Warming Fires

We’ve raised the hysteria to a new level. With all signs pointing to a major global recession our president elect wants to impose a carbon tax. Democrats have thrown out a long time chairman of the House Energy Committee in favor of an environmental nut case at a time when the auto industry is imploding. The gubernator himself is blaming California wild fires on global warming. This is getting out of hand.

There is plenty of room for skepticism. One global warming icon after another has been debunked. Polar bears aren’t drowning. Whales are trapped in suddenly thicker Arctic sea ice as the northern hemisphere appears headed into another bitterly cold winter. Greenland’s ice pack is melting a lot more slowly than Al Gore would have us believe in his version of Little House of Horrors. The Snows of Kilimanjaro aren’t melting, they are ablating, being eaten away by dry winds. For years a few scientists have taken the politically incorrect view that sun spots have a far greater impact on our climate that CO2 does. Sure enough, the solar cycle peaked in 1998 and the planet has been cooling ever since. After retreating for 200 years, Alaska’s glaciers are growing again. This week the Goddard Institute for Space Studies was forced to retract a claim that October was the hottest on record. The retraction wasn’t widely reported but it also wasn’t the first time NASA got caught with cooked books. Last year the agency had to revise its data to show the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s. They’ve been wrong enough often enough to lose a lot of credibility.

And so it goes. The often cited consensus among climate scientists turns out to be no consensus at all. A growing number dissent, despite threats of lost research funds. Dr. William Gray, famous for his accurate hurricane season forecasts calls the whole thing a fraud. He predicts a new period of cooling saying the warming backers have fudged numbers in their computer models with too much water vapor, a much more potent green house gas than CO2. He is regularly vilified by his colleagues and almost lost his job at the University of Colorado over it. Only his prestige saved him. Other skeptics (Gore would call them deniers, as in holocaust deniers) include Weather Channel founder and eminent meteorologist John Coleman who insists there is no significant manmade contribution to global warming. Roger Revelle, sometimes called father of greenhouse warming for his work correlating CO2 levels with atmospheric temperatures, taught Al Gore as a freshman. Gore refers to him as his mentor. The late oceanographer was skeptical about just how much effect CO2 has, expected it to work to temper weather extremes, not exacerbate them, and argued against drastic steps to reduce green gasses because they would be ineffective and have serious consequences for world poverty.

Another prominent meteorologist, Anthony Watts, points out that US temperature measurements have a built in warming bias in part because the instruments are typically located at fire stations, surrounded by concrete. British science journalist Lord Monkton shows the worlds oceans have been getting cooler which would cause sea levels to fall, not rise as predicted by warming models. He sees no cause for alarm. German atmospheric scientist GR Weber criticizes extremist and alarmist views as having no rational basis. A lot of this is out there. These guys have credentials, they have done their homework, and they think it’s a mistake to spend public money on something that isn’t a serious problem. We probably ought to be paying attention. I can just see them rolling their eyes at California’s Governor.

Teach a Man to Fish

If we really cared about the planet the best thing we could do for it in the short run would be to help a few billion people help themselves. It wouldn’t even necessarily cost us anything. All we really need do is dismantle the bone headed subsidies and protective tariffs we maintain for our agriculture sector. That alone would help lift heaven knows how many of the world’s desperately poor out of the squalor that produces so much pollution. Most of these people live in agrarian societies. If we opened up our markets to them their incomes would rise faster and they would have more to spend on things like education and nutrition programs, and on goods and services from people like us. More of their children would survive to adulthood with better health and higher IQ’s, and with the wealth to demand cleaner surroundings. We would feed and clothe ourselves more cheaply and have more money to spend on other things, including pollution controls. The only people to lose are an ever shrinking class of farmers and ag companies, many of whom don’t need help. If they are so addicted to the government trough they can’t survive without it then give them the damn money, just don’t tie it to artificially high prices. We will all be better off.

Yes, all these people will opt for the automobiles and air conditioners that come with the modern world. They are doing that now and without catalytic converters for their cars or pollution scrubbers for their smokestacks. They will add those when they can afford them for the same reason we did; to get rid of the smog. In the meantime we can be investing in R&D for cleaner energy options. The third world will buy the technology for those too when it is available at a reasonable price. They will also be better able to cope with the effects of global warming if it comes, and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions if that turns out to be a significant contributor. The question is when? I say the sooner the better and we can help speed the process.

All this is probably going to happen regardless of what we do. The top two Millennium Development Goals at the World Bank are: 1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger and 2. Achieve universal primary education. The bank expects the poverty rate to be cut in half by 2015 from 1990 levels. Literacy rates are going up dramatically around the globe. Child mortality is down. Nutrition is up. Emerging economies are growing at about 6% per year. That may slow in a prolonged recession but it represents a doubling every 12 years, the fastest in recorded history. The world is becoming a better place to live for a lot of its people but despite all this progress there were still 1.4 billion people living on less that $1 a day as recently as 2005. They can do better and we can help them.

