New Climate Scares Are Politics As Usual

James K. Glassman | October 30, 2000

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After all, to explain why the Earth hasn't warmed up as much in the recent past as they forecast it would in the future, the IPCC modelers had to draw this startling conclusion "big polluters" are cleaning up their emissions too much. The sulfur and other particulates they used to send up into the atmosphere bounced back the sun's rays into outer space, helping to cool the surface of the Earth. Less pollution means less bounce and, to the modelers, more warmth.

On that score, the Clean Air Act of 1990 promotes global warming. And you can bet that Gore and other environmentalists don't want to go there.

Voters can also hope he really doesn't want to go on to meet Kyoto's arbitrary CO2 targets. The pain simply isn't worth the gain.

The American Council on Capital Formation estimates the cost of cutting energy usage to meet the Kyoto protocol would translate into a 1 percent to 4 percent loss of gross domestic product annually. That's $100 billion to $400 billion a year.

And for what? If all the industrialized countries met their targets, it would mean at best a 0.011 of a percentage point reduction in greenhouse gases. As Ronald G. Prinn, co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change, has observed: "Even with Herculean efforts in reduction, warming will persist."

Meanwhile, Kyoto literally left 80 percent of the world the developing nations, many of them big polluters out of the equation. Most have willingly signed onto the protocol because it places no obligations upon them to do anything.

As their countries industrialize, their greenhouse emissions likely will increase, at least through the early stages. To counteract that effect, the United States and other advanced economies would have to literally suck CO2 and other greenhouse gases from the air, according to Prinn. No one has figured out a way to do that.

All of this makes Resources of the Future President Paul Portney look almost prescient for his comment in 1999 that the Kyoto protocol didn't have "a snowball's chance in hell of coming into effect." And that's probably true even if Gore is elected.

No elected legislature will willingly jeopardize a nation's economy on the strength of a century-long weather forecast. Climatologists have yet to demonstrate that their models accurately can predict weather in the next year or next decade, much less the next century.

The reality of that human nature is fortunate. For despite what the environmental scaremongers say, the world loses nothing by waiting even if global warming proves to be real, which is still much in doubt.

For even then, the answer to the problem won't be government controls. It will involve scientists coming up with ideas, entrepreneurs making them practical and a free market spreading the new technology around the globe.

The track record of the last two centuries demonstrates the power of that paradigm. It also shows the danger of giving in to the extremists.

With the election drawing to an end and COP-6 drawing near, people need to be wary. For as last week's events make clear, the environmental bogeyman will try to get you, if you don't watch out.