Reason Magazine - Topics > Global Warming

Are You Stomping the Environment Flat?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Are you an ecological bigfoot? Various environmental groups now offer websites where you can supposedly find out. The site provided by the folks at Redefining Progress informs me that if everyone on the planet lived my lifestyle, we would need the resources of 6.5 Earths to supply everyone. I took the test again, this time selecting all the ecological choices, including living a 500-square-foot apartment filled with second-hand furniture in a large apartment building heated with biomass, using electricity generated by solar panels, equipped with low flow toilets and showers, buying all my food at farmers markets, planting my own garden fertilized by compost from my food scraps, eating a vegan diet, recycling all my paper, plastic, aluminum, glass and electronics, owning no car, never flying and traveling no more than 2,000 miles by bus or rail each year. If everyone lived like that we would only need 0.93 earths to accommodate everyone.

What happens if I choose a slightly less-ascetic lifestyle? For example, what if I decided to drive my hybrid car 10,000 miles per year, added occasional dairy products to my diet, and did not grow a garden? Redefining Progress calculates that the planet would be on its way to destruction because we would need 1.10 earths to provide that same lifestyle for everyone.

The Global Footprint Network (GFN) offers an Earth Day Footprint quiz which appears to be a version of the Redefining Progress quiz. Here I scored even worse—it would take 8.7 Earths for everyone to enjoy my lifestyle. My ecological footprint takes up 39 acres, whereas the American average is only 24 acres. The GFN claims that there are only 4.5 biologically productive acres per person worldwide.

Then there's the Eco-Footprint site by Conservation International. Answering the questions honestly, I scored a 22, making me an "eco-novice" which is much nicer than calling me an eco-criminal. At the end of the quiz, participants are offered a chance to pledge to "recycle, reuse and repair so I use fewer materials and reduce pollution and to make my home energy efficient by using compact fluorescent light bulbs and high-efficiency appliances." By selecting all of the ecological choices I achieved a score of 83, making me an "eco-warrior."

Next, I clicked over to the Carbon Footprint site. Its calculator estimated that my wife and my lifestyle fueled 39 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. The site informed me that this is almost double the American average of 20.4 tons. But since I included my wife in the calculations, it means that we are typical Americans with regard to our per capita carbon dioxide emissions. My chief carbon sin is air travel, which emits more than 15 tons of carbon dioxide per year. The site informs visitors that the average footprint of people living in industrialized nations is 11 tons and the world average is 4 tons.

So in a quest to lower my impact on the environment, I calculated our carbon footprint if we cut our use of electricity and natural gas in half, switched our two cars for a single Toyota Prius and reduced our annual mileage by half, tripled our train travel, and never took an airplane. Furthermore, what if we became vegetarians, ate only local organic food in season, bought only second-hand clothes, furniture and appliances, never went to movies, bars or restaurants, and recycled or composted all our waste? Even then our combined carbon footprint would be 7.3 tons per year, but that would get us just below the world average of 4 tons per capita annually.

The Carbon Footprint site obligingly links to projects promising to offset my annual carbon overindulgence. For example, the site suggests that a check for $600 to fund verified clean energy projects—such as a wind energy project in India or burning biomass in Africa—instead of fossil fuels would offset the 39 tons of carbon dioxide my current lifestyle requires. Or I can buy offsets by funding a reforestation project in Kenya for $800, or pay to plant trees in Britain for $1300.

The bad news, according to the folks at Carbon Footprint, is that "to combat climate change the worldwide average needs to reduce to 2 tons." In other words, the average American must reduce his or her carbon emissions by 90 percent. Where in the world do people currently emit less than 2 tons of carbon dioxide per capita annually? Answer: Places like Togo, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Uganda and Mali.

That brings me to the Global Footprint Network's sustainability calculations. According to the GFN's Living Planet Report (2006), the minimum criteria for sustainability is measured by using the United Nations Development Program's Human Development Index (HDI) as an indicator of well-being, and its ecological footprint calculations as a measure of demand on the biosphere. "We only found one country that meets both minimum criteria, which doesn't mean that they are necessarily sustainable but they are providing long lives and high education and minimum income without using more than what is available globally worldwide per person. And this country is called Cuba," explained GFN executive director, Mathis Wackernagel on National Public Radio's Living On Earth show last November. Wackernagel added, "If we say Cuba meets the sustainable development criteria, we don't say that's the nirvana, the most beautiful life you could imagine." Indeed not.

Comparing the HDIs of the United States and Cuba, one finds that the U.S. ranks 12th out of 177countries measured while Cuba ranks 51st. In the three primary dimensions, the U.S. is 31st in life expectancy, 19th in educational achievement, and 2nd in per capita income. By contrast, Cuba ranks 32nd in life expectancy, 35th in education, and 94th in income—and that's assuming that Castro's government is truthful in its statistics. According to the U.N.'s HDI report, Cuba's per capita carbon dioxide emissions dropped from 3 tons per capita in 1990 and 2.3 tons in 2004. "If all countries in the world were to emit CO₂ at levels similar to Cuba's, we would exceed our sustainable carbon budget by approximately 3 percent," says the HDI report.

And where do countries that emit less than 2 tons of carbon dioxide per capita annually rank on the HDI? Out of 177 countries and territories ranked, Togo is 152;Nigeria, 158; Bangladesh, 140; Ethiopia, 169; Uganda, 154; and Mali, 173.

As noted above, the creators of Carbon Footprint claim that everyone in the world must eventually emit no more than 2 tons of carbon dioxide per year. When did Americans last emit so little carbon dioxide? Around 1870. Taking historical U.S. carbon emissions and multiplying them by a factor of 3.67 in order to derive total carbon dioxide emissions and then dividing that amount by the number of people living in the country, we find that Americans emitted per person roughly 2.5 tons of carbon dioxide annually back in 1870. In those days, per capita GDP was $194 per year which would be equivalent to about $2,500 today.

It is true that many of us in the rich countries could cut back a bit on our use of energy and other resources without too much pain. But 1.6 billion people around the world still lack access to electricity and 1.1 billion live on less than $1 per day. These poor people desperately need access to cheap sources of energy to improve their lives.

