Coyote Blog

Its probably time for another once-every-six-months update on global warming.  In this post I will address the current leading climate intervention position, which is:  Even if we don't understand global warming fully, the time to take massive action is now, before the process builds momentum (similar to the notion that it is easier to deflect a meteor away from earth when it is millions of miles away, rather than right on top of us).  The potential downside of global warming, it is argued, is too high to justify waiting until we are sure.   

While I find arguments that attempt to challenge the current global warming orthodoxy in any way tends to get one labeled a Luddite not worth listening to, giving one the feeling of being a southern Baptist advocating creationism in a room full of Massachusetts Democrats, I will once again try to refute this need to immediate and massive intervention.

The shorthand I use for my argument against intervention is "creating a cooler but poorer world".  In a nutshell, given current technology and likely government intervention approaches, slowing global warming almost certainly entails slowing world growth.  And while the true cost of warming is poorly understood, the true cost of reduced world economic growth is very well understood and is very high.  The real question, then, is do we understand global warming and its potential downsides enough to believe that curbing them outweighs the almost certain negative impact from a poorer world.

I will begin by conceding some warming

Typically when making this argument, I will concede some man-made global warming.  It is hard to refute the fact from various CO2 concentration estimates that man has increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere over the last 50 years, and that this CO2 likely has had and will have some impact on global temperatures.  As a result, I am willing to concede a degree or two of warming from man-made effects over the next century.  This is lower than most of the warming estimates that you see in the press, but scientists will have to nail down a lot more issues before they can convince me these higher numbers are correct.  Some of these issues include:

• World temperatures rose by a half degree in the first half of the 20th century through mostly natural phenomena.  No one knows why (though solar activity may help explain it), but even global warming's strongest supporters agree that it was probably not due to man.  No one can therefore with any accuracy separate warming in the late 20th century due to this natural effect and warming due to man's impact.  Check out Mann's now-famous hockey stick below:

Global warming advocates love this chart - I mean this is their chart, not the skeptics' - and it probably plays well with non-scientific editors who are believers themselves, but I sure wouldn't want to defend this in a board room.  What if this were a sales chart, and I wanted to claim that the sales increase after I started work in 1950 was all due to my effort.  I can just see my old boss Chuck Knight at Emerson, or maybe Larry Bossidy at AlliedSignal, saying - "well Warren, it sure looks like things changed in 1900, not 1950.  And whatever was driving things up from 1900 to 1950, why do you think that that effect, which you can't explain, suddenly stopped and your influence took over.  And by the way, why did you end your chart with 1998 - I seem to remember 1998 was the peak.  Isn't it kind of disingenuous to leave off the last 6 years when the numbers came back down some?" (update:  Even in the arctic, where the media writes with so much confidence that global warming is having a measurable impact, the difference between cyclical variations and man-made effects is hard to unravel.)

• No one really understands the cyclical variations in world temperatures and climate.  I think it is large, and certainly there are historical records of the last 800 years that seem to point to climactic extremes.  Mann, et. al. claim to have shown that man's effects dwarf these natural variations with their 1000-year hockey stick, but there are a lot of problems with Mann, not the least of which is his unbelievably suspicious refusal to release his data and methodology to the scientific community, behavior that would not be tolerated of any other scientist except one who supported the global warming consensus view.
• It is still not clear that the urban heat island effect has been fixed in the ground data, so satellite data tends to show less warming (but some none-the-less).
• The climate models are absurd in ways even a non-climatologist can figure out.  For example, economies in energy inefficient undeveloped nations are assumed to grow like crazy in the IPCC scenarios, such that "then the average income of South Africans will have overtaken that of
  Americans by a very wide margin by the end of the century. Because of
  this economic error, the IPCC scenarios of the future also suggest that
  relatively poor developing countries such as Algeria, Argentina, Libya,
  Turkey, and North Korea will all surpass the United States."
• I no longer trust the scientific community on global warming.  This quote from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NOAA) researcher and global warming action promoter, Steven Schneidersays it all:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic
statements, and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us
has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and
being honest.

While many serious scientists are working on the issue, 100% of the anti-growth, anti-technology, anti-America, and anti-man folks have jumped strongly on the global warming bandwagon, and many of these folks have in fact grabbed the reins, leading major efforts and groups.  It is important to note that these folks do not care about scientific accuracy or facts.  Their agenda is completely and absolutely to use global warming as their lead issue to push their anti-growth agenda.  As such, none of these folks are going to tolerate any fact, study, or scientific voice that in any way questions the global warming orthodoxy.  And can any scientist be considered serious who uttered the following statement (from the UN's IPCC Conference Summary, page 2):

"It is
likely that, in the Northern Hemisphere, ... 1998 [was] the warmest year during the past thousand years."

My physics instructors in college used to criticize us students constantly for not understanding the error range in our lab work.  I wonder what they would think of a group of scientists that stated with confidence that 1998 was the warmest year in the last one thousand, when they only have direct measurement for the last 100 years or so and even then over only a small percentage of the planet and the other 900 years are estimated from tree rings and ice cores.  I am tired of being criticized as a Luddite for challenging "scientists" who think they know with confidence the exact world temperature since Charlemagne. 

Anyway, to avoid getting bogged down in this mess, I am willing to posit some man-made warming, say 1-2 degrees over the next 100 years.  For most who argue the subject, this is the end of the discussion.  For me, it is just the beginning.

What impact, warming?

Beyond bad cinema and Sunday supplement hyperbole, its difficult to find the good science aimed at quantifying the impacts, positive and negative, from global warming.  In fact, it is impossible in any venue at any level of quality to find any mention of the positive impacts of warming, though anyone with half a brain can imagine any number of positive impacts (e.g. longer growing seasons in cold climates) that will at least partially offset warming negatives.

Now, I am sure many scientists would respond that climate is complicated, and its hard to judge what will happen.  Which I believe is true.  But surely the same scientists that can cay that the world will warm by x degrees with enough certainty to demand that billions or even trillions of dollars be spent to change energy use should be able to come to some conclusions about the net effects, both positive and negative, from warming.

Certainly sea levels will probably rise, as some ice caps melt, by maybe a foot in the consensus view.  And storms and hurricanes may get worse, though its hard to separate the warming effect from the natural cyclical variation in hurricane strength, at least in the Atlantic.  What does seem to be clear is that the warming disproportionately will occur in colder, drier climates.  For example, a large part of the world's warming will occur in Siberia. 

When I hear this, I immediately think longer growing seasons in cold climates plus less impact in already warm climates = more food worldwide.  It strikes me that since the climate models tend to spit out warming not only world wide but by area of the world, it would be fairly easy to translate this into an estimate of net impact on food production.  This seems to be such an obvious area of study that I can only assume it has been done, and, since we have not heard about it, that the answer from global warming was "increased food production".  Since this conclusion neither supports scary headlines, increased grant money, or the anti-growth agenda, no one really talks about it or studies it much.  I would bet that if I took all the studies and grants today aimed at quantifying the impact of global warming, more than 95% of the work, maybe 100% of the work, would be aimed solely at negative impacts, studiously ignoring any positive counter-veiling effects.

