Why does this make so much more common sense than the man-made catastrophic climate change alarmists do:
Climate change activists are right. We are in for walloping shifts in the planet’s climate. Catastrophic shifts. But the activists are wrong about the reason. Very wrong. And the prescription for a solution—a $27 trillion solution—is likely to be even more wrong. Why?
Climate change is not the fault of man. It’s Mother Nature’s way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.
We’ve been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we’ve lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.
All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes.
But don’t let such common sense logic dissuade the shakedown artists from redistributing the wealth of the “have” nations while holding down the “have not” nations from actually bettering their lives.
A former fetus, the “wordsmith from nantucket” was born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1968. Adopted at birth, wordsmith grew up a military brat. He achieved his B.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles (graduating in the top 97% of his class), where he also competed rings for the UCLA mens gymnastics team. The events of 9/11 woke him from his political slumber and malaise. Currently a personal trainer and gymnastics coach.
The wordsmith has never been to Nantucket.
Come on Wordsmith—this is way too logical.
Thank you Wordsmith.Great article I’d never have seen as I don’t subscribe to the WSJ yet.
I’m disgusted that the US has to promise 20 billion a year in reparations to “revive” the Copenhagen nonsense. Guess who will be footing that bill, with money we borrow from China just to give back to them?
Copenhagen had four inches of snow today and more is forecast for the next few days. Temperature is 25 deg. F although Denmark has a maritime climate. They may be in for a White Christmas, something which has only happened 7 times in the last century.
Aw Shucks! Global Warming not cooperating.
In one sense, we should all hope that CO2 helps keep the earth warm. Because the massive glaciation of an ice age will certainly kill many more people than the seas rising a few feet.
I’ve studied the global warming problem for over 20 years, and there is ample evidence that there’s a serious problem, and our CO2 emissions are largely responsible. The case may not be beyond any doubt, but it’s well beyond a reasonable doubt. I recommend you read skepticalscience.com for a cursory review of the arguments and evidence. Also, since environmental policy is inextricably linked to energy policy, I recommend you read Professor David MacKay’s book on sustainable energy (all of it available on line) – it should be required reading for all political leaders.
I’ve been both a conservative and an environmentalist all my life, and find it disheartening to see the cause of environmental protection ceded to the radical left. I’m writing this because I’m dismayed by the amount of denial I’m seeing here and elsewhere. To me, this is a conservative issue we should take the lead on. The left’s answers haven’t worked and won’t work.
Any serious effort to reduce emissions must tackle the two biggies: coal-fired power plants and automobiles. Fortunately, acceptable solutions exist for both problems, without requiring us to roll back the industrial revolution as some environmental groups appear to want. To cut to the chase, the solution to coal-fired power is to build nukes and solar thermal plants backstopped by natural gas. The solution to automobiles is natural gas-powered plug-in hybrids.
Environmentalists have a blind spot where nuclear power’s concerned. And they don’t appear to recognize the truly enormous amounts of land that would be needed to meet our energy needs from renewables alone, not to mention the as-yet unsolved problem of how to store power from these intermittent sources. Conservation’s great, but we can’t conserve our way to zero. Ironically, misguided environmental organizations have helped keep us wedded to coal-fired power long past the point when we should have switched over to nuclear.
Both parties have supported a corn ethanol program that yields little net energy over massive fossil inputs, and to boot has its own environmental side-effects and may ultimately pose a food-versus-fuel tradeoff we don’t want to face. The reality is that photosynthesis gathers less than 1% of the available solar energy, and processing and refining losses just make the yield go downhill from there. In contrast, a solar PV panel gets up to 15-20% of the energy, and needn’t occupy any arable land as it does so.
I could go on and on, but it’ll all be familiar to you. Reparations to developing countries in the face of massive budget deficits are a non-starter. Regulations such as CAFE work against market forces rather than with them. Systems such as cap-and-trade are similarly complex and have the dubious effect of rewarding incumbent emitters. Bans on flat-panel TVs and incandescent lights are almost comical.
Even if you’re skeptical about global warming, it’s just one of several good reasons to reduce our dependence on fossil energy. Except for coal, most of them will be well into depletion before mid-century, and even coal will go into depletion by the end of the century because we’re extracting and burning it at ever-increasing rates. If we want to continue to enjoy technological civilization, we’re going to have to find a better way to run it. Energy security is another good reason to begin moving off of resources we need to import.