Assuming that these ecological footprint calculations have some merit, the upshot is that if one does not want to "redefine progress" as a return to 19th-century poverty (and surely no one does), then accelerated technological innovation aimed at finding low-carbon sources of cheap energy is crucial. How to achieve that goal is what the real environmental debate should be on this 38th Earth Day.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Arnold Among the Lilliputians

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:00:00 EDT

It was the perfect day for a conference on climate change at Yale University last Friday. In New Haven, Connecticut, the crocuses were peeking out from the soil. A group of state governors emerged from their winter stupor and milled around on unsteady feet, climbing in and out of zero-emission busses. A couple of Canadian legislators were present, perhaps stopping over on their return migration to the north. Ah, spring.

"I would not recommend that you have a public relations campaign on global warming in January and February in Manitoba," said Manitoba Premier Gary Doer. Ne'er have truer words been spoken.

The governors were in town to sign the Governors' Declaration on Climate Change—a soft and fuzzy document "recognizing new threats" and "recommitting to the effort to stop global warming"—but pretty much everyone else was just there to see Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, delegate from the land of perpetual sun, California.

In the morning sessions, the participants uttered the usual soundbites. The governors cheerfully rejected any suggestion that government-mandated reductions in carbon output might have economic costs. Gov. Jon Corzine (D-N.J) got a round of applause for saying that higher prices on energy and restrictions on use would be "an economic opportunity, not an economic burden." Gov. Jodi Rell (R-Conn.) crowed about "green collar jobs."

But a surprising new message was on display as well: States' right are back in fashion, and this time it's liberals singing the praises of federalism.

"States' rights, particularly in the last century, were regarded as the most regressive kind of policies," said Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kansas). "The federal government would set a high bar on civil rights, or safety net issues. And states' rights was going to drag that back, to claim the opportunity to have a lower bar at the states. I want to suggest that in the 21st century this has been flipped." She expanded on that theme in an interview: "When I was young, states' rights was a pejorative term. But the federal government has been very laissez-faire in all sort of areas, so states are stepping up to fill the void." Gov. Corzine noted "a vacuum in Washington with regard to leadership on the issue of climate change," and apparently New Jersey, like nature, abhors a vacuum, since Corzine has been on the forefront of state-based carbon regulation.

Currently, 18 states have signed the Governors' Climate Change Declaration, but 36 states have enacted some kind of greenhouse-gas plan.

Why hundreds of Yalies crowded into a poorly ventilated auditorium on the first really warm, beautiful day of spring became clear when Schwarzenegger swept in at the last moment for a signing ceremony and a speech. He looked sleek in a green tie and a flawlessly uniform tan.

Schwarzenegger, a Republican, was the only one of the governors to acknowledge that states will have to make tradeoffs, mostly economic, if they are serious about reducing carbon emissions.

The biggest applause line of the day came when the seven-time Mr. Olympia turned the tables on political conventional wisdom about who is hurting the environment and who is helping. "It's not always Republicans" or big corporations, he said, that slow environmental progress. Several companies want to build solar power plants in the Mojave Desert. However, the place where they want to build may be the kind of territory that a particular kind of endangered squirrel would prefer to frequent. Efforts by the California Department of Fish and Game ("my own agency, that I'm supposed to be the head of and the boss of!") to protect "this little creature" have thwarted plans to build planet-saving solar arrays. "If we can't put a solar power plant in the Mojave Desert," Schwarzenegger thundered, "I don't know where the hell we can put it!"

Schwarzenegger has also pushed back, with lawsuits and a P.R. campaign, against the strongly worded suggestion from the Environmental Protection Agency that states are forbidden to go beyond federal standards for carbon emissions and set stricter standards of their own.

Of course, with his global fame and private jet, Schwarzenegger has taken advantage of this new states' rights doctrine more than most. Article 10 of the Constitution states that "no State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation," and also looks down on states that "enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power." But between rallying governors for carbon limits and hobnobbing with Kyoto protocol signatories, Schwarzenegger has probably already breached that dam when it comes to environmental issues. Last October, for instance, California and a coalition of European Union countries, U.S. states, Canadian provinces, Norway, and New Zealand formed the world's first International Carbon Action Partnership.

One of Schwarzenegger's applause lines: "We don't wait for Washington, because I've always said Washington is asleep at the wheel." This newfound pride in federalism has its definite limits. For every states' rights rah rah, there was a wistful plea for more federal regulation on carbon production. Even states' rights revisionist Gov. Sebelius said she hoped that "the roles will be reversed in the next administration." A proposed cap and trade plan, Gov. Jon Corzine said, is something he'd "love to see globally, love to see nationally, but unfortunately narrowed to regional efforts."

All of the governors present, including Schwarzenegger, agreed that no matter who took office in January, he or she would be "better on the global warming" than the Bush administration—meaning that some sort of national cap and trade or carbon tax was almost inevitable, whether under President McCain, President Obama, or President Clinton, and stricter federal regulations would again become the gold standard of environmental controls.

Even in this moment of states' rights redemption, the newly empowered governors restated their longing to return to the old way, when their marching orders come from Washington. This is understandable, since a uniform national policy will be easier on companies that do business in more than one state, and will send a clearer message to other countries about the United States' position on the issue. Plus, governors won't have to take the blame when their constituents object to higher prices at the pump, at the register, and at the car dealership.

Still, it is a little sad to see that even the Governator would cede power to Washington so gladly. In the meantime, he's making his own dubiously constitutional way in the enviromental future, winning the hearts and minds of Yalies, and making the other governors seem like girlie men.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is a reason associate editor.

Sneak Peek

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 13:53:00 EDT

From yesterday's governors' conference on climate change at Yale:

Stay tuned more more, including Arnold Schwarzenegger getting a massive auditorium of Yalie environmentalists to cheer at the prospect of killing endangered squirrels in the Mojave desert.

"We Don't Talk Green Talk in the Company"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:56:00 EDT

One of the best features ever to appear in reason, in my humble opinion, was a three-way debate about corporate social responsibility between Milton Friedman, Whole Foods founder John Mackey, and the guy you see above, Cypress Semiconductors' T.J. Rodgers. All three are libertarians, but they found plenty to disagree about. Rodgers was more Catholic than the pope, citing Friedman to Friedman, and accusing Mackey of letting Ralph Nader ghostwrite his contribution.

