roger pielke jr

An Authoritarian Climate

by Iain Murray on January 6, 2010 · 2 comments

in Culture, Environment, Global Warming, Personal Liberty

Certain influential forces in the environmental movement – most notably James Hansen of NASA – have expressed disquiet with the inability of democracies to deal with their imagined “climate crisis,” leading to sentiments like this one from Australian authors David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith:

We need an authoritarian form of government in order to implement the scientific consensus on greenhouse gas emissions

Climatologists Nico Stehr and Hans von Storch discuss this argument at Roger Pielke Jr’s blog.  Thankfully, the demands for an “Ecologocracy,” for want of a better term, are not yet universal in the environmental movement.  They conclude:

Finally, the growing impatience of prominent climate researchers constitutes an implicit embrace of now popular social theories. We think in this context especially of Jared Diamond’s theories on the fate of human societies. Diamond argues that only those societies have a chance of survival which practice sustainable lifestyles. Climate researchers have evidently been impressed by Diamond’s deterministic social theory. However, they have drawn the wrong conclusion, namely that only authoritarian political states guided by scientists make effective and correct decisions on the climate issue. History teaches us that the opposite is the case.

Therefore, today’s China cannot serve as a model. Climate policy must be compatible with democracy, otherwise the threat to civilization will be much more than just changes to our physical environment.

Indeed.  In fact, there may be another reason for those who despise greenhouse gas emissions also to despise democracy. and it is precisely linked to the threat to civilization.  We know that the best indicator of low greenhouse gas emissions is poverty.  As Daron Acemoglu shows, rejecting Diamond, poverty is strongly linked to the lack of market institutions that democracy protects:

People need incentives to invest and prosper; they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep that money. And the key to ensuring those incentives is sound institutions — the rule of law and security and a governing system that offers opportunities to achieve and innovate. That’s what determines the haves from the have-nots — not geography or weather or technology or disease or ethnicity.
Put simply: Fix incentives and you will fix poverty. And if you wish to fix institutions, you have to fix governments.

To put it another way, the authoritarian solution to the global warming problem, in so far as it exists, is the imposition of poverty, for that is the inevitable result of the restriction of energy use that is the authoritarians’ sine qua non. Those of us who are trying to think of alternative solutions to the problem, however, are convinced that it is the same institutions that have delivered us from poverty that will deliver us from whatever ills a warmer world might impose. To see more on this, check out Marlo Lewis’ film Policy Peril, in particular this segment.

When it Comes to Climate Change, Errors Abound

by William Yeatman on February 24, 2009 · 5 comments

in Environment, Global Warming

“A Matter of Fact,” a new report from the Center for American Progress Action Fund, challenges the Washington Post to correct George F. Will’s “Dark Green Doomsayers” column, published February 15th. The report, by CAP’s Brad Johnson, asserts that George Will made three factual errors:

  • Current “global sea ice levels” equals those of 1979
  • There hasn’t been warming in “more than a decade”
  • “Global cooling” joins a list of well publicized “planetary calamities that did not happen.”

Will’s column is not perfect, and Johnson raises some valid questions. For the sake of intellectual honesty, however, Johnson should broaden his fact-checking scope to incorporate misstatements on both sides of the global warming debate—including his own fudging of the truth.

But first, let’s address CAP’s critique of Will’s column.

Error 1. It seems that Will is guilty of delay. On the one hand, the University of Illinois Arctic Climate Research Center, the source of his assertion that global sea ice levels haven’t changed in 30 years, publically disavowed Will’s claims. On the other, ACRC reported on January 1, 2009 that global sea ice levels were “near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979.” Will’s column appeared 45 days later, during which the discrepancy between current levels and 1979 levels grew by 8%.  If anything, this demonstrates the perils of reporting on an ever-changing global climate.

Error 2. CAP and George Will have it wrong. Will wrote that it hasn’t warmed in “more than a decade,” while Brad Johnson claims that “global warming is continuing.” According to data from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, compiled by NASA’s Dr. Roy Spenser, there has been no statistical warming of lower atmosphere temperatures over the past seven years, despite the fact that global greenhouse gas emissions have increased.