I often get looks from global warming advocates like I am from Mars when I suggest work needs to be done to figure out how bad warming is, or even if it is really that bad at all.  I have learned that there are typically two reasons for this reaction:

1. I am talking to one of the anti-growth types, for whom the global warming issue is but a means to the end of growth limitation.  These folks need global warming to be BAD as a fundamental premise, not as something that can be fact-checked.  They cannot have people questioning that global warming is the ultimate bad thing that trumps everything else anymore than the Catholic Church can have folks start to question the fallibility of the Pope.
2. I am talking to an environmentalists who considers man's impact impact on earth as bad, period.  It is almost an aesthetic point of view, that it is fundamentally upsetting to see man changing the earth in such a measurable way, irregardless of whether the change affects man negatively.  These are the same folks with whom you cannot argue about caribou in ANWR.  They don't oppose ANWR drilling because they honestly think the caribou will be hurt, but because they like the notion that there is a bunch of land somewhere that man is not touching

By the way, though I know this will really mark me as an environmental Luddite, does anyone really believe that in 100 years, if we've really screwed ourselves by making things too hot, that we couldn't find a drastic way to cool the place off?  Krakatoa's eruption put enough dust in the air to cool the world for a decade.  The world, unfortunately, has a lot of devices that go bang laying around that I bet we could employ to good effect if we needed to put some dust in the stratosphere to cool ourselves off.  Yeah, I am sure that there are hidden problems here but isn't it interesting that NO ONE in global warming, inc. ever discusses any option for solving warming except shutting down the world's economies?

What impact, Intervention?

While the Kyoto treaty was a massively-flawed document, with current technologies a Kyoto type cap and trade approach is about the only way we have available to slow or halt CO2 emissions.  And, unlike the impact of warming on the world, the impact of such a intervention is very well understood by the world's economists and seldom in fact disputed by global warming advocates.  Capping world CO2 production would by definition cap world economic growth at the rate of energy efficiency growth, a number at least two points below projected real economic growth.  In addition, investment would shift from microprocessors and consumer products and new drug research and even other types of pollution control to energy. The effects of two points or more lower economic growth over 50-100 years can be devastating:

• Currently, there are perhaps a billion people, mostly in Asia, poised to exit millenia of subsistence poverty and reach the middle class.  Global warming intervention will likely consign these folks to continued poverty.  Does anyone remember that old ethics problem, the one about having a button that every time you pushed it, you got a thousand dollars but someone in China died.  Global warming intervention strikes me as a similar issue - intellectuals in the west feel better about man being in harmony with the earth but a billion Asians get locked into poverty.
• Lower world economic growth will in turn considerably shorten the lives of billions of the world's poor
• A poorer world is more vulnerable to natural disasters
• The unprecedented progress the world is experiencing in slowing birth rates, due entirely to rising wealth, will likely be reversed.  A cooler world will not only be poorer, but likely more populous as well.  It will also be a hungrier world, particularly if a cooler world does indeed result in lower food production than a warmer world
• A transformation to a prosperous middle class in Asia will make the world a much safer and more stable place, particularly vs. a cooler world with a billion Asian poor people who know that their march to progress was halted by western meddling.
• A cooler world would ironically likely be an environmentally messier world.  While anti-growth folks blame all environmental messes on progress, the fact is that environmental impact is a sort of inverted parabola when plotted against growth.  Early industrial growth tends to pollute things up, but further growth and wealth provides the resources and technology to clean things up.  The US was a cleaner place in 1970 than in 1900, and a cleaner place today than in 1970.  Stopping or drastically slowing worldwide growth would lock much of the developing world, countries like Brazil and China and Indonesia, into the top end of the parabola.  Is Brazil, for example, more likely to burn up its rain forest if it is poor or rich?

The Commons Blog links to this study by Indur Goklany on just this topic:

If global warming is real and its effects will one day be as devastating as
some believe is likely, then greater economic growth would, by increasing
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, sooner or later lead to greater damages from
climate change. On the other hand, by increasing wealth, technological
development and human capital, economic growth would broadly increase human
well-being, and society's capacity to reduce climate change damages via
adaptation or mitigation. Hence, the conundrum: at what point in the future
would the benefits of a richer and more technologically advanced world be
canceled out by the costs of a warmer world?

Indur Goklany attempted to shed light on this conundrum in a recent paper
presented at the 25th Annual North American Conference of the US Association for
Energy Economics, in Denver (Sept. 21, 2005). His paper "” "Is a
richer-but-warmer world better than poorer-but-cooler worlds?" "” which can
be found here, draws
upon the results of a series of UK Government-sponsored studies which employed
the IPCC's emissions scenarios to project future climate change between 1990 and
2100 and its global impacts on various climate-sensitive determinants of human
and environmental well-being (such as malaria, hunger, water shortage, coastal
flooding, and habitat loss). The results indicate that notwithstanding climate
change, through much of this century, human well-being is likely to be highest
in the richest-but-warmest world and lower in poorer-but-cooler worlds. With
respect to environmental well-being, matters may be best under the former world
for some critical environmental indicators through 2085-2100, but not
necessarily for others.

This conclusion casts doubt on a key premise implicit in all calls to take
actions now that would go beyond "no-regret" policies in order to reduce GHG
emissions in the near term, namely, a richer-but-warmer world will, before too
long, necessarily be worse for the globe than a poorer-but-cooler world. But the
above analysis suggests this is unlikely to happen, at least until after the
2085-2100 period.

Policy Alternatives

Above, we looked at the effect of a cap and trade scheme, which would have about the same effect as some type of carbon tax.  This is the best possible approach, if an interventionist approach is taken.  Any other is worse.

The primary other alternative bandied about by scientists is some type of alternative energy Manhattan project.  This can only be a disaster.   Many scientists are technocratic fascists at heart, and are convinced that if only they could run the economy or some part of it, instead of relying on this messy bottom-up spontaneous order we call the marketplace, things, well, would be better.  The problem is that scientists, no matter how smart they are, miss with their bets because the economy, and thus the lowest cost approach to less CO2 production, is too complicated for anyone to understand or manage.  And even if the scientists stumbled on the right approaches, the political process would just screw the solution up.  Probably the number one alternative energy program in the US is ethanol subsidies, which are scientifically insane since ethanol actually increases rather than reduces fossil fuel consumption.  Political subsidies almost always lead to investments tailored just to capture the subsidy, that do little to solve the underlying problem.  In Arizona, we have thousands of cars with subsidized conversions to engines that burn multiple fuels but never burn anything but gasoline.  In California, there are hundreds of massive windmills that never turn, having already served their purpose to capture a subsidy.  In California, the state bent over backwards to encourage electric cars, but in fact a different technology, the hybrid, has taken off.

