GLOBAL WARMING REDUX

Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, writes:  “There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why.  As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of climate systems, however, we don’t find the alarmist theory matching observations. . . It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system’s behavior over the next five days.  Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. . . I haven’t seen that type of climate humility lately.  Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global warming apocalypse.  Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer.” 

What are some of the concerns that Christy has about the “jump-to-conclusions advocates?”  He lists five major concerns:

1. Christy is trying to understand the real causes behind what we are seeing with the climate warming about 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century.  He discounts the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we have seen the climate do has happened before.  Sea levels rise and fall continually.  The Arctic cap has shrunk before.  “One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America.”
2. One of the challenges in studying global climate is keeping a global perspective, especially when much of the research focuses on data gathered from spots around the globe.  “Often observations from one region get more attention than equally valid data from another.”
3. The recent CNN report “Planet in Peril,” for instance, spent considerable time discussing shrinking Arctic sea ice cover.  CNN did not note that winter sea ice around Antarctica last month set a record maximum for coverage since aerial measurements started.  Why?  We do not exactly know, but it seems that CNN should have raised this issue!
4. There is the challenge of translating global trends to local climate.  Has global warming produced the five-year drought and fires in the US Southwest?  “If you look at the 1000-year climate record for the western US, you will see not five-year but 50-year long droughts.  The 12th and 13th centuries were especially dry.  The inconvenient truth is that the last century has been fairly benign in the American West.  A return to the region’s long-term ‘normal’ climate would present huge challenges for urban planners.” 
5. Without a doubt, atmospheric dioxide is increasing due primarily to carbon-based energy production.  So, Christy tests the radical solutions to combat this.  “California and some Northeastern states have decided to force their residents to buy cars that average 43 miles-per-gallon within the next decade.  Even if you applied this law to the entire world, the net effect would reduce projected warming by about 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, an amount so minuscule as to be undetectable.  Global temperatures vary more than that from day to day.”  For that reason, Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus 2004, using leading economists to do a cost-benefit analysis of health issues, has concluded that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit global warming.

It is at least seems logical to conclude that the moral imperative of where to act is obvious!  Lomborg writes that “we could spend $3 billion annually—2 % of the [Kyoto] protocol’s cost—on mosquito nets and medication and cut malaria incidence almost in half within a decade.  Malaria deaths rates are rising in sub-Saharan Africa, but this has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with poverty:  Poor and corrupt governments find it hard to implement and fund the spraying and the provision of mosquito nets that would help eradicate the disease.  Yet for every dollar we spend saving one person through polices like the Kyoto Protocol, we could save 36,000 through direct intervention. . . Wherever you look, the inescapable conclusion is the same:  Reducing carbon emissions is not the best way to help the world.  I don’t point this out to be a contrarian.  We do need to fix global warming in the long run.  But I’m frustrated at our blinkered focus on policies that won’t achieve it. . . Proponents of pacts such as Kyoto want us to spend enormous sums of money doing very little good for the planet a hundred years from now.  We need to find a smarter way.”

As I have argued many times on Issues, God has given us stewardship responsibility over His world.  That stewardship responsibility is comprehensive and demands enormous wisdom and discernment.  John R. Christy and Bjorn Lomborg have given us a grid through which to think about those stewardship responsibilities.

See Bjorn Lomborg in the Washington Post (7 October 2007) and John R. Christy, Wall Street Journal (2 November 2007).