Archive for the ‘Climate Change’ Category

The Failure of Al Gore

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

by Walter Russell Mead

The following quote from The American Interest blog site is highly recommended. Mead explains why the political agenda of the Global Warming or Climate Change movement has failed. Nothing politically will be done about it, except in local areas.

Gore’s failures are not just about leadership. The strategic vision he crafted for the global green movement has comprehensively failed. That is no accident; the entire green policy vision was so poorly conceived, so carelessly constructed, so unbalanced and so rife with contradictions that it could only thrive among activists and enthusiasts. Once the political power of the climate movement, aided by an indulgent and largely unquestioning press, had pushed the climate agenda into the realm of serious politics, failure was inevitable. The only question was whether the comprehensive green meltdown would occur before or after the movement achieved its core political goal of a comprehensive and binding global agreement on greenhouse gasses.

That question has now been answered; the movement failed before it got its treaty, and while the media and the establishment have still generally failed to analyze these developments and draw the consequences, the global climate movement has become the kind of embarrassment intellectuals like to ignore. Like the Club of Rome, Y2K, the Iraq Study Group and President Obama’s management of the Middle East peace process it is something polite people try not to think about. This is why Al Gore is less visible than he used to be, and his views are less eagerly sought: the polite world and its ready handmaid the press know Gore has failed but does not want to think or write about why.

The global green strategy was a comprehensive, unified and coordinated one. Green activists around the world, in some countries empowered because proportional representation gives fringe groups disproportionate political influence, would unite around the push for a single global solution to climate change. The global solution involved a treaty to be negotiated under UN auspices that would be “legally binding” and subject the emission of greenhouse gasses to strict global controls. Developing countries would receive massive transfers of official aid ($100 billion or more a year) to compensate them for the costs they would incur in meeting carbon targets; developed countries like the United States would face stricter targets still. The target for the treaty was to cap global emissions at levels believed to keep the global temperature rise this century to two degrees centigrade.

To reach this Valhalla, a political strategy was put in place; it is the strategy that the former vice president is still gamely trying to push in his Rolling Stone article. It has failed.

The idea was to develop and present a scientific case that global warming was happening, that it was caused by human activity, and that its consequences in the near future were so devastating that a binding and effective GGCT (Global Green Carbon Treaty) was the only way out.

Politically, the framers of this approach could count on the support of green movements worldwide, on diplomats and UN officials constantly looking for new missions and new budgets, on anti-capitalist or anti-growth forces who want to slow down or reverse the process of capitalist economic development reshaping the world, on Europeans and others concerned about the rapid rise of Asia and the shift of political power from west to east, and on a group of economic interests and financial market wizards who stood to make hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars from the massive reorientation of the world economy the green program would require.

To make the case for a proposition like this, one needs to make the following argument: that the cost of inaction is unacceptably high, that the proposed measures are both feasible and effective, and that there are no easier or cheaper methods of accomplishing the goal. This is no special set of high hurdles invented for the purpose of frustrating the greens; it is the basic test that any proposal in any arena must pass.

In the global warming debate, this involves arguing first that the evidence for rapid and destructive climate change is rock solid, second that the global green agenda can be put into place and will work if it is, and third that there are no less costly, less intrusive or more workable alternative policies to the green agenda as it is now understood.

From the beginning, the movement was dogged by what proved to be a fatal flaw. That problem was and is the sheer expense, complexity and unwieldiness of the GGCT. The political goal of the global green movement is so enormously complicated, so economically expensive, so administratively difficult, so dependent on the coordination and cooperation of so many different powerful political interests with radically different agendas that its adoption was extremely unlikely.

Any serious discussion of the merits of the GGCT would be fatal because the more the world reflects on the topic the more the world’s diplomats, policy makers and opinion leaders realize just how utopian and unworkable this “strategy” really is.

The global green treaty movement to outlaw climate change is the most egregious folly to seize the world’s imagination since the Kellog-Briand Pact Kellog-Briand Pact outlawed war in the late 1920s. The idea that the nations of the earth could agree on an enforceable treaty mandating deep cuts in their output of all greenhouse gasses is absurd. A global treaty to meet Mr. Gore’s policy goals isn’t a treaty: the changes such a treaty requires are so broad and so sweeping that a GGCT is less a treaty than a constitution for global government. Worse, it is a constitution for a global welfare state with trillions of dollars ultimately sent by the taxpayers of rich countries to governments (however feckless, inept, corrupt or tyrannical) in poor ones.

For this treaty to work, China, India, Nigeria and Brazil and scores of other developing countries must in effect accept limits on their economic growth. The United States must commit through treaty to policies that cannot get simple majorities in Congress — like sending billions of dollars in climate aid to countries like Iran, North Korea, Syria and Pakistan, even as we adopt intrusive and expensive energy controls here at home.

The green plan is a plan for a global constitution because the treaty will regulate economic production in every country on earth. This is a deeply intrusive concept; China, Nigeria, Myanmar, Iran and Vietnam will have to monitor and report on every factory, every farm, every truck and car, every generator and power plant in their territory. Many states do not now have and possibly never will have the ability to do this in a transparent and effective way. Many others will cheat, either for economic advantage or for reasons of national security. Many states do not want their own citizens to have this knowledge, much less the officials of hostile foreign powers.

Moreover, there will have to be sanctions. After all, what happens if a country violates its treaty commitments? If nothing happens, the entire treaty system collapses of its own weight. But to work, enforcement will have to mean penalties greater than the advantages from cheating. Who will monitor output around the world, assess performance against commitments, levy penalties and fines — and then enforce those decisions when they are made?

There are no real answers to these questions and can be none. No institutions exist with the power and resources to play these roles; the world’s jealous nation states will not consent to create them.

The dream that the menace of global warming will cause humanity to overcome its ancient divisions and unite in a grand global coalition is sophomoric. Rising CO2 levels will not cause the world’s governments to accept and enforce international policing of the most intimate details of their economic lives. If the menace of nuclear war can’t create world government, the menace of global warming won’t do it either.

The case for the Kellog-Briand Treaty is actually much stronger than the case for the Global Green Climate Treaty. The scientific evidence that war is dangerous and becoming more murderous, more risky and less acceptable every day needs no complex calculations and no computer models to convince a skeptical public. There can be few people on earth who do not understand and fear the horrors of modern war; nothing could be more evident and obvious than the danger that future wars pose to the human race.

Compared to the GGCT, the Kellog-Briand treaty against war was a piece of cake. A Kellog-Briand Deux would be easier to write, easier to negotiate, easier to ratify and easier to monitor than the green treaty of Al Gore’s dreams. A treaty banning war involves monitoring a few easily measurable and generally visible activities. The line between what is permitted and what is prohibited is much easier to draw in the Kellog-Briand case than in the GGCT, and many fewer activities would have to be covered — meaning the negotiation process would be less cumbersome and contentious. Violations are easier to check as well. It is much easier to see that a state is mobilizing an army than it is to monitor the millions and billions of economic activities to be regulated by global warming treaty.

The global greens don’t want to talk about any of this. They don’t want anybody to reflect on the obvious truth that a GGCT will be either ludicrously weak, unratifiable in the US Senate or unenforceable. (Like the Kyoto Protocol it could well be all three.) They are building a bridge to nowhere, and attacking anybody who disagrees as a flat earther.

They want to talk about science, not history, policy and the realities of international life. The science, they say, is “settled.” (Never mind that far better researched subjects, like human nutrition, are far from settled and that we are still watching governments build and deconstruct food pyramids as the “settled” scientific consensus continues to change.) Don’t tell me my solution is stupid, say the greens — the problem is real!