Besides, when has this government led technology revolution approach ever worked?  I would say twice - once for the Atomic bomb and the second time to get to the moon.  And what did either get us?  The first got us something I am not sure we even should want, with very little carryover into the civilian world.  The second got us a big scientific dead end, and probably set back our space efforts by getting us to the moon 30 years or so before we were really ready to do something about it or follow up the efforts.

If we must intervene to limit CO2, we should jack up the price of fossil fuels with taxes, or institute a cap and trade scheme which will result in about the same price increase, and the market through millions of individual efforts will find the lowest cost net way to reach whatever energy consumption level you want with the least possible cost.  (The only real current alternative that is rapidly deploy-able to reduce CO2 emissions anyway is nuclear power, which could be a solution but was killed by...the very people now wailing about global warming.)

Conclusion

I would like to see some real quality discussion as to the relative merits of the path the world is on today vs. an interventionist world that is cooler but poorer, more populous, hungrier, and less politically stable.  If anyone knows of some thoughtful work in this area, please leave a link in the comment area or in my email.

By the way, I got through this whole post without mentioning or quoting Bjorn Lomborg, which really is not fair since he has been very eloquent about just this cooler but poorer argument, but since he is treated like the anti-Christ by global warming believers, it generally only causes people to stop listening when you mention him.

Note finally that other past articles in this series can be found here and here and here.

Disclosure:   I am not funded in any way by the automobile or electric power industry. In fact, my personal business
actually benefits from higher oil prices, since our recreation sites
tend to be near-to-home alternatives for those who can't afford to
drive across country, so global warming intervention would probably help me in the near term.  However, I do own a fair amount of Exxon-Mobil stock, so you may assume that all my opinions are tainted, following the tried and true Global Warming formula that any money from the energy industry is automatically tainting, but incentives that tie grant money, recognition, or press exposure to the magnitude of warming a scientist predicts never carry a taint.  My opinions carry with them an honest concern for the well-being of non-Americans, like the Chinese, which I'm told used to be considered a liberal value until liberals and progressives decided more recently that they actually fear and oppose economic growth in places like China.

Now that Hurricane Katrina has moved inland, it's time for the next stage of preparation - preparing for the onslaught of global warming activists ready to use New Orleans' devastation to justify government intervention in the economy.  Heck, some global warming activists tried to blame the earthquake induced SE Asian Tsunami on global warming.

For the last couple of years, the meme has circulated that hurricanes are getting worse, and that this is a predictable result of global warming.  More destructive hurricanes may or may not be a result of global warming -- I don't know, and I challenge any climatologist who thinks they can make a definitive prediction on hurricane forces based on a half degree change in global temperatures. 

What is fairly clear is that hurricanes are not actually getting worse.  Damage from them is getting worse, but that is more of a function of building a lot of expensive structures close to the water over the last 30 years.  And it is particularly true in New Orleans, which relies on massive pumps operating 24 hours a day to keep the city above water on a good day.  Patrick Michaels has more on the hurricane meme here, including a disturbing tale of the religion of global warming trumping good science.  Where I am on global warming here.  More on global warming activism overcoming the scientific method here.  I will never forget this quote from Steve Schneider of the NOAA:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic
statements, and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us
has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and
being honest.

I thought this quote, via Reason, from anti-smoking advocate Michael Siegel is representative of how many pseudo-scientific advocacy groups work today:

In the 20 years that I was a member of the tobacco control movement,
I was led to believe that there were only two sides to any anti-smoking issue:
our side and the tobacco industry side. Therefore, anyone who disagreed with our
position had to be, in some way, affiliated with the tobacco industry. I was
also taught to respond to their arguments not on any scientific grounds or on
the merit of their arguments, but by simply discrediting the person by attacking
their affiliation with the tobacco companies.

As I have found out over the past two decades, there are a lot of
individuals who disagree with a number of positions that the anti-smoking
movement has taken (interestingly, now I find myself to be one of them). And not
all of these individuals are affiliated with, or working for the tobacco
industry. As individuals who are not part of a tobacco industry campaign, these
people are entitled to express their opinions and their arguments really deserve
to be addressed on their merits. At very least, anti-smoking organizations and
advocates should not attack these individuals. Attacking their arguments is
legitimate, but attacking the individuals, in these cases, is not.

Take this statement, substitute global warming for anti-smoking and oil industry for tobacco industry and the statement still works just as well.

Update:  For another example, see the debate over child seat efficacy at the Freakonomics Blog.  A couple of researchers studied data on injury rates of kids in car seats vs. kids in seat belts, and found little incremental benefits of seat belts.  Note their desire to find the truth under the numbers:

What is more puzzling to me is why my results and Heaton's both suggest very
little injury benefit of car seats, but the medical literature often finds 70%
(!!) reductions of injuries with car seats relative to seat belts. We find
reductions that are an order of magnitude smaller. They use very different
methods -- surveying people in the weeks after crashes for instance -- but still
it is really a puzzle. Which is why, when you read my paper, I am extremely
cautious in interpreting the injury findings.

I hope that the medical researchers, Heaton, and I can all work together to
try to make some sense of the conflicting results being generated by these
different methodologies to resolve this important question.

Seems like a reasonable scientific attitude.  Now (via Marginal Revolution) here is the response of a child seat "activist" to their findings:

Their [Levitt and Dubner] conclusions stand in stark contrast to the existing
body of scientific data that support current child restraint recommendations,
and are, in our opinion, irresponsible and dangerous....We hope that this
misleading article does not cost a child his life.

In other words:  Open scientific debat = killing children.  Levitt and Dubner must work for Haliburton.  Levitt has an update to the whole debate here.

Advocates for radical government intervention to halt climate change claim that they have "proven" the case for limitations on CO2 emissions beyond the doubt of anyone except contemptible corporate greed-hounds.  As Todd Zwycki quotes Ellen Goodman:

The climate is equally apparent in the struggle over what the Bush
administration calls "climate change" "” and everyone else calls global warming.
The only way to justify doing nothing about global warming now is to
deliberately muddle the science. It's not an accident that Philip Cooney,
the White House official caught editing reports on greenhouse gases, left for
Exxon Mobil, which has indeed funded doubts.

I have written on the burden of proof that is needed to justify Kyoto-like interventions a number of times, most recently here.  This is what I think has been "proven" sufficiently well.

1. Proven: Man-made CO2 has increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (best evidence from ice cores and samplings in Hawaii)
2. Proven:  Temperatures in the world have risen since 1900. (though perhaps less than typicaly reported due to under-correction for urban heat-island effects).
3. Proven:  The temperature rise in the first half of the 1900's was not man-made, having occured before substantial man-made CO2 production, and therefore is attributable to some other (disputed and/or unknown) effect.

