Roy Spencer - Confessions of a Climate Scientist. Cures for Global Warming Mass Hysteria, Książki, Książki po ...

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
Confessions of a Climate Scientist
Cures for Global Warming Mass Hysteria
Prologue
Chapter 1: Global Warming Hysteria
All natural disasters are now caused by global warming.
Chapter 2: Science Isn’t Truth
What we know isn’t necessarily so.
Chapter 3: How Weather Works
The Mission: to move heat from where there is more to where there is less.
Chapter 4: How Global Warming (Allegedly) Works
The theory is sound, but the smoking gun is nowhere to be found.
Chapter 5: The Scientists’ Faith, the Environmentalists’ Religion
Belief in dangerous global warming is more faith than it is science.
Chapter 6: It’s Economics, Stupid
Views on what should be done about global warming are usually related to
what we believe about economics and wealth.
Chapter 7: The Politics of Climate Change
No other public issue has so much potential for abuse of authority.
Chapter 8: Dumb Global Warming Solutions
Are they really serious about fixing global warming, or are they
just pulling our leg?
Chapter 9: Smart Global Warming Solutions
New energy technologies of the future are the only hope to ‘save’ us from
the threats posed by global warming.
Chapter 10: Summary
Epilogue
Prologue
Mark Twain observed that “everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything
about it.” Well, today’s popular view is that we finally are doing something about the weather. We
are making it worse.
Because of carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, some scientists are
predicting dramatic weather changes ahead. Depending upon which scientists you believe, the extra
carbon dioxide we are putting in the atmosphere could melt the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets,
flooding coastal locations worldwide. It could shut down the Atlantic Gulf Stream and oceanic
thermohaline circulation, triggering the rapid onset of a new Ice Age. Global weather circulation
changes could cause more severe floods and droughts, altering or even destroying entire
ecosystems.
The fear of global warming has galvanized the environmental movement and led to billions
of dollars in federal expenditures to observe and understand the climate system. It has spun off
popular movies, and helped to solidify political movements, such as the Green Party in Germany.
Former Vice Presiden, Al Gore, has written books and even made a movie about the problem. Art
Bell’s popular book,
The Coming Global Superstorm,
and its movie spin-off,
The Day After
Tomorrow,
are good examples of the public’s fascination with the prospect of global climate
catastrophe. Global warming has given new purpose to the lives of entertainers and movie stars,
some of whom have taken a special interest in the issue.
Oh, and we scientists who make our living off it think it’s a pretty cool gig, too.
2
But the western world’s fear of global warming and its effects has now reached the point of
obsession. The media is more than willing to spread, indeed amplify, the fear that we are filling up
the Earth, pushing it beyond its ability to sustain life and that Mother Nature is suffering as a result
of our sins. Humans are now being increasingly blamed for every hurricane, tornado, tsunami,
earthquake, flood, and drought that occurs.
I would say that the coming global superstorm has already arrived – but it is a storm of hype
and hysteria.
I believe that the environmental fears that have consumed the western world stem from two
central beliefs. The first is that the Earth is fragile and needs to be protected, even to the detriment
of humans if necessary. Many people feel that the climate system is being pushed beyond its limits,
past some imaginary tipping point from which there will be no return.
The second is that the increasing wealth of nations is bad for the environment. Since
technology and our desire for more stuff are to blame for environmental problems, it is thought that
we should renounce our modern lifestyle.
I will argue for exactly the opposite viewpoint: that the Earth is pretty resilient; and that only
through mankind’s ingenuity and freedom to create wealth do we solve, or at least minimize,
environmental problems as they arise.
We have had no shortage of pessimistic environmental predictions over the last forty years.
The birth of the modern environmental movement is usually traced to the publication of Rachel
Carson’s
Silent Spring
. A biologist, Carson was passionate about the dangers of the use the
insecticide DDT, which was in widespread use at the time. One concern was that DDT was causing
a thinning of egg shells in some birds, but also that DDT was causing problems throughout the food
chain.
While Carson is still admired for paving the way for future generations of environmentalists,
governmental policies resulting from her work have caused the deaths of literally millions of people
by allowing malaria to thrive in Africa. Instead of greatly reducing the amount of DDT that was so
indiscriminately sprayed on crops, governments banned the use of the pesticide altogether. That the
most famous policy reaction to environmental concerns has caused so much human suffering
should, by itself, make us wary of any sweeping efforts to ‘protect the environment’.
Carson’s research dealt with the dangers of a particular insecticide, yet it wasn’t long before
predictions of more widespread doom from other human pressures on the environment began to
appear. In Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book,
The Population Bomb
, Ehrlich predicted that worldwide crises
in food supply and natural resource availability would occur by 1990. Huge famines and economic
system failures were predicted, destabilizing social and political order in the world. The basic
premise of the book was that, while available resources were growing linearly with time, the
population of the Earth was growing faster, at a geometric rate. Eventually, the population pressure
would be too much –
unsustainable
in today’s environmentally-friendly lexicon.
The only problem with Ehrlich’s premise was that it was not true, and the crises never
materialized. The economist Julian Simon won a famous bet with Ehrlich over whether several
natural resources would become less or more available between 1980 and 1990. Simon allowed
Ehrlich to choose five metals that Ehrlich thought would go up in price. Ehrlich chose copper,
chrome, nickel, tin, and tungsten. A decrease in resource availability would be measured as an
3
increase in price. Ten years later, in 1990, Dr. Ehrlich was forced to write a check to Dr. Simon,
since the cost of all of the metals had decreased over the previous ten years.
