Cooling it on Warming
Global warming may be happening. But the extent of the potential danger is such that doing nothing is the best strategy of all.
Jan Narveson - March 12, 2008
Things have taken an interesting turn or two in the Global Warming biz. Over and over again you'll have heard that there is a "consensus" among "scientists" that global warming "is real," that human activity is the--or a--main cause of it, and that this all justifies imposing major-league restrictions on this and that (and major-league taxes to support the restrictions).
I am not a scientist, but I have read a lot of material on this subject by scientists. And approximately two things are extremely clear. First, the claim that “scientists” are “agreed” on global warming is just false. As I am writing this, a conference is being held in New York featuring several hundred speakers, many of whom are climatologists--in marked contrast to the membership of the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (IPCC) whose several reports are the source of most of the pronouncements you will have heard from various media sources over the last couple of decades--detailing the case against consensus and the objections to the current (politically correct) theory. What this group of very respected writers are questioning is not climate change, but, rather, that the climate change we have seen is anywhere near sufficient to justify Al Gore-type claims that mankind has a crisis at hand about which we must act now.
The second thing that is perfectly clear is a fact. It is a fact that has gotten no attention from the public press that I know of, but is a familiar fact to climatologists. This fact is that the Kyoto Protocol--calling for major restrictions on carbon output--has the following feature: it will do no good.
To repeat: it will do no good. The several scientists who have bothered to do their homework on Kyoto report that even if--as is certainly not going to happen--everybody lived up to the restrictions, the net result in terms of climate cooling over some 50 years would be on the order of 0.1 degree Celsius. (The estimates range from a low of .07 to a high of .15) These figures are equivalent to nothing.
That is to say: the enormous number of variables that could account for changes of that order of magnitude is such that it would be impossible to say that it had been the restrictions that brought about that result, if it could even be accurately measured. But an indiscernible result is, from the human, political point of view, no result at all.
A public policy that imposes draconian restrictions on all of our lives in order to bring about a result like that is, to put it bluntly, completely irresponsible. But essentially all the nations in the world are lining up in support of Kyoto. Even the Americans, who held out for quite awhile, are now agreeing that we must “do something.” Indeed, it is very difficult to find, anywhere in our history a comparable level of irresponsibility in reaction to a supposedly scientific finding.
Rationally speaking, and on the contrary, what we "must" do is nothing. We should certainly sign off from any Kyoto- or Bali-type measures. We should pipe down and return the whole subject to the scientists. Many years down the road maybe something will have happened with enough shape to justify some sort of policy--though I doubt it. Weather and climate are just too complicated, and contributions to it by forces that are far, far beyond human control are just too obvious.
Consider that on the standard account of climate, the Earth during the past 150 or so years has been coming out of a cold period (the “little ice age”), and we have not even reached an equal level of warmth experienced during the “medieval warm period” (around 900-1000 A.D.--the period when the Vikings were settling in Greenland and talking about Labrador and Newfoundland as nice cheery places where you could grow grapes, etc.)
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