Here is what is still in doubt, with no consensus:

1. In Dispute:  How much of the world temperature rise since 1950 was due to man-made CO2 output?   Some unknown phenomena caused a pre-1950 rise, leaving open the question of how much this other phenomena raised temperatures in the latter half of the 1900's and how much was due to man-made CO2.
2. In Dispute:  How much will the world's temperature rise in the future due to man-made CO2?  Climate is a complex animal, and no honest thinking climate scientist believes they have the right model yet, particularly since none of the most-used models explains history very well.  Also, beyond climate, the economic models that drive CO2 levels in the climate model are hugely flawed, causing the models to way over-estimate man-made CO2 production.
3. In Dispute:  What are the positives and negatives of global warming for humans?  The negatives are dealt with all too casually, in the sort of unproven scare story day-after-tomorrow unscientific approach that makes good NY Times Sunday Edition reading but does little to introduce any facts.  The positives are never, ever mentioned. "Disinterested" climate scientists never mention that some parts of the world will benefit, in terms of longer growing seasons, or that most of the warming will occur in winter nights in the coldest regions, where warming would be welcome.  Its almost as if they weren't disinterested and had an interest in the answer coming out a certain way.

Wait, we are not done yet.  There is one critical questions that is never even addressed by global warming advocates:

1. Not Even Addressed:  How do the costs of limiting CO2 emissions, including decreased economic growth and increased poverty, stand up against the dangers?  No one has done a good study of this, though people like Bjorn Lomburg have argued that the cost-benefit is much worse than solving some of the world's other problems.

Basically, the philosophy of environmentalists is that if man changed the world, its worth any cost to reverse it.  Sorry, but this is not sufficient evidence to trash the world economy with new taxes and output restrictions. 

Todd Zwycki, in the article linked above, has a nice analysis:

So the real question to ask here is whether on net, the costs of doing
something about global climate change outweigh the benefits of doing it. This is
the same question we ask (or should ask) about every other intervention into
nature--should we kill the parasites in water so that we can drink it, should we
drain a mosquito-infested swamp to eliminate the risk of malaria, should we
provide a vaccine to kill naturally-occurring smallpox. To imply that if the
science shows we are changing the climate we must do something about it is as
wrongheaded as it would be to say that if we are not contributing to global
warming we should not do anything about it.

On the question of whether global warming would be a net benefit or detriment
to the planet, the evidence I have seen to date suggests that it is
inconclusive. There will be impacts on crop yields, growing locations, forests,
energy consumption, etc., that cut in many different directions. The question of
whether the warming will occur equally throughout the world, or whether it will
occur more strongly in the coldest parts of the world appears to also be
unsettled, and has powerful normative implications for policy. To get bogged
down in the science, and especially in causal questions, seems to me to be
largely beside the point.

Over the last year or so, ad hominem political arguments have really begun to drive me crazy.  I don't think that they are any more prevalent, but since I have begun blogging and tried to really get underneath the factual underpinnings of certain issues, these ad hominem arguments have become more irritating.

What do I mean by ad hominem arguments?  Here are several examples:

Ad Hominem Classic

The classic Ad Hominem attack is one that substitutes a (mostly) irrelevant personal attack on the author of an argument instead of logically or factually disputing the argument itself.  I could pick from about a thousand examples a week from the blogosphere, but a good recent example were conservative attacks on Robert Byrd's admittedly over-the-top defense of allowing filibusters for judicial nominees.  Almost every response I saw to Byrd was careful to remind readers that Bird was a KKK leader forty plus years ago.  Though certainly unsavory, it is unclear how being a KKK member is relevant to the argument about the filibuster rule (the only real connection, though irrelevant to refuting Byrd's arguments, is that Byrd used a filibuster rather famously to try to head off passage of the Civil Rights Act in the early 60's).  If anything, one might argue that Byrd's historic white supremacist activities might make him more rather than less favorable to judicial nominees.  If anything, the one relevant fact about Byrd that might have some bearing on the argument is that he is often considered a constitutional expert, and has been cited as such a number of times by Republicans when it suited his purpose.

Ad Hominem Shorthand

This is a staple of Blog comments.  Examples include "Bush is a Fascist", "Bush is a Liar", "They're Moonbats" etc.  These arguments usually do nothing to enhance an online argument.

Ad Hominem Motivation / bias

A good example is "of course you oppose abortion - you're Catholic".   While bias or group affiliation may be a pointer to potential weaknesses in a person's argument, they are not weaknesses in and of themselves, and pointing out these biases or affiliations does not constitute refutation of an argument.

Ad Hominem Protected Group Status

This is the reverse of the one above.  Rather than trying to refute the argument by pointing out the group affiliation of the other person, you are instead trying to short-circuit the argument by taking advantage of your own group affiliation.  A good example is of those in "protected" groups (blacks, women, etc) responding to arguments by saying you are just being racist / sexist.  This is a very popular tactic on campus's, where members of protected groups use campus speech codes to try to declare certain arguments illegal "hate speech", thereby eliminating the necessity of actually having to respond to or refute the argument.

Ad Hominem Source of Funding

This charge is increasingly prevalent in the blogosphere, as both liberals and conservatives accuse the other of "astroturfing", or offering political opinions for payola.  While source of funds for writing and research are important points of disclosure, the fact that an argument has been subsidized by this or that group does not automatically negate the argument.  For example, global warming activists love to point to studies that refute warming claims by claiming the study was paid for by the power industry, or the oil industry, or whoever.  While this should make one skeptical, it does not constitute sufficient refutation of logic and data, though it is often used that way.

Ad hominem guilt by association

This is perhaps the weakest of all ad hominem attacks.  It attempts to undermine an argument not by pointing out flaws in the person making the argument, but by pointing out flaws in other people making the argument.  For example, conservatives like to dispose of anti-war arguments by pointing the the wackiest of anti-war protesters, and saying "see, you are just one of these moonbats".  More recently, liberals have tried to undermine reasonable people arguing for not removing Terri Shiavo's feeding tube by pointing to how unsavory and unreasonable other people have been in the same cause.  Can't we just admit that for any argument one wants to make, there is someone out there who agrees but who one would not want to be associated with.

*    *    *

Anyway, I probably left a few out.  I don't know if it is still the case, but in British legal arguments there used to be a distinction between hard evidence directly refuting an argument and "pointers", or items that might cause one to be suspicious of the opposite party's arguments, but which don't actually constitute proof.  In this context, ad hominem arguments can be thought to sometimes provide a useful pointer, but they should never be mistaken for a true refutation of the facts.

For more, Wikipedia has a good article.

Today (OK, its the 16th now, so yesterday) is apparently the start date for the Kyoto Treaty.  You can find examples of my skepticism about the costs and benefits of the Kyoto treaty here.  I won't go back over all that stuff here.

