climate change — VOICES for REASON

Anytime you see an electric car you are likely to see a “zero emissions” sticker on it, implying that the driver of the car is driving without emitting CO2. Electric car companies are using this idea to market their cars, and to imply that those of us who drive gasoline-powered cars should feel guilty. For example, Coda Automotive, an electric car company, brags that its not-yet-existent sedan, once it exists, will be “An all-electric car to let you drive your way out from under the thumb of big oil. To help steer us away from climate change, polluted skies…”

It is true that electric motors do not emit CO2, and electric cars don’t have tailpipes that emit CO2 or anything else. But ask yourself (or Coda): Where does the electricity that charges the “zero emissions” car come from? Answer: It almost certainly comes from burning coal or natural gas, by far the leading sources of electricity production in America, because they produce the cheapest, most abundant power. Another question: What happens when you burn coal or natural gas to produce electricity? CO2 is emitted.

To call a car “zero emissions” because it generates CO2 at the power plant instead of the engine is intellectually indefensible–and dishonest. And it is a particularly dangerous form of dishonesty, because it promotes the idea that oil and other fossil fuels are dispensable to our standard of living. They are not.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Following the Climategate scandal, I commented that on the climate issue “there has been a consistent pattern of exaggeration and deception, of context-dropping claims, and of distortion of the facts and the scientific process”—and that this has been driven by “a widespread commitment to environmentalist ideology.”

Well since Climategate, there have been so many other scientific scandals that have emerged it’s hard to keep up with them all. As the Wall Street Journal put it:

It has been a bad—make that dreadful—few weeks for what used to be called the “settled science” of global warming, and especially for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that is supposed to be its gold standard.

First it turns out that the Himalayan glaciers are not going to melt anytime soon, notwithstanding dire U.N. predictions. Next came news that an IPCC claim that global warming could destroy 40% of the Amazon was based on a report by an environmental pressure group. Other IPCC sources of scholarly note have included a mountaineering magazine and a student paper.

Here’s a round-up of the growing list of scientific distortions from the Orange County Register’s Mark Landsbaum.  So much for “The debate is over.”

Photo credit: flickr/azrainman

Thankfully, no binding agreement was reached on the global economic suicide pact that delegates were trying to craft at the climate conference in Copenhagen. Despite President Obama’s personal intervention—which apparently does not have magical agreement-forging powers (who knew?)—all that emerged from the meeting was a toothless “accord” and an agreement to keep talking.

But even though the provisions of the accord are legally non-binding, they do represent small steps toward actual commitments. The accord includes pledges to “enhance our long-term cooperative action to combat climate change,” to “hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius,” to “cooperate to achieve the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible,” and to provide undeveloped countries with “adequate funding” to adapt to climate change.

This last item was a major theme of the conference. The fact that poor countries are much more vulnerable to severe climate events than industrialized nations is widely recognized, and it is used to argue that developed nations have a duty to dole out massive amounts of foreign aid to help undeveloped countries adapt.

What’s not widely acknowledged is the fact that preindustrial countries have always been vulnerable to drought and hurricanes and heat waves and so on—and they always will be so long as they remain preindustrial. What keeps them at risk is not the possibility of large-scale changes to the climate, but their poverty and lack of technology. Their climate vulnerability is primarily a result of their lack of industrialization and political freedom.  Read the rest of this entry »

The Climategate documents—the hundreds of emails and other data hacked from the Climatic Research Unit of England’s East Anglia University—have exposed serious breaches of scientific integrity. They contain evidence of collusion among a small but highly influential group of climate researchers to suppress and even delete key data, to manipulate the scientific peer-review process, to exclude the work of dissenting scientists, and allegedly to evade Freedom of Information requests by destroying requested materials.

Climate alarmists have responded by trying desperately to make the issue go away. They argue that the bad behavior of a few individuals doesn’t invalidate the entire edifice of global warming science. Surely, they ask, you’re not suggesting that the whole theory is just one big massive fraud, are you?

Some are even trying to ridicule the legitimate concerns the documents raise by invoking the specter of some sort of nefarious global conspiracy. At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill, Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) sarcastically put the question to a number of testifying scientists:

“I just wanted to ask you if you’re part of that massive international conspiracy,” he said to the witnesses, adding with a note of sarcasm, “Are either one of you members of the Trilateral Commission, SPECTRE or KAOS? I just need an answer.”

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One argument sometimes heard in favor of green energy is that sources such as wind and solar are “free, forever.”  Al Gore, in particular, has said repeatedly that to end our “overdependence on outdated, heavily polluting carbon-based technologies . . . we need sources that are free forever, like the sun, wind and earth.” (See also here, here and here.)

