(This IBD Editorial was sent to me by the authors)
By WILLIE SOON, ROBERT CARTER AND DAVID LEGATES
This is a response to “Why Can’t We Innovate Our Way To A Carbon-Free Energy Future?“, a “Perspective” by Bjorn Lomborg that ran in this space a week ago.
Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and “Cool It,” is right about the need to focus on critical health and economic priorities. But he is wrong about human carbon dioxide emissions causing what is now being called “global climate disruption.”
By demonizing the gas of life, in league with Al Gore and Bill Gates, Lomborg commits several serious scientific errors. As independent scientists, with broad training in mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology and geography, we know CO2 is not a pollutant, and the notion of “carbon-free” or “zero-carbon” energy is inherently harmful and anti-scientific.
If nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, helium or any other nontoxic gas is pumped into a chamber containing air and a growing plant, the response is barely measurable. By contrast, if more CO2 is added, the plant and its root system benefit enormously, displaying enhanced growth and more efficient use of available water and nutrients.
Far from having detrimental effects, carbon dioxide has decidedly beneficial impacts on plants, aquatic and terrestrial alike, and a new study connects enhanced plant productivity to greater bird species diversity in China. How, therefore, can anyone conclude that human carbon dioxide is a pollutant that must be eradicated?
These facts erect a formidable barrier for “zero-carbon” advocates. By insisting that no human CO2 should be emitted, they are promoting continued suboptimal growth of food plant species in the face of impending global food shortages — and poorer functioning and less diversity in the global ecosystem.
Zero-carbon activists respond to these facts by asserting that human CO2 emissions cause “dangerous global warming.” They are wrong about this, too.
If rising atmospheric CO2 levels drive global temperatures upward, as they insist, why is Earth not suffering from the dangerous “fever” that Al Gore predicted? Instead, after mild warming at the end of the twentieth century, global temperatures have leveled off for the past decade, amid steadily rising carbon dioxide levels.
Lomborg’s claim that we need to “cure” so-called “unchecked climate change” is thus fallacious and contradicted by reality. Reducing human CO2 emissions will likely have no measurable cooling effect on planetary temperatures.
His insistence that we prioritize expenditures is spot-on when applied to genuine environmental and societal problems. However, it is irrelevant when the problems are mythical — or devised to advance ideological agendas. Moreover, even if human impacts on the global climate can actually be measured at some future date, humans currently lack the scientific and engineering understanding and capability to deliberately “manage” Earth’s constantly changing climate for the better.
Most certain of all, atmospheric carbon dioxide is not the “climate control knob” that anti-hydrocarbon alarmists assert, and it is irresponsible for Lomborg to claim his socio-political agenda will provide a low-cost solution for the global warming “problem.”
The scientific reality is that even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been unable to demonstrate a cause-and-effect scientific connection between rising human CO2 emissions and dangerous warming.. To support global limits on CO2 emissions, in the absence of real-world data showing clear cause and effect, is scientific and policy incompetence on the highest order.
Imagine a drug company seeking FDA approval for a new drug, based on an analysis that says simply: “Our supercomputers say the drug is safe and effective. We have no clinical data to support this, but can think of no reason actual results would contradict what our computers predict. Moreover, failure to license the drug will be disastrous for patients suffering from the targeted disease.” Failing to demand actual dose-and-response studies, before licensing the drug, would be gross negligence on FDA’s part.
Between 2007 and 2009, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions dropped approximately 10%, to their lowest level since 1995, largely because of reduced energy consumption during the recession. Similar CO2 emission reductions occurred in Britain, Germany, France and Japan.
Have their climates gotten better or less dangerous? Are they now a better place, for having a lower intensity carbon energy diet? Have global temperatures been statistically unchanged since 1995 because, or in spite of, Chinese and Indian carbon dioxide emissions increasing far more than the aforementioned countries reduced theirs?
These are practical, not rhetorical questions. As far as we can see, the only direct effect of decreasing CO2 levels via expensive renewable energy programs has been to cost more American and European jobs than would otherwise have been the case during the global economic recession.
The central issue is not whether rising CO2 levels will cause a warmer planet. The fundamental concern is whether globally warmer temperatures are factually worse (or better) for human societies — and more (or less) damaging to the environment — than colder temperatures (like those experienced during the ice ages and Little Ice Age).
