Ronald Bailey replies:
First, I want to thank my readers for their insightful criticisms. Let's start with the science. Considerable uncertainties bedevil climate science, and new information comes in all the time. Increasing global temperatures, higher arctic temperatures, melting mountain glaciers and permafrost, thinning sea ice, higher sea surface temperatures, and earlier springs all coincided with rising carbon dioxide levels during the last 40 years. Trends in storminess, hurricane strength, and the ice mass balance in Greenland and Antarctica are hotly contested. People have honest disagreements about how to interpret these trends. Everyone has to make up his own mind as he weighs the uncertain evidence. As Andrew Kenny points out, there is recent countervailing evidence, including a steep drop in average temperatures. And if the sunspot cycle calms down as predicted, we should find out in a decade or so if solar activity is the culprit.
I cheered in December when researchers at the Hadley Center predicted that global average temperature would rise by 0.3 degree Celsius between 2004 and 2014, and that half of the years after 2009 would be hotter than the hottest year in the modern instrumental record, 1998. At last, a firm prediction by which to evaluate the climate models. But an April study by climate modelers at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences suggests natural climate changes will offset any warming caused by increased greenhouse gases for the next decade or so. If true, that means the world's governments will largely be trusting the outputs of computer models as they try to devise policies to address projected climate change. That's very troubling.
On to policy. I described the shenanigans to which John DeJager alludes precisely to highlight the huge public choice implications of cap-andtrade schemes. I favor a carbon tax because I think, perhaps erroneously, that it would offer less scope for shenanigans and could be used to reduce income taxes. Furthermore, raising the price of carbon fuels would encourage inventors and entrepreneurs to hurry along the beneficial technological trends that DeJager identifies. (Note: Plug-in hybrid automobiles are not currently available.)
Since the reason debate, the presidential campaign posturing over higher gasoline prices has pretty much persuaded me that carbon taxes are politically impossible. Who's going to vote for the guy who promises to double the price of their gasoline and their electric bills? Both McCain and Obama would raise energy prices behind the smoke and mirrors of a corrupt cap-and-trade scheme and sell it as a "market" solution. In public policy terms, probably the cheapest and least economically intrusive way to address climate change would be to fund research and development for low-carbon energy. But given the government's sorry record on energy R&D, that's likely to be a waste of time and money.
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