These days, Rodgers is also the chairman of SunPower Corp, a manufacturer of solar-power systems. But his stance on the touchy-feely side of corporate social responsibility doesn't seem to have changed:

"We don't talk green talk in the company. As a matter of fact, I get itchy when I hear that kind of stuff."

Then he tells a story about the time he caught the president of SunPower "blathering about ice caps or something like that" and went to great lengths to publicly mock him for being, essentially, a Birkenstocks-wearing dirty hippie.

Rodgers' position these days seems to be something like this: Give the people a product they want, make a profit doing it, and don't feel too high and mighty if you happen to do something "socially responsible." Green is good? Who cares? The important thing, as he puts it, is that "green is green." Like money, get it?

Watch the whole thing at reason.tv

Read more about Rodgers here. More from Rodgers here.

What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? And Just How Sensitive is the Climate Anyway?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:00:00 EST

Editor's Note: reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey will be filing a series of regular dispatches from the Heartland Institute's controversial International Conference on Climate Change. Below is the final dispatch in that series.

New York, March 4—Let's start with some possible news from Heartland Institute's International Climate Change Conference. In the context of man-made global warming, climate sensitivity asks how much temperatures increase if one adds a specified amount of a greenhouse gas. In general, most climatologists accept the proposition, all things being equal, that if one doubles carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the average temperature will go up by +1 degree centigrade. But all things are not equal. In climate models, additional heat from carbon dioxide boosts atmospheric water vapor which in turn acts as a greenhouse gas. All models are dominated by this positive feedback loop. As a consequence, the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated in its Fourth Assessment Report (4AR) last year that it "is likely to be in the range 2 to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C." In other words, doubling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is likely to warm the planet by between 2 degrees and 4.5 degrees centigrade.

So how do we find out how sensitive climate is to CO2? During his luncheon keynote, University of Alabama climatologist Roy Spencer described how two of his new studies are attempting to answer that question. In 2001, Massachusetts Institute of Technology climatologist Richard Lindzen hypothesized that there might be what he called an "adaptive infrared iris" over the tropics through which tropical storms dissipate excess heat. But other researchers looked and found no strong evidence for such a mechanism.

Now Spencer and his colleagues using satellite data noticed big temperature fluctuations in the tropics in which strong warming was followed by rapid cooling. So Spencer looked at 15 strong intraseasonal oscillations in the tropics to see how clouds evolve. What was known is that tropical storms produce high cirrus clouds. Cirrus clouds are global warming culprits that retain heat and warm the planet. In the climate models, cirrus clouds tend to remain aloft for a long time. However, Spencer's satellite observations found that they in fact dissipate rapidly, allowing heat to escape back into space and thus cooling the planet.

"To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent," Spencer noted when the study was published in Geophysical Research Letters. "The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming." Clouds constitute the biggest uncertainty in climate models and Spencer is hoping the modelers will include this effect in future runs to see how it would affect climate projections.

Next, Spencer discussed new research (accepted but not yet published) that he said strongly suggests that climate sensitivity is much lower than the climate models find. As I understood Spencer (and I could be garbling this), in the climate models a feedback is by definition a result of surface temperature change.

As Spencer explained his preliminary thinking at the website Climate Science, "For instance, low cloud cover decreasing with surface warming would be a positive feedback on the temperature change by letting more shortwave solar radiation in. But what never seems to be addressed is the question: What caused the temperature change in the first place? How do we know that the low cloud cover decreased as a response to the surface warming, rather than the other way around?"

In fact, using satellite data combined with a small model, Spencer finds that changes in cloudiness appear to drive changes in temperature. If this is so, Spencer suggests, this means that models have fundamentally mixed up cause and effect. He reported that his study had been peer-reviewed by the two of the climatologists on whose work the IPCC relied for estimating climate sensitivity. "Both came back and said 'you're right,'" claimed Spencer.

If Spencer's results are confirmed—and this is a huge if—it would mean that the climate is far less sensitive to perturbation by carbon dioxide than the models suggest. Spencer says that if he is right about climate sensitivity that would imply that the average temperature of the planet might rise by +0.5 degrees centigrade by the end of this century due to the effects of rising carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. (I will report more fully on Spencer's claims once the study is published and the climatological community has gotten a chance to respond to it).

But let's go back to politics. The final morning of the conference began with a rousing speech by Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic. He made it clear that to call him a global warming skeptic would be a bit of an understatement. A point Klaus makes crystal clear in his just published book, Blue Planet in Green Chains - What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? "My answer is clear and resolute: 'it is our freedom.' I may also add 'and our prosperity,'" declared Klaus.

Klaus noted that ideological environmentalism appeals to the same sort of people who have always been attracted to collectivist ideas. He warned that environmentalism at its worst is just the latest dogma to claim that a looming "crisis" requires people to sacrifice their prosperity and their freedoms for the greater good. Let me quote Klaus at length.

"Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical—the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality," warned Klaus. "What I have in mind [is], of course, environmentalism and its currently strongest version, climate alarmism."

Klaus added, "What I see in Europe (and in the U.S. and other countries as well) is a powerful combination of irresponsibility, of wishful thinking, of implicit believing in some form of Malthusianism, of cynical approach of those who themselves are sufficiently well-off, together with the strong belief in the possibility of changing the economic nature of things through a radical political project."

But assume that man-made global warming is a genuine crisis. That it is a real gigantic open access commons problem. Wouldn't that require some kind of governmental action to coordinate a solution to the problem? I have recently come out in favor of using a carbon tax as a way to spur the technological innovation toward a low-carbon energy economy (and incidentally as a way to also reduce taxes on labor and capital). This was not a popular position at the conference. Why not?

While many environmentalists focus on mitigation (cutting greenhouse gas emissions), many of the economists who spoke at the conference argued that adaptation through wealth creation is the better strategy. Policies aimed at reducing energy consumption to mitigate man-made global warming would likely result in a poorer, less technologically adept future in which future generations would be less able to address the problems caused by climate change. This is clearly true and as a reluctant proponent of a carbon tax, I am painfully aware of this trade-off.

As John Locke Foundation economist Roy Cordato explained: "A higher tax today means lower production and output of goods and services tomorrow, making future generations materially worse off. In setting a carbon tax you must show that future generations would value the problems solved by reduced global warming more than they would value the goods and services that were foregone." He argued it's not possible to know the preferences of future generations, but providing them with more wealth and better technologies will give them more options to express whatever preferences they have.

