What do we know about global warming and how does Climategate affect this? What should (or should not) happen at the Copenhagen global warming summit? Do we need to sacrifice freedom and curtail economic activity to prevent catastrophe or does the world need more freedom and capitalism to unleash the creativity of billions of people to increase the quality of human life and create a cleaner, greener planet?
Here is what we know as laymen reading available information. I am skipping links to references, but all the information can easily be found on the internet. This is a little longer than the typical summary of global warming and its policy implications, but it is intended to bring together a lot of pieces of the debate over our future in an accessible format for the educated general reader.
1. The Earth’s climate always changes. In the past 150 – 200 years it has gotten warmer.
In recorded human history the climate was warmer during Roman times (the Romans, for instance, grew wine in Great Britain), followed by a cold period during the early Middle Ages, followed by a Medieval warm period during which Icelanders and Norwegians settled on the southern tip of Greenland. When the climate got significantly colder during what is known as the “Little Ice Age”, these European settlers vanished from Greenland. The Little Ice Age lasted from about 1300 to about 1800. In the last 150 – 200 years the Earth has gotten warmer. This is not a continuous smooth trend. For example from the 1940s to the 1970s it generally got colder, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s it got warmer and since 1998 it has gotten cooler again.
Prior to recorded human history there were many long-term cycles in climate. At times a thick ice sheet covered most of North America.
2. Human activity has increased the amount of carbondioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.
CO2 has increased from about 280 parts per million (or 0.028 percent) in the late 1800s to about 380 parts per million (0.038%). That is a 35 percent increase, but CO2 still makes up only a tiny part of our atmosphere.
3. Global warming scientists claim that this increase in CO2 and future increases will result in catastrophic warming causing unpredictable weather, droughts, floods, stronger hurricanes, etc. They base this prediction on models that they have created that take the amount of CO2 into account, but leave out other factors such as the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere or variations in solar activity.
4. Ice core data shows that there is a correlation between CO2 and temperature.
As Al Gore stated in his movie, this relationship is complex. He didn’t elaborate on this complexity, but a key fact to understand is that temperatures increased first, followed by increases in CO2 over a few hundred years. So a temperature increase is followed by a rise in CO2 rather than the other way around. How is this possible? Well, one explanation is that warmer oceans and previously frozen soil release a lot of CO2. Interestingly, the rise in CO2 did not cause further warming, so there must be mechanisms that stabilize and reduce CO2. This doesn’t mean that these mechanisms will kick in and eliminate man-made CO2, but more research along this line would be interesting.
5. We do not know how much of the warming of the past 200 years is the result of human activity.
There are some studies that show that only a small part or none of the warning is caused by man. Global warming advocates claim that all of it is caused by humans. Consider what we know: the Earth started warming in the early to mid-1800s at a time when human carbon emissions were tiny compared to today. Could it be that we just happened to advance technologically during a time of natural warming? How different would things look if the industrial revolution had started at the beginning of the Little Ice Age in 1300!
6. A warmer climate has positive and negative effects.
Consider some of the positive factors that you never hear from global warming alarmists. Plants can grow at higher latitudes. In the northern hemisphere where the bulk of the Earth’s landmass is located, more food can be grown in places like Siberia, Canada and northern Europe. There could also be more forests replacing the loss in tropical forests like the Amazon that is always lamented by environmentalists.
People can withstand heat better than cold. I live in Florida and am able to engage in vigorous exercise in 90 degree summer weather as long as I drink plenty of fluids. Air condition is a benefit of civilization, but it is not necessary for humans to survive in warm climates. On the other hand, humans will quickly freeze to death in extreme cold weather without a lot of protective gear and shelter. This is not meant to imply that people weakened by disease or age are not in danger in extreme heat, but as human societies become wealthier we can protect humans from these dangers.
7. If the predictions made by global warming alarmists were true, it is difficult to see what we could do to reverse global warming at this point short of abandoning much of modern technology and living again like our ancestors did in the 19th century. Asides from the obvious reality that no sane society would agree to turning back civilization by one hundred or two hundred years, the Earth’s population could not be sustained without modern carbon-emitting technology. Mass starvation would surely be the result. For the extremists on global warming who see humans as an infestation of the planet, that may be a good thing, but I think we can assume that sane people will not condone the death of hundreds of millions or billions of people. The cure is worse than the “disease.”
8. If the predictions made by global warming alarmists were true, mitigating the bad effects would be a better strategy. The average Bangladeshi threatened by rising sea levels in 2100 will be a lot wealthier than the average Bangladeshi today (if we don’t prevent Bangladesh from developing) and might look to Holland for a way to mitigate rising sea levels. Much of Holland is on below sea level land reclaimed from the ocean. Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician has done a lot of interesting work on the effectiveness of spending resources on reversing global warming vs. dealing with current, real problems such as malnutrition, lack of clean water, malaria and HIV and mitigating future effects of warming.
9. Climategate has confirmed that the advocates of global warming have performed their work without openly sharing all the information. They claim that they do this because of attacks from climate skeptics, but could it be that they have confused cause and effect? Lack of transparency by global warming scientists and an unwillingness to show their cards have made a lot of people skeptics.
On top of this lack of transparency, the leading scientists of global warming have been caught bullying scientific journals not to accept papers from anyone challenging their views and comments from programmers on the actual code of the climate models confirm suspicions that the models may be fatally flawed.
Leading global warming scientists have behaved like the executives of the cigarette industry who tried to hide undisputable links between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. We should hold them to the same standard as the cigarette industry.
10. The solutions proposed by global warming alarmists involve extreme curbs on economic activity and transfers of huge sums from the US and other wealthy countries to developing countries. With the discrediting of socialism in all its forms in the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of left-wing intellectuals and politicians have found a new home in the global warming movement. Global warming gives them an alternate way of destroying capitalism and creating a society controlled by government, this time on a global scale.
Freedom and capitalism have created enormous wealth in advanced economies. China, India, Brazil and other emerging countries are rapidly catching up with North America, East Asia and Europe. A world in which more people live in at least moderate prosperity can be a world with less war and conflict and the ability to better deal with threats from extremist ideologies from terrorists like al-Qaeda and the rulers of countries like Iran, North Korea and Venezuela.
If global warming scientists have identified real dangers requiring immediate action, they should openly share all the information and be willing to face challenges from skeptics. A free exchange of ideas will result in people being better informed and making better policy decisions.
There should be no deals to make drastic changes that will hurt economic development in Copenhagen. There needs to be an honest debate before specific policies should be considered.
Capitalism has unleashed creativity that will extend our ability to find and use carbon-based energy while we need it to fuel economic development. At the same time capitalism creates incentives for developing “green”, cleaner sources of energy including nuclear and solar energy. There is no crisis requiring the sacrifice of human freedom and the destruction of wealth.