On a superficial glance, this might seem to have a certain ring of plausibility. To use the energy in oil, coal and natural gas takes a lot of work and resources: the fuels have to be discovered, extracted, transported, processed, refined, and distributed—all at great effort and expense.

By contrast, sunlight and wind are flows of energy that already occur all by themselves in nature. Sunshine is, literally, a stream of electromagnetic energy flowing onto the earth. Similarly with wind, which consists of air particles that carry kinetic energy by the very fact of their being in motion. We can feel the effects of such energy without effort, just by sitting in the sun and enjoying the breeze.

But if you give this even a tiny amount of additional thought, you should quickly realize that the “free forever” argument is just plain silly.

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I sometimes receive questions from readers such as the following:

Q: I consider myself a strong free-market advocate and a fan of Ayn Rand’s writings. However, I find your denial of rising global temperatures to be contradictory to Rand’s view that we should follow the facts of reality based on reason and objective knowledge. You are not a climate scientist (your bio says “PhD in theoretical physics”), so how are you qualified to draw conclusions about global warming? If the only fact we have on which to base a conclusion is that many experts support the existence of global warming, then isn’t it only rational, under Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, to conclude that global warming is, in fact, a problem?

Here’s my answer:

A: First of all, let me clarify that I am not in “denial of rising global temperatures.” There is no question that the earth is warmer today than it has been since the start of systematic thermometer records. But it is also true that the start of that record happens to coincide with the end of a relatively cold period in recent climate history—one characterized by a little ice age. The issue is not whether temperatures are warmer today than they were a century ago, but whether the increase in global temperature can be solidly attributed to man-made emissions of greenhouse gases. Read the rest of this entry »

A number of developments on the climate front suggest that the tide has turned somewhat for promoters of green climate policy:

• Although Congress has been working for months on a climate change bill that would impose a carbon rationing scheme (cap and trade) on the U.S. economy, and although the House version passed by a narrow margin in June—the Senate version is struggling badly.

• The world is gearing up for a major climate conference in Copenhagen (Dec. 7-18)—which has long been anticipated by climate activists as the chance to hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol before it expires in 2012. But it’s looking less and less likely that the conference will produce any sort of strong, binding agreement.

• A recent Pew poll suggests that fewer Americans see global warming as a “very serious” problem, and the more people hear about cap and trade, the less they support it. (Those who describe themselves as having “heard a lot” about cap and trade tend to oppose it by two-to-one.)

Does this mean that those of us who oppose green climate policies are winning? Is the battle over this issue almost over? Far from it.

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I’ve just had an article on climate policy published in the journal Energy and Environment. It will appear in a special issue of the journal focusing on “Climate Policy and Energy Poverty.”

The article takes what I think is a pretty unique approach to the topic. I don’t focus on the science of climate change–i.e., I don’t specifically address the question of whether or not man-made greenhouse gases are the dominant agents driving the earth’s climate (though I don’t accept the ubiquitous assertion that they are). Instead, I address an entirely different question; one that I think the proponents of climate change alarm ignore completely.

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One of the “clean energy” sources promoted by environmentalists is geothermal–energy derived from the natural heat deep below the earth’s surface. Unlike solar or wind power, which are intermittent and therefore unreliable sources of energy, geothermal heat is always present. It doesn’t require vast installations of unsightly, noisy wind turbines or immense arrays of mirrors or solar cells, and it produces no emissions whatsoever (except perhaps some water vapor from cooling units).

But before you cue the chorus of green hallelujahs in praise of geothermal, you might want to take a look at a recent New York Times article that points out one little problem with the primary method of extracting geothermal energy: it causes earthquakes.

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I my last post I mentioned Richard Lindzen’s keynote address at the Heartland Institute’s climate change conference. Another talk that I found especially interesting was the one by Gabriel Calzada, an economics professor from King Juan Carlos University in Spain. (Videos of this talk and most of the others are available at the conference website.)

Calzada is the lead author of a study that attacks the myth of economy-boosting “green jobs.” President Obama has cited Spain’s green energy initiatives as a model for the United States to follow. But Calzada and his colleagues argue that the Spanish programs have been an economy-killing disaster, with more than two jobs lost for every “green job” siphoned from the market economy through taxation.

It is completely bizarre for the Obama administration to hold up this job-destroying program as a curative for an economy that’s already on the ropes due to massive government intervention in finance, health care, and energy. If Obama finds any more ways like these to “boost” the economy, it won’t be long before we have no economy left.