Concern over global warming has reached the point where both Presidential candidates are vying to prove that they are the sincerest champions of its remedy. To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all warmers now. Although the science is far from settled, as many would have us believe, that point is now moot. Some form of climate-change legislation is barreling down the legislative highway like Mack truck that's lost its brakes. It may not take the form of the bill created by Senators Lieberman and Warner which became stalled in the Senate for procedural reasons last Friday, but then that was a warm-up for the the next Congress and the next President (Obama?). Some form of "cap and trade" law is in our future. It will seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from regulated entities. Certainly by 2012 emissions from power plants, factories, refineries, and other regulated entities will be allocated rights to emit limited amounts of six greenhouse gases, called allowances. Some allowances will be given away, while others will be auctioned off.
There are numerous troubling concerns with aspects of the legislation itself such as do we really have the right technologies in place that can deal with the effects of such a program? Are we certain that such a massive tax on energy will not send us to the poorhouse before we get even remotely close to the goal of emission reductions?
Virtually all climatologists are telling us that global warming is real and that it is man-made. According to the U.N. Climate Panel we will see average world temperature rise about 2.6 degrees Centigrade or 4.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. The question no one seems to have asked is how much of a problem is this? As Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, reminded a recent Manhattan Institute gathering in New York, "We're unlikely to make good choices if we're scared. If somebody puts a gun to your head, you're unlikely to think rationally and prioritize very well."
Is it possible that both the seriousness and the imminence of the threat have been overstated? The media have linked every storm and hurricane since Katrina to global warming. In his web site for his now storied "An Inconvenient Truth" Al Gore declaims, "We have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into this tailspin of destruction involving stream waters, floods, drought, epidemics and killer heat waves unlike anything we've ever experienced."
Many scientists not least among them those associated with the World Meteorological Organization do not agree with such apocalyptic claims. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects a sea-level rise of approximately seven to 23 inches over the next century, not the widely publicized 20 feet in former Vice President Gore's book and documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
The Danish social scientist Lomborg also points to a different way of looking at climate change. Take heat death. Are we going to see more heat deaths because of the temperature rising, he asks? Absolutely, as temperatures go up, there will be more heat waves, and that means there's going to be more people dying from heat. He points to the best studies we have, mostly from Europe, about heat and cold deaths. These estimate that by 2050, on average we may see about 2,000 more heat deaths every year because of global warming.
The curious point, however, is that the same data indicates that we will also see fewer deaths due to cold. Is this significant? In the U.K., says Lomborg, global warming will claim 2,000 heat deaths a year. Yet the same data supports the estimate that we would see about 20,000 fewer cold deaths because of global warming. So as far as the British are concerned warming has an upside-one that we are not likely to hear much about from the media. But Lomborg asserts this is true virtually everywhere in the world. He reckons that the best global estimate is that we are likely to see about 400,000 more heat deaths but about 1.8 million fewer cold deaths worldwide. So if this was the only problem with global warming, we should actually have more.
The most visited clip from Al Gore's movie is the one where Florida is deluged by a 20 feet sea level rise, and New York, San Francisco, Shanghai and Holland disappears. It's dramatic end-of-the-world stuff. You can understand why he didn't show the more plausible rise of one foot because one wouldn't have been able to see it. Actually, we know how damaging a one foot of sea-level rise is because over the last 150 years, sea levels rose about one foot. Yet did any one notice? As Lomborg says, "imagine asking a very old person who had lived for most of the 20th century, €˜What were the important things that happened in the 20th century?' She'll talk about the two world wars, the suffrage for women, maybe the IT revolution, but she will not say, "Oh, and sea levels rose."
It underscores his larger point. Warming may be a problem but not the one we've been led to believe. Take Malaria. Warmers say malaria will rise as a result of warming climate change. It's true. Malaria usually correlates with temperature rise. We're likely to see about 0.2 percent more malaria by the end of the century. But there's a much stronger correlation to wealth. If you're rich, you don't get malaria. Even if you get malaria, you don't die from malaria. If you're poor, you get malaria, and you die from malaria. "Isn't it curious," says Lomborg "that we worry so much about doing something about 0.2 percent in a hundred years when there's 100 percent malaria right now that we could fix so much cheaper."
"If we really care about malaria-stricken pople, we can save 850,000 lives every year throughout the century for one-sixtieth of the cost. Or to put it differently, for every time climate change measures would save one person from dying from malaria, the same amount of money spent on malaria policies could save 35,000 people. The question really is then, why is it that we seem so intent on saving one instead of 35,000?"
The so-called plight of the polar bear summarizes this intellectual confusion nicely. Polar bears have become the icon of global warming. Polar bears are said to be threatened with extinction, which is not true. If anything, we've seen a dramatic increase in the global polar bear population, from about 5,000 in the 1960s to about 22,000 today. But people seem to think that reducing global warming will save the polar bear. If every country adhered to the Kyoto protocol throughout the 21st century, we would probably save about one polar bear every year. That would cost about a couple hundred million dollars. Is it not strange that no one raises that fact that today we shoot between 300 and 500 polar bears every year? Wouldn't it be a lot more cost effective to stop shooting 300 polar bears rather than spending billions of doollars on saving one?
The larger point that people like Lomborg and a handful of others are making is that there is something wrong with a question when it can only be answered in one way. Before embarking on legislation that cobbles our energy sector and reduces economic growth we should examine alternative choices.
The Heritage Foundation together with MIT and Charles River Associates offer a compelling analysis of the costs both the U.S. and to specific regions that a carbon cap and trade system will exact.
Consider this. If every country signed on to the Kyoto Protocol and did everything required of them Lomborg reckons we would postpone global warming by seven days per year at a cost of over a $150 billion dollars a year. That's a lot of money for very, very little yield. Maybe we should start thinking of a smarter strategy.
Concern over global warming has reached the point where both Presidential candidates are vying to prove that they are the sincerest champions of its remedy. To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all warmers now. Although the science is far from settled, as many would have us believe, that point is now moot. Some form of climate-change legislation is barreling down the legislative highway like Mack truck that's lost its brakes. It may not take the form of the bill created by Senators Lieberman and Warner which became stalled in the Senate for procedural reasons last Friday, but then that was a warm-up for the the next Congress and the next President (Obama?). Some form of "cap and trade" law is in our future. It will seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from regulated entities. Certainly by 2012 emissions from power plants, factories, refineries, and other regulated entities will be allocated rights to emit limited amounts of six greenhouse gases, called allowances. Some allowances will be given away, while others will be auctioned off.
