THE MISSING DEBATE ON CLIMATE CHANGE
BY LEN SOUSA
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What's missing?
A second look at the climate consensus. |
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In all this readiness to confess their environmental sins, many people have clinged to the belief that global warming is an inevitable fate we will all suffer unless we radically change our ways and repent. (Sound familiar?) But in the midst of all the clamoring, where was the national public discourse on the subject? Why was there little to no intelligent debate as to how significant the temperature change would be and how cutting carbon emissions would change things? To date, those who disagree with the climate catastrophe scenario are considered, at worst, utter fools and, at best, grossly ignorant on the facts. Most prefer to silently side with the alleged consensus on climate so as not to make waves or be called deniers by those professing to know more. But is this really good science? Shouldn’t there be a larger public debate that we’ve been missing?
A Non-Expert Validated
Several months ago, I posted a response to the hysteria over global warming. It was an informal exploration into climate change that summed up my thoughts on the issue and provided some useful links for more information. I simply argued for a more reasoned/logical approach to the discussion, hoping readers would go on to make up their own minds by reading the research and not going by the headlines—something sorely lacking in a majority of the news articles I've ever read on the subject.
My only goal in writing the piece was to advocate not believing all the hype—and, indeed, much of it has since been shown to be either false or greatly exaggerated. Some examples: the melting snows of Kilimanjaro, sea levels rising, Polar Bear population, warmer winters, and stronger hurricanes.
The last point I made in the essay was a bit of a prediction. I said that in an effort to save the world from a crisis that may never come, we would be ignoring or impeding serious problems that people are facing at this moment, such as poverty, hunger, and disease. Now it appears those words have come back to haunt me as the New York Times reports the very same Doomsday scenario I had laid out is already starting to come true. As many focus on the “need” to do something about climate change immediately (i.e. cutting carbon emissions), national leaders are putting their voices and their money into creating biofuels. Strangely, not in something proven like nuclear energy, but in creating ethanol out of corn. The result has been an increase in the cost of these foods and, consequently, nations that cannot afford to feed their own people. While it’s true that several factors affect food prices—including the price of oil—the desire to turn certain foods into biofuel only helps to raise those prices and will only increase demand in the future. Not to sound like an alarmist, but we’re frighteningly close to the beginning stages of forcing people to choose between food and fuel. There’s little we can do about the cost of oil in the U.S. in the short term because we don’t currently have the technology to replace it and we’ve consistently ignored nuclear power for three decades thanks to the same fear-mongering environmentalists we’re hearing from now. However, there’s a lot we can do just by skipping the concept of biofuels which have not proven to do what they claim to do and may in fact be doing more harm than good.
An Expert Weighs In
This interview with the director of the Oregon Climate Service, George Taylor (not this guy), hits a lot of the major climate change points I agree with right on the head. One important quote: “I believe the climate changes as a result of several factors, some natural, some human. Human factors include greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, but also a host of other effects—deforestation, urbanization, emission of aerosols. Carbon dioxide gets all the headlines, but frankly, I think it is overemphasized.” Taylor goes on to describe several natural factors that also have an impact on global temperature including solar radiation, the ocean, volcanic eruptions, El Niño, La Niña, and even clouds (the last three are never included in climate models).
If I could summarize my entire view on climate change, it would be with the above quote. There’s just a maddening notion in popular culture that carbon dioxide is the only problem we face. In truth, there are lots of factors that may affect climate (some rather ironic) and the model is not a simple A-B-C series of events. Thinking so simplistically about something as complex as climate doesn’t make any sense. Making large scale changes now that will affect the economy of developing nations based on a theory that hasn’t been proven to be the solution seems similarly wrong-headed. I’m not advocating taking climate off the political discussion table. I just want the discussion to be more open. I’m not interested in people claiming the global temperature isn’t changing or humans don’t have an impact—all the science shows both statements to be likely false—but I am interested in people admitting that there are many factors contributing to the temperature change and it's difficult, at this time, the pinpoint what is causing what without more research.
What we do know for a fact is that there are major food crises going on in many countries. If larger nations like the United States start limiting how and when they produce carbon, I can imagine where we begin to say it’s not worth the "carbon footprint" to fly food supplies to a starving nation this month or we have to limit the amount of trips aid workers make to poorer nations. There are real problems going on right now that need to be dealt with and focusing on a crisis that may or may not occur 100 years from now doesn’t seem like the best way to deal with it. As I mentioned in my original essay, what makes us believe we’ll still be dealing with the same polluting industries in the next 100 years? A century ago, we didn’t even have airplanes in the sky. Why do we assume we will still have the same kind of polluting vehicles in 2108?
Another comment Taylor makes that echoes one I made in my original piece is one he paraphrases from Richard Feynman: “In science,” Taylor says, “we should all be skeptics, especially of our own work. I’ve been wrong enough in the past to know I might be wrong now.” Despite this willingness to be wrong and to accept debate on the issue, Taylor received a lot of flack for his stance. Even the governor of Oregon wanted to fire him from his post over his comments on climate change. (Taylor retired in June but won't admit if he was forced to do so.) Is this really the kind of debate-squashing society we want?
Doing Something vs. Doing ‘Nothing’
The last question in the aforementioned interview with George Taylor is rooted in a statement repeated by a lot of alarmists who say it as if it’s the final nail in the climate debate coffin. They claim that doing “something” is better than doing nothing. Even if we are wrong, they argue, what’s the worst that can happen? However, this is a very naïve understanding of how the world works and just what “nothing” might mean.
Doing “nothing” means not making drastic changes that will undoubtedly have negative effects on both the weak American econonmy and on poorer countries that depend on the United States and other industrialized nations. In truth, “doing nothing” means keeping things going as they are. Making large-scale changes that some people think might have a small impact on the future could have a serious impact on food and medical supplies in many countries. As we've already seen, by doing “something” such as investing in ethanol, we’ve hurt people by increasing the cost of corn worldwide. Doing “nothing” certainly does not mean avoiding research or investing in green technology or nuclear energy—moving away from fossil fuels is indeed the way of the future and one I completely support—but should we invest in unresearched, bad ideas like ethanol just to make ourselves feel better while doing more harm than good? Currently, it takes 400lbs of corn to create just 25 gallons of ethanol. If you had the choice to send corn or biofuel to those starving in India, which would you pick?
Environmentalists prefer to group things into black and white terms, claiming that if you aren’t with them in their alarmism then you’re with the large corporations who only want to increase pollution and make money—in fact, chances are anyone who speaks out against global warming hysteria is getting paid to do so by the big oil companies. But this radical view of the world is not only disturbingly similar to McCarthyism, it’s also a sure-fire way to stop intelligent debate.
But if we were to put things in the black-and-white perspective alarmists so often like to use, we could say the choice between doing nothing or doing something could mean certain catastrophe now or possible catastrophe later. In which case, is doing “nothing” really such a bad idea?