Mssrs. Kellog and Briand could have said the same thing: how can you be against our treaty campaign? Don’t you understand that War Is Bad? Are you some kind of war-denialist?

Mr. Gore’s work up to and including his latest Rolling Stone essay has taken a demagogic rather than intellectual approach. His method of arguing is to trumpet the science of climate change and to make ad hominem arguments against its opponents. The science is clear, it is settled, and the opposition against it is funded by people with an economic stake in denial. I am right about the science and my opponents are a bunch of evil opportunists in it only for the money.

That is Mr. Gore’s position, and it is his entire position. He says nothing about the feasibility of the proposed GGCT or its cost effectiveness. That, presumably, we must take on faith. There is nothing to discuss about policy. It is essentially the cry of Chicken Little: “The sky is falling and we must run and tell the king.”

Thus speaketh Al Gore: the world is burning down and so you must immediately follow my plan for fixing what’s wrong. He does not discuss whether his plan is feasible; to anyone who objects to the ponderous, unwieldy Rube Goldberg style green treaty agenda, Gore simply bellows: “What’s the matter you soul-dead, hired flack of the evil oil companies, don’t you believe in Science?”

Al Gore’s logic is exactly like the genealogy of the man who boasted that his line of descent went all the way back to Julius Caesar — with only two gaps. Gore’s ironclad argument has only two gaps: he presents no evidence that the GGCT is either feasible (that it would be efficacious if put into practice and that it can in fact be put into practice in a reasonable time frame) or economical (that it is the cheapest and most effective means of reaching the goal, and that the cost of the fix is less than the cost of the problem).

This is the method of the global green movement as shaped by Al Gore: an ever-crescendoing invocation of blizzards, droughts, locusts and floods aims to stampede the populace into embracing one of the most dubious and unworkable policy prescriptions ever presented to the public eye.

As a strategy it was as stupid as the treaty itself. Many countries are not influenced much by public opinion; China’s approach to the issue has consistently focused on China’s national interest rather than on any utopian dreams of green global governance. Key actors in Copenhagen and elsewhere have looked to cash in on what they see as a neurotic western overreaction; the number and power of such actors ensures that no global treaty will ever reflect the concerns and priorities of green activists but will be warped and distorted to serve the special interests of powerful countries.

Meanwhile, excitable climate activists inevitably stretched the available scientific evidence to build public support in the west. Like Dean Acheson at the dawn of the Cold War, they were “clearer than truth” in the interests of persuading the public to back what they considered to be an ambitious but vital agenda. As evidence of the exaggerations and inaccuracies trickled into view, public confidence in the scientific case for global warming fell and the greens are still scrambling to recapture the intellectual authority they lost in 2009-2010.

The real issue here is not climate science. It is true that, as many critics attest, Gore fundamentally misstates the nature of the scientific discussion of climate change and, especially, the extremely complex questions associated with interventions in it. He overstates what is known, disregards the inherent uncertainties involved in the study of a complex system like the climate, understates the significance of the remaining gray areas, and demagogues the science to get more out of it than his case really merits. The contrast between the intellectually unscrupulous propaganda he makes (the green-friendly UK has ruled that Gore’s Oscar winning film can only be shown in schools if teachers alert students to its errors of scientific fact) and Gore’s self-presentation as a condescending, de haut en bas Great Explainer patiently enlightening the rubes so infuriates many of his opponents that they cannot help themselves. They start arguing with him about hockey sticks and CO2.

This is exactly what Mr. Gore wants; it moves the argument onto his strongest terrain. Whatever one thinks of the scientific evidence for climate change, Gore is on much stronger ground when he argues that the earth is warming than when he argues that a great green global treaty on the lines he proposes can ever be either adopted or enforced. There are a great many scientists and scientific journals who agree with Mr. Gore about climate change. Perhaps they are all frauds and mountebanks — but that is a tough case to make in the court of public opinion. Once the argument moves to science it goes into complex and tricky terrain from which the broad lay public will draw only uncertain conclusions. Gore does not win the scientific argument as decisively as he would like — but his opponents cannot deliver a political death blow there, either. The lay public perceives angry experts and dueling theories with a large but not totally convincing preponderance of evidence on Gore’s side.

There is, however, no serious evidence in either history or political studies to suggest that his approach to the problem can ever be adopted or will ever work. Like war, global warming may well be real — but that doesn’t mean a treaty can help.

The green movement’s core tactic is not to “hide the decline” or otherwise to cook the books of science. Its core tactic to cloak a comically absurd, impossibly complex and obviously impractical political program in the authority of science. Let anyone attack the cretinous and rickety construct of policies, trade-offs, offsets and bribes by which the greens plan to govern the world economy in the twenty first century, and they attack you as an anti-science bigot.

To argue with these people about science is to miss the core point. Even if the science is exactly as Mr. Gore claims, his policies are still useless. His advocacy is still a distraction. The movement he heads is still a ship of fools.

It is a waste of time to talk science with Al Gore. It is a waste of time to listen to him at all. That, apparently, is what the world at long last is beginning to understand. The policy makers and the heads of state who only two years ago were ready to follow Gore up the mountain have softly and quietly tuned him out.

These days, he can’t even get his picture on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Published June 27, 2011, by The American Interest blog site

See also “The Failure of Al Gore: Part I (June 24, 2011)” and “Part III (July 1, 2011)”

Posted in Climate Change, Global Warming, Political Theory | No Comments »

Climate Catastrophe Cancelled

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

[ Transcript in English ]

Finnish Broadcasting Co. YLE, TV1, Nov 11th 2009 at 8.00 pm.

[LINK HERE] to Finnish Broadcasting Web Site to view pictures of graphs shown on the broadcast.

Voiceover (VO), reporter Martti Backman: Governments around the world are preparing for a grand climate conference, which should decide how humanity responds to the threat of a climate catastrophe. Negotiations are under way to replace the Kyoto treaty with a new treaty of Copenhagen.

VO: The threat is based on assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. According to the panel, the Earth is going through an unprecedented period of temperature increase, caused by man and his carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal and oil.

(Pictures from An Incovenient Truth)

The Earth’s climate has always been changing. But now we are told that warming is happening faster than ever. The view is based on this figure.

(Picture: The global warming hockey stick graph. Music: Electric organ sounds from an ice-hockey game)

VO: This ten-year-old figure, dubbed as the hockey stick, was meant to revolutionize the dominant view of global climate history. The stick’s handle stretches for almost a thousand years, creating an impression of a steady climate, and its’ rising blade in the late 1900′s is proof of sudden, strong warming, which is caused by man.

According to the older view, climate has naturally varied considerably over the past millennium, and in the middle ages it was clearly warmer than today. But in the hockey stick graph, the Medieval Warm Period and the little ice age after it have disappeared. The hockey stick was promoted to honorary status in the IPCC’s third assessment report’s cover. It became the logo of catastrophic climate change. The stick was used to back up the claim that, 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium.

Steve McIntyre: ”At the time I was doing mining exploration business and I just wondered, in the most casual possible way, how they knew that. So that led me start looking at the data and six years later, I’m still doing it”.

VO: The Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre had doubts about the scientific strength of the hockey stick graph, and he decided to unravel the numbers behind it, with the diligence of an auditor. The father of the hockey stick, professor Michael Mann resisted McIntyre’s efforts to get hold of his research data, and it wasn’t until 2003 that McIntyre succeeded in getting access to the data.

McIntyre: ” It turned out that he had modified a principal components method incorrectly and the modified method produced hockey stick-shaped graphs ninety-nine percent of the time. It also emphasized a class of proxies, strip-bark bristlecone pines that previous authors had said were not actually a temperature proxy”.