Error 3. Will is right and CAP is wrong. Johnson notes that there was never a “scientific consensus” on global cooling, but that’s not what Will claimed. He only wrote that some scientists and media outlets warned of global cooling, which is true.

I am an unabashed global warming “denier,” but I nonetheless applaud Brad Johnson’s efforts. On the topic of global warming, misrepresentations of the science abound, and we in the energy/global warming policy community should root them out and expose them with vigilance.

With that in mind, I have a “Matter of Fact” list of my own:

Fiction: Al Gore claims in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, that “there is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others and it is this. When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer ….”

Fact: It hasn’t warmed in 7 years, despite a steady increase in global greenhouse gas emissions. Where’s the Warming, Al?

Fiction: Dr. James Hansen, ultra-alarmist, has suggested that a 2-3 degree warming would cause sea levels to rise by 80 feet. Hansen then lowered his estimation to 20 feet. His most recent estimate is “at least” 3.2 to 6.4 feet.

Fact: The preeminent body of climate scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, suggests that a 2-3 degree warming would cause sea levels to rise 7 to 23 inches.

Fiction: In 1986, Dr. John P Holdren, President Barack Obama’s choice to become White House Science Adviser, is quoted as having said that global warming could cause the deaths of 1 billion human beings by 2020. During his confirmation hearing two weeks ago, Holdren was questioned about this claim, and said that “it is still possible.”

Fact: To fulfill Holdren’s alarmist warning, climate change would have to kill twice as many people as died in World War Two, each year, for the next ten years.

Fiction: The Center for American Progress’s Brad Johnson last summer reported that the death of two Boy Scouts in Iowa was “evidence” of “the consequences” of global warming.

Fact: As recently noted on Roger Pielke Jr’s Prometheus, the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters cautions that “justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading.”

When the Irreversible Effects Meet the Immovable Policy

by Iain Murray on January 27, 2009

in Energy, Environment, Global Warming, International

Apparently, global warming is now irreversible. Or, at least, it is if you don’t consider any of the policy options that might, you know, reverse it. As Roger Pielke Jr points out, the study didn’t examine the potential for geoengineering:

Geoengineering to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere was not considered in the study. “Ideas about taking the carbon dioxide away after the world puts it in have been proposed, but right now those are very speculative,” said Solomon.

Then only reason geoengineering remains speculative is because the global warming industry is locked into one policy model: mitigation. If adaptation is the red-headed stepchild of global warming research, geoengineering is the unacknowledged bastard, kept tied up in the basement and fed only with a bucket of fish heads.

Meanwhile, the McKinsey Global Initiative has come out with version 2 of its “we can save the world very cheaply” report, which is available if you register and give them your email address via the links here. The fiendish consultants have disabled the ability to cut their charts out, so you’ll have to get a copy for yourself, but their Exhibit 1 shows that all the “affordable” options are to do with energy efficiency, not grand new green energy projects, which are much more expensive and require aggressive carbon pricing (and this needs to be born in mind as well). Furthermore, these are truly global initiatives – something has has to be done everywhere, around the world – as Exhibit 4 makes clear. Something we can do quite affordably may be a different kettle of fish heads for the developing world. If you can’t afford an incandescent lightbulb, you can’t afford an LED lamp, whatever the CO2 abatement potential is. I hope to provide a full response to the McKinsey paper soon.

EU Climate Agreement All Smoke and Mirrors

by Iain Murray on December 15, 2008 · 5 comments

in Environment, Global Warming, International, Politics as Usual

So if the EU has just put together an agreement to reduce emissions by 20% by 2020, why are the climate alarmist groups calling it “a dark day” and “an embarrassment”?

Well, the answer is because the actual agreement is for a 4% reduction (also explained in the last link, but Roger Pielke Jr does it better). And that may be null and void if a global agreement doesn’t emerge at Copenhagen next year, which it probably won’t.

Note also that the “rich” countries of the EU-15 have actually failed to make any dent in their emissions since the early 90s and that the former Eastern bloc countries have also not really lost much ground since 2000 either. Of course, they have a recession that will reduce emissions over the next couple of years, and if they’re silly enough to adopt the policies that will turn it into a Great Depression, they might just hit their targets. There will be singing and dancing among the ruins, I am sure, when that takes place.