From: Zhang, Yangkun (Yangkun.Zhang@FMR.COM)
Date: Tue Oct 31 2000 - 14:35:12 PPET
Tech Central Station October 30, 2000
New Climate Scares Are Politics As Usual
It's Halloween time, and things are starting to get scary on the
environmental front.
In two weeks at The Hague in the Netherlands, hundreds of scientists and
government officials will gather at the Sixth Conference of the Parties to
hammer out rules and regulations to deal with global warming. Appropriately
acronymed COP-6, this United Nation's conclave aims to police and eventually
arrest the emission of greenhouse gases from human activity.
It is an attempt to move along the protocol put forth at a 1997 conference
in Kyoto, Japan. It called for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2)
and other greenhouse gases worldwide by 5.2 percent from 1990 levels by
2012. Under the agreement, not yet ratified by any industrial nation, the
European Union would reduce its emissions by 8 percent while the Clinton
administration promised the United States would cut its by 7 percent.
There's little support among the public here or in Congress for such
efforts.
So, it is little surprise that some environmentalists are trying to scare up
some now, especially when it might also be of benefit to their favorite
candidate, Al Gore.
Last week, a summary of a draft report by the by the U.N.-sponsored
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was leaked to the press. It
purports to show a consensus among scientists that mankind's burning of
fossil fuels is influencing climate.
According to the summary, the panel concludes that if greenhouse emissions
are not curtailed, average temperatures at the Earth's surface could rise
2.7 to nearly 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That's about
60 percent more than the estimate of five years ago.
There's plenty of reason to treat skeptically the summary's supposed
findings.
For one thing, the last time a summary of an IPCC report was released
headlines blared hyperbolic claims about problems that proved to be far more
tentatively stated when the final report appeared. The final version of this
IPCC report isn't due out until May.
More important, other recent studies on Earth's warming have yet to support
the doom and gloom based upon the IPCC's models of the effect greenhouse
gases are supposed to have on climate. Satellite measurements of the Earth's
temperature refined to a hundredth of a degree show only a 0.1-degree
temperature rise in the last 21 years, with most of the effect a result of
the El Nino weather pattern in the Pacific in 1997. Other studies show that
a rise in oceans predicted by the models hasn't occurred.
Which leads to one final reason to treat the summary with great care: Vice
President Gore has latched onto it as proof that he needs to be elected
president.
"Big polluter... would say vote for George Bush or in any case vote for
Ralph Nader, but whatever you do don't vote for Al Gore," he shouted at a
rally in Wisconsin the day after the draft summary was leaked. "For 24
years, I have never backed down or given up on the environment and I never
will in my whole life."
Such political posturing reinforces the skepticism expressed by climate
expert Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about
the summary.
Lindzen who is helping write one of the chapters of the IPCC assessment,
continues to doubt that human activity has much to do with climate change.
He describes the summary as "waffle words designed for one thing, to ensure
that the issue remains important enough that it is not put on the back
burner."
For the time being, that is where the issue belongs on the back burner,
especially regarding government action. The world needs much clearer
scientific evidence, not only about what is happening with global warming
but what intelligently ought to be done about it.
After all, to explain why the Earth hasn't warmed up as much in the recent
past as they forecast it would in the future, the IPCC modelers had to draw
this startling conclusion "big polluters" are cleaning up their emissions
too much. The sulfur and other particulates they used to send up into the
atmosphere bounced back the sun's rays into outer space, helping to cool the
surface of the Earth. Less pollution means less bounce and, to the modelers,
more warmth.
On that score, the Clean Air Act of 1990 promotes global warming. And you
can bet that Gore and other environmentalists don't want to go there.
Voters can also hope he really doesn't want to go on to meet Kyoto's
arbitrary CO2 targets. The pain simply isn't worth the gain.
The American Council on Capital Formation estimates the cost of cutting
energy usage to meet the Kyoto protocol would translate into a 1 percent to
4 percent loss of gross domestic product annually. That's $100 billion to
$400 billion a year.
And for what? If all the industrialized countries met their targets, it
would mean at best a 0.011 of a percentage point reduction in greenhouse
gases. As Ronald G. Prinn, co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science
and Policy of Climate Change, has observed: "Even with Herculean efforts in
reduction, warming will persist."
Meanwhile, Kyoto literally left 80 percent of the world the developing
nations, many of them big polluters out of the equation. Most have
willingly signed onto the protocol because it places no obligations upon
them to do anything.
As their countries industrialize, their greenhouse emissions likely will
increase, at least through the early stages. To counteract that effect, the
United States and other advanced economies would have to literally suck CO2
and other greenhouse gases from the air, according to Prinn. No one has
figured out a way to do that.
All of this makes Resources of the Future President Paul Portney look almost
prescient for his comment in 1999 that the Kyoto protocol didn't have "a
snowball's chance in hell of coming into effect." And that's probably true
even if Gore is elected.
No elected legislature will willingly jeopardize a nation's economy on the
strength of a century-long weather forecast. Climatologists have yet to
demonstrate that their models accurately can predict weather in the next
year or next decade, much less the next century.
The reality of that human nature is fortunate. For despite what the
environmental scaremongers say, the world loses nothing by waiting even if
global warming proves to be real, which is still much in doubt.
For even then, the answer to the problem won't be government controls. It
will involve scientists coming up with ideas, entrepreneurs making them
practical and a free market spreading the new technology around the globe.
The track record of the last two centuries demonstrates the power of that
paradigm. It also shows the danger of giving in to the extremists.
With the election drawing to an end and COP-6 drawing near, people need to
be wary. For as last week's events make clear, the environmental bogeyman
will try to get you, if you don't watch out.
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---- James K. Glassman is the host of Tech Central Station, an online meeting place for technology news, analysis, and market intelligence providing a free-market agenda for high technology. He is also a trustee of the Reason Foundation.
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