VO: Temperature records measured by thermometers are at most 150 years long. Earlier histories have to be reconstructed with so-called proxies, or surrogate thermometers. Past climates are deduced for example from tree rings and lake sediments or varves.

The shape of the hockey stick was to a large extent caused by tree rings from a few North American bristlecone pines. McIntyre succeeded in deconstructing the stick. The United States National Academy of Sciences set up a committee to investigate his findings. The committee found that, McIntyre had been right to question the temperature reconstruction and announced that, bristlecone pines should no more be used as proof of climate change.

Steve McIntyre, an outsider in climate science, had succeeded in breaking Mann’s hockey stick, the icon of the climate change movement. But the story was not over. A whole factory started to produce new sticks to replace the broken one.

McIntyre: “There was another class of study, which used a series of tree rings from a scientist called Keith Briffa, from Northern Russia, from a site called Yamal, and this had an even bigger hockey stick-shape than the Michael Mann -hockey stick and this one – - has been used in multiple studies as well and so, over the past few years I’ve been trying to get information about how this particular series was constructed”.

VO: Keith Briffa is one of the big names in climate research. He is a professor in the IPCC’s scientific stronghold in Britain, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. He is also a lead author of the past climate chapters of the IPCC’s assessment reports.

McIntyre had to fight for three years to get Briffa’s Yamal data under his microscope. But a lot happened before that.

The well-known medieval warmth was disturbing to the scientists close to the IPCC, the so-called hockey team. In the mid 1990′s the American geologist David Deming received an astonishing e-mail, in which one prominent climate researcher announced to his colleagues:

Actor’s voice: “We have to get rid of the medieval warm period.”

(Picture of Deming’s written statement from the Senate Environmental committee website)

VO: Deming testified about the e-mail at hearings in the United States congress.

Soon after this e-mail, Keith Briffa published a study, where the millennial temperature history looked like this: (the upper curve appears on screen)

VO: The Briffa study was based on a very limited number of tree ring samples from the so-called Polar Urals region in Siberia. With the help of just three short tree ring series he claimed that the year 1032 in the middle of the balmy middle ages, had been the coldest in the millennium. And the modern period appeared to be very warm. A real hockey stick.

A couple of years later, Briffa’s colleague returned to Siberia to drill new tree ring samples. When they were added to Briffa’s original data, the curve looked surprisingly like this: (lower curve appears on screen, the curves merge).

The hockey stick had disappeared, and the medieval warm period had been reinstated as warmer than the present.

McIntyre: “Unfortunately, this updated Polar Urals result was never published and Briffa, in his works since 2000, has made no – - reference to this updated study”.

VO: The updated Polar Urals series was forgotten. Instead, Briffa replaced his original weak Polar Urals data in 2000 with new tree ring series drilled from the Yamal peninsula hundreds of kilometers away. With this data, the climate reconstruction looks like this: (lower curve appears).

VO: The blade of the hockey stick rises at the end of the millennium stronger than ever and the medieval warm period is clearly shadowed by it, if not made to vanish completely.

Yamal data became the most important temperature proxy for all later hockey sticks, and it was used in at least seven temperature reconstruction studies.

But McIntyre knew something about the construction of hockey sticks, and he could not believe in the Yamal curve. The contradiction to established paleoclimatic knowledge was simply too big.

McIntyre: “And the question is just, why was the Polar Urals update not reported? And if the Yamal series was going to be used rather than Polar Urals, that should have been clearly explained to readers. The criteria for preferring one rather than the other should have been also clearly explained”.

VO: Finnish Lapland lies at the same latitudes as Yamal, and there are plenty of Finnish studies on past climates based on tree rings. These studies are considered to be among the best in the world, for their sample quality as well as methodologically. What kinds of hockey sticks have been found in them?

Kari Mielikäinen, professor of forest research (Metla, Finland): “We have this long series going back over 7,000 years, and there’s no hockey stick there.”

VO: Briffa’s Yamal hockey stick was published in the prestigious journal Science. McIntyre asked for a copy of the raw data from Yamal.

McIntyre: ”Briffa refused. The editors of Science refused to require Briffa to provide the measurement data…”

VO: It took McIntyre three years to get hold of the data, although one of the most important rules in science is that, raw data should be made available to anybody who is interested in checking and replicating a study.

Finally Briffa made a “mistake”. He published yet another article based on the Yamal data in a journal of the British Royal Society. The prestigious scientific society held on to the principle of data transparency and forced Briffa to make his raw data public. In September this year, the Canadian climate auditor had his forebodings confirmed.

McIntyre: ”So after, after sort of, three years of frustration and trying to examine the data that Briffa had used and probably four years of people saying that this data supported the Michael Mann -work on other grounds, it was really quite frustrating to find that it was built up on ten trees that had been not randomly selected”.

VO: So the Yamal data included only ten living trees from the 1990′s, and the rapid growth of these individuals caused the steep rise of the hockey stick blade. In Finnish dendrological studies, hardly anything would be said based on just ten trees. What’s demanded is at least 50 trees for each year, and several other quality criteria as well. How have these criteria been observed in the Yamal data?

Kari Mielikäinen (professor of forest research, Finnish Forest Research Institute Metla): “Rather weakly it seems. It looks like there are problems with both cohort structure and also the regional distribution (of the sample).”

VO: McIntyre conducted a simple statistical exercise. He replaced the 10-tree Yamal sample by a larger 34-tree sample collected from the same area. (In this figure) the added material is depicted with the black curve, and the combination of both data sets as a green curve.

VO: The hockey stick blade disappears, or actually turns downwards. And the medieval period is again warmer than the present.

McIntyre: ”I think that the preferential selection of Yamal, rather than Polar Urals, biases the result that’s presented to the public”.

VO: All good proxy-based climatic reconstructions should compare the results with adjacently located measurements from thermometers. When this is done in the Yamal area, it emerges that none of the near-by weather stations have recorded warming that would explain the hockey stick graph. In other words, if those ten trees have grown abnormally fast in the 1990′s it is due to something else than heat.

Mielikäinen: “If you choose one convenient series just to prove a point, be it a hockey stick or anything, you are definitely on a wrong track.”

VO: Problems with tree ring studies will be addressed next summer in an international scientific congress chaired by Mielikäinen in Rovaniemi (Finnish Lapland).

(pause)

VO: The author of the Yamal reconstruction, Keith Briffa, has disputed the criticism aimed at his study, but it still draws heated debate.

Briffa’s employer, the IPCC-affiliated climate research unit CRU maintains a global database of temperature measurements from weather stations. This database is central to the conclusion that global temperatures have risen to a worrying extent during the past 40 years. The CRU has combined thermometer readings into a global average with a method which it refuses to disclose, but which allegedly has brought added value to the raw data. McIntyre has requested the data from CRU director Phil Jones, but he has been turned down, and others as well.

McIntyre: “An Australian named Warwick Hughes had asked for the data and Warwick Hughes had published some articles that had been critical of how the temperature histories had been prepared, and Jones said ‘Why should I send – we have twenty-five years invested in this, why should I send the data to you when your only objective is to find anything wrong with it?”, which is a very unscientific statement.”

VO: The CRU database is the most important scientific justification for the demands that the most ambitious treaty in mankind’s history should be finalized in Copenhagen in December. In spite of this, there is no way to replicate its’ validity.

Recently the CRU director Phil Jones has announced that the original measurement data does not exist anymore because of data storage difficulties. A dog ate the world’s most important scientific measurement homework.

