Gregg Easterbrook

When Al Gore was in the White House, global warming was a disaster of the first order. Republican presidential candidates are now saying it is anything from a fraud to trivial.

Both sides claim sound science, and both are wrong. In politics, “sound science” means whatever supports your preconceived positions.

For American voters, climate change is an issue offering lessons in how to reject political nonsense on the extremes, and find the middle. If we can’t find the middle of a generation-long concern like climate change, one where modest steps are sufficient for the moment, how will we ever tackle immediate issues such as jobs, debt and the looming retirement of the Baby Boomers?

First, here are the positions of Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. (Herman Cain has not taken a position on climate change.)

Last June, Romney said in New Hampshire: “I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer” and that “humans contribute to that.” In New England, voters of both parties tend to support environmental protection. Romney’s June statement is similar to what George W. Bush said when he was president.

Speaking last month in Pennsylvania, a coal-producing state, Romney switched gears, saying, “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course.” Watch what he says here beginning at 2:17.

Perry, both speaking and in his campaign book “Fed Up”, has said climate change claims are based on “doctored data” and that “we are seeing almost weekly or even daily scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing our climate to change.”

My guess is that the “doctored data” to which Perry refers is probably Climate-Gate – a real but trivial scandal which has assumed conspiracy-theory status on the right. The researchers who sent the Climate-Gate emails may have been nutty as fruitcakes, but do not represent the academic mainstream.

The “scientists… coming forward” to which Perry refers probably are in this petition, which Rush Limbaugh has talked up. Organized under the name of Frederick Seitz, a distinguished past president of the National Academy of Sciences, the petition, supposedly signed by 31,487 scientists, claims claims “there is no convincing scientific evidence” of imminent danger from artificial greenhouse gases. Seitz, who died in 2008, was 87 years of age when he endorsed the petition. The sample card appears to bear the signature of the late Hungarian-American scientist Edward Teller, who was 90 yards of age when the petition began.

To be listed as a “scientist” signer, you only check a box attesting that you are. No credentials or affiliations for the signatories are given. I pulled three names from the signature list at random — Robert Simpson Hahn, Cathryn E. Hahn and Gregory A. Hahn. None appear on any science organization membership list or academic directory that I could locate; a Robert Simpson Hahn published a chemistry dissertation in 1944. Whether the petition actually has been signed by 31,487 working scientists is anyone’s guess.

What does the science mainstream think? In May, the National Research Council warned the “risk of dangerous climate change impacts is growing.” Last month the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study, led by Richard Muller, a prominent physicist and previously a climate change skeptic, concluded that “global warming is real”.

In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences joined the science academies of Britain, Germany, Japan and other nations in a joint statement saying, “There is now strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring.” And, in 2006, the federal Climate Change Science Program, under the direction of the George W. Bush White House, found “clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.”

Mainstream researchers could be wrong, of course. But it’s unlikely Rick Perry knows more about climate change than the National Academy of Sciences. Just as Gore’s Hollywood exaggerations about global warming made you wince, the right’s current fad for global-warming denial is also wince-inducing.

One aspect of that denial in the Republican campaigns may be a desire to create a bogeyman for the false notion that carbon dioxide regulations are to blame for unemployment rates. Michele Bachmann has called the Environmental Protection Agency the “jobs-killing organization of America”, for example. Since the United States currently has no carbon dioxide regulations, this seems fantastical.

A defensible fear is that the United States ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, or its successor treaty now under discussion, would give United Nations’ bureaucrats input into U.S. domestic energy policy. That would be bad for the American economy, while surely the United Nations would accomplish nothing at a great expense. Last year, I argued that the United States should drop out of international carbon negotiations and start its own greenhouse-gas reform program.

Republican candidates are well-advised to be wary of the Kyoto concept. But they’re wrong to pretend climate change is not a danger. Slowly rising global temperatures, and the accompanying climate impacts, are supported by a strong body of research. They won’t cause the doomsday that Gore so fervently expresses, but greenhouse gas levels could plague our descendants — and will be a lot cheaper to deal with now than later.

