-----
Conclusion: ‘The courage to do nothing’
Over the
course of this paper, we have discussed a number of “ugly facts” about the
present climate panic. In chapter 2, for
example, it was shown that climate is cyclical, and that – contrary to the
thrust and tenor of the past several decades of climate rhetoric – there is
nothing at all unusual about the warming that the Earth has undergone since the
end of the Little Ice Age. Chapter 3 noted
that observed data show that despite continually increasing atmospheric carbon
dioxide concentrations, the Earth has been cooling for at least seven years,
contradicting all of the projections of climate models based on the AGW thesis. Chapter 4 demonstrated that there is no
correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and average
global temperatures; and while there does appear to be a correlation (over the
past 400k+ years, at least) between global temperature and CO2 concentrations, the fact that
changes in temperature appear to precede changes in carbon dioxide
concentrations by hundreds of years suggests that the former drive the latter,
rather than the other way around.
This
chapter also, incidentally, showed that there is no correlation between world
fuel consumption and global temperatures over the past century and a half of
human industrial activity. These
observed data definitively falsify the thesis that carbon dioxide (much less
human-produced carbon dioxide) is the principle driver of climate. Chapter 5 then highlighted the significant
correlation between solar activity levels and average global temperatures, noting
that the thesis proposed by Henrik Svensmark – low-cloud nucleation by cosmic
rays – suggests that we should be paying less attention to human-produced
carbon dioxide, and more attention to what the Sun happens to be doing. And right now, the Sun is doing nothing. This fact, rather than the meaningless
bugbear of “carbon emissions”, is cause for alarm.
We then
turned to a survey of other factors relevant to the climate debate. Chapter 6 explored historical examples of
economic bubbles, and discussed the likelihood that attempts to create a global
market for “carbon credits” will lead to another bubble – one that is likely to
burst once the falsification of the AGW thesis is widely acknowledged, wiping
out the “carbon market” in precisely the same manner as other bubble-based
markets have been obliterated in the past.
Chapter 7 examined the logical fallacies inherent in dubbing climate
change a ‘threat’, and discussed the strategic dangers of doing so – not least
of which is that it distracts governments from actual threats by human agents
possessing both the capability and the intent to do harm. [AUTHOR'S NOTE: FOR REASONS EXPLAINED ELSEWHERE, THIS CHAPTER IS NOT INCLUDED IN THE ON-LINE VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE] And Chapter 8 [here, Chapter 7] investigated how the climate
panic has been both created and sustained through the persistent failure to
demand that all who purport to speak as scientists conform, as a condition of
credibility, to the principles of sound empirical science.
Finally,
chapter 9 [here, Chapter 8] looked at how moral panics can supplant reason and drive decision-makers
to persist in acts of the most egregious folly – and discussed what can happen
when ideologically-driven political folly blossoms into its full, destructive potential. This final chapter also examined the
likelihood and potential consequences of a prolonged period of global cooling;
offered some thoughts on how modern society is founded on using energy to
produce ever more, and ever more highly-ordered, power; and discussed how attempts
to constrain, let alone reduce, energy consumption are likely to lead to
potentially catastrophic economic and societal consequences. This chapter concluded that the quest for
“efficiency” is a chimera; historically, more efficiency in consuming energy
has always led to more consumption of energy, not less. Energy consumption, in fact, only decreases
when economic activity declines sharply due to a socio-economic catastrophe – a
devastating event like the 1973 oil shock, the recession of the early 1980s, or the combination of the dot-com
crash and the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Those agitating for “reduced energy
consumption” should therefore be careful what they wish for.
There are
glimmerings of hope on the horizon. As
this paper was going to press, pending climate change legislation in the US
Senate received a serious blow when Senators adopted an amendment on the 2010 budget
resolution “to require that such legislation does not increase electricity or
gasoline prices.”[1] Given that the legislation is designed to
reduce emissions principally by reducing energy consumption through economic
disincentives, it is by definition impossible to promise that electricity or
gasoline prices will not increase (this is particularly true given that Barack
Obama, in a 2008 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, admitted on camera
that his cap-and-trade proposal would cause energy prices to “skyrocket”). This
amendment, therefore, entirely undermines the legislation. 89 Senators (48 of them Democrats) voted in
favour of the amendment – including Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the
Committee on Environment and Public Works, who explicitly stated that “Any kind
of cap-and-trade system that comes forward will not raise energy and gas
prices” – as mind-bogglingly oxymoronic a statement as can be imagined.[2] At the end of the day, only 8 Senators out of
99 were prepared to vote in favour of higher energy prices as a means of
constraining carbon emissions; 89 voted to “do nothing.” Thus, while there may be little prospect of a
sudden outbreak of scientific rigour or even common sense in the climate debate,
we should be grateful that enlightened political self-interest can apparently
be counted upon to help stave off a legislative catastrophe.