(Pause, move to Korttajärvi, central Finland.)

VO: Materials for the hockey stick factory have also been collected from Finland.

Reporter Backman, standing on a jetty: “This small Korttajärvi in Jyväskylä has become a focal point in the international climate debate. Based on samples taken from its’ bottom sediments, some foreign researchers claim that, an unprecedented warming occurred at the end of the 20th century. Finnish researchers, on the other hand, have used the lake to show that climate has always changed, even more than recently, and irrespective of human influence.”

VO: Five years ago, one of the Korttajärvi researchers responded to MOT’s question about the IPCC’s claim that recent temperatures are highest in a thousand years.

(Interview footage from MOT archive, 2004)

Ojala: “Based on these studies it seems that this claim is not quite true, at least for the Northern hemisphere, at least for Scandinavia. We’ve clearly had much warmer winters here in the Nautajärvi and Korttajärvi area, than what we are experiencing now.”

Question by Backman: “What’s your estimate, how much warmer was the medieval period in Finland, compared to the present?”

Ojala: “It is difficult to say exactly. But we may speak of half a degree (Celsius), even a whole degree based on several European studies.”

VO: At least two research teams close to the IPCC added the sediment data collected by Finnish researchers as part of their own paleoclimatic model reconstructions. This was done with agreement, but the Finns were surprised to see that in a study published this September, their data and interpretation of its’ meaning had been turned upside down. Here is the millennial temperature reconstruction from Korttajärvi done by the Finns:

VO: And here we have the same data presented by the hockey team:

VO: A nice hockey stick has emerged from the Korttajärvi mud. What in the Finnish study signified cold, had been turned into warmth in the IPCC science and vice versa. This interpretation passed the scientific peer review.

Dr. Atte Korhola, professor of environmental change at the University of Helsinki, is an expert in lake sediment studies.

Atte Korhola: “Some curves and data have been used upside down, and this is not a compliment to climate science. And in this context it is relevant to note that the same people who are behind this are running what may be the world’s most influential climate website, RealClimate. With this they are contributing to the credibility of science – or reducing it. And in my opinion this is alarming because it bears on the credibility of the field, and if these kinds of things emerge often – that data have been used insufficiently or even falsely, or if data series have been truncated or they have not been appropriately published (for replication), it obviously erodes the credibility, and this is a serious problem.”

VO: The author of the September study, Darrell Kaufman, admitted his mistake two weeks ago and sent a correction to the journal Science. But the main author of a previous study, Michael Mann, the father of the original hockey stick, still sticks to the claim that a hockey stick was found at the bottom of lake Korttajärvi.

(Pause)

VO: The climate studies used by the UN affiliated IPCC are usually computer simulations, based on models emulating the behavior of global climate. Some traditional researchers have criticized studies based on just computer simulations, calling it “playstation climatology”.

According to the most prominent computer models, human activity should cause global warming that looks like this:

(Graph showing rising projections to 2100.)

But the measurements show that, real temperature has so far varied like this:

(Graph showing land and satellite based measurements of global temperature until 2009 – clearly below the model simulations.)

VO: A poorly known fact is that, global climate stopped warming after a two-decade period (in the late 1900′s). Since 1998 there has been no statistically measured global warming. Instead, the climate has slightly cooled for several years. Not one of the climate models used by the IPCC was able to predict this turn of events.

Some new studies predict the cooling phase to continue longer, maybe for a couple of decades. In spite of that, many leading scientists affiliated with the IPCC still claim that global warming continues, even faster than predicted.

Meanwhile, some of the catastrophic consequences predicted by the models have been revealed as overblown. The Arctic sea ice has started to recover from its’ minimum area recorded two years ago, Antarctic melting has slowed down to a minimum during measured history, sea level rise has not accelerated from its’ previous rate, and hurricane seasons have been mild. Nature has not obeyed the manuscript.

Korhola: “In late summer 2008 I was in England, where all newspapers ran a front-page story about a scenario predicting the total disappearance of Arctic sea ice by that summer. And these predictions were distributed by two leading researchers of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, Mark Serreze and Jay Zwally. Well, what happened was that these predictions did not come true, but that 2008 was clearly a better year than 2007 with the collapse in ice extent, which was apparently caused by anomalous atmospheric pressure and wind conditions in the Arctic regions.”

VO: Richard Lindzen is a professor of climate science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technololy, one of the world’s most prestigious science universities. He is one of the few scientists who do not study climate by simulating it with computer models. He studies observations from the real natural world.

Richard Lindzen: “This field is completely sick in that way, I mean, you have models you know that they don’t work, you know they don’t reproduce a – phenomenon, but you bend data to fit the model. I don’t think this can go on for long without being embarrassing”.

VO: In September, Lindzen published a study that hit the core of the climate debate. Based on radiation measurements, he calculated how much the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration could really warm up the Earth.

The Earth is protected from cosmic freezing by the atmospheric gas blanket. According to the catastrophic warming theory, the CO2 emitted from burning oil and coal thickens the blanket and thus causes the temperature to rise dangerously.

An undisputed scientific fact is that, a doubling of CO2 in itself is enough to cause a one degree (Celsius) of atmospheric warming, which would not be a problem. But the climate models have been fed with the assumption that the warming caused by CO2 increased the concentration of water vapor, which in turn would further thicken the blanket and multiply the total warming a couple of times, up to a fateful six degrees.

Lindzen: “The models do exactly what they are supposed to, given their sensitivity. They all show the blanket thickens and it thickens by the amount consistent with the sensitivity of the models do of doubling of CO2. Do the same thing to nature, and it does exactly the opposite, and it does it more powerfully. So you have all the models agreeing with each other, and all of them wrong compared to nature.”

VO: The question of water vapor feedback is the key in determining the threat of a climate catastrophe. The climate models assume that, the higher the surface temperature rises, the thicker the warming blanket gets. But is this really happening?

Lindzen and his team compared sea-level temperatures with the satellite-based measurements of incoming and outgoing radiation in the upper atmosphere. While all computer models show that, as the surface temperature rises, less radiation escapes to space:

(Graph of 11 model simulations with downward sloping lines)

VO: The reality measured from nature is exactly diametrical:

(The 12th diagram ‘ERBE’ by Lindzen added to the graph set, showing a rising curve)

VO: It turned out that, cloud cover changes as the surface warms, but it was not getting thicker; it was thinning. In this way, nature prevents the atmosphere from excessive heating. The cloud cover reacts to temperature changes like an eye’s iris to changes in light, by contracting or expanding. Lindzen calls this thermostatic behavior the Iris-effect.

And what is the significance of this effect to the estimates of human-caused climatic warming?

Lindzen: “It’s saying that, instead of the one degree being magnified, it should be shrunk by at least a half.”

Question by Backman: “And how much would this sensitivity be in degrees of Celsius?”

Lindzen: “Now, in terms of degrees of Celsius it says that we shall expect doubling the CO2 might contribute in the order of half a degree to the global mean temperature anomaly.”

Backman: “And how big a problem is that?”

Lindzen: “None. We see that from month to month, year to year all the time. I mean the truth is, we have seen already two thirds, three quarters of a degree. This is not the period when the world is falling apart. It’s a period when the population has grown, when famine has been defeated, when people live longer than ever and there is large number of people that are supposedly terribly warming the earth, are living better for the most part.”

VO: Lindzen’s study shows with measurements that the assumption of an impending climate catastrophe is basically wrong. The IPCC camp has reacted to the study with complege silence.

Lindzen: “I think it’s because it’s so simple and obvious, and I think even the alarmist groups know that the better part of wisdom is not to publicize this.”