A tax on carbon fuels would be simpler and more honest than most of the left’s current proposals. It’s not as if the costs of cap-and-trade won’t ultimately be passed along to consumers anyway. The tax could be phased in gradually to give the economy time to adapt. A tax works with market forces rather than against them. In contrast, CAFE regulations force car makers to build cars people don’t want when fuel is cheap. Make no mistake, when fuels begin to deplete, prices will soar. We had a taste of that in 2008, because both supply and demand are relatively inelastic. A tax causes this change to happen sooner, to happen gradually, and most importantly the excess monies remain here, where we could use them to reduce our deficits. If we wait, we’ll ultimately face another crisis, and the monies will flow to Hugo Chavez and other oil-rich thugs. Those who instinctively oppose taxes should consider the relative merits of taxing consumption versus taxing income and productivity; unless you think we need no government, no military, etc., we need to raise revenues to run it somehow.
A conservative plan should also develop our own domestic resources. The left has another blind spot here, because unless you think we’ll no longer be using oil in 10 years, anything we can produce here will help in two ways: first, every barrel of oil we produce here is a barrel we won’t have to import, and second, by keeping supplies adequately balanced with demand, we can stay out of the inelastic region where price shocks will reprice every barrel, not just the ones we produce ourselves.
Leadership often means making tough decisions with imperfect information. Global warming is just such a situation. Leaving aside the lamentable environmental effects, the economic costs of sea level rise alone are worthy of concern. When you stack up the mounting evidence that there’s a warming problem with other issues such as energy security and the depletion of fossil resources, I believe, as a naturally conservative and cautious person, that action is warranted.
Perhaps you will elaborate on the credentials you tout, Doug? Or are we supposed to blindly accept your superior knowledge here, contrary to other climate specialists? nay… contrary to Mother Nature herself.
They say it will only cost the US about $100 billion …
Doug, Doug, Doug…
The taste of desperation is palatable. You post a boiler-plate copy of some talking point sheet that you were handed at the beginning of your shift, and expect us to react…how?
Allow me to show you.
You are a bucket of spit. You know nothing about CO2, let alone the physical sciences. You are a tool, and you knew nothing about conservatism. We see right though you, and this post.
Thanks for the insight to your new angle, now please move along. This is the deep end of the pool, and you haven’t brought your floaties. Say hi to George.
Perhaps doug can explain to us how we were not wiped out during the Mideival Warm Period, or the Roman Warm Period, or the Climate Optimum, all of which were much warmer than the ‘tipping point’ that algor shrieks about on a daily basis?
I too have studied and read about the proported global warming for 20 years. I am not a science layman. Doug, there is a very great deal of doubt that Carbon Dioxide plays any significant role in climate. I can do the calculations to show it should have a little effect, however the paleo record most certainly does not support catastrophic warming claims. Indeed it is apparent from the record that in the past it has not been a big enough effector of climate to even produce the modest warming that the radiation transfer equations predict.
Your claim that carbon Dioxide is largely responsible for warming is doubtful at best and if the so called “corrections” placed into the record at NASA and NOAA and as we have just learned CRU are removed and the raw data used, or better yet if we use only rural stations it now appears that the 30’s were significantly warmer than today and that most of the supposed 1.1 degree of warming during the last 130 years is in fact fake.
The way these people fought FOIA requests is a very damning piece of evidence. Where in anything you would call science is it OK to publish a paper and make claims while hiding the data and method used? This made the entire field not science by the most fundamental definition of science. Until the results are independantly reproducible, what you have is a religion not a scientific field.
Environmental groups are not “blind” to nuclear power. They built their fortunes and reputations by scaring people over it and blocking it at every step. Once it was dead they turned on oil and now coal. Their primary concern is that there are too many of you people out there. The actual health of the environment, the safety and prosperity of the earth and the health of the biospere are very far down the list of concerns for most of them.
Wondering Aloud hit the nail on the head. The EPA has been a thorn in the side of energy and everything else since the 60’s. Let me rephrase that the environmental groups have been the perps. Nuclear power is the only way to go because sooner than later the world is going to run out of conventional means of power and heat and transportation and whatever else we’ll need to function.
