My blogosphere daimon BB and I have been chewing over the global warming issue of late. BB is all for the conventional wisdom on this matter: global warming is happening, we caused it, and we have to do something about it. I have long been convinced that the third article of faith is nonsense. We aren't and can't do anything about it, if doing something about it means reducing carbon emissions. With India and China rising as economic powers, with millions yearning to join the global middle class, it much matter how virtuous the developed world should be. Carbon emissions are going to increase world wide. That is so obvious a fact that those who talk about reducing emissions or a zero-carbon are living in cloud cookoo land. But of course, the developed nations aren't being virtuous.
My friend Ron Bailey, science correspondent for Reason Magazine, has this:
Nations that signed the Kyoto Protocol agreed to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases—chiefly carbon dioxide—by an average of 5 percent below the level they emitted in 1990. In one sense, the collapse of the former Soviet Bloc economies has already helped achieve this goal. On the other hand, most economically developed nations—including many countries in Western Europe, as well as Japan, Canada, and Australia—are not meeting their Kyoto Protocol goals.
In other words, the only way to meet the Kyoto Protocol standards is for your economy to collapse into rubble. Well, that may be happening to the world God help us, but surely no one is trying to make it happen. National economies still standing aren't abiding by their agreements.
On the other hand, I have until recently accepted the first two articles of global warming faith: that the world is in a long term warming trend, and that human activity is accelerating that trend. I now suspect that both of those ideas may be wrong. Again from Ron:
Given that climate is by definition a long-term phenomenon, one should be cautious about interpreting ten years of data. Still, it is the case that global average temperatures have remained essentially flat since 2001 while the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by about 5 percent. It is also true that this decade is on average warmer than the previous decade, though so far there is no clear upward trend. And what about the future? Earlier this year, a German climate modeling group published a study in Nature suggesting that global average temperatures may not increase in the coming decade because of offsetting natural climate variations. Policymakers will likely find it difficult to persuade the public to endure the economic pain of higher energy bills if temperatures are not actually increasing.
Now I note that none of this was predicted by the computer models on which the whole global warming faith is based. Moreover, this certainly undermines the principle ethic of global warming, that we must act right now! Surely if natural forces are cooling the planet for the foreseeable future, we can enjoy some breathing-out room.
But what about those computer models?
Clearly, most climate modelers believe that adding more carbon dioxide will eventually lead to unacceptably high global temperatures. However, other researchers question aspects of those models. For example, are the models' estimates of the amount of carbon dioxide that's likely to be emitted from soils too high? Are cloud feedback estimates biased in a positive direction, leading researchers to predict greater warming than is likely to occur? And is soot responsible for most of the recent warming in the arctic?
It looks to me like the whole global warming package is now worth a subprime mortgage. Maybe the global warming faithful should apply to Henry Paulson for a federal bailout.
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