The Commons

Scientists distorting debate

George Woodwell’s attack in the letters page of the Boston Globe on James Taylor's article on The Day After Tomorrow is a textbook example of how the scientific establishment builds political mountains out of scientific molehills whenever anyone questions the vast sums paid out of taxpayers’ pockets to keep the global warming industry going. Woodwell’s critique of Taylor’s article omits important information the voter needs to help him decide whether global warming should be a priority when she needs to choose between, for example, education spending, climate change research funding and lower taxes.

Woodwell says the Earth has warmed rapidly over the last century. True (although "rapidly" is an overstatement), but as even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits, much of that warming happened in the first half of the century and man’s activities were not responsible. The planet cooled between the 1950s and 1970s. It is only in the past 30 years that scientists say the Earth has warmed owing at least in part to mankind’s contribution. The public needs to know that.

Woodwell says glacial ice is melting globally. Yes, glaciers all over the world are melting. Most of them have been melting for hundreds of years. The glaciers atop Kilimanjaro have been receding even though the temperature there has been falling. Other glaciers, however, like those in Scandinavia, are advancing. There are glaciers in Alaska advancing while others a short distance away are receding. The public needs to know that.

Woodwell says that sea level is rising. Yes over the past century, but again, sea level has been rising for a long time. Satellite altimeters indicate virtually no change in sea level globally over the past decade. On-the-ground research in the Maldives, one of the low-lying island chains often claimed to be at risk from the flooding Woodwell alleges, demonstrates that the sea level there has fallen significantly over the past 30 years. The public needs to know that.

Woodwell alleges that recent droughts in North America are “warming-induced.” The historical record indicates that North America has seen thirteen major droughts over the past 500 years, the worst of them by far in the Sixteenth century. We have seen nothing in recent years to rival this drought or that of the dust-bowl years. The public needs to know that.

Finally, Woodwell claims that anomalies such as tornadoes are becoming more common. True again, but intense tornadoes – the ones that do the damage – and deaths resulting from them have decreased . It’s probably that we see more tornadoes now simply because our monitoring systems are better at detecting small tornadoes than they were a few years ago.

The public needs to know all of this. Overall, the billions of dollars we spend on researching climate change reveal that the world is getting slightly warmer as a result of man’s activities. Whether this is anything to worry about is something voters and their representatives have to decide on the basis of full information. We should bear in mind that much of these scientists’ funding is dependent on voters being scared.

(In case anyone should object that my organization receives some funding from energy companies, I should say that CEI has a proud history of supporting free enterprise and limited government and we will continue to raise public awareness of the waste of public money climate alarmism represents regardless of our funding sources.)

Principe de precaution

The French assembly has voted to amend the French constitution to include the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principle. You can read a French language story on the subject here: La Constitution s'ouvre à l'environnement.

The passage was a victory for the right. The Socialists abstained. The Greens voted against.

Consensus in Copenhagen

Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus met in Denmark in the last week of May. The project described itself as follows:

“The goal of the Copenhagen Consensus project was to set priorities among a series of proposals for confronting ten great global challenges. These challenges, selected from a wider set of issues identified by the United Nations, are: civil conflicts; climate change; communicable diseases; education; financial stability; governance; hunger and malnutrition; migration; trade reform; and water and sanitation.

“A panel of economic experts, comprising eight of the world’s most distinguished economists, was invited to consider these issues. The members were Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University, Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago (Nobel laureate), Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich, Justin Yifu Lin of Peking University, Douglass North of Washington University in St Louis (Nobel laureate), Thomas Schelling of the University of Maryland, Vernon Smith of George Mason University (Nobel laureate), and Nancy Stokey of the University of Chicago.”

The project ranked four projects as representing very good value for money. They were: new programs to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS; reducing the prevalence of iron-deficiency anemia by means of food supplements; multilateral and unilateral of tariffs and non-tariff barriers, together with the elimination of agricultural subsidies; and the control and treatment of malaria.

On climate change, the Consensus project considered a paper authored by William R. Cline of the Center for Global Development and Institute for International Economics, which suggested that the benefits of action now on climate change would outweigh the costs by $166 trillion to $94 trillion. However, the only way the paper was able to achieve such a benefit: cost ration was by using an unfeasibly low discount rate for the benefits of 1.5 percent. The panel rejected this economically nonsensical methodology.

In fact the panel ranked all three suggestions for action – an “optimal carbon tax,” a “value-at-risk carbon tax” and the Kyoto protocol as bad investments. The final report summarized:

“The panel looked at three proposals, including the Kyoto Protocol, for dealing with climate change by reducing emissions of carbon. The expert panel regarded all three proposals as having costs that were likely to exceed the benefits. The panel recognized that global warming must be addressed, but agreed that approaches based on too abrupt a shift toward lower emissions of carbon are needlessly expensive. The experts expressed an interest in an alternative, proposed in one of the opponent papers, that envisaged a carbon tax much lower in the first years of implementation than the figures called for in the challenge paper, rising gradually in later years. Such a proposal however was not examined in detail in the presentations put to the panel, and so was not ranked. The panel urged increased funding for research into more affordable carbon-abatement technologies.”

So is this all bad news for climate alarmists? You wouldn't think so if you read the Denver Post:

In addition to oil prices hovering at record levels, some economists say a carbon tax would encourage Americans to curb wasteful energy consumption that contributes to global warming.

Three prominent economists appearing here for the global economics conference "Copenhagen Consensus" agreed that the chances of approving a carbon tax during an election year are slim. Consumers would face the tax at the gas pump. ...

A carbon tax would be a more efficient means of addressing problems tied to global warming than many other measures that have won favor on the world stage, according to the economists: William Cline, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics and the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.; Harvard University professor Robert Mendelsohn; and Stanford University professor Alan Manne.

... While the men agree that a carbon tax would be one financially sound way to fight global warming, they disagree about how high the tax should be.

Quite how this squares with the final report of the consensus project - that three out of the four carbon tax proposals (including Kyoto, a tax in all but name) represent bad value for money, and that the fourth is not developed enough to judge - is beyond me.