The Washington Post article linked above includes the usual misstatements about global warming, and is fisked here.  I particularly liked this line (emphasis mine):

...by uniting the vast majority of the world's nations, Kyoto could equally be the harbinger of an international model that rewards pollution-cutting innovation and pushes countries and companies to pursue cleaner forms of growth

The implication being that the US is the odd man out of a global consensus.  But then read further:

The pact, ratified by 141 nations, limits emissions from 35 industrialized countries

See the consensus problem?  Yes 141 nations ratified it, but only because 106 of them didn't have to do anything and were exempt.  In fact, they were exempted because the framers of the treaty knew that these countries would not ratify the treaty unless they were exempt. 

I also enjoyed the implication in the article that America's withdrawal from the treaty is solely based on the stand of President Bush.  You very seldom see any mention that the Senate voted 95-0 NOT to sign Kyoto until it was substantially amended, changes that have never been made to the treaty and never will be.  This occurred years before GWB became president.

Consensus on global warming (and on many other academic issues on campus) is apparently achieved the same way Augusta Country Club remains all male:  just don't invite anyone who doesn't fit in (via the Commons):

LONDON, February 2 (RIA Novosti's Alexander Smotrov) - Presidential economic aide Andrei Illarionov criticizes the policy of censorship practiced at the British Climate Change Conference.

The scientific conference of G8 experts is held in Exeter in the south of Britain on February 1 through 3.

"Its organizers have not accepted reports from many participants whose views are different from that of the organizers,'" Mr. Illarionov told RIA Novosti in the interview.

Asked by the RIA Novosti correspondent why his name is not in the list of speakers, Mr. Illarionov said: "Making a report here is impossible because organizers practice a policy of censorship against people having different points of view."

Mr. Illarionov is against the Kyoto Protocol, which intends the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions.

After a number of posts on global warming, several of my friends and family have sent me various links and tracts and articles, apparently concerned about me as a Kyoto "unbeliever".  It reminds me a lot of my neighbor giving my wife religious pamphlets when she found out we didn't go to church on Sunday.  Jerry Pournelle has a good series of posts about getting roughly the same reaction. 

So here is a bit of advice:  First, keep sending me anything thing that has science in it, I always enjoy reading it.  Second, if you are going to send me climate science, make sure you understand where my agnosticism lies:  I don't need more articles saying "see, the world has warmed, therefore we need the Kyoto treaty" or "look at the CO2 rise at Hilo station".  In my mind, there are five logic steps you need to make to justify Kyoto-type emissions limitations.   Everyone sends me proof of the first two steps, but I seldom see science on the last three, which are the most problematic.  Here they are, and where my current thinking is on each:

1.   Is the world warming?  The answer is yes, though ground-based measurements influenced by urban heat islands may be over-estimating the rise, despite corrections.  Also, one needs to remember that some of the warming occurred in the early parts of the century, where man-made CO2 is unlikely to be to blame. 

By the way, be very careful of advocates' graphs - often the time scale is "managed".  Someone sent me this link, of rising temperatures in Central Park.  Unfortunately, the graph is carefully selected, and here is the graph with all the data (same data source) shown.  I have seen the same game played with this chart several times, showing only the data since 1965, which obviously would tell a very different story.  All that being said, I am still convinced the earth is warming some, but what does it tell you when organizations play such exaggeration games with the data - are they being objective scientists or advocates? 

2.  Is the warming due to man-made CO2?  The answer is partially, though perhaps not as much as global-warming activists want to believe.  Yes, man-made CO2 has almost certainly increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, but solar activity has also been at a cyclical peak in this century, and many point to this activity as another contributor to warming.  Also, something other than man-made CO2 drove a half-degree warming early in the century, so whatever caused that warming may well be contributing to warming in the second half of the century (unless you want to take the dangerously untenable position that whatever drove early century warming stopped at the same time that CO2 started having an effect).  Finally, there are still arguments about the quality of the statistical analysis in looking at long term climate trends.

3.  How much will man-made CO2 raise temperatures in the future?  My answer is some, but not nearly as much as models predict.  First, recognize that funding levels for climate research today tend to rise in proportion to how dire the forecast is, so organizations have a financial incentive to over-predict.  Second, when current models are applied to history, they over-predict temperature rise.  This leads me to worry that they may be over-predicting for the future as well.   Yes, they claim to have "corrected" this problem, but in fact they just added fudge factors -- whole fortunes have been lost on Wall Street this way.  Third, and the one thing I can confirm from my own knowledge and analysis, climate models GROSSLY over-estimate man-made CO2 production in the future due to enormously flawed economic models.  I spend a lot more time disecting these mistakes here, but to summarize, the models take the most inefficient nations, assume little efficiency improvements, then grow their economies like crazy:

Because of this economic error, the IPCC scenarios of the future also suggest that relatively poor developing countries such as Algeria, Argentina, Libya, Turkey, and North Korea will all surpass the United States [in terms of GNP]

4.  What is the net cost to the world of global warming?  This is where climate science really begins to break down.  The answer is that, scientifically, we don't know.  We don't even know if it is net bad - warming may be net beneficial.  The "bad things" claims have tended to have a "day after tomorrow" sloppiness to them, but the main bad things cited are rising sea levels and increases in violent weather patterns.  Note that the second is entirely unproven, and, no matter what any media article says, we have not yet seen any increase in violent weather recently -- the data so far does not support it.  As to rising sea levels, there is more science behind the claim but again, we have not yet seen any evidence of it.  Most climate scientists will admit that the majority of the warming will occur on winter nights in the coldest regions (e.g. lots of warming of Siberian winters).  But arctic ice melt in sea level rise scenarios mainly occurs during summer days.  How can this be reconciled?  In fact, NASA data shows little or no warming to date in Antarctica or in the Arctic, despite the fact that models say that it should show the most (and therefore the most melting ice).

Beyond the lack of proof is the fact that most global warming activists don't consider or don't want to admit that there are positive effects.  For example, warming would lengthen growing seasons in most areas, potentially increasing food production.  For example, the Cato Institute reported:

The weather can, of course, be too warm, but that is unlikely to become a major problem if the globe warms. Even though it is far from certain that the temperature will rise, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the U.N. body that has been studying this possibility for more than a decade) has forecast that, by the end of the next century, the world's climate will be about 3.6° Fahrenheit warmer than today and that precipitation worldwide will increase by about 7 percent. The scientists who make up this body also predict that most of the warming will occur at night and during the winter. In fact, records show that, over this century, summer highs have actually declined while winter lows have gone up. In addition, temperatures are expected to increase the most towards the poles. Thus Minneapolis should enjoy more warming than Dallas; but even the Twin Cities should find that most of their temperature increase will occur during their coldest season, making their climate more livable.