Plus, the initial steps that would be taken to moderate greenhouse gases – improved energy efficiency, more use of natural gas and uranium, less use of coal and oil – are in the interest of the United States, regardless of climate trends. And they may be a lot more practical than supposed. See that argument here.

Photos, top to bottom: People balance as they walk on a flooded railway in Bangkok November 2, 2011. Thai authorities tried to stem growing anger among flood victims on Tuesday as water swamped new neighbourhoods and the government began mapping out a plan costing billions of dollars to prevent a repeat disaster and secure investor confidence. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj; A boy swims in the murky waters of Manila Bay, in this file picture taken March 21, 2010. REUTERS/Cheryl Ravelo/Files

The fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, coupled with the mild hurricane Danielle tracking toward Bermuda, turns thoughts toward cyclones.

In May, before the current Atlantic hurricane season began, forecasts were for Armageddon. This year’s hurricane season could be “very active” (Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) or “very very active” (CNN) or “a hell of a year” with “quite high” numbers of intense storms (William Gray, head of the hurricane prediction center at Colorado State University).

What has actually happened so far? A below-average season of two hurricanes, neither one intense.

The totals should change, though. September can be the peak month for Atlantic hurricanes. But three of the last four years have shown below-average hurricane activity in the Atlantic, and 2010 is shaping up as another below-average season.

What’s going on here? Wasn’t global warming supposed to spawn ultra-monster hurricanes? That’s what Al Gore started claiming five years ago. Similar assertions have been heard from other quarters, too.

Of course, just because Al Gore says something doesn’t mean it’s untrue. So what is going on?

The media loves predictions of deadly hurricanes. Each spring NOAA, CSU and other organizations issue hurricane forecasts; in recent years nearly all such forecasts have been alarming; the alarming forecasts are played up. If hurricane season ends without calamity, there are never follow-up stories noting the predictions were wrong, because newspapers and newscasts want to feature the next spring’s alarming predictions.

The media loves hurricanes, period. Hurricanes make great television! Fierce winds, lapping waves, correspondents in heavy rain gear shouting to be heard. Plus because hurricanes take days to form, there’s time to put newscasting resources in their paths: good luck positioning cameras in the path of a tornado. I don’t think it is too cynical to say that cable news is rooting for destructive hurricanes, though rooting for a kind of Hollywood fantasy hurricane which causes widespread cinematic-quality destruction but doesn’t kill anyone.

Predictions are worthless. The below mini-chart shows the pre-hurricane-season predictions of NOAA and CSU, followed by actual results. (I use the upper bound for NOAA, which sometimes issues vague predictions such as “three to seven” hurricanes, which is like predicting, “the Dow Jones will either rise or fall.” I use the seasons-start predictions by CSU, which has a sneaky habit of altering its forecasts once the season is nearly over and most of the trend is already known.)

Note that in the six years before the current season, only two of the 12 major predictions turned out to be correct. Since the likely numerical range of hurricanes is fairly small – the 50-year average is six hurricanes, three intense – you’d think some predictions would be right by sheer chance. Instead the leading experts in the field have been wrong on 10 of their last 12 projections, and are on track to be totally wrong this year.

Predictions get attention anyway. Last year Colorado State analyzed its predictions and for the last 25 years discerned only a “modest” improvement over simply predicting every season would be average. As best I could determine, no major media outlet covered the release of this report showing that hurricane predictions are a complete waste of everyone’s time.

The sillier the prediction, the better. Colorado State has gotten press for this website, which claims to generate a scientific likelihood of hurricane landfalling by U.S. county.  The page offers absurdly hyper-specific predictions, such as a “18.7 percent probability” that a hurricane will strike Harrison County, Mississippi, this year, or a “2.4 percent probability” that a hurricane will cross Essex County, New Jersey. Numbers such as these are gibberish, not science — since what’s to the right of the decimal point cannot possibly have statistical significance, and what’s to the left is pure guesswork. But the pseudo-science feel makes for a nice source of stories for local newscasters. (“Researchers Say Hurricane Might Strike Maine.”)

