About a year ago, I became convinced that the global warming debate was going the way of other environmental issues during the past 40 years. Dissenting voices were being silenced as America hurtled toward more laws, regulations, and bureaucratic control — which, "informed" opinion makers insist, are the only solutions allowed to any problems global warming might bring. Sadly, this pattern has repeated time and again on a wide array of environmental issues since the 1960s, when the lawyers of the nascent Environmental Defense Fund began lobbying for local, then national, and then international bans on the pesticide DDT. The results in virtually every case have been disastrous: significant losses of both liberty and prosperity and, in some cases, environmental and humanitarian catastrophe.
The plan advocated by global warming zealots to limit access to proven, affordable energy sources "would have a far worse impact on poor and vulnerable populations around the world than any expected rise in average global temperatures," says the Competitive Enterprise Institute's senior fellow Marlo Lewis. But we don't expect the new billion-dollar, global warming think tank to think much about that.
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
The Beacon Hill Institute, the economics think tank that has written peer reviews of global warming policy recommendations coming out of the state climate commissions (as advanced by the Center for Climate Strategies), has now done some of their own analysis — for North Carolina. The results are pretty ugly and contradict the economic fantasy promoted by CCS and the NC Climate Action Plan Advisory Group:
North Carolina would lose more than 33,000 jobs and face a $4.5 billion hit to its Gross State Product by 2011, if lawmakers adopt just a fraction of the policies under consideration now to address climate change. A Boston-based economist who has analyzed the policy proposals will deliver that message Tuesday to a legislative study group.
The policies studied also would cost the state more than $502 million in investment, lower real disposable income by $2.2 billion, and reduce state and local revenue by more than $184 million, said David Tuerck, chairman of the Suffolk University Department of Economics and executive director of the department’s research arm, the Beacon Hill Institute. Tuerck is scheduled to testify to the N.C. Legislative Commission on Global Climate Change during its meeting 11 a.m. Tuesday in Raleigh.
The climate commission is considering 56 policy proposals developed by the Climate Action Plan Advisory Group. The proposals aim to limit global warming by cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Supporters contend those policy proposals would help North Carolina’s economy. A report from the Appalachian State University Energy Center suggests the policies would generate more than 300,000 jobs by 2020 and boost Gross State Product by nearly $1.5 billion.
Tuerck explains further CCS's and ASU's disconnect from reality here, for the John Locke Foundation.
Sometimes, bad economic policies create small annoyances. Sometimes, they lead to catastrophes. For years, the U.S. has heavily subsidized the production of corn-based ethanol. The global impact of that policy is beginning to lean toward the latter category.
The most outrageously repulsive and hypocritical reaction to the Pope’s visit came from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Her office's press release included the following admonition from Pelosi: “As we are honored by the visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, the President should heed his warnings about our moral responsibility to act, calling for a ‘strong commitment to reverse those trends that risk making the situation of decay irreversible.’” The Washington Times ran a front-page photo [find photo] of the militantly pro-abortion Speaker bowing and kissing the Pope's ring when she was presented to him in the White House Rose Garden.
Perhaps Germans fear Russia more than rising temperatures. A national debate has started on energy security, and there has even been talk of a coal revival in Germany, irrespective of the impact on climate change. In the end, the German people will have to decide what they are willing to sacrifice for a cleaner environment. After all, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
We'll refrain from commenting on the sartorial nightmare suggested by a buzz phrase that is as silly as it is deceptive. But we cannot resist the chance to expose the economic nonsense that surrounds the green-collar solution. Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both promise to create high-paying jobs for workers who will battle global warming, pollution, and all manner of environmental ills. Of course, the economy is already doing just that — and as environmental technology develops, more jobs will be created.
In the realm of energy policy, there are a great many bad ideas and a very few good ones. The usual practice of presidential candidates is to (1) sift through all these proposals, (2) separate the wheat from the chaff and (3) keep the chaff.
Posted by Paul, at 04:35 PM
There are several interesting climate related studies in this week's Science magazine.
Greenland Ice Slipping Away but Not All That Quickly
Almost 6 years ago, a paper in Science warned of an unheralded environmental peril. Melted snow and ice seemed to be reaching the base of the great Greenland ice sheet, lubricating it and accelerating the sheet’s slide toward oblivion in the sea, where it was raising sea level worldwide (12 July 2002, p. 218).
A new study has confirmed that meltwater reaches the ice sheet’s base and does indeed speed the ice’s seaward flow. The good news is that the process is more leisurely than many climate scientists had feared. Glaciologist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University in State College says, "It matters, but it’s not huge.” The finding should ease concerns that Greenland ice could raise sea level a disastrous meter or more by the end of the century.
Read more at PHYSORG.com: Lakes of meltwater can crack Greenland's ice and contribute to faster ice sheet flow
Coral Adaptation in the Face of Climate Change
IN THEIR REVIEW, “CORAL REEFS UNDER RAPID CLIMATE CHANGE and ocean acidification” (14 December 2007, p. 1737), O. Hoegh- Guldberg et al. present future reef scenarios that range from coral-dominated communities to rapidly eroding rubble banks. Notably, none of their scenarios considers the capacity for corals to adapt. The authors dismiss adaptation because “[r]eef-building corals have relatively long generation times and low genetic diversity, making or slow rates of adaptation [relative to rates of change].” We think the possibility of adaptation deserves a second look.
In the absence of longterm demographic studies to detect temporal trends in life history traits, predicting rates of adaptation, and whether they will be exceeded by rates of environmental change, is pure speculation. Indeed, where such data are available for terrestrial organisms they demonstrate that contemporary evolution in response to climate change is possible (7).
There's another coral story in The Herald Sun: Scientists find corals flourishing on Bikini Atoll
Phytoplankton Calcification in a High-CO2 World
Ocean acidification in response to rising atmospheric CO2 partial pressures is widely expected to reduce calcification by marine organisms. From the mid-Mesozoic, coccolithophores have been major calcium carbonate producers in the world’s oceans, today accounting for about a third of the total marine CaCO3 production. Here, we present laboratory evidence that calcification and net primary production in the coccolithophore species Emiliania huxleyi are significantly increased by high CO2 partial pressures. Field evidence from the deep ocean is consistent with these laboratory conclusions, indicating that over the past 220 years there has been a 40% increase in average coccolith mass. Our findings show that coccolithophores are already responding and will probably continue to respond to rising atmospheric CO2 partial pressures, which has important implications for biogeochemical modeling of future oceans and climate.
Read more at Dot Earth: Some Plankton Thrive With More CO2
Lawrence Solomon’s book profiles nearly three dozen top scientists who have resisted the pull of climate alarmism.
Once upon a time, the media believed in the open exchange of opinions regarding public policy…But there’s one hot-button issue on which virtually no dissent is allowed: climate change. In a style reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, people disagreeing with any element of the agenda pursued by Al Gore and his climate catastrophists have been derided as “deniers,” a term clearly intended to equate dissent with mental illness, if not post hoc complicity in atrocities (as in “Holocaust denier”). “Fifteen per cent of the people believe the moon landing was staged on some movie lot and a somewhat smaller number still believe the Earth is flat,” Gore says. “They all get together on a Saturday night and party with the global-warming deniers.”
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