One final note, geophysicist Russell Seitz gave an interesting talk about the future of "fossil hydrogen." Fossil hydrogen? Yes indeed. Seitz pointed out that coal varies considerably in the amount of hydrogen it contains. Some varieties of bituminous coal are 65 percent carbon and some are 46 percent carbon. Seitz suggested that in an ideal case utilities could cut their carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent by switching to high hydrogen coal.

That's it from the International Climate Change Conference.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Amazing Climate Predictions Revealed—Climate Models Reviled

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EST

New York, March 3—I spent the second day of the Heartland Institute's International Climate Change Conference listening to presentations in the climatology track. This means that I missed all of the presentations on paleoclimatology, the politics of climate change, the economics of climate change, and the impacts of climate change, not to mention the four different documentaries questioning climate change alarmism.

News flash: Climate skeptics don't agree among themselves about what, if anything, is going on with the world's climate. Occasionally there was something of a camp-meeting atmosphere among participants. It is clear that some feel victimized by those who are promoting the idea that man-made global warming is a big problem requiring immediate action. In any case, the climate skeptics began their day early with well-attended breakfast presentations starting at 7:00 a.m. One of the breakfast presenters was University of Guelph environmental economist Ross McKitrick. McKitrick and statistician Stephen McIntyre are the duo that pointed out the flaws in the famous "hockey stick" reconstruction of historical climate data by climatologist Michael Mann. The "hockey stick" purported to show that the 20th century was the warmest century in 1,000 years. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) featured it as evidence for climate change prominently in its Third Assessment Report.

In 2006, a National Research Council report dealing with controversy concluded that it was "plausible" that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were warmer in the 20th century than for any comparable period in the last 1,000 years. However, McKitrick and Ross were more or less vindicated when the NRC report added tellingly that "substantial uncertainties" in the data undermined confidence in any assessment of temperature changes prior to the year 1600 which just happened to have been near the nadir of the Little Ice Age. Furthermore, the NRC noted, "Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that 'the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium' because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales."

Over breakfast, McKitrick presented recently published work in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) showing that the surface temperature dataset are seriously contaminated by extraneous factors. Basically, climatologists try to take into account effects like urbanization, industrialization, and other land use changes and adjust temperature data accordingly to reveal the actual temperature trends. McKitrick tested the hypothesis that all these surface processes had been correctly filtered out which would imply that their effect on temperature data would be zero. He reported to the audience that this was not so. It turns out that the richer the country, the higher the temperature. McKitrick estimates that properly accounting for these non-climatic socioeconomic effects would cut "the estimated 1980-2002 global average temperature trend over land by about half."

Naturally such a conclusion has not gone unnoticed by those scientists concerned about the dangers of man-made global warming. McKitrick says that he has in fact run further tests to take into account their criticisms and asked to publish his additional results as a reply in the JGR. However, the editor told him that since no one had sent in a critique, there was reason to publish a reply. McKitrick said that he has asked one of his chief critics to write up his critique and submit it, so that he could reply in the peer-reviewed literature.

So after breakfast, I settled into the room where the climatology track took place. A good bit of the climatology track was devoted to critiquing the general circulation climate models (GCMs) For example, University of Rochester physicist David Douglass presented the results of his recent study that compared the outputs of 22 different climate models with observational temperature data in the tropical troposphere. According to Douglass, the models show that tropical troposphere should warm as much as 3 times faster than surface. However, when this result is checked against observational temperature data from satellites and weather balloons, it turns out the surface and troposphere warm at about the same rate. Thus, Douglass concludes, greenhouse gases must be having only a minor impact on global temperature trends. Naturally, this study is controversial.

One of the more remarkable performances was by Australian entrepreneur David C. Archibald during one of the afternoon panels. Archibald is described in the conference materials as "a scientist operating in the fields of cancer research, climate science, and oil exploration." He also appears to have business interests in some oil fields in Australia. In any case, Archibald made it very clear that he is a big believer in the idea that climate change is primarily driven by the sun. Archibald's basic theory is that when the sun's magnetic field strength drops there are fewer sunspots which reduce the amount of particles ejected as the solar wind. Less solar wind allows more galactic cosmic rays to enter the Earth's atmosphere. Archibald is here relying on studies by Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark which find that cosmic rays do produce cloud condensation nuclei which then might create low level clouds that reflect more sunlight back into space thus making the Earth colder.

Archibald predicts that the next solar cycle, Cycle 24, will produce a weak magnetic field which means that more cosmic rays will enter the atmosphere to create clouds and thus cool the earth. Actually, a 2007 NASA scientific panel was evenly split on the strong/weak prediction for Cycle 24. However, many researchers expect that Cycle 25 may be one the weakest in centuries. Archibald ended by boldly predicting that the world will see average temperatures drop by -2.2 degrees centigrade in the coming decade. That's more than three times the amount of warming the world has experienced over the last century. He also predicted as a consequence that the growing seasons in the United States would be shortened by a total of four weeks, dramatically reducing food production.

So as I puzzled over these presentations, it seems to me that we're being offered three different sets of predictions. First, there's the IPCC prediction that the next couple of decades should warm up at a rate of +0.2 degrees centigrade per decade (which is not all that different from climatologist Patrick Michael's rate of +0.17 degrees per decade.) Interestingly, as I've mentioned many times before, the U.K.'s Hadley Centre is predicting that average global temperatures in 2014 will be +0.3 degrees warmer than they were in 2004. Second, there are the climate skeptics who do not believe that warming will continue and expect a bit of cooling. And for those of an apocalyptic frame of mind, they have Archibald's -2.2 degrees of cooling over the next decade.

Finally, one of the more disquieting presentations was by retired TV meteorologist Anthony Watts. Part of Watts' training back when he was getting his degree in 1970s was to construct a Stevenson screen in which to shelter weather instruments. When he was putting it together his hands got covered in whitewash. He complained to his professor and suggested that he paint it with latex paint instead. His professor objected that whitewash had been used since 1892 and new paints would change the way the instruments functioned and possibly bias the data they collected. The U.S. Weather Bureau changed paints in the late 1970s.

With time on his hands, a retired Watts decided to run a back yard test with Stevenson screens using whitewash, white latex paint, unpainted wood and an aspirated temperature shield. He measured for several months, but typical among his results was one day in August when he found that the bare screen registered a maximum daytime temperature of 98.47 degrees, the latex screen was 97.74 degrees, the whitewashed one was 96.94 and the aspirated temperature shield reported 95.03 degrees.