Hurricanes have been awful long before artificial global warming. The extremely strong Great Hurricane of 1780 killed about 27,500 people, at a time when the Western Hemisphere was far less populous — and when artificial greenhouse gas emissions were not a factor. The Category Four Galveston hurricane of 1900 killed 8,000 people, and occurred when greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere were much lower than today. The 1938 Long Island hurricane left 800 dead and $4.6 billion in property damage (stated in 2010 dollars), also occurring before coal and oil use could have altered nature.

Hurricanes don’t show any pattern clearly linked to greenhouse gases. A terrible hurricane year (2005) or an eerily quiet year (2009) doesn’t prove anything one way or the other. Nor does the larger trend. For the last 60 years, decade-by-decade averages have been roughly the same. A good summary is here.

But you should still worry. Just because climate change hasn’t yet caused more or stronger hurricanes does not mean they will not happen. The evidence for climate change is strong. If sea surface temperatures are the key to hurricanes, as some researchers think, then hurricanes should get worse, because sea surface temperatures are rising. Then again, climate change might make cold fronts less cold, while reducing the difference between high- and low-pressure areas, and those factors could reduce hurricane incidence or intensity.

This 2005 paper by a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, published just before Katrina, takes the view that rising sea-surface temperatures will cause stronger hurricanes and also more rain. This 2009 paper, from a researcher affiliated with the same organization, takes the view that hurricane activity will decline in a warmer world.

This recently released study, from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton — gotta love that name — splits down the middle, forecasting that climate change will increase hurricane activity but slowly, requiring decades or longer. (The Princeton paper is also a rare example of presenting scientific information in a way intended to be comprehensible and accessible.)

Perhaps the Princeton paper would cause you to think, “If hurricanes won’t get worse until 2050, then I don’t need to care about this.” You do.

One of the big questions of global warming is whether there will be tipping points — natural thresholds that cause climate change to accelerate. If the Princeton paper’s view is correct, by the time the tipping point for hurricanes is reached, it will be too late to reverse the effect — because greenhouse gas levels in the air will be too high.
Bottom line: instant-doomsday hurricane panic isn’t supported by science. But greenhouse gas regulation is.

Photo caption: Waves crash upon rocks as weather conditions worsen due to a low pressure system passing through the area along the coastline in Port Fourchon, Louisiana July 5, 2010. There was a “high chance” it will become the second named storm of the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season before it makes landfall in the Terrebonne Parish area near Caillou Bay early Monday evening, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said . REUTERS/Sean Gardner

International negotiations on global-warming accords continue to be an expensive exercise in pointlessness, while the leading anti-greenhouse-gas legislation in the United States Senate, shepherded by John Kerry of Massachusetts, is said to be so lengthy it may make the recent health-care bill seem like a Post-It note. Release of Kerry’s proposal was delayed Tuesday when its sole Republican cosponsor, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, developed cold feet. Some Senate action on the proposal is expected this spring.

Ideally, both the international negotiations and the Kerry bill will collapse under the weight of their own complexity. That would be ideal if you favor progress against greenhouse gases! The threat of artificially triggered climate change is all too real: see more on that below. But new thinking – not more top-down bureaucracy – is the best hope to reduce greenhouse gas accumulation.

Both the international proposals, and Kerry’s bill, seek to create ultra-elaborate regulatory regimes that would guarantee cushy jobs for bureaucrats and big paydays for lobbyists, but not necessarily much reform. Both reflect what many hate about government – prescriptive top-down regulation combined with ample opportunities for insiders to direct giveaways to themselves. Among Washington insiders, especially the think-tank set, there’s a sense of delight that a mega-elaborate greenhouse-gas regulatory hierarchy is coming. Thousands of lobbying pressure-points will be created, while some gigantic Department of Atmospheric Administration will result, top heavy with senior-grade functionaries who spend their days infighting about whose signature goes on memos. Elites in Washington and Brussels surely will benefit from the complex approach to greenhouse regulation. Will anybody else?

First the international situation. At the Rio global-warming summit in 1992, heads of state made symbolic nonbinding commitments about greenhouse reduction while praising themselves, then pledged to serious action sometime soon. At the Copenhagen global-warming summit in 2009, heads of state made symbolic nonbinding commitments about greenhouse reduction while praising themselves, then pledged to serious action sometime soon. Insert another city name and future year, and the sentence will read the same.