I’ll bang out a response in the latest thread that was opened, sometime later tonight. I’d appreciate it if you could refrain from the ad-hominen attacks as they do nothing to add to the debate. My thoughts and words are entirely my own. FWIW I’m a conservative dating from the Reagan era, and was even a delegate to the state convention back then. To paraphrase the late president, I didn’t leave the GOP, the GOP left me. It doesn’t mean I’ve switched sides. I guess I’m now one of the many folks for whom neither party is a good fit.
There’s nothing new here about “adjusting” the numbers for those us who’ve been following the debate right along. You can Google for McIntyre and McKitrick’s late-90s paper deconstructing Mann’s “hockey stick”, and, if you care to, Mann’s response on RealClimate.org. I’m a layman like most of you here, albeit one with an engineering degree. I got interested in this topic in grad school, at a time when the evidence was less clear than it is now. I was at UVa and originally talked with Prof. Michaels about it. He was, and is, skeptical. A child of the 1970s, I remember the gas lines all too well. Fossil energy depletion has been something I’ve worried about all my life. So I come by my environmental conservatism naturally. I could say, tongue in cheek, that I put the “conserve” in conservative. Teddy Roosevelt was my kinda president. So was Ronald Reagan.
P.S. if you haven’t seen it lately, watch the early-70s classic Soylent Green. In it Heston and Young live in a future dystopia and actually discuss “global warming” by name. This at the tail end of a decades-long cooling period! It took courage for the first few scientists to suggest that there was warming problem back then. There was, and is, a problem.
Teddy Roosevelt was a Progressive. One of the first.
@Doug
I will first start out by apologizing for bashing you right out of the gate. I have had the misfortune of running across the tactic I accused you of many times, and have seen it being constructed on many Lefty sites when the see themselves cornered into acquiescence. It’s an old game that quite frankly pisses me off. Your initial post had every “red flag”, and I wrongly assumed it was just another case of a lefty pretending to be a Conservative only to make the Lefty case in a “palatable” way.
On the other hand, your post(s) still contain all the characteristics of someone who while educated, has fallen for the “bait” in a bad way. The way you posted a second time, while completely ignoring the thoughts and contribution of Wondering Aloud, makes me think you are NOT truly open to rational discourse, and are unwilling to accept a counter-posit. I hope to be proved wrong in this assumption.
I can assure you that you are not the only degreed person here. Some of us even have 2 advanced degrees, along with a couple more minors, and have spent a couple of decades in the accompaniment of scientists of many disciplines, up to and including being the son of an engineer/scientist. Knowing what needs to happen chemically and physically to create microprocessors is not for Joe the Plumber, no matter how right he was (and right he was), but most people are “Joes”, and there is no reason they can’t understand the science behind microchips and climate, as much as anyone in the either field, given the proper information in basic English. Never underestimate the “everyman.”
I don’t know if you will be back after the shoddy treatment you received from me, but regardless, this post is for the edification of the readers, as much as it is for you. I am going to devote several hours to this, and I am sure you will find we agree on a few things, but are worlds apart on others.
Let’s begin:
I have studied it as well, and will take issue with your premise that there is a serious problem, let alone CO2 being that “problem”. There is plenty of “reasonable doubt” as evidenced by the over 500 papers purporting as such. This position of yours belies any intent to accept a counter-view, no matter how well researched, or cited.
John Cook is good at constructing an argument, but is singularly under the assumption that man is responsible for fully one third of the CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere. This is absolute rubbish. According to all involved, (even the most pro-AGW) we are at most responsible for some 3% of the .0388 % of CO2 in the atmosphere. He ignores what’s counter to his position, and selectively argues the points made by others. Bad form indeed. His obvious ignoring of the water vapor that makes up 98% of the global warming effect is also telling.
MacKay is brilliant, (and a pragmatic one at that), but he has taken no definitive position concerning the effects of man’s contribution to CO2 totals. Yes he should be read, but only among many other contributors to overall knowledge. Primarily he should be read in order to gauge how ridiculous and expensive all these supposed “fixes” are. Covering the continent with windmills and solar panels, while filling the shoreline with tidal-generators in a non-starter, even if eliminating the political travails. He only half-heartedly, and begrudgingly accepts nuclear power.
That, and I personally despise rabid pacifists, as I see it as the penultimate in cowardice.
Me too. Not only was it taken over by the Left, it has further been taken over by moneyed interests, and “statist”government hacks. My (and thousands of others) “denial” of AGW on the other-hand is something you need to take a closer look at, and quit dismissing us out-of-hand. It makes you look decidedly non-scientific. No, the left’s answers will not work, because their goals are not science-based…they are money and politically based.