None of my arguments should be taken to
suggest that there are not real environmental problems that need to be
resolved. Although some will doubtless attempt
to portray it as such, this paper is emphatically not an argument against conserving energy wherever possible;
improving technological efficiency throughout the fuel production and
consumption cycle; taking every reasonable step to reduce and prevent genuine
pollution (which carbon dioxide most definitely is not); or engaging in
credible, transparent research on the environmental impacts of human activity. Nor am I suggesting that alternative energy
sources should not be explored; the fact that solar, wind and other forms of
renewable energy are not at present capable of competing economically with
conventional sources does not imply that they will necessarily always be at a
disadvantage. These energy sources could
well become more important in the future.
But if history is any guide, it is likely that the most important energy
source fifty or a hundred years from now will be something that has not, as of
yet, even been identified. As I pointed out in chapter 8, it is impossible to
predict the technological future – and anyone purporting to do so is engaging
in speculative fiction rather than rigorous scientific analysis.
The entire
edifice of Western industrial society has been constructed upon the consumption
of energy, much of which is in fact used to acquire low-ordered energy and
refine it into the increasingly ordered streams of power necessary to enable our
technologically-based civilization to function.
When discussing “alternative energy sources”, it is important to
understand that our modern energy economy is predicated upon denser sources of
energy displacing less-dense sources, as hydrocarbons displaced carbohydrates,
and as nuclear power is gradually displacing hydrocarbons.[3] Any attempt to force energy consumption patterns
in the opposite direction – down the entropic slope towards less-dense energy
sources like wind power, solar power, and carbohydrate-derived fuels such as ethanol
– is foredoomed to failure. No matter
how efficient these sources become at extracting and ordering energy, they will
always be hobbled by inescapable upper limits, ranging from the amount of
sunlight that falls on a given patch of ground (which can be increasingly
efficiently captured, but which can never be increased unless the Sun’s
irradiance increases or the Earth’s orbit shrinks), to the maximum sustained
speed of winds and the ability of plant DNA to turn disordered chemicals and light
into ordered sugars.
These
diffuse, low-ordered energy sources will never supply the hundreds of gigawatts
churned out night and day by power plants that measure fuel consumption in
megatonnes, or that generate more power within a few slugs of enriched uranium
than the entire human race was capable of generating three centuries ago. Nor will they provide the exajoules of concentrated
potential energy necessary to deliver humans to their places of work, to put
food on their tables, and to engage in all the myriad activities deriving from
the manner in which our oil-powered, motorized civilization has evolved over
the past century. Alternative energy
sources may one day transform some small sectors of our energy economy; but market
forces will accomplish this transformation, if indeed it can be accomplished.[4] To attempt to do so by government fiat,
against the historic fact of ever-increasing consumption, and the inexorable
logic of supply and demand, is to court disaster.
The
international pursuit of planet-wide political measures to “combat climate change”
is a textbook example of Tuchman’s definition of folly – of political leaders clinging
to a failed idea, and adamantly refusing to be deflected by the facts. There
is no “climate crisis”. The warming
that we have experienced is neither unusual nor unexpected. There is no evidence of a causal correlation
between human industrial activity and atmospheric temperature, and much
evidence that the Sun is the primary driver of terrestrial climate. Warmer and colder periods have happened
before, without human intervention (indeed, without humans); and there is every
indication, based on historical climate cycles and current patterns of solar
activity, that the Earth is about to enter a prolonged, possibly multi-decadal,
cooling phase. To persist in costly and
economically damaging attempts to regulate, control or tax carbon dioxide
emissions in the face of these “ugly facts” would be a violation of reason, and
a folly of epic proportions.
