectious diseases such as malaria spreading more widely
have also been largely discounted in more recent IPCC reports, because
vulnerability to infectious diseases correlates less with warm climates
than with poverty and the poor public health conditions it entails, both
of which risk being greatly exacerbated by strong decarbonization
policies.
This recurring failure to explain the past and predict the present hasn’t stopped alarmists from claiming, as the
President did recently on Twitter,
“Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real,
man-made and dangerous.” The President perhaps was relying on the
most famous of the surveys
claiming a near-universal consensus on man-made climate change—a 2013
survey by the Australian John Cook and several colleagues in the journal
Environmental Research Letters. Cook and his colleagues
surveyed the abstracts of 11,944 peer-reviewed journal articles drawn
from a simple database search of key terms. They classified the papers
on the basis of whether the papers expressed an opinion on whether
“humans are causing global warming” and, if so, whether the opinion
embraced or rejected the consensus. They found that about two-thirds
expressed no opinion, and of the third that did, nearly all embraced the
consensus.
The
generality of Cook’s criterion elides the same crucial distinction as
the IPCC’s most recent statements attributing global warming to
anthropogenic carbon dioxide: There is a huge difference between
admitting that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is
a driver of current global warming, and claiming that it responsible for
virtually all current global warming. On the crucial question of
how much
of the observed warming is attributable to humans, only a tiny fraction
of the studies offered “explicit endorsement with quantification”; the
rest offered either “explicit endorsement without quantification” or
“implicit endorsement.” The single most telling weakness of the Cook
study is that very few scientists are prepared to offer even a rough
estimate of
how much of current global warming is attributable
to anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Many climate scientists who agree that
humans contribute to global warming are skeptical of prognostications of
catastrophic climate change. The Cook survey
throws all of these
into its 97 percent consensus, a remarkable achievement in packaging a
survey that quite clearly shows considerable diversity and uncertainty
in what peer-reviewed scientific papers have actually found.
Meanwhile,
Michael Mann’s famous “hockey stick” study has been savaged by the
scientific community. That study purported to show temperatures spiking
to dramatic new heights as a result of anthropogenic carbon dioxide; it
was, some will recall, the most influential factoid of Al Gore’s
An Inconvenient Truth.
Scientists have criticized Mann’s misuse of proxy data, his failure to
fairly reflect the complexity of the climate system, and above all his
statistical methodology, which produced a hockey stick 99 percent of the
time in 10,000 sets of randomly generated data. The
Annals of Applied Statistics has devoted
an entire issue to the methodological problems of the Mann study.
This
blurring of the lines between inquiry and advocacy confuses the public
and leaves scientists open to charges of professional dishonesty. The
fact that the apocalyptic vision of impending doom is a matter of
obligatory orthodoxy gives the movement a
quasi-religious tone,
and lends itself to the persecution of “skeptics” as heretics. Of
course, such an attitude ignores the essence of the scientific spirit,
which is one of constructive skepticism. It also lends itself to policy
proposals of a revolutionary—or reformationist, to extend the religious
metaphor—brand that ignores or discounts rational cost-benefit analysis.
Revolutionary PoliticsThe
climate change movement is a diverse coalition. There are captains of
capitalism (George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer) and there are
inveterate enemies of capitalism (Naomi Klein). There are Greens opposed
to free trade, and those (like Ignacio Ramonet, publisher of
Le Monde Diplomatique)
who think that the root of all evil is the World Bank, IMF, and
globalization. There are Marxists who believe in state suppression of
the free market. And there are eco-socialists, red-green activists who
take a dim view of the “materialism” of economic development but
nevertheless believe in a mixture of Marxism and environmentalism.
In
the United States, where unadulterated socialism usually doesn’t sell
well, the climate alarmists put a decidedly capitalist face on their
policy prescriptions. Led by prominent social-democratic billionaires,
these capitalist-climate-alarmists go for huge clean energy subsidies
and come armed with all kinds of theories about how a 50 percent or even
80 percent renewable energy mandate would pay for itself. (It will only
do so if there are technological breakthroughs in renewable energy
technology, and those breakthroughs are far more likely to occur through
systematic investment in research and development, not in huge but
diffuse subsidies to various private companies whose R&D capacities
are at best uneven.) This political marketing strategy has infused the
regulatory process itself in the Obama Administration. The Environmental
Protection Agency claims that its Clean Power Plan will create add to
GDP. Perhaps, but there is no question that the subsidies translate into
a form of patronage support for Democrats. The Clean Power Plan
essentially forces “red” states like Texas (and chiefly Texas, in terms
of overall carbon emissions reductions) to adopt the electricity mix of
“blue” states like California—precisely because electricity is so much
cheaper and more reliable in Texas than in California, conferring a huge
advantage in interstate competition.