VO: Professor Atte Kohola is not skeptical of the potential threat of climatic warming like his colleague in Boston, but both scientists are worried about the politicizion of climate science.

Korhola: “Especially now with the Copenhagen conference approaching, one gets the impression that also among scientists, many have lost control. Especially when you compare original studies to how they are presented to the public, in the mass media, there is a huge gap in what comes out. We get a lot of material with terms like dramatic, catastrophic, unprecedented, and among some researchers there is even talk of planetary doom and saving the planet.”

Lindzen: “The real question is, why the last few years have seen this huge boost with all these crazy movies – “Inconvenient truth” – nonsense spewed out, hysteria? We are all going to die, if we don’t change our light bulbs immediately. I can only say, somebody must have noticed that the temperature has stopped increasing and they had all these agendas by now to make billions of dollars, and do this and do that, get people to pay taxes and feel happy about it, because they are saving the earth and so on. So you have the politicians, the bureaucrats, the scientists and so on, and all felt you know that if the temperature continues this way, this is finished if we don’t get it through immediately so the volume has increased.”

VO: MOT asked for an interview with the director of the Finnish meteorological institute, Dr. Petteri Taalas, who is sympathetic to the IPCC’s main line. He refused.

END.
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Posted in Climate Change, Editorial Page, Global Warming | 1 Comment »

India and Climate Change

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

By William Antholis

This essay by the head of the Brookings Institution further shows why there in no JUSTICE in the urgency for suppressing CO2 gas.

As the world community gears up for another round of climate-change talks – and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrives in Delhi on Sunday for meetings with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – a central issue will be how to bring developing countries into a climate-change pact.

Developing countries such as India do not want to pledge to reduce their emissions until industrial countries have first demonstrated not just pledges but actual emissions cuts. Industrial countries, for their part, generally recognize that they should act first. But they want some assurance that their reductions won’t be meaningless in the face of rapidly rising emissions in China and India.

India’s Mr. Singh has become the spokesperson for “equity” in emissions reductions. Mr. Singh has acknowledged that climate change is a problem and has said that India will do its part. Like all developing country leaders, however, he points to the fact that industrial countries have contributed a century’s worth of emissions to the global atmosphere while developing countries have only started to use, in his phrase, their “share of the global atmosphere.” He has pledged that India will never exceed the per capita emissions of industrialized nations. He also said that India will only consider signing on to a climate pact when a common global per capita emissions target has been established.

When it comes to saving the planet, there are strong reasons to consider per capita emissions as part of a burden sharing formula. However, we should be cautious about making this the magic bullet that resolves the dispute between industrial and developing countries. Indeed, the Indians themselves should be cautious. It undermines a core part of their argument.

At some level, Mr. Singh is right. India has not contributed historically to the problem. U.S. per capita emissions are probably 12 times those of India’s. If the U.S. meets the ambitious goal of cutting emissions 83% by 2050 – as stipulated in the recent energy bill passed by the House of Representatives – U.S per capita emissions would drop from 20 tons to three or four tons per person annually.

That per capita standard would still be double India’s current level of two tons per person. Because emissions linger in the atmosphere for 50 years, scientists tell us that all countries must cut their emissions over the next four decades to protect the planet. So if the U.S., the EU, and Japan slash emissions, but China, India and other developing countries continue to emit greenhouse gases unabated, by 2050 the overall global emissions might decrease, but not by enough.

But that’s not the only reason to be concerned about the per capita standard.

First, a per capita emissions standard does not consider population growth. It only looks at the quantity of greenhouse gases each person emits. That standard accepts, in essence, that unmitigated population growth is fine. This undermines a careful consensus developed over a decade ago, with India’s support, at the 1994 United Nations International Conference on Population and Development. After a century of inaction, the world community agreed that population growth needed to be managed. Even under that mandate, China and India together may add almost a billion more people to the world’s population by 2050.

Second, countries like India are using a double standard when they talk about history. In essence, developing nations are arguing that the U.S., the EU and Japan need to act first on climate change. They need to make up for their history of using fossil fuels, even though these nations did not know at the time that they were threatening the climate.

Yet there is also a population-growth history that can’t be ignored. During at least the last half of the 20th century, population growth exploded in developing nations. From 1950 to 2000, world population grew 2.5 billion to six billion – an increase of about 140%. Over that period, India went from 350 million people to over a billion – up 182%, outpacing even China’s increase. By comparison, the U.S. grew from 157 million to 287 million – a rate of increase that is well below the world average.

If developed nations are held responsible for emissions that they historically contributed, oblivious to their impact on climate change, why shouldn’t developing nations take responsibility for producing generations of people who will generate emissions into the future? Put another way, it is unclear whether we should use the population figures of 1950, 2000 or 2050 in judging per capita contributions to climate change.

Fighting climate change is a complex and dynamic undertaking. As with most metrics, the per capita standard is too simple. It doesn’t fully acknowledge the emissions of previous and future generations. When Mrs. Clinton meets with Mr. Singh, she should make it clear that a static per capita metric alone cannot solve the problem of climate change.

Mr. Antholis, who served on the National Security Council during the Kyoto negotiations, is managing director of the Brookings Institution.

Reprinted from The Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2009.

Posted in Climate Change, Editorial Page, Ethics | No Comments »

Don't Treat CO2 as a Pollutant

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

by Mark W. Hendrickson

From higher energy bills to lost jobs, the impact of carbon regulations will hurt us far more than CO2 itself ever could.

A few days before this year’s Earth Day, America’s ideological greens received a present they have been desiring for years: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) – responding to a 2007 US Supreme Court ruling – officially designated carbon dioxide (CO2) as a pollutant. That spurred Democrats in Congress to push a major climate change bill. In the next 25 years, their massive cap-and-trade scheme would, according to a Heritage Foundation study, inflict gross domestic product losses of $9.4 trillion, raise an average family’s energy bill by $1,241, and destroy some 1,145,000 jobs. Democrats want it passed by July 4.

Get ready for a veritable Pandora’s box of complications.

A generation ago, it was considered great progress against pollution when catalytic converters were added to automobile engines to change poisonous carbon monoxide to benign carbon dioxide. Now, CO2 has been demoted.

The EPA’s characterization of CO2 as a pollutant brings into question the natural order of things. By the EPA’s logic, either God or Mother Nature (whichever creator you believe in) seriously goofed. After all, CO2 is the base of our food chain. “Pollutants” are supposed to be harmful to life, not helpful to it, aren’t they?

Of course, it is true (although environmentalists often ignore it when trying to ban such useful chemicals as pesticides, insecticides, Alar, PCBs, and others) that “the dose makes the poison.” Too much oxygen, for example, poses danger to human life. So what is the “right” concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere? There is no right answer to this question. The concentration of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere fluctuated greatly long before humans appeared on Earth, and that concentration has fluctuated since then, too.

The current concentration is approximately 385 parts per million. Some scientists maintain that 1,000 parts per million would provide an ideal atmosphere for plant life, accelerating plant growth and multiplying yields, thereby sustaining far more animal and human life than is currently possible. Whatever standard the EPA selects will be arbitrary.

“Forget about the plants,” say the greens. “What we’re trying to control is how warm Earth’s atmosphere gets.” To which I reply, “With all due respect, are you kidding me?”

As with a “right” concentration of CO2, what is the “right” average global temperature? For 7,000 of the past 10,000 years, Earth was cooler than it is now; mankind prospers more in warm climates than cold climates; and the Antarctic icecap was significantly larger during the warmer mid-Holocene period than it is today. Are you sure warmer is bad or wrong?

