George F. Will - Fuzzy Climate Math - washingtonpost.com
Tom Skiba referred me to this George Will column. It has been unseasonably cold, and on Wednesday here in Chicago we got hit with a major snow storm. I was giving a talk on HOAs at a conference on urban theory at UIC. I started it by speculating that Al Gore must be in town giving a talk on global warming. Remember "the Gore Effect"? As I sit here Saturday the snow is still melting off.
In a campaign without peacetime precedent, the media-entertainment-environmental complex is warning about global warming. Never, other than during the two world wars, has there been such a concerted effort by opinion-forming institutions to indoctrinate Americans, 83 percent of whom now call global warming a " serious problem." Indoctrination is supposed to be a predicate for action commensurate with professions of seriousness.
1 comment:
George Will writes today that any attempts to avert large-scale global warming would be absurdly expensive, while the "positive impact on the globe's temperature [would be] insignificant." He's also discovered--shockingly--that California can't reduce the world's CO2 emissions all by itself. So there you have it: No use trying. Nothing we can do. Give Bangladesh our regards.
Would it be too much to ask Will to offer numbers here? Yes, it would. (Although he does rattle off a bunch of facts about zinc mining in Canada.) Fortunately, though, Reuters just got its mitts on a leaked copy of the forthcoming IPCC report on mitigation--which deals with this exact subject--so we can put this discussion in context. The IPCC plans to report that it is perfectly possible to prevent global average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C (the "dangerous" threshold). It would cost about 3 percent of global GDP--roughly one year's worth of economic growth. Not cheap, but not exactly undoable, either.
Maybe Will would say that a year's worth of economic growth is still too high a price to pay. Or maybe he would start arguing about discount rates and the like. But why not have that debate, rather than rambling on about Ben & Jerry's and then accusing environmentalists of "fuzzy climate math"?
--Bradford
Post a Comment