Reinventions: Climate Change

I've decided to make YouTube videos describing some of the reinventions I plan to include in my book, Reinventions: Fresh Ideas on the Big Issues. Here's the first of those videos. If you'd rather just read the text, the transcript appears below:

REINVENTIONS
Climate Change
by Marty Nemko
(transcript of the video above)

I'm Marty Nemko and this is the first of my reinventions. I want to reinvent our approach to climate change from one of nearly religious zeal to one of dispassionate agnosticism. Here's why.

The science is NOT yet clear enough to justify the enormous cost and severe restrictions on our freedoms--for example the gridlock we'll ever more be forced to sit in because environmentalists are blocking freeway building. And then there are the opportunity costs: what the money and efforts could otherwise be devoted to, for example, figuring out how to cure cancer, or improve education.

You might ask, "How can you say the science justifying making major efforts to try to cool the globe is unclear? The UN's International Panel on Climate Change, consisting of 1,200 scientists say it's true."

Fact is, of those 1,200 scientists, only a few have power and those few are a politically stacked group--scientists ideologically predisposed, data or not, to want to be "strongly green."

When one looks dispassionately at the data on climate change, it's clear that more and better data are needed. Remember, to justify the huge costs, all of five things must be true:

1. Climate change must be occurring.

2. The climate change must be significantly manmade. The most recent study by the prestigious European agency, CERN, calls that into serious question.

3. The climate change must be a net negative. (In fact, global warming will make much of the world's cold climates more livable and arable.)

4. The plan to cool the planet must actually work.

5. There must be substantial worldwide compliance with the greatly increased costs and severe incursions of freedom that the effort to cool the planet would require. Even more problematic, that worldwide compliance would need to remain in place for the 50 to 100 years until technology advances enough to make such costs unnecessary.

The odds of all five of those things occurring are tiny--and that assumes that the computer prediction models are valid. And no less than top scientists MIT's Richard Lindzen, Harvard's Willie Wei-Hock Soon, and Princeton's Freeman Dyson (arguably the world's most eminent living physicist,) and many less well-known but credible scientists are convinced that the computer models are based on very dubious assumptions. That too is the upshot of Climate Change Reconsidered, a 430-page, September 2011 report written by 11 scientists and sponsored by three climate-change-related nonprofits. (It should be stressed that their questioning the wisdom of making massive efforts to cool the planet remains only a dissent from the dominant position held by the IPCC, Al Gore, etc.)

Certainly, bang-for-the-buck efforts to reduce our carbon footprint should be implemented, for example, raising gas-mileage standards. That minimally impedes freedom yet saves a fortune, reduces pollutants, and increases energy independence.

The reinvention I ask for is for scientists, the media, and all of us to recognize that there are responsible narratives other than "The world is doomed unless we spend, virtually without limits, to attempt to cool the planet." We need to replace the censorship of the dissenting view I outline here with a careful consideration of it. It's time for research and for debate, not massive spending. There are too many surer ways to spend money and effort to improve humankind: immunizing children in developing countries, better funding research on sudden heart attack, improving the quality of education everywhere so it lives up to its yet unrealized promise as a magic pill.