And how do you propose to regulate Earth’s temperature when as much as three-quarters of the variability is due to variations in solar activity, with the remaining one-quarter due to changes in Earth’s orbit, axis, and albedo (reflectivity)? This truly is “mission impossible.” Mankind can no more regulate Earth’s temperature than it can the tides.

Even if the “greenhouse effect” were greater than it actually is, the EPA and Congress would be powerless to alter it for several reasons:

    1. Human activity accounts for less than 4 percent of global CO2 emissions.
    2. CO2 itself accounts for only 10 or 20 percent of the greenhouse effect.

This discloses the capricious nature of the EPA’s decision to classify CO2 as a pollutant, for if CO2 is a pollutant because it is a greenhouse gas, then the most common greenhouse gas of all – water vapor, which accounts for more than three-quarters of the atmosphere’s greenhouse effect – should be regulated, too. The EPA isn’t going after water vapor, of course, because then everyone would realize how absurd climate-control regulation really is.

    3. Even if Americans were to eliminate their CO2 emissions completely, total human emissions of CO2 would still increase as billions of people around the world continue to develop economically.

Clearly, it is beyond the ken of mortals to answer the metaquestions about the right concentration of CO2, or the optimal global average temperature, or to control CO2 levels in the atmosphere. I feel sorry for the professionals at the EPA who are now expected to come up with answers for these unanswerable questions.

However, I do not feel sorry for the political appointees, like climate czar Carol Browner, because it looks as if they are about to get what they evidently want – the power to increase their power over Americans’ lives and pocketbooks via CO2 emission regulations.

From higher energy bills to lost jobs, the impact of CO2 regulations will hurt us far more than CO2 itself ever could. Let’s nail shut the lid on this Pandora’s box before it swings wide open.

Mark W. Hendrickson is an adjunct faculty member, economist, and contributing scholar with The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College, where this essay was first published. Also published in the Christian Science Monitor, June 23, 2009

Posted in Climate Change, Editorial Page, Global Warming | 2 Comments »

Bound to Burn

Monday, April 27th, 2009

by Peter Huber

If, on the other hand, we persist in building green bridges to nowhere, we will make things worse, not better. Good intentions aren’t enough. Turned into ineffectual action, they can cost the earth and accelerate its ruin at the same time.

Like medieval priests, today’s carbon brokers will sell you an indulgence that forgives your carbon sins. It will run you about $500 for 5 tons of forgiveness – about how much the typical American needs every year. Or about $2,000 a year for a typical four-person household. Your broker will spend the money on such things as reducing methane emissions from hog farms in Brazil.

But if you really want to make a difference, you must send a check large enough to forgive the carbon emitted by four poor Brazilian households, too – because they’re not going to do it themselves. To cover all five households, then, send $4,000. And you probably forgot to send in a check last year, and you might forget again in the future, so you’d best make it an even $40,000, to take care of a decade right now. If you decline to write your own check while insisting that to save the world we must ditch the carbon, you are just burdening your already sooty soul with another ton of self-righteous hypocrisy. And you can’t possibly afford what it will cost to forgive that.

If making carbon this personal seems rude, then think globally instead. During the presidential race, Barack Obama was heard to remark that he would bankrupt the coal industry. No one can doubt Washington’s power to bankrupt almost anything – in the United States. But China is adding 100 gigawatts of coal-fired electrical capacity a year. That’s another whole United States’ worth of coal consumption added every three years, with no stopping point in sight. Much of the rest of the developing world is on a similar path.

Cut to the chase. We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions – because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still.

We don’t control the global supply of carbon.

Ten countries ruled by nasty people control 80 percent of the planet’s oil reserves – about 1 trillion barrels, currently worth about $40 trillion. If $40 trillion worth of gold were located where most of the oil is, one could only scoff at any suggestion that we might somehow persuade the nasty people to leave the wealth buried. They can lift most of their oil at a cost well under $10 a barrel. They will drill. They will pump. And they will find buyers. Oil is all they’ve got.

Poor countries all around the planet are sitting on a second, even bigger source of carbon – almost a trillion tons of cheap, easily accessible coal. They also control most of the planet’s third great carbon reservoir – the rain forests and soil. They will keep squeezing the carbon out of cheap coal, and cheap forest, and cheap soil, because that’s all they’ve got. Unless they can find something even cheaper. But they won’t – not any time in the foreseeable future.

We no longer control the demand for carbon, either. The 5 billion poor – the other 80 percent – are already the main problem, not us. Collectively, they emit 20 percent more greenhouse gas than we do. We burn a lot more carbon individually, but they have a lot more children. Their fecundity has eclipsed our gluttony, and the gap is now widening fast. China, not the United States, is now the planet’s largest emitter. Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and others are in hot pursuit. And these countries have all made it clear that they aren’t interested in spending what money they have on low-carb diets. It is idle to argue, as some have done, that global warming can be solved – decades hence – at a cost of 1 to 2 percent of the global economy. Eighty percent of the global population hasn’t signed on to pay more than 0 percent.

Accepting this last, self-evident fact, the Kyoto Protocol divides the world into two groups. The roughly 1.2 billion citizens of industrialized countries are expected to reduce their emissions. The other 5 billion – including both China and India, each of which is about as populous as the entire Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – aren’t. These numbers alone guarantee that humanity isn’t going to reduce global emissions at any point in the foreseeable future – unless it does it the old-fashioned way, by getting poorer. But the current recession won’t last forever, and the long-term trend is clear. Their populations and per-capita emissions are rising far faster than ours could fall under any remotely plausible carbon-reduction scheme.

Might we simply buy their cooperation? Various plans have circulated for having the rich pay the poor to stop burning down rain forests and to lower greenhouse-gas emissions from primitive agricultural practices. But taking control of what belongs to someone else ultimately means buying it. Over the long term, we would in effect have to buy up a large fraction of all the world’s forests, soil, coal, and oil – and then post guards to make sure that poor people didn’t sneak in and grab all the carbon anyway. Buying off people just doesn’t fly when they outnumber you four to one.

Might we instead manage to give the world something cheaper than carbon? The moon-shot law of economics says yes, of course we can. If we just put our minds to it, it will happen. Atom bomb, moon landing, ultracheap energy – all it takes is a triumph of political will.

Really? For the very poorest, this would mean beating the price of the free rain forest that they burn down to clear land to plant a subsistence crop. For the slightly less poor, it would mean beating the price of coal used to generate electricity at under 3 cents per kilowatt-hour.

And with one important exception, which we will return to shortly, no carbon-free fuel or technology comes remotely close to being able to do that. Fossil fuels are extremely cheap because geological forces happen to have created large deposits of these dense forms of energy in accessible places. Find a mountain of coal, and you can just shovel gargantuan amounts of energy into the boxcars.

Shoveling wind and sun is much, much harder. Windmills are now 50-story skyscrapers. Yet one windmill generates a piddling 2 to 3 megawatts. A jumbo jet needs 100 megawatts to get off the ground; Google is building 100-megawatt server farms. Meeting New York City’s total energy demand would require 13,000 of those skyscrapers spinning at top speed, which would require scattering about 50,000 of them across the state, to make sure that you always hit enough windy spots. To answer the howls of green protest that inevitably greet realistic engineering estimates like these, note that real-world systems must be able to meet peak, not average, demand; that reserve margins are essential; and that converting electric power into liquid or gaseous fuels to power the existing transportation and heating systems would entail substantial losses. What was Mayor Bloomberg thinking when he suggested that he might just tuck windmills into Manhattan? Such thoughts betray a deep ignorance about how difficult it is to get a lot of energy out of sources as thin and dilute as wind and sun.