Outside the United States
environmentalists tend to be more socialistic (witness the prevalence of
Green parties in Europe). Their policy proposals usually involve some
combination of “a revolution in the way people think and live, to
worldwide economic controls on, for example, population growth, energy
production, or carbon emissions—the last of which implies indirect if
not direct control over virtually all economic activity. Americans
across the political spectrum might agree that the scientific evidence
on climate change justifies certain precautionary measures, and that
naturalism is an important value. But with so many alarmists, from Bill
McKibben to Naomi Klein, calling for an end to capitalism as we know it,
the debate tends to go off the rails from the start. Hence, for
example, John Holdren, Obama’s senior advisor for science and
technology, in his 1973 book
Human Ecology,
called for “a massive campaign” to “de-develop” the United States,
including redistribution of wealth both within and among nations.
The
socialist bent of the alarmists’ policy prescriptions is especially
suspicious because we’ve heard it all before—from the Club of Rome’s
Limits to Growth to professor Paul Ehrlich’s
The Population Bomb. Those
doomsday scenarios were soon followed by the fear of a catastrophic oil
shortage, popular later in the 1970s. There were no catastrophic food
or energy shortages, of course, and the “peak oil” scare petered out
even faster than the population bomb scare. There’s no way to predict
the next “scientific” doomsday fad, but we can be fairly certain that it
will include frantic calls for government or “global” government
controls on industrial activity. Like proponents of bygone doomsday
fads, most of today’s climate alarmists share an unshakable conviction
that humans are the problem and that nature in its “natural” state is
pristine and perfect. That is the 19
th century Romantic
spirit at the heart of today’s environmentalist movement, the hallmarks
of which are a deification of nature and a revulsion for the works of
human beings, not to exclude innovations that lead to dramatic
improvements in material well-being.But that begs an important
question: Do climate alarmists want to eliminate the human impact on
climate, regardless what the climate would be doing otherwise? Or are
they trying to eliminate climate change itself, regardless of cause?
Obama’s loose talk about “saving the planet” seems to elide rather than
to clarify whether it’s really the planet that needs saving from
mankind, mankind that needs saving from itself.
The question hasn’t gone unnoticed. In
Slate,
Joseph Romm concedes that the planet will be fine no matter what we do,
so we should be more worried about ourselves. We live on a planet where
adaptation is a necessary skill. Yale economist William Nordhaus notes
that the era of human expansion has coincided with a 12,000-year period
of uncharacteristically stable climate. He surmises that human
civilization may be unusually dependent on this stability. Hence,
pace
Nordhaus, if that stability is now ending, our goal should be to modify
the climate through climate engineering, to render it stable enough for
human habitation. MIT physicist David Keith agrees, proposing a
low-cost solution: inject sulfuric acid into the stratosphere, where the
right amount would reflect enough sunlight back into outer space to
neutralize a dangerous warming trend.Imagine something that is
entirely possible - that a single such technological breakthrough enables
us to control the world’s average temperatures. Could we then agree on
what the ideal temperature should be? Is the current global average
temperature the ideal one? Many would take that for granted, and climate
alarmists appear to presuppose it, but the proposition is hardly
self-evident. That is especially true given that even in the worst-case
scenario, higher temperatures would
not be completely devoid of benefits.
Far more people die of cold than of heat. Marginally higher
temperatures and carbon dioxide levels would likely increase the world’s
overall production of plant biomass, and lengthen growing seasons,
thereby reducing the proportion of the world’s land required for
agricultural production and increasing the amount of land available for
high-quality natural habitat.
To read the IPCC reports, alarmists
find the idea of adapting to climate change far less satisfying than the
idea of preventing it. But their focus on worldwide economic controls
boils down to a kind of climate engineering, because it presupposes that
humanity should not learn to live with a changing planet. Hence we are
to believe that the most adaptable species that has ever existed, a
species so sophisticated that it can survive in outer space, requires an
absolutely stable average temperature and sea-level in order to
survive. This defies common sense.
Human
civilization faces many challenges. We face an ever-present risk of
dangerous climate change due to natural causes. We face an immediate
crisis in the rapid loss of the world’s most valuable and critical
habitat, due chiefly to farming and logging. The future will bring
further challenges for which we will find ourselves far less prepared
than we could have been. But frightfully little attention is being paid
to these risks, for the simple reason that they don’t fit snugly into
the environmentalists’ essentially anti-industrial agenda.
Man-made
climate change, on the other hand, is the perfect vehicle for advancing
that agenda. Dealing with it requires choking off fossil fuels, a
top-down reorganization of economic activity, and income redistribution.
If alarmists were really interested in protecting humans against
climate change, they would be helping Bangladesh adapt to monsoon floods
and thereby avoid thousands of deaths every few years, instead of
insisting on green energy boondoggles that will never save a soul there
or anywhere else.
The Paris conference achieved agreement on an
annual $100-billion Global Climate Fund to help developing countries
reduce their carbon footprint. The money would be far better spent on
adaptation assistance, to make sure that poor societies preserve
critical habitat while reinforcing their access to things they will need
in the event of really catastrophic climate change: food, water, and
fossil fuels.In the meantime, every year will bring more new
scientific research to bear on the climate debate. Whatever the current
“consensus,” new research is certain to challenge it. The primitive urge
to “call out” the skeptics can silence and punish individual
scientists. But it cannot alter the structure of scientific revolutions
in a scientific age.
Mario Loyola is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty.