5.  What is the Cost-Benefit trade-offs of mandated CO2 limitations?  Again, no one knows and if there is any good science on this, I have not seen it.  You can guess that if we have not even figured out if warming is net-bad or net-good, we probably don't have a good handle on cost-benefit trade-offs of treaties like Kyoto.  Even without this trade-off analysis, though, we can come to a few conclusions about Kyoto:

• Even global warming activists admit that Kyoto will at best reduce temperatures 50 years from now by something like a tenth of a degree.
• Whatever the benefit of reducing CO2 is, Kyoto takes one of the highest cost approaches (see study here).  The main reason is fairly obvious based on the laws of diminishing returns:  The cheapest place to reduce emissions is in the most inefficient countries, and vice versa.  But Kyoto focuses all its reductions on the most efficient industrialized countries, so it is seeking reductions in the highest possible cost locations.
• Kyoto is mainly a slam-America treaty.  The way it was constructed, with its 1990 reference date, was cleverly chosen to put most of the burden on the US.  The US has experienced fabulous growth since 1990, while Japan and European nations have experienced slow growth as well as structural changes that make the target artificially easy to reach for them (see more here).   Fast growth developing countries are excluded from the treaty entirely.

So here is my point -- it is possible to believe in the theory of man-made CO2 driving temperature increases and still be skeptical of government action on emissions.  Jerry Pournelle has a good series of posts on the same topic. 

For other reading, probably the first place to look is the Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg. Lomborg in this book has probably the best counter-case to the enviro-disaster stories filling the media. He has become an object of absolute hatred among the anti-growth anti globalization fanatics who have latched onto climate change as the key to advancing their anti-technology and anti-capitalist political agenda. The attacks on him have become nearly as edifying about what drives the environmental movement as his book itself. The Economist has a nice article about his book and about the wild-eyed furious reaction of environmental activists to it. The Economist also editorializes here, and you can follow all the criticism and response here on Lomborg's site.

Other sources: This paper is a good roundup of all the issues I have addressed. Cato has a lot of other material here as does the Heartland Institute and at The Commons.

UPDATE:

A great post from Silflay Hraka that is much more eloquent (and concise) than I am is linked here

I have written in the last week here and here about how it is poverty, not global warming or any other tired explanation, that has the most to do with high death tolls from natural disasters. 

The Mises Institute makes the case in more depth.  Excerpt:

The correlation between poverty and destruction resulting from natural disaster seems to hold up not only with a cross-section of nations, but also over time. As nations become wealthier, their losses of human life from natural calamities tend to fall. Countries that experience economic growth are putting themselves in a better position to reduce the number of deaths that result from natural cataclysms, and the clearest way to produce that economic growth is to allow people to interact in the marketplace without government intrusion.

Several days ago in this post I made the point that the only connection between the recent tsunami deaths and global warming I could find was that 3rd world poverty, which global warming treaties will likely help lock in place, made people more vulnerable to the disaster.  Kendra Okonski makes a similar point in the Asian Wall Street Journal.  Note:

Appropriate infrastructure, including warning systems that can save lives, communications systems, transportation infrastructure, medical facilities, and sophisticated construction methods are the tangible benefits of economic development. Just look at the much lower death tolls when tsunamis strike Japan, where the average citizen is 43 times wealthier than his counterparts in countries such as Indonesia, and so much better placed to afford the infrastructure needed to minimize loss of life.

He goes on to point out how focus on the focus on global warming, combined with growth destroying treaties like Kyoto as well as a hodge-podge of other statist policies will conspire to keep many people locked in poverty:

This week's tragedy illustrates why environmentalists' proposals are preposterous and counterproductive. Policies such as the Kyoto Protocol -- a global treaty to limit emissions in industrialized countries -- would in fact harm the poor the most, by slowing economic growth and distracting attention from real and present problems.

So, in conclusion

The real problem for most of the people affected by the disaster is poverty. Whatever the earth, or its climate, may have in store in the next few decades, the best strategy to minimize human deaths and suffering is to tackle poverty through economic development and technological progress.

UPDATE:  More here at Cafe Hayek

Global warming advocates are already trying to make hay from the recent tsunami disaster (via Reuters, who else)

"Global Warming, Pollution Add to Coastal Threats"

Creeping rise in sea levels tied to global warming, pollution and damage to coral reefs may make coastlines even more vulnerable to disasters like tsunamis or storms in future, experts said on Monday.

Of course it says "may...in the future", but advocates want you to believe that the death toll is due in part to global warming.  Forget of course that the world has yet to see any rises in ocean level (presumably due to melting ice somewhere) or that the basic disaster mechanism of earthquake causing tidal wave has nothing, zero, nada to do with climate.

The argument that clearing mangrove swamps may make a tsunami worse may or may not be true to some extent, but this is only a secondary effect.  The primary, by far, human activity that affected the death toll is the desire by humans to live on the coast.  Unless you want to change this (and I would bet that a disproportionate number of the world's environmentalists make this same personal choice to live on the coast) it does not really matter if there are mangroves or not.

Ironically, the primary way to avoid such disasters is not by reversing human technology (as global warming activists want to do), but by increasing it, in the form of warning systems and evacuation routes.  Global warming advocates actually want to keep everyone poor - they blame wealth and progress for global warming, but note that wealthy countries like the US (the global warming great Satan) has had the technology and the wealth to afford to put systems in place that would have prevented such a huge death toll.  Wealth, prosperity and technology are what would have averted this disaster, and it is just these things that global warming advocates oppose for Southeast Asia.  So here is my alternate headline and first paragraph:

"Poverty, Lack of Technology add to Coastal Threats"

The creeping influence of global warming advocates and treaties that are limiting 3rd world growth and prosperity may make coastlines even more vulnerable to disasters like tsunamis or storms in future, experts said on Monday.

I worry that global warming advocacy has crossed the line from science to religion, such that data counter to the basic mantra is considered heresy rather than scientific discourse. 

In my review of Michael Crichton's new book, I said I was sympathetic to his global warming skepticism but that I thought his characters and plot were over the top and he was too heavy handed with the polemic, which hurts any action novel.  Maybe I was wrong:

We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

- National Center for Atmospheric Research (NOAA) researcher and global warming action promoter, Steven Schneider

More here from Arizona Watch.  I do disagree a bit with using the Nature Conservancy as a proxy for all environmental groups.  Though they advocate things I don't agree with, the vast majority of their funds go to actual preservation rather than political advocacy (unlike Sierra Club or others).  They are actually one of the better examples of trying to use private voluntary action rather than the government to reach some environmental goals.

I have written more on Kyoto here.  A good recent article in TCS by George Taylor talking about the panic around arctic temperatures is here.

OK, I am not trying to make this the global warming blog, so hopefully this will be it on the climate posts for a while, but Bjorn Lomborg, perhaps the most disliked scientist in the world for his critiques of many environmental arguments, makes the argument that global warming is a fact, but stopping it may be more expensive than it is worth.

My post here and here remind me that I should review the book I just finished --Michael Crichton's State of Fear.  In this book, a group of environmental activists are trying to help mother nature along by creating some natural disasters to draw media attention for the global warming crusade.