Watts decided to check to see how the Stevenson screens housing nearby weather stations that were part of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) had been painted. What Watts discovered was much more disturbing—many USHCN weather stations were deplorably placed near parking lots, air conditioning vents, under shade trees, at sewage treatment plants, and so forth.

Watts then proceeded to show the audience slide after slide of badly, even absurdly, sited weather stations. Watts has now created a website of volunteers who are working to identify and audit the siting of all USHCN weather stations. The results are reported at SurfaceStations.org (regrettably down for maintenance at the moment. But for 50 examples of badly sited stations, go here.) So far Watts' volunteers have reported 502 of the 1221 stations in the U.S., and only 13 percent of the network so far conforms to the National Weather Service's own best practices manual. This is shocking when one considers that these are the same surface stations that climatologists rely upon to detect temperature trends.

The International Conference on Climate Change wraps up tomorrow with presentations by, among other notables, Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic (again at the 7:00 am breakfast slot), hurricane expert William Gray, and University of Alabama at Huntsville climatologist Roy Spencer.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Reason #347 to Be Skeptical of Ethanol

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 14:38:00 EST

Ethanol is a close cousin to the grain alcohol that's used to fuel various flaming beverages (e.g. the Forest Fire: 4/5 shot Everclear plus 1/5 shot Tabasco sauce--light and shoot). Perhaps unsurprisingly, ethanol fires are tricky. Water won't put them out, and neither will the foam that most fire departments have used since the 1960s.

Many fire departments around the country do not have the [ethanol-specific] foam, do not have enough of it, or are not well trained in how to apply it, firefighting specialists say. It is also more expensive than conventional foam.

While firefighters will eventually adapt, there have already been a few incidents:

In the last three months of 2007, three major fires highlighted the danger. In western Pennsylvania, nine ethanol tanker cars derailed and triggered a blaze that tied up a busy rail line.
In Missouri, a tanker truck carrying several thousand gallons of ethanol and gasoline crashed near the state Capitol, killing the driver.
And in Ohio, a train heading through the northeastern part of the state to Buffalo derailed and burned, forcing more than 1,000 people from their homes.

Just one more point for the "con" column on ethanol. For tons more skepticism about the great alcoholic hope, read reason articles on ethanol here.

Via Jacob Grier

"Global Warming Is Real"

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EST

New York, March 2—The Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change kicked off this evening at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Manhattan. Joseph Bast, president of the Institute, began by announcing that the meeting of 500 participants had attracted more than 200 scientists, economists, and other policy analysts to address questions that he thinks have been insufficiently scrutinized by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). According to Bast, those questions include: (1) how reliable are the climate data; (2) how much of global warming is natural and how much is man-made; (3) how reliable are climate computer models; and (4) is reducing greenhouse gas emissions the best or only way to address climate change?

Heartland Institute senior policy analyst, James Taylor, told the participants that the organizers had invited many of the prominent "alarmists" to present their views at the conference. "Not a single one would come to speak," Taylor said.

The keynote speaker after the gala dinner was University of Virginia climatologist and Cato Institute Senior Environmental Fellow, Patrick Michaels. His talk was titled, "Global Warming's Convenient Facts." Michaels began by telling the audience, "Global warming is real and people have something to do with it." He also noted that one should not care a wit about the fact that humans are causing temperatures to increase. Rather, one should care how much the increase is likely to be.

Michaels pointed out that the surface records show average global temperatures increasing at a steady rate of +0.17 degrees centigrade per decade since 1977. He also hastened to put the kibosh on recent assertions that "global warming stopped in 1998." While global average temperatures have been essentially flat since 1998, Michaels argued that natural variations in the climate mask any increases due to greenhouse gases. In particular, cooler waters in the Pacific ("La Nina") and lower solar activity have conspired to drop average global temperatures. When these trends reverse, average global temperatures will rapidly rise to reveal the established long term man-made warming trend of +0.17 degrees centigrade per decade. Michaels warned against succumbing to the temptation to cite current flattened global temperatures as evidence against man-made global warming.

Michaels then turned to various climate change puzzles. Is Antarctica melting, he asked? Exhibit A in the Antarctica warming story is the 2002 collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula. However, as Michaels showed, the peninsula is a very small area of the southern continent and most of Antarctica shows no warming trend. In fact, the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (4AR), released in 2007, found that "current global model studies project that the Antarctic ice sheet will remain too cold for widespread surface melting." Michaels sardonically noted that former Vice President Al Gore did not say that sea level would rise by 20 feet in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth; he just showed animations of such a sea-level rise.

What about Greenland? Michaels displayed temperature records showing that Greenland's temperatures had been higher in the earlier part of the 20th century. In particular he cited a 2006 study by Danish researchers who reported, "The warmest year in the extended Greenland temperature record is 1941, while the 1930s and 1940s are the warmest decades." Michaels suggested that Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice annually. He further noted that there are about 690,000 cubic miles of ice locked up in Greenland's ice cap. At that rate of melting, Greenland's ice cap would shrink by less than 0.4 percent over the next century. According to recent reports, Greenland's ice cap is now losing about 57 cubic miles of ice annually. If that rate were sustained over the next 100 years, a little over 0.8 percent of the ice cap would melt away into the oceans.

Michaels also talked about the recent steep reduction in summer Arctic sea ice. However, he pointed to research by UCLA biological geographer Glen MacDonald and his colleagues who found that the Eurasian tree line reached as far as the shores of the Arctic Ocean 9,000 to 7,000 years ago. Why? Because "the mean July temperatures along the northern coastline of Russia may have been 2.5° to 7.0° celsius warmer than modern [ones]." This implies considerably reduced Arctic sea ice cover lasting for centuries in the past. Michaels noted in passing that polar bears survived that warmer period. Although Michaels did not mention it (one can't throw everything into one talk, after all), expanding boreal forests would darken the earth's surface which could in turn accelerate Arctic warming.

Michaels ended by asking, "How much will it warm?" He suggested that the constant rate of +0.17 degrees centigrade per decade is likely. What does he think we should do about that warming? Michaels worries that regulatory responses that aim to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions now will slow economic growth and technological progress, making future generations poorer and less able to address the challenges of man-made climate change.

