Tag Archives: global warming

Al Gore Isn’t Connected to Reality

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When rational person watch this video, they come to two conclusions 1) there must be some kind of climate crisis and 2) this guy is bat sh*t insane.

Number 2 is undoubtedly correct–Al Gore is nuts. But we are not in a “climate crisis” we should see some serious increase in temperature. Here’s a temperature chart from the satellite data for the past 12 years:

Looking at the graph you notice that there has only been a slight increase in temperature for the past 12 years. So where’s the crisis? There was only a slight increase in global temperature (and decrease since 1998) even though worldwide carbon dioxide emissions have increased by 30%.

Al Gore wants us to ignore our domestic energy supplies because of a crisis that doesn’t exist. That doesn’t make a ton of sense.

Why the Kyoto Protocol Failed

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One of the many reasons the Kyoto Protocol failed has failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as promised is because the rules were poorly designed (you could argue they were set up to be gamed). The Wall Street Journal reports that a French companies will make about $1 billion dollars in greenhouse gas credits all because it made a $15 million dollar investment. Here’s the WSJ:

The company, Rhodia SA, manufactures hundreds of tons a day of adipic acid, an ingredient in nylon, at its factory here. But the real money is in what it doesn’t make. The payday, which could amount to more than $1 billion over seven years, comes from destroying nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, an unwanted byproduct and potent greenhouse gas. It’s Rhodia’s single most profitable business world-wide. Last year, destroying nitrous oxide here and at a similar plant in Brazil generated €189 million ($300.5 million) in sales of pollution “credits.” […] The Rhodia factory in [South Korea] alone is slated to bring in more money, under the U.N.-administered program, than all the clean-air projects currently registered on the continent of Africa.

This doesn’t make any rational sense, but that’s not the point, is it?

Why environmentalism as religion is not necessarily a bad thing

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Freeman Dyson, one of the most respected physicists in the world, writes an interesting review of two books about the costs of global warming policies. I might write something about that later, but he writes something very insightful about environmentalism as religion. He defines environmentalism as “a religion of hope and respect for nature.” I can completely accept that. Too bad that’s not what most environmental activists are about. Here’s Dyson:

All the books that I have seen about the science and economics of global warming, including the two books under review, miss the main point. The main point is religious rather than scientific. There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world.

Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard.

How to fight global warming more efficiently than using cap-and-trade

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Bjorn Lomborg writes in the Washington Post today:

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a co-sponsor of the bill, has called it “the world’s most far-reaching program to fight global warming.” It is indeed policy on a grand scale. It would slow American economic growth by trillions of dollars over the next half-century. But in terms of temperature, the result will be negligible if China and India don’t also commit to reducing their emissions, and it will be only slightly more significant if they do. By itself, Lieberman-Warner would postpone the temperature increase projected for 2050 by about two years.

Politicians favor the cap-and-trade system because it is an indirect tax that disguises the true costs of reducing carbon emissions. It also gives lawmakers an opportunity to control the number and distribution of emissions allowances, and the flow of billions of dollars of subsidies and sweeteners.

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Many people believe that everyone has a moral obligation to ask how we can best combat climate change. Attempts to curb carbon emissions along the lines of the bill now pending are a poor answer compared with other options.

Consider that today, solar panels are one-tenth as efficient as the cheapest fossil fuels. Only the very wealthy can afford them. Many “green” approaches do little more than make rich people feel they are helping the planet. We can’t avoid climate change by forcing a few more inefficient solar panels onto rooftops.

The answer is to dramatically increase research and development so that solar panels become cheaper than fossil fuels sooner rather than later. Imagine if solar panels became cheaper than fossil fuels by 2050: We would have solved the problem of global warming, because switching to the environmentally friendly option wouldn’t be the preserve of rich Westerners.

The Logic of the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner Bill

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Here’s the logic of the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner global warming bill:

  1. We must “do something” about global warming.
  2. This is something.
  3. Therefore, we much do it.

[Logic courtesy of Brian Kaplan via Megan McCardle.]

Who cares that the bill will increase the price of energy and won’t make a difference with respect to global temperature. These are unimportant. Results and costs don’t matter. What matters is “doing something.”

What if the developed world really cared about the poor in the Third World?

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I just saw these two stories:

‘£1.6bn must be spent on climate change’

10M children worldwide die from lack of health care

One of the biggest reasons people care about human-caused global warming is because of the impacts on the poor in the Third World. But what would give you more bang for your buck, Pound, or Euro–money spent on dubious green technologies (we see how well the biofuel scheme is going) or spending money directly on medical care, clean water, and malaria prevention in the Third World?

To me the choice is clear–money is better spent on programs that provide real relief than on speculative projects which have dubious track records.

The Value of Global Climate Models

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A new paper was published in Nature that finds that natural forces may offset human-caused global warming over the next few decades. This is very interesting because it means that our current global climate models tell us almost nothing of value. But don’t take my word for it, take from Roger Pielke, Jr, a  professor of  Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a staff scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He writes:

I am sure that this is an excellent paper by world class scientists. But when I look at the broader significance of the paper what I see is that there is in fact nothing that can be observed in the climate system that would be inconsistent with climate model predictions. If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with model predictions, then so too is pretty much anything and everything under the sun.

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Don’t get me wrong, models are great tools for probing our understanding and exploring various assumptions about how nature works. But scientists think they know with certainty that carbon dioxide leads to bad outcomes for the planet, so future modeling will only refine that fact. I am focused on the predictive value of the models, which appears to be nil. So models have plenty of scientific value left in them, but tools to use in planning or policy? Forget about it.

Just a reminder–all the threats of climate doom are based on the global climate models. But the modelers don’t tell us what real-world happenings would falsify their predictions (as real science would require). Climate models have their place, but they shouldn’t be used for planning or policy.