Addressing a United Nations summit on global warming, President Barack Obama said that here was ďthe one issue that will define the contours of this century.Ē And, yes, it could, especially if the politicians...
Addressing a United Nations summit on global warming, President Barack Obama said that here was ďthe one issue that will define the contours of this century.Ē And, yes, it could, especially if the politicians insist on remedies that arenít remedies, ignore remedies that actually fix things, confuse speculation with certainty and show the climate a thing or two about ways to hurt people.
Uncertainty happens to be a biggie right now. We do not know how bad things really might be because average surface temperatures of this beloved planet of ours have not cooperated with computer models. The predictions were that things would keep heating up, they havenít since 1998, and three possible conclusions seem reasonable and worthy of attention.
One is that expected horrors arenít going to materialize, that nothing is as bad as it once seemed. It is certainly true that the Earth is a lot warmer than it was a while back and that modernityís greenhouse gas emissions had something to do with it, but, well, progress toward something awful is now so lax that we can relax and plot lesser responses than once advised.
A second, related conclusion is that, whatever the future may hold, we are more and more coming to terms with a complexity that makes ironclad forecasts silly. There are multiple factors affecting the climate, scientists have a seriously limited understanding of how they work in unison and therefore we just canít know whatís coming. Some think the handwringing should therefore be put on hold.
Hey, donít do that, say others, contending vast evidence shows we are still on track toward Armageddon and that less surface warmth than anticipated in the here and now does not say much about the long term. My own take is that we should listen to the likes of Judith Curry, a climate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who points to clear overstatements as she warns that a dramatic political assault on greenhouse gases could turn out to be more than a little wrongheaded.
One reason, it seems clear to me, is the cost. A Yale economist, William Nordhaus, long ago showed how an Al Gore climate proposal would cost trillions more than it saved, which would be a good way of savaging the poor. More tempered approaches havenít exactly come cheap, either. A German official has said the European Unionís embrace of the anti-warming Kyoto accords has been sending fuel prices to a level portending deindustrialization.
While some reports have lately argued the savings in prevented illness would more than make up for higher fuel expenditures, a recent New York Times op-ed piece by Robert Stavins, a professor of environmental economics at Harvard, concurs that action against climate change could be costly. He says a full-fledged program could give us ďa 5 percent loss of worldwide economic activity a yearĒ by centuryís end. While he also agrees that nothing will matter without international cooperation, he is for concrete action and thinks there can be hope with the right kind of leadership.
I do not advise nodding off to sleep, but am myself mainly worried about the shouts of those who are dogmatically convinced of their apocalyptic visions and the tricks, travesties, honest misconceptions and unintended consequences of so much political contrivance.
A better course in my mind is to cheer on further investigation, to grasp this countryís technological genius and to give proper respect to a major fact, namely that nothing has done as much as free-market fracking to lower greenhouse gas emissions. We can and should exercise care and work with other countries while being prudent enough not to cripple ourselves pointlessly. We should count on who we are to step forward if necessary as we learn more.
Jay Ambrose (email@example.com) is an op-ed columnist for McClatchy-Tribune.