The Heartland conference has presentations from over 100 participants over the next two days, so it's going to be hard to choose among them. For now, my second dispatch will focus on some of the scientific analyses of climate models and economic projections.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

All About Ron Bailey

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 06:28:00 EST

The latest issue of DoubleThink, the magazine of America's Future Foundation, has an in-depth and very interesting story about reason's own science correspondent, Ronald Bailey, and why he changed his position on anthropogenic global warming (which, in my view, is testament to Bailey's dedication to going where the facts lead; as I say in the article, Ron Bailey is by far the most scrupulously honest and intellectually serious science writer I know). Here's an early snippet:

A socialist when he went to college in the early 1970s, Bailey's undergraduate years happened to coincide with a boom in books warning of a coming environmental apocalypse. In just a few years, natural resources would run out. Oil reserves would dry up. The air and rivers would turn toxic. Overpopulation would lead to famine and disease. To Bailey's college professors, it was the gospel truth.
Meanwhile the young socialist's idealism led him, ironically enough, towards libertarianism.
"I became a libertarian, politically speaking because—and I know this is going to sound sanctimonious but it is literally true—if you are really concerned about the poor people then you have to pick the system that in fact helps poor people. And the only one that has done that is democratic capitalism, period," he says during a long interview at his Dupont Circle apartment.

The whole article, which delves into Bailey's reasons for changing his position on global warming and the reception of that switch within the broadly defined free-market movement, is well worth reading. Check it out here.

And check out the fantastic panel on "Global Warming: Risks and Consequences" that we hosted at last fall's Reason in DC conference. Moderated by reason's Matt Welch, and featuring economist Lynne Kiesling, Competitive Enterprise Institute's Fred Smith, and Bailey himself, it's well worth watching over at reason.tv. Click below to get started.

Three Words: Giant. Burmese. Pythons.

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:19:00 EST

Just when you thought global warming scare stories couldn't go any farther over the top:

This USA Today headline:

Pythons could squeeze lower third of USA

This lede:

As climate change warms the nation, giant Burmese pythons could colonize one-third of the USA, from San Francisco across the Southwest, Texas and the South and up north along the Virginia coast, according to U.S. Geological Survey maps released Wednesday.
The pythons can be 20 feet long and 250 pounds. They are highly adaptable to new environments.

And this, from the last paragraph:

The Burmese python is not poisonous and not considered a danger to humans. Attacks on humans have involved pet owners who mishandle and misfeed the snakes

Via The Weekly Standard

For more reason on global warming, go here. For more almost-but-not-quite-relevant stories, read Kerry Howley on Burma.

Now Playing at reason.tv: The Great Global Warming Debate featuring Ron Bailey, Fred Smith, and Lynne Kiesling!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:10:00 EST

Click here to see video of one of the great panels from last fall's Reason in DC conference: reason science correspondent Ron Bailey, Competitive Enterprise Institute president Fred L. Smith, Jr., and Knowledge Problem blogger and Northwestern economist Lynne Kiesling duking it out over free-market-friendly approaches to remediating the effects of global warming.

Losing Bet on Climate Change: Update

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:00:00 EST

For those making predictions, it has become increasingly popular to put your money where your mouth is. For example, the Iowa Electronic Markets and Intrade allow users to participate in online futures trading involving the outcomes of political events. The Long Now Foundation sponsors the Long Bets website at which competitors bet on issues that are societally and scientifically important—e.g., by 2010 at least 50 percent of all books sold worldwide will be printed on demand at the point of sale, or that at least one human being alive in 2000 will also be alive in 2150.

So what about climate change? In April 2006, I wrote a column, "Losing Bet on Climate Change," about a notional wager proposed by University of Virginia climatologist, Cato Institute senior fellow, and catastrophic climate change skeptic Patrick Michaels. In 1998, Michaels made the following bet in his World Climate Report:

If we were of a betting sort (and there are some nasty rumors going around that we are), we would be willing to wager that the 10-year period beginning in January 1998 and extending through December 2007 will show a statistically significant downward trend in the monthly satellite record of global temperatures.
Surely such a wager should sound interesting to those who think the planetary temperature will increase several tenths of a degree during that period.

Michaels acknowledged in my 2006 column that "technically we lose the bet." Why? Because no statistically significant downward trend had emerged. On the other hand, the actual upward satellite record temperature trend of +0.032 degrees Celsius was not significantly different from zero.
On January 7th of this year, Michaels sent an e-mail alerting me to the fact that global temperature trend in the satellite data set put together by researchers at Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) showed a downward temperature trend. Michaels correctly noted that the RSS data set is generally preferred by "greens" because it shows a higher rate of warming than does the satellite data set put together by John Christy and his colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH). According to Michaels, "The trend in the monthly anomaly data from January 1998 through December 2007 is -0.06degC/decade." Michaels' email added, "I expect you will note this prominently."

The first thing to keep in mind is that the downward trend between 1998 and 2008 in the RSS data cited by Michaels is not "statistically significant," so he would still have lost his bet. And new information suggests that that there may be a spurious cooling trend in the last few months of the RSS data set. So Michaels' colleague Chip Knappenberger did calculations using the UAH data and found that the "trend in the UAH derived temperatures of the earth's lower atmosphere for the most recent 10-year period (January 1998 though December 2007) is a positive 0.04ºC/decade (although it is not statistically significant)." Either way, both sets of satellite data show that the trend in average global temperatures for the past decade has been more or less flat.

Carl Mears from RSS argues that a decade is too short a time period for teasing out man-made trends from the climate record. What is the long term trend? Since 1978, the RSS data set finds that the lower troposphere is warming at about +0.173 degrees Celsius per decade, while the UAH data set trend is +0.142 degrees Celsius per decade.

Another problem with making bets on temperature trends is that the data sets are constantly being revised. Knappenberger notes that both the RSS data and UAH data have been revised, as have the surface temperature data sets compiled by Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York and the Hadley Centre in Britain. Knappenberger adds that even with revisions the surface temperature data sets nevertheless show a warming trend of +0.16 to +0.18 degrees Celsius per decade. In 1998, the world experienced a huge El Nino event in which the tropical Pacific Ocean heated up the planet. The tropical Pacific has now switched to a La Nina which will reverse the El Nino and cool the planet. If the La Nina had occurred earlier in 2007 and there are no errors in the RSS data, there might have been enough cooling such that Michaels would have won his bet. But that didn't happen.