Yet here we are pouring subsidized ethanol into our tanks to reduce gas mileage. We allow fast track negotiating authority to expire effectively ensuring the failure of the latest round of world trade talks, which might have been a shot in the arm for a global economy now in a tail spin. Congress easily overrides a presidential veto on a massive farm bill to keep prices high on favored commodities for another five years. To the degree we talk about the environment at all we spend our energy protecting beaches and arctic wilderness areas that are in no danger. And we propose carbon taxes to reduce CO2 emissions. Scientists for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the panel most often cited as the authority on global warming, say no conceivable reductions will have much effect in this century. New taxes will certainly suppress economic progress that would allow us to better deal with it. We can do better than this.

Better Ideas for the Planet

Count me among the skeptics but let’s assume for the moment global warming is a fact, principally caused by human activity. The question is what to do about it. If you subscribe to the notion we should revert to a pre-industrial society, live in self sustaining communities without global trade or travel, happily riding bicycles to work, you can stop reading. The sixteenth century was not a pleasant time to live for most people, and they didn’t have bicycles. I will take an opposing view; a clean environment is desirable primarily to make the world a more hospitable place to live for its people. That means more of us must be more prosperous, better able to take advantage of the benefits modern goods and services can offer, and better equipped to clean up after ourselves.

There is a lot we could do. Brown clouds over Asia are back in the news today, but they are new only to Asia. They were once the order of the day in the west too. In much of early eighteenth century England the air was unfit to breath. I remember when my family heated our house with a coal fireplace. At least we had a chimney but soot was everywhere. That stuff was filthy. We still generate most of our electricity from coal but the haze is nothing like it was then, and nothing like it is in Asia now. It can be cleaned up. I would argue that as Asians become more prosperous they will do just that.

Dirty as it is coal is cleaner than wood, at least when it burns, but in the third world many families still cook with poorly ventilated indoor wood stoves. They generate a lot of carbon monoxide and particulate matter, a major source of respiratory infection. Just remember the last time you were in a room with an open fire. Didn’t your clothes smell afterwards? It’s not especially good for your lungs either. WHO estimates that cooking with not so green solid biomass fuels such as wood or dung contributes to a level of indoor pollution responsible for “2.7% of the global burden of disease.” That translates to a lot of deaths, especially among malnourished children. WHO’s recommendation; switch to kerosene or liquid petroleum gas. But the world’s poor can’t afford even kerosene. I submit they would do anything they possibly could to help a sick child stop coughing. A small increase in income levels would work wonders. Raising the price of kerosene would condemn those children for who knows how many more generations.

That’s what we are proposing with Kyoto style protocols to reduce carbon dioxide emissions; raise the price of precious fuels for rich and poor alike. For the latter it is more than an inconvenience. It can be a death sentence. Do we really expect countries like India to go along? It’s a terrible idea and there are better ways. I’m not suggesting the air needs to be cleaned up only in the third world. We have a way to go ourselves, but if global warming is a problem it is a global one. We can’t solve it by ourselves and we can’t expect people currently living in poverty to be satisfied with their lot. We must have solutions that allow them a route to prosperity. They will settle for nothing less.

There are solutions at hand. Some of them don’t cost very much. Some, like reduced trade barriers, have net economic benefits all around. Look at the Copenhagen Consensus web site. They’ve assembled a group of more than 50 prominent economists, including 5 Nobel Laureates, to rank cost effective approaches to the world’s most serious environmental issues. At the top of the list is a simple nutrition program. Trade is second. More R&D into zero and low carbon fuels is 14^th of 30. It’s a thought provoking list from a very thoughtful group. Before we go spending trillions on CO2 reduction programs that don’t promise much benefit, we might consider some of these ideas.

Carbon Hyperbole

We had an early frost in North Texas this year, about three weeks before usual. The reason was pretty simple, a combination of low humidity and no cloud cover. When the sun went down the temperature started dropping like a rock, a classic reaction to low greenhouse atmospheric conditions. Thin dry air is the reason temperatures tend to fall so quickly at night in the mountains. Without water vapor the earth would be a much colder place and most life as we know it would be impossible. It is far and away the most important of the green house gasses and I suspect most of us don’t even realize that is one. Most of us might list carbon dioxide and maybe methane or nitrous oxides, but almost certainly not water vapor. In fairness an increase in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, those generated by human activity, is usually cited as the primary cause of global warming. Water vapor is rarely mentioned. But I think the example illustrates that most of us don’t really know very much about the issue. We’ve been conditioned to think of greenhouse gasses as pollutants and of course that isn’t necessarily so.