Two decades of international negotiations on greenhouse gases have led to almost nothing of substance, beyond some European Union trial programs. The only concrete achievement is an annual Conference of Parties, via which highly paid delegates fly in jets burning fossil fuels, and ride in low-mileage limousines, to meet in luxurious circumstances and demand that someone else conserve resources. Milan, Bali, Copenhagen – the 2010 Conference of Parties will be held in Cancun. Why aren’t these meetings in Chengdu or Fargo? International elites need to be in resort locations to think about why average people’s use of fossil fuel must be restricted!

George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Protocol underlying the international talks, and though President Barrack Obama sends U.S. delegates to international greenhouse negotiations, he has not endorsed any international carbon-restriction language that would be binding on the United States. Denmark and Germany, the industrial nations with the strongest commitment to greenhouse-gas reduction, might actually accept strict international greenhouse rules, which would for intents and purposed be international control of internal energy policy.

It’s hard to believe many other countries would. Even Japan, host for the Kyoto agreement, has merrily ignored the carbon-emission restrictions that Tokyo appeared to accept there.

International agreements on relatively minor ecological subjects have proven hard to implement – enforcement of a whaling ban continues to bedevil the world’s nations, and whaling has almost no economic significance. To think there can be international regulation of fuel use – energy production is the single largest economic sector – is a fantasy. Though, a good excuse for a taxpayer-subsidized week in Cancun.

The key point is that international greenhouse regulation isn’t necessary! Smog is declining almost everywhere in the world, though no international agreement governs smog. Smog is way down in Mexico City and in Los Angeles, somewhat down in Beijing. If you saw the Olympics smog, rest assured, it was far worse a decade ago.

Smog is declining because anti-smog technology has been invented, and proven affordable and compatible with economic growth. Last week, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson noted that air pollution in the United States has declined 60 percent in recent decades, even as GDP doubled. Now that affordable anti-smog technology exists, nations are switching to such technology of their own volition, because it is in their interest to do so. The lack of international involvement in smog reduction has been a reason for rapid progress. No complex rules to satisfy, just implement the best ideas as quickly as practical. National self-interest is a far more powerful motivator than empty speeches at conferences.

Like smog, greenhouse gases are an air-pollution problem. What is needed is for greenhouse gas reduction technology to be invented, then nations will adopt such technology on their own, because it is in their self-interest to do so. No Bible-sized international greenhouse gas treaty ever will be enforced; negotiations toward this end are a complete waste of everyone’s time. The climate change problem will be solved when nations act on their own.

Where will greenhouse-gas control technology be invented? In the United States, the world’s most innovative, tech-savvy nation – and the place where smog-control technology was invented. Once greenhouse-gas emission ceases to be free in the United States, control mechanisms will be invented – then other nations will switch to them, of their own volition. That’s the realistic way to stop artificially caused climate change. Tech-savvy China surely also will contribute, but the United States must lead the way.

The Kerry bill, subject of year-long negotiations among many senators, would create a super-complicated sector-by-sector cap on carbon emissions from various industries, impose a puzzling number-from-a-hat goal of 17 percent greenhouse gas reduction by the year 2020, and authorize still more legislation on the details of sector-by-sector rules. All the media attention would be on the Kerry-bill vote, which would be seen as a dramatic commitment to global warming prevention. Lobbyists would take command when the sector-by-sector rules were enacted, larding them with subsidies and giveaways. (Reform at Risk, an excellent 2008 book by University of Virginia political scientist Eric Patashnik, shows how the media swarm over symbolic legislative votes but ignore the later amendments by which lobbyists rewrite rules to create handouts to political donors.)

Editorialists and environmentalists are likely to say that Congress must hurry to enact the Kerry bill because climate change is happening. It is. But it’s taken a century for greenhouse gas accumulation to become a problem; the fix will take at least decades. The response must be smart and flexible. Well-drawn legislation is the priority, and however well-meant, Kerry’s approach is way too complex and bureaucratic. It won’t work – and that would cause public cynicism about greenhouse gas reduction, setting back the cause.