So what about future climate change bets? Bets force intellectual clarity and can capture the public's imagination. Over at Long Bets, there are a number of climate related predictions on offer though no actual bets have been placed. One proposed bet is that by 2100 global average temperatures measured by satellites will be less than +1.94 degrees Celsius higher than the average temperature in 1990. Another predicts that temperatures will increase by at least +0.15 degrees Celsius from 2005 to 2025. This last one is wimpy considering that even the lowest trend is the UAH's at +0.142 degrees Celsius per decade. At the Bali Climate Change Conference, the Hadley Centre boldly predicted that by 2014 "the global average temperature is expected to have risen by around 0.3 degrees Celsius compared to 2004, and half of the years after 2009 are predicted to be hotter than the current record hot year, 1998."

The Hadley Centre prediction sounds like a pretty reasonable bet to me. Now will any climate change skeptics and militants step up and make it?

Disclosure: I am an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Hercules in New York

info@reason.com (Shikha Dalmia) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:00:00 EST

New Yorkers should rejoice that the Environmental Protection Agency last week slapped down California's request to write its own fuel-economy rules to combat global warming. Gov. Spitzer had vowed to follow the lead of California's Arnold Schwarzenegger—so if the "Governator" had prevailed, New Yorkers would have seen their wallets and their cars shrinking.

New York (with more than a dozen other states) has historically adopted California's standards for tail-pipe emissions—requirements notably tougher than federal standards. Since 1970, the Golden State has regularly won the right to set tougher-than-the-feds clean-air rules because it needed more drastic standards to address its acute smog problem. The feds have granted other states with similar air-pollution issues the option of choosing California's rules.

But following California on fighting smog is far different from copying it on combating global warming, as Spitzer has declared he'd do.

Smog has local causes—and local health effects. It produces higher rates of asthma, emphysema and other respiratory ailments; these can be addressed by reducing local emissions of smog-causing gases, such as ozone and sulfur dioxide.

But global climate change is, obviously, a global issue - its causes and effects simply aren't localized in the same way. Its impact on particular communities is a vast unknown - and there are no local remedies for it.

California's proposed fuel-economy standards became especially redundant after President Bush signed the new energy bill into law last week. This will require automakers to raise their fuel-economy standards by 40 percent—to an industry-wide average of 35 miles per gallon—sby 2020.

Schwarzenegger doesn't agree; he's threatening to sue the EPA to overturn its decision. His rules would force automakers to bump up their fuel efficiency 23 percent by 2012 and 30 percent by 2016—the equivalent of 33.8 mpg.

This is an impossible task. The federal standards will be tough enough for automakers to deliver without compromising on space, safety, power and (above all) low prices—all things that consumers value more than gas mileage. There is simply no technology now available that can combine everything that consumers want with the stipulated gas mileage. If there was, automakers wouldn't need a mandate—they'd run, not walk, to put it on the market.

But why are California's goals so much tougher, even though the federal rules allow just four more years to another 1.2 mpg? Because cars have a long production cycle—models now in the planning stage won't be available until 2014.

So there's simply no time to come up with new designs that will do the job. That means the only way automakers could comply with California's deadline is by withholding from consumers the higher-emission vehicles they want in states that insist on it.

In other words, they'd have to pull the vast majority of their vehicles from those markets, not only SUVs and light trucks, but even most sedans.

Consider Toyota, the darling of the greens: It now makes maybe two vehicles—manual-transmission Yaris and hybrid Prius—that meet California's standards. Toyota's Camry, the top-selling car in America, gets only 25 mpg in combined city and highway driving.

Indeed, the net effect of the California standard would be to impose either small compacts or hybrids on all new-car buyers—even though hybrids costs $3,000 to $5,000 more than their non-hybridized versions and have a much shorter lifespan.

The few New Yorkers who prefer expensive, hybrid vehicles—or tiny subcompacts—wouldn't feel the pinch of the California rules. But hybrids make up only about 1 percent of New York's (and the nation's) auto purchases. By contrast, about half of New York motorists drive light trucks such as SUVs, minivans and pick-ups—compared with 53 percent nationally. And if you exclude Manhattan, New York's share of light trucks is actually higher than the national figure. (In parts of Upstate, it's close to 60 percent.)

It's not hard to understand why so many New Yorkers pick these gas-guzzlers over sedans with better gas mileage. Suburban families with kids love SUVs for their spaciousness and superior safety record. (Several national studies have confirmed that SUVs are responsible for 2,200 to 3,900 fewer auto deaths every year.) And certain types of light trucks are particularly suitable for winter driving in Upstate's hills.

Perhaps more important is the simple fact that cramming New Yorkers into smaller, more expensive and less safe cars wouldn't do anything about global climate change.

Many climate scientists agree: Even if the whole world adopted a 45 mpg fuel-economy standard, global temperature would drop by only five-hundredths of a degree Fahrenheit by 2100.

And James Hansen—a Columbia University climatologist and a global warming worrywart—has admitted under oath that subjecting the whole country to the Schwarzenegger standard wouldn't bring any measurable cut in global temperature.

Schwarzenegger seems determined to cast himself as Don Quixote in the unfolding drama of global warming. Spitzer would be foolish to play Sancho Panzo in that futile battle.

Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at the Reason Foundation. This article originally appeared in the New York Post.

Diplomatic FIreworks at Bali Climate Change Conference

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 20:57:00 EST

U.S. Prevails in Climate Talks (at least initially)

The U.S. appeared to have gotten pretty much what it wanted from the negotiatons when the U.N. Climate Change Conference plenary session resumed here in Bali at around 8 am on Saturday morning. Specifically, there is no mention in the text about cutting greenhouse gases (GHG) by between 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 as the Europeans and the developing nations wanted. Instead the preamble reads:

Recognizing that deep cuts in global emissions will be required to achieve the ultimate objective of the Convention and emphasizing the urgency to address climate change as indicated in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

There is a footnote after the word urgency which refers the reader to specific pages of the report by the IPCC Working Group III of the Fourth Assessment Report. (if you're interested see pages 39, 90, and 776.) One finds on those pages emissions reductions scenarios and their projected effects of future temperature increases. By putting it in a footnote, the U.S. hopes to avoid having the reductions transmogrify in subsequent negotiations into firm targets.

