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.

More Evidence That Going Green is Very Risky

My friend, Jeffrie Givens, sent me this new study on "green jobs" in Spain. It finds that for every green job created by the government, 2.2 jobs were lost by the private sector. The study goes on to report that the financial costs and the loss in jobs are not unique to Spain and that only one in ten jobs created were permanent jobs.

Will America's green job mandate do this to America too? A 2009 report by the Institute for Energy Research predicts that indeed it will. Here's an excerpt:

"It is highly questionable whether a government campaign to spur “green jobs” would have net economic benefits. Indeed, the distortionary impacts of government intrusion into energy markets could prematurely force business to abandon current production technologies for more expensive ones. Furthermore, there would likely be negative economic consequences from forcing higher-cost alternative energy sources upon the economy. These factors would likely increase consumer energy costs and the costs of a wide array of energy-intensive goods, slow GDP growth and ironically may yield no net job gains. More likely, they would result in net job losses."

Indeed, I am finding, in my career coaching practice, that most of the new green jobs are short-term, temp project work. When the government stimulus runs out, the sense is that these jobs will evaporate. And most of them are not good jobs, even if they did last. For example, the stimulus package includes $5 billion to weatherize low-income homes. Well, those jobs usually include such unpleasant activities as crawling into tight attic spaces to blow (and breathe) treated-cellulose insulation.

And now let's turn to whether trying to stop climate change is worth it. Ever more scientists are saying no. For example, to have even a trivial impact on global warming would require the world to reduce its carbon footprint by a politically unrealistic 70(!) percent. Those scientists argue that it's far wiser to spend the far more moderate amount of money needed to adapt to global warming than to attempt to cool the planet.

We must stop treating environmentalism like a religion but rather as one of many possible areas for expenditure that society must, in a clear-eyed way, decide whether to fund and to what extent. To spend massive sums on a boondoggle means that many, many other initiatives go unfunded, and in turn, unimaginable and avoidable human suffering will occur.

For example, while the massive green spending and incursions into freedom being contemplated are of truly uncertain benefit, it is a certainty that giving that sum of money directly to the African people could save millions of lives and dramatically improve the standard of living of millions more. Yet we're making the largest bet in world history that "going green" will be worth the costs and opportunity costs. I truly do not understand.

I must be wrong. Indeed, most nations, led by the extraordinarily respected Barack Obama are betting so many chips on Green. But what, in fact, am I not understanding?

Best Summary of Why It's Premature to Try to Cool the Earth

This is Senator Inhofe's (Minority Chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee) statement at today’s hearing on the current status of the science on climate change.

I believe this testimony and its associated links is the best aggregation of data suggesting that that it is very premature of the world to decide that it needs to jump on Al Gore's bandwagon and make massive efforts to attempt to lower the earth's temperature.

Numerous peer-reviewed studies, analyses and prominent scientists continue to speak out to refute many conclusions of the IPCC. I have documented in the past how the consensus on the “science is settled” debate has been challenged, and in many cases, completely refuted, from the hockey stick, to the Stern Review, to the IPCC backtracking on conclusive physical links between global warming and observed hurricane frequency and intensity. Just this past week, a major new study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics that finds worldwide land warming has occurred largely in response' to oceans, and not carbon dioxide. There have also been recent challenges by Russian scientists to the very idea that carbon dioxide is driving Earth’s temperature and a report from India challenging the so-called “consensus.” The Physics and Society Forum, a unit within the American Physical Society, published a new paper refuting the IPCC conclusions where the editor conceded there is a ‘considerable presence' of global warming skeptics within the scientific community. More and more prominent scientists continue to speak out and dissent from man made global warming. In June, the Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever, declared himself a “skeptic” and said “global warming has become a new religion.” Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanna Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology also dissented in 2008. “As a scientist I remain skeptical” of climate fears, Dr. Simpson said in February of this year. In June, a top UN IPCC Japanese Scientist, Dr. Kiminori Itoh, turned on the IPCC and called man-made global warming fears the “worst scientific scandal in the history.” In addition, more evidence of challenges to global warming occurred when two top hurricane scientists announced they were reconsidering their views on global warming and hurricanes. As the normal scientific process continues to evolve and models continue to improve, there have many more instances documented that are positive developments, which should be embraced, rather than ridiculed or immediately attacked by the media or policymakers. It is my hope that as more and more of these researchers speak out, scientific objectivity and integrity can be restored to the field of global warming research.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=4b486f26-802a-23ad-4b32-f7ef47ce6468

Here is an excerpt from Senate testimony today by former NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist, Earth System Science Center University of Alabama in Huntsville

"On the subject of the Administration’s involvement in policy-relevant scientific work performed by government employees in the EPA, NASA, and other agencies, I can provide some perspective based upon my previous experiences as a NASA employee. For example, during the Clinton-Gore Administration I was told what I could and could not say during congressional testimony. Since it was well known that I am skeptical of the view that mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions are mostly responsible for global warming, I assumed that this advice was to help protect Vice President Gore’s agenda on the subject. […] Regarding the currently popular theory that mankind is responsible for global warming, I am very pleased to deliver good news from the front lines of climate change research. Our latest research results, which I am about to describe, could have an enormous impact on policy decisions regarding greenhouse gas emissions. Despite decades of persistent uncertainty over how sensitive the climate system is to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. […] If true, an insensitive climate system would mean that we have little to worry about in the way of manmade global warming and associated climate change. And, as we will see, it would also mean that the warming we have experienced in the last 100 years is mostly natural. Of course, if climate change is mostly natural then it is largely out of our control, and is likely to end -- if it has not ended already, since satellite-measured global temperatures have not warmed for at least seven years now. […] Based upon global oceanic climate variations measured by a variety of NASA and NOAA satellites during the period 2000 through 2005 we have found a signature of climate sensitivity so low that it would reduce future global warming projections to below 1 deg. C by the year 2100. […] Obviously, what I am claiming today is of great importance to the global warming debate and related policy decisions, and it will surely be controversial. These results are not totally unprecedented, though, as other recently published research6 has also led to the conclusion that the real climate system does not exhibit net positive feedback. […] I hope that the Committee realizes that, if true, these new results mean that humanity will be largely spared the negative consequences of human-induced climate change. This would be good news that should be celebrated -- not attacked and maligned. And given that virtually no research into possible natural explanations for global warming has been performed, it is time for scientific objectivity and integrity to be restored to the field of global warming research. This Committee could, at a minimum, make a statement that encourages that goal."