The real case against activist global warming policy.

AuthorPayne, James L.
PositionREFLECTIONS

The brutal winter weather that afflicted the East Coast, including Washington, D.C., earlier this year and the failure of global temperatures to rise--as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--since 1998 have given critics of global warming policies a point to bring up in the climate debate, but it would be a mistake for them to use these facts as their main argument. The case against activist global warming policy goes much deeper than what is happening in the weather today or even this decade. The real case is that activist policy depends on a teetering chain of improbabilities.

Climate alarmists believe the issue is simple: a warming climate threatens humanity, and government should save us from this danger. As President Obama put it in his 2014 State of the Union message, "Climate change is a fact." In the thinking of alarmists such as Obama, those who resist this "fact"--meaning both the change in weather and the array of policies designed to limit carbon dioxide levels--are "deniers," as in "Holocaust deniers," because they seem to be rejecting an obvious truth.

But the issue isn't simple. The activist position involves an extensive chain of assumptions, every one of which has to be true in order for carbon-dioxide-limiting policies to be justified.

Here are the main tenets of the activist stance:

  1. Global temperature over the past century has risen.

  2. Temperature will continue to rise over the next century and impact climate.

  3. The main cause of this continuing temperature rise is the emission of carbon dioxide due to consumption of fossil fuels.

  4. The future rise in global temperature will have extremely high human costs (the Great Net Harm proposition).

  5. The cost of governmental programs for restricting the use of fossil fuels will be significantly less than the net harm of carbon-dioxide-induced global warming (the Benefit-Cost proposition).

  6. Governments are effective and responsible problem-solving machines and can therefore implement a robust, consistent, and worldwide policy of restricting the use of fossil fuels (the Government Efficacy proposition).

As the global warming debate is carried on today, almost all the attention goes to the first three propositions. The IPCC's multiple and voluminous reports, which are the foundation for the entire debate, focus on these first three propositions. They advance the carbon dioxide theory, and they report on temperature trends and related physical changes, including the extent of sea ice, the rise in sea level, and expected changes in precipitation and storm parameters.

Now there certainly is room for skepticism toward the IPCC's positions on these topics. Indeed, even the IPCC panelists admit this. They express their findings and predictions with probabilistic language--likely, very likely, medium confidence, and so on--and never use the term certain. Obviously, for example, any change in solar processes will knock all predictions about global warming into a cocked hat. And it is also true that the carbon dioxide theory is only a theory, there being no way to conduct controlled experiments on the earth's climate. Furthermore, scientists agree that there are other anthropogenic warming agents--such as methane and nitrous oxide--so that even a complete limitation of carbon dioxide emissions would not prevent all possible warming.

Skeptics of the global warming theory are understandably frustrated by activists who...

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