I really wanted to like this book.  For once, the villain was not some greedy dastardly businessman trying to increase profits of his corporation at the expense of people's lives.  I have always felt that novels with a political ax to grind were tedious, particularly when they got to the preachy parts.  Clive Cussler, for example, has gotten bad about this in his later books like Shock Wave.  In this book, like in most, the crime is usually so over the top that it is just illogical that anyone would go about business that way - the same time and money spent on less villainous activities would yield far more profit.  It's like those James Bond movie villains who create a $100 million laser satellite and underground control facility only to extort $10 million.

I had thought that the reason I did not like these books was that I disagreed with most of political polemic in them.   However, "State of Fear" has taught be a valuable lesson - I hated the polemic in this novel too, even when I agreed with it.  Crichton makes the same mistake I have railed on Cussler and others for - the cost and elaborate planning that go into most of the planned terrorist attacks make no sense in proportion to benefits.  While I might agree that too many people are mindlessly marching to the global warming drummer without any real thought or consideration of the facts, I thinking blowing some of these folks up into out of control monsters does not help make that point - it just makes you look like you have an ax to grind.  Its also unfair to give the global warming point of view such a poor advocate, the sum total of whose analytical arsenal consists of saying "well, everyone believes it".

<rant>  By the way, a quick word to all you statists, socialists, liberals, and environmental freaks who seem so worked up all over the web about the above admittedly poor literary techniques:  Get over it!  First, global warming is seldom represented by its advocates as the messy, unclear, chaotic, hard to predict thing it really is.  You advocates of global warming have constantly exagerated your case, so get over it when someone does it in the other direction.  Second, I have probably read over a hundred novels where the advocates of capitalism, markets, business, and individual responsibility are just as incompetant as the advocates for global warming are in this book.  Let me see you complain about a book with polemic that you agree with, as I have done, and then I will listen to you. </rant>

So I rank the book as OK, with some pretty good scenes and plot marred by some tedious expositions and diatribes (and remember, this is coming from someone who agrees with the diatribes!)  Tom Clancy does a much better job of evenhandedly dealing with eco-terrorists in Rainbow Six, probably his last good novel. 

By the way, if I wanted to novelize a rant against global warming's bad science, I would choose about anyone except for Crichton, whose middle name is "bad science".  I enjoy his novels, but did you ever ask yourself why all the doctors had to go through all that decontamination in Andromeda Strain, when they were never going to come in contact with the objects under study anyway?  Or, in Timeline, if they are really traveling to parallel but out of sync alternate universes, then how do changes they make in the other universes (such as the dropped glasses) propagate to our universe?  And don't get me started on the science of Prey or the use of chaos theory in Jurrasic Park.

UPDATE

Well, the emails are already coming in.  Since this is getting a lot of hits already off search engines by people who do not normally read this site, and to save writing a number of individual responses, I will give the elevator version of where I am on global warming:

• The world has probably warmed over the last several decades due to man-made CO2 production, but less than is generally reported because
  • Global warming advocates, out of several available data sets, always pick the one that shows the most warming, while other data sets show less.  The data set they choose (ground temperatures) is not without issues.
  • Advocates tend to ignore other influences that might be raising temperatures in addition to man-made CO2, including natural climatic cycles, increased solar activity, and urban heat island effects.  These effects were apparently substantial in the first half of the century.  To argue that they are not part of the story in the second half of the century, you have to argue that they stopped at the same time that CO2 began having an effect.
• The world will warm further due to man-made CO2, but the models for future warming are almost certainly overstated, for at least two reasons:
  • While I can't judge the science, I sure as heck can evaluate an economic model and the models for the amount of CO2 produced in the next century are basically economic models.  And they are hugely flawed.  The models have made assumptions that grossly overstate CO2 production in the future.  As just one example, the models assume that many of the least energy efficient nations have huge growth booms over the next 50 years, so that their economies grow larger than that of the US (for example, South Africa is shown to have a larger economy in the future than the US).  These models also assume that these countries do not get much more efficient, so you end up with models showing enormous, absurdly energy efficient economies in the future -- which of course grossly overstates CO2 production
  • As I said, I don't have the science to dispute the models in depth, but one has to be concerned when the models do not match history, and in fact predict historically a much higher temperature rise than we have seen to date.  Advocates will argue that this is fixed, but it was fixed with fudge factors, not science.  People have tried doing this with financial models as well, fudging theoretical models that aren't working to match history, and have gone broke doing so.
• When and where warming occurs does matter.  Crichton was dead wrong about this - things do not warm evenly.  Models show most warming is in the coldest areas in winter at night.  Since having warming night-time winter temperatures in Siberia does not really panic anyone, this does not get much coverage.
• The Kyoto treaty is hugely flawed, leaves out the countries causing the most CO2 production increases, is ridiculously anti-American, will cost economies a ton, and will have little affect on future warming, even by advocate's models.
• I worry that the science being done on global warming is not as good as it could be, as the field has become so politicized.  Any scientist who dares to even introduce data that might soften the global warming catastrophe message is marginalized.
• Those who report on global warming, including the media and the administration of large projects like the UN climate change project distort scientific findings, substituting complexity and questions with certainty

This is just a summary, without dueling citations.  I covered the same points, but marshaling evidence and citations here.

MORE REVIEWS

More blog reviews, both positive and nevative, linked here.  Other folks who are skeptical about global warming seem to have liked the book a lot.  I still think that this is more of a reaction to finally having a novel that is skeptical of progressive causes rather than a reaction to a quality adventure book.  I continue to maintain that it is better for action books to just stick to the action.  I will be very upset if this starts an arms race among writers to get more and more heavy handed with their politics in their novels.

If you have never checked out JunkScience.com, you should.  They do a nice job of providing balance and fact-based analysis for many science "stories" in the media, particularly those where the science is driven by political correctness or a litigation and/or political agenda.  The spend a lot of time on global warming, mainly because there is just so much bad science there to criticize, but they range all over, from the latest food Nazi threats to the latest chemical contamination panic.

Last week, they release their 10 most embarrassing moments of 2004.  One example:

10. University of Arkansas researchers attacked the Atkins Diet in January with a report linking a high-carbohydrate diet with weight loss, saying it was possible to lose weight without cutting calories and without exercising. What they didn't reveal, however, was that the study subjects who lost weight actually ate 400-600 calories per day less than those who didn't lose weight.

Never, ever, ever trust a science story in the press.  The press has no idea how to use or manipulate data (if they had been able to do math, they would not have been journalism majors in the first place).  The press generally publishes science stories by cribbing 95% of the story from activists press releases.  Even when there is data in the story, rather than just bald unsupported declarations, it is either seriously flawed, or more humorously, contradicts the text of the story.

I can't resist supporting this statement with a couple of examples from JunkScience.com.