Rather than a super-complex regulatory scheme, what the United States needs is a carbon tax. That’s right, a t-a-x. As in, TAX.

We live in a moment when tax is a forbidden word, yet ever-higher national debt is okey-doke. That equation needs to change. Whatever government taxes, society gets less of. Right now government mainly taxes capital and labor, which society wants more of. Pollution, on the other hand, society wants less of. Taxing greenhouse gases will give inventors and entrepreneurs a profit incentive to think of ways to reduce global warming emissions, which currently are free. The result will be that society gets less air pollution, while money generated by a carbon tax reduces the deficit.

A carbon tax would be far simpler and less bureaucratic than any sector-by-sector cap scheme. Even Republican economists such as N. Gregory Mankiw, who was a chair of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, have announced support for carbon taxes.

In a carbon-cap system, federal bureaucrats would make all decisions, surely after years of delay and special-pleading lobbying. In a carbon-tax system, individual inventors and business people make the decisions, quickly and flexibly, driven by the chance at profit. Appeasing bureaucrats or gaining profits: Which seems to you the stronger source of motivation?

If the United States imposes a carbon tax – acting on its own, forget the international negotiations – American innovation may produce greenhouse-restricting technology, clean energy and business models that other nations will adopt of their own volition. This was the model that worked against smog; it should be used against the next air pollution problem, greenhouse gases.

Obviously, no politician wants to advocate a t-a-x. But Barack Obama is the most persuasive political leader since Ronald Reagan. He of all people can show the American public the logic of the situation – especially since a carbon tax would be infinitely preferable to corporate and income taxes in fighting the deficit.

Footnote 1: senators Susan Collins of Maine and Maria Cantwell of Washington State have proposed a variation on the carbon tax, via which carbon-tax revenues would annually be rebated to individuals. This is a noble idea, but with an ever-worse deficit, carbon tax revenues should go toward debt retirement. There’s also a worry that if the Cantwell-Collins scheme was enacted, the money would just end up redirected to special-interest groups. (“Because of the [insert word] crisis, this year the carbon revenue is going to [insert group that bought most favor]. Next year we promise that…”) The Cantwell-Collins would do a better job at reducing greenhouse gases than the Kerry bill, but wouldn’t help with the national debt.

Footnote 2: Incorporating its 27 amendments, the United States Constitution is about 8,000 words long – about 35 pages double-spaced. The recent health care bill was about 235,000 words, or 29 times the length of the Constitution; the 2010 Defense Authorization Act was 120,000 words, 15 times the length of the Constitution. The Kerry greenhouse gas legislation is expected similarly to rival in length the final Harry Potter book.

Why not a standard that legislation cannot exceed the length of the Constitution? That would cut away non-germane riders and sweetheart language inserted at the behest of campaign donors. If Congress cannot express its will in less than the length of the Constitution, chances are it is lobbyists who are the ones expressing themselves.

IS ARTIFICIAL CLIMATE CHANGE REAL?

The National Academy of Sciences, which through the 1990s was skeptical of global warming scare-mongering, said in 2005 that climate change is real. I don’t pretend to know more about science than the National Academy of Sciences. So this is good enough for me.

There is indeed a strong scientific consensus regarding a danger from climate change – those who claim otherwise aren’t being honest. But the consensus is quite mild – those who claim a doomsday consensus aren’t being honest, either.

The consensus is that in the last century, air has warmed by somewhat more than one degree Fahrenheit; the oceans have warmed a little and become more acidic; ocean warming means more than air warming, because the oceans have far more mass than the air; rainfall patterns have changed in some places; most ice melting has accelerated; ocean warmth (not melting ice) has caused modest sea-level rise; human action plays at least some role in all this.

The consensus hardly means crisis. Glaciers and sea ice, for example, have been in a melting cycle for thousands of years, while air warming has, so far at least, been good for farm yields. But climate change has serious possible negative consequences, especially if rainfall shifts away from agricultural regions or sea-level rise accelerates. Climate change, rather than global warming – rising temperature in itself can be beneficial — is the big worry. All the world’s major science academies have said they are convinced climate change is happened and that human action plays a role. That is an ample consensus to justify reform.