It’s often suggested that technology improvements and mass production will sharply lower the cost of wind and solar. But engineers have pursued these technologies for decades, and while costs of some components have fallen, there is no serious prospect of costs plummeting and performance soaring as they have in our laptops and cell phones. When you replace conventional with renewable energy, everything gets bigger, not smaller – and bigger costs more, not less. Even if solar cells themselves were free, solar power would remain very expensive because of the huge structures and support systems required to extract large amounts of electricity from a source so weak that it takes hours to deliver a tan.

Nuclear Power

This is why the (few) greens ready to accept engineering and economic reality have suddenly emerged as avid proponents of nuclear power. In the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident – which didn’t harm anyone, and wouldn’t even have damaged the reactor core if the operators had simply kept their hands off the switches and let the automatic safety systems do their job – ostensibly green antinuclear activists unwittingly boosted U.S. coal consumption by about 400 million tons per year. The United States would be in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol today if we could simply undo their handiwork and conjure back into existence the nuclear plants that were in the pipeline in nuclear power’s heyday. Nuclear power is fantastically compact, and – as America’s nuclear navy, several commercial U.S. operators, France, Japan, and a handful of other countries have convincingly established – it’s both safe and cheap wherever engineers are allowed to get on with it.

But getting on with it briskly is essential, because costs hinge on the huge, up-front capital investment in the power plant. Years of delay between the capital investment and when it starts earning a return are ruinous. Most of the developed world has made nuclear power unaffordable by surrounding it with a regulatory process so sluggish and unpredictable that no one will pour a couple of billion dollars into a new plant, for the good reason that no one knows when (or even if) the investment will be allowed to start making money.

And countries that don’t trust nuclear power on their own soil must hesitate to share the technology with countries where you never know who will be in charge next year, or what he might decide to do with his nuclear toys. So much for the possibility that cheap nuclear power might replace carbon-spewing sources of energy in the developing world. Moreover, even India and China, which have mastered nuclear technologies, are deploying far more new coal capacity.

Remember, finally, that most of the cost of carbon-based energy resides not in the fuels but in the gigantic infrastructure of furnaces, turbines, and engines. Those costs are sunk, which means that carbon-free alternatives – with their own huge, attendant, front-end capital costs – must be cheap enough to beat carbon fuels that already have their infrastructure in place. That won’t happen in our lifetimes.

Another argument commonly advanced is that getting over carbon will, nevertheless, be comparatively cheap, because it will get us over oil, too – which will impoverish our enemies and save us a bundle at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. But uranium aside, the most economical substitute for oil is, in fact, electricity generated with coal. Cheap coal-fired electricity has been, is, and will continue to be a substitute for oil, or a substitute for natural gas, which can in turn substitute for oil. By sharply boosting the cost of coal electricity, the war on carbon will make us more dependent on oil, not less.

The first place where coal displaces oil is in the electric power plant itself. When oil prices spiked in the early 1980s, U.S. utilities quickly switched to other fuels, with coal leading the pack; the coal-fired plants now being built in China, India, and other developing countries are displacing diesel generators. More power plants burning coal to produce cheap electricity can also mean less natural gas used to generate electricity. And less used for industrial, commercial, and residential heating, welding, and chemical processing, as these users switch to electrically powered alternatives. The gas that’s freed up this way can then substitute for diesel fuel in heavy trucks, delivery vehicles, and buses. And coal-fired electricity will eventually begin displacing gasoline, too, as soon as plug-in hybrid cars start recharging their batteries directly from the grid.

To top it all, using electricity generated in large part by coal to power our passenger cars would lower carbon emissions – even in Indiana, which generates 75 percent of its electricity with coal. Big power plants are so much more efficient than the gasoline engines in our cars that a plug-in hybrid car running on electricity supplied by Indiana’s current grid still ends up more carbon-frugal than comparable cars burning gasoline in a conventional engine under the hood. Old-guard energy types have been saying this for decades. In a major report released last March, the World Wildlife Fund finally concluded that they were right all along.

But true carbon zealots won’t settle for modest reductions in carbon emissions when fat targets beckon. They see coal-fired electricity as the dragon to slay first. Huge, stationary sources can’t run or hide, and the cost of doing without them doesn’t get rung up in plain view at the gas pump. California, Pennsylvania, and other greener-than-thou states have made flatlining electricity consumption the linchpin of their war on carbon. That is the one certain way to halt the displacement of foreign oil by cheap, domestic electricity.

The oil-coal economics come down to this. Per unit of energy delivered, coal costs about one-fifth as much as oil – but contains one-third more carbon. High carbon taxes (or tradable permits, or any other economic equivalent) sharply narrow the price gap between oil and the one fuel that can displace it worldwide, here and now. The oil nasties will celebrate the green war on carbon as enthusiastically as the coal industry celebrated the green war on uranium 30 years ago.

The other 5 billion are too poor to deny these economic realities. For them, the price to beat is 3-cent coal-fired electricity. China and India won’t trade 3-cent coal for 15-cent wind or 30-cent solar. As for us, if we embrace those economically frivolous alternatives on our own, we will certainly end up doing more harm than good.

By pouring money into anything-but-carbon fuels, we will lower demand for carbon, making it even cheaper for the rest of the world to buy and burn. The rest will use cheaper energy to accelerate their own economic growth.

Jobs will go where energy is cheap, just as they go where labor is cheap. Manufacturing and heavy industry require a great deal of energy, and in a global economy, no competitor can survive while paying substantially more for an essential input.

The carbon police acknowledge the problem and talk vaguely of using tariffs and such to address it. But carbon is far too deeply embedded in the global economy, and materials, goods, and services move and intermingle far too freely, for the customs agents to track.

Consider your next Google search. As noted in a recent article in Harper’s, “Google . . . and its rivals now head abroad for cheaper, often dirtier power.” Google itself (the “don’t be evil” company) is looking to set up one of its electrically voracious server farms at a site in Lithuania, “disingenuously described as being near a hydroelectric dam.” But Lithuania’s grid is 0.5 percent hydroelectric and 78 percent nuclear. Perhaps the company’s next huge farm will be “near” the Three Gorges Dam in China, built to generate over three times as much power as our own Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State. China will be happy to play along, while it quietly plugs another coal plant into its grid a few pylons down the line. All the while, of course, Google will maintain its low-energy headquarters in California, a state that often boasts of the wise regulatory policies – centered, one is told, on efficiency and conservation – that have made it such a frugal energy user. But in fact, sky-high prices have played the key role, curbing internal demand and propelling the flight from California of power plants, heavy industries, chip fabs, server farms, and much else (see “California’s Potemkin Environmentalism,” City Journal, Spring 2008).

So the suggestion that we can lift ourselves out of the economic doldrums by spending lavishly on exceptionally expensive new sources of energy is absurd. “Green jobs” means Americans paying other Americans to chase carbon while the rest of the world builds new power plants and factories. And the environmental consequences of outsourcing jobs, industries, and carbon to developing countries are beyond dispute. They use energy far less efficiently than we do, and they remain almost completely oblivious to environmental impacts, just as we were in our own first century of industrialization. A massive transfer of carbon, industry, and jobs from us to them will raise carbon emissions, not lower them.

The grand theory for how the developed world can unilaterally save the planet seems to run like this. We buy time for the planet by rapidly slashing our own emissions. We do so by developing carbon-free alternatives even cheaper than carbon. The rest of the world will then quickly adopt these alternatives, leaving most of its trillion barrels of oil and trillion tons of coal safely buried, most of the rain forests standing, and most of the planet’s carbon-rich soil undisturbed. From end to end, however, this vision strains credulity.