That all tends to get lost in the noise over global warming. An extremist environmental lobby, a few well intentioned celebrities, and a compliant media have so wildly exaggerated the harmful effects of CO2 that we may be about to inflict really serious long term damage to our economy in order to reduce emissions. We are told that last summer’s $4 gasoline was a good thing. Some think $5 or even $7 would be better. Our president elect wants a carbon cap and trade auction that would bankrupt anybody building a new coal fired power plant. If we don’t act now, humanity will soon be reduced to a few thousand souls living at either pole, the only habitable places left on the planet. Society will collapse into medieval poverty. To avoid that fate we must impose economic penalties on ourselves that would take us to, um, medieval poverty.

It’s a shame because there are so many opportunities we could be pursuing to make the planet a better place, and are distracted by all this hype. We could be drilling in ANWAR at virtually no environmental cost and using the oil royalties to clean up the Chesapeake, Lake Pontchartrain, the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi, San Francisco Bay, and who knows how many other polluted waters. At a fraction of the cost of cap and trade taxes we could build enough nuclear power plants to supply all our electricity needs with no pollution emissions of any kind. We could divert coal to clean technology that would eliminate our dependence on foreign oil, bring enormous economic benefits, and knock the props from under some of the world’s worst tyrants. We could build desalinization plants to supply fresh water for our cities in the southwest, divert water they use now to irrigation, and feed a lot of hungry people.

There are a lot of things we could and should be doing to make the world better and more livable but aren’t because of misplaced priorities. Instead we want to incur enormous costs for negligible benefit. Even the most alarmist scientists say current proposals to restrict carbon emissions will have little effect on global warming. Some say the whole thing is a giant hoax. Most say the warming is a fact and is caused by human activity but the dangers are grossly over stated.

I was encouraged last week to see several carbon related state ballot initiatives defeated as too onerous and too costly. Maybe we will now begin to have some reasoned public discourse. It has been too long absent.

Lame Duck

Franklin Roosevelt was first elected president on November 8^th, 1932 but didn’t take office until March 4^th. The cruel winter in between was tragic for the nation. Herbert Hoover was moving frantically on domestic stimulus measures that FDR would later build on. He pleaded with the president elect to collaborate with him on that, on European war debt, and on an international economic conference to be held in January. FDR refused, partly because he genuinely believed the depression to be a strictly domestic issue, and partly, as he infamously remarked, to make sure any further deterioration was “Hoover’s baby.” He was as wrong on the first count as he was callous on the second. The United States depended then as it does now on a global economy. International cooperation was desperately needed to deal with a crisis that affected the entire world. It would take the incoming president some time to understand that. Concerted action by FDR and Hoover in early 1933 might have taken years off the worst depression this country has ever known. It didn’t happen and hard times dragged on.

With talk of a new depression in the air some pundits are remembering what became known as the interregnum and suggesting now might be time to narrow it further, to within a few days of the election. But the history doesn’t support such a move. There is no reason to suppose that had Roosevelt’s famous 100 days begun earlier they would have been more effective. The London Monetary Conference didn’t convene until June, 1933. FDR sent his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, with a delegation but undercut them with his own ambivalence and in the end rejected the stabilization plan they negotiated. He completely misunderstood the international nature of the depression. Taking office earlier would not likely have helped. He would have been no better prepared.

It seems to me new presidents elect need some time to get organized. They spend two years or more running their campaigns and doing little else. They have positions on all major issues of course but until they actually take office they have no experience at all in implementing policy. They tend to be desperately short on specifics. To expect them to step in immediately and take the reins of power is asking too much, especially in times of crisis. They need to know who their cabinet members will be, and incoming staff need time to prepare as well. No, orderly process with transition as smooth as possible is much to be preferred over abrupt and hasty takeover.

Not that transitions are necessarily smooth, but we haven’t had a repeat of 1933. January inaugurations have served us reasonably well through the years. Cooperation between incoming and outgoing administrations has been cordial if not warm, including several during war time. Eisenhower took over from Truman at the height of the Korean War, as did Nixon from Johnson in 1969 with Vietnam raging. American embassy personnel were held hostage in Iran until Ronald Reagan was sworn in, Iranians spitefully withholding their release until Jimmy Carter was gone. It would be hard to make a case that taking office immediately after election would have helped those administrations.

So why make a change now? Many of those advocating such a move are old enough to remember earlier times of stress. I don’t hear them making their arguments in the context of history. Could it be they’ve forgotten it? Do they really think today’s troubles are so different they warrant a one off constitutional amendment? Or are they just so caught up in their preference for a particular candidate, or their dislike for an incumbent that their judgment is clouded? I suspect the latter.