While Ehrlich was correct that the amount of raw material in the ground does go down as
mankind removes it, Julian Simon noted that mankind always adapts. We become more efficient in
our use of those materials, or we find replacement materials. Someday we might even be mining
our landfills to recover and recycle discarded materials.
In fact, almost all known reserves of resources have actually grown faster than the
population over time. Even the United Nations, which never saw a crisis it wouldn’t take money for
to fail at solving, has projected that the global population will level off in this century. But this
hasn’t prevented a variety of experts to continue to claim that humanity’s current rate of
consumption can not be sustained.
Not every environmentalist has bought into predictions of global doom, though. In the late
1990’s, a professor of statistics and self-proclaimed environmentalist decided to examine many of
the environmentalists’ claims. Bjorn Lomborg and his statistics students started investigating the
data that environmentalists were basing their gloomy predictions of environmental disaster on. He
thus embarked on his road to conversion from environmental worry-wart to an optimistic defender
of capitalism and the future of both humanity and the Earth.
By almost every measure, Lomborg found that the state of humanity and the Earth has
gradually improved, most noticeably in the last 100 years. On average, people are living longer,
healthier, better fed, and more prosperous than ever before. Many diseases have been eradicated,
and the gradual spread of free markets around the world has led to more efficient and cleaner use of
natural resources.
In his book,
The Skeptical Environmentalist
, Lomborg makes it clear that there is still room
for improvement in many areas. But the idea that ‘things are getting worse’ is just plain wrong.
Even overpopulation is now much less of a concern than it used to be. As the developing
countries of the world become modernized, their birth rates fall. And despite population increases
in recent decades, agricultural output has gone up even faster -- on less farmland!
Now, global warming is the
cause du jour
. Environmentalists, politicians, clergy, doctors,
and representatives of probably every other profession, have all spoken out about the dangers that
global warming poses to both humanity and the Earth.
That mankind inadvertently influences the weather is true, at least to some extent. It would
be surprising indeed for the climate system to not notice that six billion people live on the Earth.
Everything
influences the weather. Why should it be any different for humans? A forest changes
the weather from what it would otherwise be if the forest did not exist. The same goes for lakes and
oceans, rivers, plains, and mountains. We might have a fond attachment to deserts, but think
objectively about what they really are: vast stretches of nearly dead land.
The romantic notion that nature untouched by man is ‘pristine’ is a philosophic, even
religious, point of view. Why do we give nature a pass, but not ourselves? I find such attitudes
fundamentally anti-human, and certainly not scientific. As long as we keep being told, explicitly in
news stories, or implicitly through movie themes, that we are the enemies of the environment, then
4
we will be too meek to stand up for ourselves and our right to use nature for our own purposes. I
believe that the only rights that the natural world has are those conferred upon it by humans.
Once we elevate the concerns of nature above those of people, we abdicate our authority to
do the things that are necessary to improve the human condition. Yet you seldom hear this point of
view being advanced. It is considered politically incorrect, anthropocentric, arrogant, or even worse
-- capitalistic.
I am part of the relatively small, infamous minority of climate researchers known as global
warming ‘skeptics’. Despite the oft repeated claims of our detractors, it is
not
true that we do not
believe in global warming. Al Gore has grown fond of calling us “global warming deniers,”
apparently hoping to confuse us with "holocaust deniers," though he is well aware that none of us
deny that global warming has taken place. What we
are
skeptical of is the theory that all global
warming is caused by mankind. We are also skeptical that we currently understand the climate
system and our future technological state well enough to make useful predictions of global warming
in the next 50 to 100 years, or that we need to reduce fossil fuel use
now
.
There are two themes in environmentalist rhetoric that seek to discredit the skeptics. The
first is that we are not in good faith; that rich corporations pay us to express the opinions we do, and
that therefore we can’t be trusted. The second is that the scientific consensus is that global warming
is real, and that everything we say is disinformation.
On the first point, contrary to what most would expect, the financial incentive for individual
scientists to speak out on global warming is on the side of the global warming alarmists. While
private industry would seem to have the most money available to ‘buy’ opinions, big corporations
tend to shy away from trying to exert that kind of influence. For one thing, it would subject them to
huge liability for all manner of defaults and illegalities up to and including, potentially, criminal
bribery. For myself, I have never been approached by any energy company seeking to pay me for
any service. I wrote ‘skeptical’ articles and book chapters for no pay for thirteen years before a
science and technology website offered to pay me to write on global warming.
Corporations recognize the need for (supposedly unbiased) government sponsored research
to help answer scientific questions. As we shall see, the governmental funding of researchers is
definitely biased toward work that demonstrates that global warming
is
a threat, since this helps to
maintain research programs at NASA, NOAA, EPA, and DOE.
In contrast, left-leaning philanthropic foundations routinely give money to alarmist causes.
For instance, $500,000 no-strings-attached grants have been awarded by the MacArthur Foundation
to climate researchers who speak out publicly against the global warming threat. James Hansen, a
director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a vocal supporter of John Kerry for
President, received a $250,000 grant from a foundation headed by John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz
Kerry. Coincidence? Maybe yes, maybe no.
The ideological left dominates the non-profit arena; relatively speaking there are few
ideologically conservative or even centrist science awards these days. It's an even bet that no Nobel
Prize will go to the scientist who demonstrates that global warming is not the huge threat to
mankind that it is advertised to be.
While many pro-free market organizations get funds from big corporations, the dollars
behind these groups pales in comparison to the budgets of environmental organizations (some of
5
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Roy Spencer - Confessions of a Climate Scientist. Cures for Global Warming Mass Hysteria, Książki, Książki po ...

Tematy