Monckton
put it best: “The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the
courage to do nothing.”[5]
There is therefore
an urgent need for a comprehensive reassessment of climate change from a
perspective of rational risk analysis based on objective, transparent,
peer-reviewed empirical science. Any
such reassessment must begin by acknowledging both the weakness of predictive
methodologies in the face of complex, interdependent non-linear systems like
climate, and the utter inadequacy of linear trend projection as a means of
predicting mankind’s technological future.
It must acknowledge mankind’s vanishingly small contribution to the
terrestrial energy budget, and work upwards from there to attempt to determine
whether human activities have a measurable impact on climate (rather than, as
the AGW theorists have done, assuming a human impact and then extrapolating from
that empirically unfounded assumption to a whole array of projections ranging
from the mundane to the fantastic). It
must recognize the historical susceptibility of moral panics and economic
bubbles to manipulation by opportunists for pecuniary or political ends. And it must be alert to, and steer clear of, the
exaggeration, misrepresentation of science, and demagoguery that have been the
principal tools of those who, for the past two decades, have been force-feeding
the AGW thesis, and all its multifarious, nonsensical derivatives, to the world.
Governments should
reflect carefully before taking costly and irrevocable action in an attempt to
alter a global phenomenon that according to all available evidence is largely
if not exclusively natural, and that does not in any case appear to be susceptible
to human intervention. It would be
inadvisable to attempt to identify, let alone implement, policy options
designed to influence climate before a thorough, and thoroughly scientific,
understanding of the sources, mechanisms and consequences of climate change has
been reached.
If these
principles are scrupulously observed, the outcome of such a reassessment would
prove a far better basis for policy than the acrimony, alarmism and hyperbole
that have thus far characterized, and will forever stand as the shameful legacy
of, the great climate panic.
----------
ACRONYMS
|
AGW
|
Anthropogenic Global Warming
|
|
AMSU/MSU
|
(Advanced) Microwave Sounding Unit
|
|
GCM
|
General Circulation Model
|
|
GISS
|
Goddard Institute of Space Studies
|
|
IGCC
|
Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle
|
|
IPCC
|
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
|
|
LIA
|
Little Ice Age
|
|
MWP
|
Medieval Warm Period
|
|
NGCC
|
Natural Gas Combined Cycle
|
|
RSS
|
Remote Sensing System
|
|
TAR
|
Third Assessment Report (IPCC, 2001)
|
|
TSI
|
Total Solar Irradiance
|
|
UAH
|
University of Alabama at Huntsville
|
SELECTED
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Any discussion of the science underlying
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[1]
US Senate website, 2 April 2009 [http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_
vote_cfm.cfm?congress=111&session=1&vote=00117].
[2]
Capitolhillreports.com, 1 April 2009 [http://www.capitolhillreports.com/033109.htm].
[3]
Huber and Mills, The Bottomless Well,
167-70.
[4]
In March 2009, Royal Dutch Shell, the world’s second-largest non-state owned
oil company, announced that it was scaling back its “renewable energy”
programme, noting that wind and solar power “struggle to compete with the other
investment opportunities” in the corporation’s portfolio. Robin Pagnamenta, “Anger as Shell reduces
renewables investment”, Timesonline, 18 March 2009 [http://business.timesonline.
co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article5927869.ece]. Needless to say, the “anger” cited in the
title of the piece came from environmental groups, not from Shell’s
shareholders.
Similarly,
declining concerns over the price of gasoline have led, between mid-2008 and
early 2009, to a decline of two-thirds in the sale of hybrid vehicles. As one industry analyst pointed out in the
context of this story, the auto-makers are themselves on the horns of a painful
dilemma; they have to satisfy the green-mania of the politicians who are
deciding whether to provide bail-out funds, but their financial situation is
unlikely to improve if, in response to political demands, they build vast
fleets of hybrid cars that customers do not want to buy. Ken Bensinger, “Hybrid car sales go from 60
to 0 at breakneck speed”, LA Times, 17 March 2009 [http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hybrid17-2009mar17,0,6682265.story].
[5]
Monckton, “Climate Sensitivity
Reconsidered”, Physics & Society,
July 2008 [http://www.aps.org/units/ fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm].