Bjorn Lomborg, Al Gore and Bill Gates need to consider the likelihood that, driven by changes in solar activity and ocean circulation, Earth will cool significantly over coming decades. Damaging the global economy with ineffectual carbon dioxide controls, in a futile quest to “stop global warming,” looks stupid now.
Viewed later, with hindsight, it will be judged outrageously irresponsible.
• Soon studies sun-climate connections at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
• Carter is an emeritus fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs and chief science advisor to the International Climate Science Coalition.
• Legates is a hydroclimatologist at the University of Delaware and serves as the state climatologist of Delaware.
This editorial appeared at Investors Business Daily – here
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anorak2 ~ “Replacing one stubborn ideology with its equally stubborn twin brother isn’t really an improvement. Pragmatism rules. Let sectors that are best done privately be private, let those that achieve better results in the public hand remain public. I think that is the legacy learnt from the past 20ish years of ideological privatisation experiments in Western nations.”
Well I agree that’s true, but that’s because it is essentially a truism – “For best results, let the better do what they are best at.” So not really pragmatic, since pragmatic statements provide solutions to questions. Which sector is “best done privately” or “best done publicly”? Who gets to decide what constitutes a “best” result?
Here’s my pragmatic suggestion: The dividing line is “Will there be a profit, how much and how soon?”
Governments do not need to make profits, they need to establish and enforce laws that maintain the value of the currency they issue. Governments have no business making profits (otherwise, your government has become a business, which is a bad place for your nation to go). Governments support the citizens of their nation in such a way that the nation as a whole can make profits.
Private investors (the citizens), on the other hand, are all about profit. If enough individuals are convinced that a large enough profit will be received in a short enough term, a private business will be established that is fueled by that investment. If the investors were intelligent and well informed (and perhaps a little bit lucky), there will actually be a profit.
Those are the extremes. In between you can have everything from non-profit businesses to open source programmers.
Take the “environmental protection” sector. Without government involvement, where would the profit be? Would corporations pay people to: devise a checklist of ways their venture could harm the commons, inspect their property, assess fees based on the checklist, use those fees collected to mitigate the damage (when possible)? That’s a rhetorical question. In this sector, the ideal is for the government to take some profits from the citizens as a whole (taxes) in order to monitor a subset of citizens who may be harming the resources of the nation. No financial profit is expected from this monitoring – taxes make up for the costs of the venture that the assessed fees do not absorb. If this venture were to become privatized it would depend on government subsidies to survive.
Take the “new energy sources” sector. Profit in the short term is a maybe, so instead of full government funding the government uses taxes to provide more investment fuel for a private sector that already exists (government grants). Businesses can compete for the grant, which comes with conditions. Ideally, the government involvement will allow this sector to result in a net profit for the nation sooner than would have been achieved by private investment alone.
For the ideal results to be achieved consistently, the nation needs intelligent, informed citizens who can exert control over an intelligent, informed government. Without that, government funding of any sector is a crapshoot. Occasional success is not an accurate measure – even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.
When will Willie Bob and Dave stage a live demonstration of the fatal flaw of Warmism on Fox TV by flooding the studio with a 50:50 mixture of oxygen and The Gas Of Life?
We’ll all feel better when they do.
I’ve seen serious research reports (no I can’t give references; google it up yourself) that studied the global food production system, and the effect of various changes; such as the various “green” revolutions, improved crops; better water conserving irrigation etc. Such studies have concluded, that 20% of the present total world food production cannot be explained without invoking the increase in atmospheric CO2 from its 280 ppm to about 380, which likely was the value when I read these articles.
Other studies also show that total world food supply is directly proportional to total world energy input to the food system. That holds across the board from the most primitive of high labor agricultures to modern machine intensive farming. You throw in all the fuel for farm machinery; the energy of chemicals for fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides; you name it; even the energy in the powder for the bullets used by “Eskimos” to shoot seals, and the gas to chase them with snowmobiles. All of those energy enhancements increase the food output of every kind of society on earth.
So if the USA doesn’t get real energy from somewhere; the world will suffer from food shortages eventually; and global cooling will just make that need for more energy input even worse.
At least one such article appears in an old (very old) issue of Scientific American; it was a special issue on energy and food.
Feel sorry for all those who rented or bought AL GORES junk science laden A INCONVENT TRUTH these people have been cheated by a lying huckster and con-man