This is a temperature chart for Central Park, NY.  It gets a lot of play in the press as a "common sense" proof of global warming, and comes right off the NASA climate site:

Now, lets ignore the fact that urbanization could be causing a local temperature increase that does not reflect a general climate trend.  Lets, however, select our time frame a little differently.  Lets take the whole data set, which goes back further, rather than this set chosen by activists to make their point.  The same data over a longer trend looks like this:

OOPS!  Gee, I am not sure Central Park looks much warmer.  In fact, you could argue it is cooler.  Hmmmm.  Ask yourself if you really think it was an accident that the year with the single lowest temperature in the middle of the second graph was used as the starting point for the first.

OK, one other, because I can't resist.  There is some debate (though perhaps not enough) about what temperature data set to use - ground level readings, satellite data, balloons, etc.  It might not stun you to learn that out of 3-5 alternative temperature data sets, global warming activists choose not the middle or the average but the single set (ground temperatures) that show by far the most warming to date.  By coincidence, this data set is perhaps the least reliable, since it never has had anything like 100% area coverage, it is subject to the most human error, and it is influenced by urban warming effects. 

However, if you want to use ground data, certainly the most reliable is data for the United States, where data has been taken over a larger coverage area for more time with more consistent standards than any other location.  Global Warming activists will love to show this chart of US temperatures since about 1978:

Wow, that looks bad - looks like a nearly one degree Celsius rise in less than 25 years.  This is the "hockey stick" climatologists refer to.  Let's leave aside that this same rise is not visible in satellite data or other measurement approaches.  Like the NYC data, lets take a longer time span.  Can you guess why this chart begins in 1978? 

So we are not even at the high's for the last 100 years - those occured in the 1930's  (you remember - drought, dust bowl, etc?)

OK, that's just a taste - check out their web site for more.  In addition, you can read my post on the Kyoto treaty to find other skeptics of global warming, as well as some specific information about how Kyoto is more an anti-American treaty than an environmental treaty.

UPDATE

Based on some responses I have gotten, its probably best that I point out that the reason for posting the charts above was not to "disprove" global warming.  It was to just make the point that you need to be careful with any science you see in the media.  If you look here or here, you will see where I am on global warming, which basically that manmade warming probably exists but is being overstated for a variety of reasons.  In fact, my whole point here is really that you CAN'T prove or disprove something as complex, chaotic, and poorly understood as climate change with 2 or 3 charts.

A while back, I wrote here with a wrap-up of what I believed about Global Warming and the Kyoto Treaty.  My point of view is that the earth is probably warming, but not nearly as fast as doomsayers predict; that the certainty the major media puts forth on global warming bears no resemblance to the messy, chaotic nature of climate and climate research; and that Kyoto is a bad treaty aimed at screwing the US, and that the costs don't outweigh the (marginal) benefits of its adoption.

Reason has a nice roundup of some new evidence pertaining to climate, that helps confirm at least the first 2 of my 3 hypotheses above.  About half the evidence points to warming and about half refutes rapid warming.  It would be interesting to do a media search to see which of these made the papers, but I think you can probably guess.

This is the second part of a two part post. Part 1, with more general background on my libertarian point of view on the environment, is here.

Because hell is freezing over today, and because the Russions just ratified the Kyoto Treaty, apparently putting it over the top for it to get started, I wanted to talk more specifically about the Global Warming and the Kyoto Treaty.

First, recognize that, whatever one's views are of Global Warming, Kyoto is a flawed treating from the United State's perspective. Leaving out the validity of global warming or the cost-benefit issues (which we will discuss below) the Kyoto treaty is a thoroughly anti-American document, crafted by other countries to put the vast vast majority of the cost on the US.

Why? Well, first, and most obviously, the entire developing world, including China, SE Asia, and India, are exempt. These countries account for 80% of the world's population and the great majority of growth in CO2 emissions over the next few decades, and they are not even included. If you doubt this at all, just look at what the economic recovery in China over the past months has done to oil prices. China's growth in hydrocarbon consumption will skyrocket over the coming years.

The second major flaw is that European nations cleverly crafted the treaty so that among developed nations, it disproportionately affects the US. Rather than freezing emissions at current levels or limiting growth rates, it calls for emissions to be rolled back to 6-8% below 1990 levels. Why 1990? Well, a couple of important things have happened since 1990, including:

a. European (and Japanese) economic growth has stagnated since 1990, while the US economy has grown like crazy. By setting the target date back to 1990, rather than just starting from today, the treaty is effectively trying to roll back the economic growth in the US that other major world economies did not enjoy. This difference in economic growth is a real sore spot for continental Europeans.
b. In 1990, Germany was reunified, and Germany inherited a whole country full of polluting inefficient factories from the old Soviet days. Most of the factories have been closed in the last decade, giving Germany an instant one-time leg up in meeting the treaty targets, but only if the date was set back to 1990, rather than starting today.
c. Since 1990, the British have had a similar effect from the closing of a number of old dirty Midlands coal mines and switching fuels from very dirty coal burned inefficiently to more modern gas and oil furnaces.
d. Since 1990, the Russians have an even greater such effect, given low economic growth and the closure of thousands of atrociously inefficient communist-era industries.

A third flaw is that Kyoto refused to accept increases in CO2 absorption as an offset to CO2 emissions. For example, increasing the amount of forest cover in a country can have the same effect as reducing emissions, since the forests lock up atmospheric carbon. The only logical reason for disallowing this in Kyoto is that it is an area where North America has a real advantage. Contrary to what most people might guess given all the doom and gloom environmental talk about sprawl and deforestation, the acres of forested land in the US has been steadily increasing since the 1920s.

It is flabbergasting that US negotiators could allow us to get so thoroughly hosed in these negotiations. Does anyone really want to roll back the economic gains of the nineties, while giving the rest of the world a free pass? Anyway, as a result of these flaws, and again having little to do with the global warming argument itself, the Senate voted 95-0 in 1997 not to sign or ratify the treaty unless these flaws (which still exist in the treaty) were fixed Note that this vote included now-candidate John Kerry and previous enviro-candidate Al Gore.

These gross and obvious flaws in Kyoto could let us off the hook from arguing the main point, which is, does global warming justify some sort of international action like Kyoto. So lets assume that Kyoto was all nice and fair and some reasonable basis was arrived at for letting countries share the pain. Should we be doing something?

To see if a treaty like a modified-to-be-fair-Kyoto makes sense to sign and adhere to, one must evaluate at least five questions:

1. Has the world been warming, and is this due to man's activities and specifically CO2(rather than natural cycles)
2. Do increasing CO2 levels lead to global warming in the future
3. Are man-made actions substantially increasing CO2 levels, and what kind of temperature increase might this translate into
4. How harmful will the projected temperature increases be
5. How much harm will CO2 limitations create and how do these stack up against the harms of global warming.

Continue reading ‘Libertarianism, the Environment, and Kyoto: Part 2’ »