Perhaps it’s the recognition of that inconvenient truth that has made the anti-carbon rhetoric increasingly apocalyptic. Coal trains have been analogized to boxcars headed for Auschwitz. There is talk of the extinction of all humanity. But then, we have heard such things before. It is indeed quite routine, in environmental discourse, to frame choices as involving potentially infinite costs on the green side of the ledger. If they really are infinite, no reasonable person can quibble about spending mere billions, or even trillions, on the dollar side, to dodge the apocalyptic bullet.

Thirty years ago, the case against nuclear power was framed as the “Zero-Infinity Dilemma.” The risks of a meltdown might be vanishingly small, but if it happened, the costs would be infinitely large, so we should forget about uranium. Computer models demonstrated that meltdowns were highly unlikely and that the costs of a meltdown, should one occur, would be manageable – but greens scoffed: huge computer models couldn’t be trusted. So we ended up burning much more coal. The software shoe is on the other foot now; the machines that said nukes wouldn’t melt now say that the ice caps will. Warming skeptics scoff in turn, and can quite plausibly argue that a planet is harder to model than a nuclear reactor. But that’s a detail. From a rhetorical perspective, any claim that the infinite, the apocalypse, or the Almighty supports your side of the argument shuts down all further discussion.

To judge by actions rather than words, however, few people and almost no national governments actually believe in the infinite rewards of exorcising carbon from economic life. Kyoto has hurt the anti-carbon mission far more than carbon zealots seem to grasp. It has proved only that with carbon, governments will say and sign anything – and then do less than nothing. The United States should steer well clear of such treaties because they are unenforceable, routinely ignored, and therefore worthless.

If we’re truly worried about carbon, we must instead approach it as if the emissions originated in an annual eruption of Mount Krakatoa. Don’t try to persuade the volcano to sign a treaty promising to stop. Focus instead on what might be done to protect and promote the planet’s carbon sinks – the systems that suck carbon back out of the air and bury it. Green plants currently pump 15 to 20 times as much carbon out of the atmosphere as humanity releases into it – that’s the pump that put all that carbon underground in the first place, millions of years ago. At present, almost all of that plant-captured carbon is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by animal consumers. North America, however, is currently sinking almost two-thirds of its carbon emissions back into prairies and forests that were originally leveled in the 1800s but are now recovering. For the next 50 years or so, we should focus on promoting better land use and reforestation worldwide. Beyond that, weather and the oceans naturally sink about one-fifth of total fossil-fuel emissions. We should also investigate large-scale options for accelerating the process of ocean sequestration.

Carbon zealots despise carbon-sinking schemes because, they insist, nobody can be sure that the sunk carbon will stay sunk. Yet everything they propose hinges on the assumption that carbon already sunk by nature in what are now hugely valuable deposits of oil and coal can be kept sunk by treaty and imaginary cheaper-than-carbon alternatives. This, yet again, gets things backward. We certainly know how to improve agriculture to protect soil, and how to grow new trees, and how to maintain existing forests, and we can almost certainly learn how to mummify carbon and bury it back in the earth or the depths of the oceans, in ways that neither man nor nature will disturb. It’s keeping nature’s black gold sequestered from humanity that’s impossible.

If we do need to do something serious about carbon, the sequestration of carbon after it’s burned is the one approach that accepts the growth of carbon emissions as an inescapable fact of the twenty-first century. And it’s the one approach that the rest of the world can embrace, too, here and now, because it begins with improving land use, which can lead directly and quickly to greater prosperity. If, on the other hand, we persist in building green bridges to nowhere, we will make things worse, not better. Good intentions aren’t enough. Turned into ineffectual action, they can cost the earth and accelerate its ruin at the same time.

Peter Huber is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and the coauthor, most recently, of The Bottomless Well. His article develops arguments that he made in an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate in January. This article appeared in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Spring 2009, vol.19, no.2.

Posted in Climate Change, Editorial Page | 5 Comments »

Respond to Medical Pot Raids with Legalization

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

by Anthony Gregory

Activists are outraged over President Obama’s raid of Emmalyn’s California Cannabis Clinic in San Francisco, but they should not be surprised.

Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, had promised to end federal medical marijuana raids as conducted by the Clinton and Bush administrations, leaving alone dispensaries operating legally under state law. Obama broke the spirit of the promise, but not the letter. The excuse for this last raid was state law violations — supposedly, sales taxes were being evaded. Now the feds will probably prosecute under federal law.

The state government was not agitating for a crackdown. Sacramento was not complaining about sales tax evasion. San Francisco had given a permit to this dispensary.

“It is disturbing that, despite the DEA’s vague claims about violations of state and federal laws,” Aaron Smith from the Marijuana Policy Project noted about the Drug Enforcement Agency, “they apparently made no effort to contact the local authorities who monitor and license medical marijuana providers.”

Furthermore, sales tax violations are rarely handled this way. The California chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws points out, “The normal process in such cases is for the Board of Equalization to audit the business in question, not for federal agents to enter like storm troopers and steal all of the business’s inventory.”

This episode should remind liberal pot activists of the potentially despotic power involved in tax collection. The power to tax is the power to destroy. Raids like this are unusual but not unheard of in mere tax cases. Presumably, if California’s marijuana industry were governed only by libertarian law — no violence, no theft, and no fraud — there would be far fewer excuses for the feds to step in.

Short of exempting medical marijuana from sales tax altogether, how can future outrages be prevented? California should go on the offensive. It should legalize marijuana, leave its regulation to the market, and, for now, treat it like any other retail good in terms of tax law.

The state could do so by treating marijuana as a legal medicine, thereby protecting users and distributors from federal sanction, assuming Obama keeps his promise to the letter. California could make medical marijuana completely legal — like aspirin or cough syrup — and allow retailers of all types to sell it without license or prescription.

Marijuana could be sold in grocery stores and pharmacies as an over-the-counter treatment. It could be made available everywhere. This measure would make it much harder for the feds to raid facilities as though they were underground, barely legal operations. It would expose the contradictions in the Drug War.

The Drug War is a total disaster. It has failed to significantly reduce drug abuse while violating personal liberty, serving as an excuse to shred the Bill of Rights, and being the major cause of gang violence, whether in our inner cities or on the border with Mexico.

If America ended drug prohibition, the Mexican border violence that has killed thousands over the past couple of years would end completely. Unfortunately, Obama is moving in the wrong direction, sending more troops to the border. Such state violence has forced the drug market underground, and every successful breakup of a dominant cartel only opens up a vacuum inevitably filled by other smaller groups violently competing over turf. The more the government cracks down, the worse it will get.

On medical marijuana, Obama was supposed to signify a shift in policy. His last DEA raid should put that myth to bed. By legalizing medical marijuana in 1996, California forced the issue over whether federal drug laws should supersede local standards. In terms of public opinion and political pressure, much has been won. It’s time to keep pushing.

In Gonzales v. Raich (2005), the Supreme Court’s five liberals all voted for federal supremacy over California’s medical marijuana laws, so more court cases might not be the answer. California should instead continue to liberalize its drug laws. Doing so will, at least, complicate Obama’s policy of federal raids and further undermine faith in the national government setting drug policy.

Anthony Gregory is is a writer and musician living in Berkeley, California. He earned his bachelor’s degree in history at U.C. Berkeley, where he was president of the Cal Libertarians. He is a research analyst at the Independent Institute (independent.org), a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation (fff.org), and a columnist for LewRockwell.com. His own website is AnthonyGregory.com.

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