The Climate Is Changing

The argument for pre-emptive measures to halt man-made global warming tends to go something like this: the planet Venus has surface temperatures hot enough to melt lead, this heat is maintained by a carbon dioxide (CO2) fueled runaway greenhouse effect, industrial activity on Earth increases atmospheric CO2, rising CO2 will raise Earth’s temperature via a greenhouse effect, therefore industrial activity must be curtailed to save the Earth. If you sensed that some important details were missing from that argument, you are correct. Venus’s atmosphere has about 230,000 times as much CO2 as Earth’s. In fact, there is an order of magnitude more carbon in Venus’s atmosphere than there is in all of the atmosphere, oceans and crust of the Earth. There is also some evidence that Venus’s oceans boiled away first, then the CO2 built up to ridiculous levels.

The problem with the climate change argument is not so much a tendency for stretched analogies, but rather a problem with the predictive power of climate models. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses very complex models to predict what will happen to the Earth’s climate when certain things change. These models do a good job of explaining the past, but never seem to anticipate what happens next. Sounds like a strange problem for a model to have, but “overfitting” is actually a well-known problem in statistics.

Whenever there is a cool summer or other evidence that the Earth is not about to burst into flame, mainstream climate researchers come out after the fact and explain that this or that happened, but don’t worry because the planet will get back to baking in short order. Inconvenient facts like decreasing temperatures since 1998 are dismissed. This is a shame, since as recently as the 1970s scientists were warning us of an impending ice age. If only the ice age doomsayers had held on for a couple more decades!

If the world is going to throw trillions of dollars at a problem because a model predicts doom, the world might demand a reasonable level of performance from that model. The world might also want to know why natural sources led to wild fluctuation of Earth’s climate in the past but that any change today must be of artificial origin (the simplest explanation is that the dinosaurs were using SUVs and coal-fired power plants).

Note that decreasing temperatures since 1998 do not mean global warming is not happening. All sides agree that Earth’s climate is full of complex feedback mechanisms, and the planet could just be shifting gears on an upward trajectory. However, since the last ten years caught mainstream climatologists by surprise, and a natural explanation is at hand (a particularly calm sunspot cycle), it would be prudent to make sure that a multi-trillion dollar effort won’t be made moot by some random blip in natural variation.

There are a number of environmental problems that need to be addressed even if global warming turns out be a complete fabrication. The problem is that environmentalists have put all of their stock in one boogeyman called CO2. CO2 became too important, and economic interests in continuing the gravy train of government funding appear to have led some researchers to proclaim that global warming is a threat no matter what the evidence says.

Since cuts to space programs mean we won’t have another planet to live on for quite some time, it makes sense to take care of the one we’re on. However, the solution is not to have government regulate the economy to death. For example, classifying CO2 as a pollutant would mean any business with a carbon footprint over 250 tons per year would have to install fantastically expensive mitigation technologies. (Yes, the EPA says its regulations only target those over 25,000 tons per year but the law says 250 tons of any pollutant gets you on the list, and the EPA doesn’t have the authority to change that number.) There are about 6.1 million such “polluters” in the country. Making them install useless carbon control technology is just the kind of job-killing move that the economy needs right now.

The solution to this problem is to let someone make money from solving bits of it. A cap-and-trade scheme is helpful when it deals with actual pollutants rather than a natural component of the atmosphere. Furthermore, businesses that sell mitigation technologies should be incentivized to work with developing nations rather than lobbying Western leaders for a captive customer base in the developed world.

One additional course correction is to make sure that the money from solving the problem actually goes to those trying to solve the problem as opposed to fearmongers who benefit financially from continued panic no matter the actual facts.