If you are talking “emissions” other than CO2, I agree, but you’re not taking my 70 Camaro unless you kill me and both my sons. 😉 As for your next paragraph, yes we should have been building nuke-plants. The “stimulus plan” passed earlier this year could have built another 200 plants atop the 102 we already have, and would have truly stimulated the economy for years to come.
The ethanol scam is nothing but a bribe. It should be cut off now. But we should also remove the tariffs on importing ethanol from Brazil and any other country that wishes to sell to us. I once did a calculation on how many square miles of NASA-spec solar panels it would take to replace all the oil used for transportation and power-generation in this country. Imagine the fit the environuts would have if we proposed covering all of Arizona with panels. Those manufacture of those panels contain a lot of pollution too.
You state you want a gas-tax, yet you also claim to be a Reaganite. Gas and oil are already the highest taxed items in the economy, and it is more than enough (90cents/gal here in CA). If battery-power/hybrids become the better choice, the market will naturally go there, but the pollution involved in batteries and copper mining should concern you much more than the plant food we presently produce in CO2. It is estimated that our coal supplies are much more that your stated 40 years worth. Most analysts have it pegged at 500 to 1000 years, as a vast majority of it is off-limits, yet we know it’s there. Oil shale, sands, and offshore natural gas in America exceed Saudi Arabia’s contribution to global total of BTU’s, and we should be using/drilling it for precisely the reasons you outlined. The high prices we saw in 2008 had nothing to do with availability, and everything to do with the investment houses putting cash into commodities other than housing. Goldman Sachs also saw an opportunity to screw us some more. Drilling now, while we move to nuclear is a sound strategy, both short and long-term.
Global warming is a natural occurring phenomenon that happens when coming out of an ice-age. There is nothing out of the ordinary about these temps. It peaked in 98, leveled off till 2007, and is now headed downward, and will continue to do so for at least 20 years. NONE of the models showed this, and therefore their models are flawed. In fact their models don’t even fit when overlaid atop past temps. The sea-level is doing nothing out of trend, and based upon the newest research, the temp of the ocean is going down. The expansion level of the water has had a corresponding reduction in rise, and there is NO evidence at all that it is detrimental to anyone.
RE: You second post:
I don’t give a damn who you voted for, when you voted, nor for whom you’ve worked. It has no relevance to this discussion.
Your next comments are nothing short of ludicrous:
The “adjusting” was nothing short of fraud. It was not done to normalize the data, it was done to force the result. This is a cardinal sin of science. M&M destroyed his hockey stick, and Mann was reprimanded for it. Yet it didn’t stop the UN from using it anyway, and supposedly objective people like you from continuing to believe it. Get over it…it’s junk-science based on fraudulent data.
Realclimate is a mouthpiece for England’s CRU, and was created by them. They are NOT objective in any way, shape, or form, and your continued bragging about degrees is offputting.
The gas lines have NOTHING to do with the topic at hand, nor does worrying about fossil-fuel supplies imply a “natural” tendency for environmental concerns. Strawman arguments denote weakness of position, and this looks like my barn, which as of today is holding over 200 bales. Teddy may be your hero conservation-wise, but the man saw America as deficiently empirical, and gave birth to Progressivism that begat Wilson that begat Hitler. As for being an environmentalist, the man killed over 11,000 animals in one hunting trip to Africa. I can’t say I care for the man one wit, and why you brought his name into this discussion is beyond me.
Dood. It was a movie. A story. Not real. Not based on fact. No “scientists” contributed to the movie, and back then they all thought we were going to freeze.
There was no problem with our temp then, and there isn’t now, until you or anyone else can tell us what that “ideal” temp happens to be.
If and when you want to go toe-to-toe with me with actual science, we’ll have a go, but I do hope you come better prepared than this example.
@Patvann:
“I’m a layman like most of you here, albeit one with an engineering degree.” — Doug
I’m wondering what kind of an “engineer” Doug is, or claims to be.
Engineers are very quantitative and factual, not given to confused ramblings. And most would recognize the “SkepticalScience” and “RealClimate” blogs as scams on a first reading, because they have the tools, the discipline and the clarity to see through B.S. Sorry Doug, but your writing doesn’t sound like that of ANY engineer I know, and I know quite a few.
AND SPEAKING OF HOW A REAL ENGINEER LOOKS AT IT…