It also initially appeared that the U.S. had succeeded in getting language into the text implying that developing countries should also undertake GHG emissions cuts. To wit:

Enhanced national and international action on mitigation of climate change, including, inter alia, consideration of:...

Measurable, reportable and verifiable nationally appropriate mitigation actions by developing country Parties in the context of sustainable development, supported by technology and enabled by financing and capacity-building.

However, when the text was presented in the Plenary session, the representative from India stood up to object saying that his country would prefer a text that read:

...Nationally appropriate mitigation actions by developing country Parties in the context of sustainable development, supported by technology and enabled by financing and capacity-building in a measurable, auditable, and verifiable manner.

Note the difference--instead of putting the burden on developing countries to commit to emissions cuts, the new version puts the burden on developed countries to commit to supplying climate change technologies and financing to developing countries--and they don't mean by markets and trade. At that point the Plenary was suspended for further negotiations.

Diplomatic Tiff

An hour and half later, the president of the Conference, Rachmat Witoelar, tried to begin the meeting. The Chinese, Indian ,and Pakistani delegations objected that negotiations were still going on outside the hall. The Chinese delegate angrily asked, "Whose COP is is this?" and demanded an apology from the president for starting the meeting. The implication was that it is being hijacked by the rich countries.

President Witoelar then suspended the meeting again. We're all waiting to see what happens next. I must leave the Convention Hall in half an hour, so I may not get to report live on the diplomatic endgame.

Greenpeace: Let Them Eat Cake

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 17:33:00 EST

Nusa Dua, Bali - On December 11, Greenpeace distributed slices from a gigantic chocolate cake to participants at the U.N. Climate Change conference (COP-13) to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol. Since many Kyoto Protocol signatories are not meeting their obligations to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to levels below those of 1990, I'm not sure what the festivities are all about. In fact, Japan, Canada and many EU countries are emitting more GHG than they did in 1990.

Oh, well. It's the thought that counts.

One of the hottest topics being negotiated the COP-13 is technology transfer. I was under the impression that technology usually got transferred when one party sold it to another. That's how I got the Sony Vaio on which I am typing this dispatch. Apparently that's old-fashioned thinking. Under the new post-Kyoto climate treaty, poor countries are demanding that rich countries create some kind of tech transfer fund that would be used to subsidize their purchases of new low-carbon energy and carbon sequestration technologies.

If that weren't enough there are rumblings among poor country negotiators that they want the right to simply seize the patents (nicely called "compulsory licensing" in trade talks) and make the equipment themselves. "If there is insistence on the 'full protection of intellectual property' in relation to climate-friendly technology, it would be a barrier to technology transfer," declared Martin Khor, director of the leftist Third World Network. Is threatening to confiscate their patents really the way to encourage companies and inventors to invest in creating the innovative low-carbon energy technologies that world is being told are vital to stopping dangerous climate change?

In the meantime, the rich countries quite sensibly urged poor countries to drop their tariffs on environmental goods, e.g., energy production technologies. James Connaughton, the director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, noted that as a result of tariffs the world is foregoing 15 percent of potential investment in clean energy technologies. However, with consummate hypocrisy, rich countries refused to consider lowering their tariffs on biofuels imported from poor countries, insisting that is an "agricultural" rather than "environmental" issue.

Just how much man-made warming is dangerous? The Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research took a stab at answering that question during a side event today at the Grand Hyatt. The British government's Hadley Centre is one of the world's leading climate modeling organizations. Vicky Pope, one of the scientific leaders at the Centre, tried to quantify the risks of climate change. She pointed out that the world is already at concentrations of 380 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, up from 280 ppm in pre-industrial times. However, if all of the other GHG were included (e.g., methane and chlorofluorocarbons) concentrations of GHG would already be 430 ppm in CO2 equivalents.

Hadley climate models project that if atmospheric concentrations of GHG were stabilized at 430 ppm, we run a 63 percent chance that the earth's eventual average temperature would exceed 2 degrees Celsius greater than pre-industrial temperatures and 10 percent chance they would rise higher than 3 degrees Celsius. At 450 ppm, the chances rise to 77 percent and 18 percent respectively. And if concentrations climb to 550 ppm, the chances that average temperatures would exceed 2 degrees Celsius are 99 percent and are 69 percent for surpassing 3 degrees Celsius.

Pope noted that the climate models project if temperatures rise to 2 degrees Celsius, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet may become inevitable. She hastened to add that current models suggest that completely melting the Greenland ice sheet would take 2,000 to 3,000 years, although improved models focusing on ice dynamic could change that projection for the worse. Pope added that this year the extent of summer Arctic sea ice fell to its lowest recorded level. She played a video of a model simulation suggesting that summer Arctic sea ice could be completely gone by 2080.

Average global temperatures exceeding 3 degrees Celsius could mean significant loss of Amazon rainforest and stresses on agricultural production that reduce food supplies. "We need severe mitigation to stabilize CO2 equivalent concentrations at 450 ppm," concluded Pope. This is in line with Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections that global GHG emissions must start falling well before 2030 if that goal is to be met.

Pope displayed a chart ranking the last 150 years in order of their average temperatures. He showed that the ten warmest years have all occurred since 1995. With less than 3 weeks to go, 2007 is on track to be the fifth warmest year on record.

Most interestingly, and to its credit, the Hadley Centre has now gone out on a risky prediction limb. The Centre has combined its weather prediction model with a climate change model to make definite forecasts about the world's climate for the next decade. To wit: "We are now using the system to predict changes out to 2014. By the end of this period, the global average temperature is expected to have risen by around 0.3 degrees Celsius compared to 2004, and half of the years after 2009 are predicted to be hotter than the current record hot year, 1998." Since various temperature records—surface, satellite and weather balloons—have shown a temperature trend that increases at about 0.2 degrees per decade or less, this is a truly bold prediction.

In an April 2006 column, I held climatologist Patrick Michaels, a well-known global warming skeptic, to his prediction about temperature trends between 1998 and 2007. Michaels had bet "that the 10-year period beginning in January 1998 and extending through December 2007 will show a statistically significant downward trend in the monthly satellite record of global temperatures." He lost that bet.

Over a glass of wine in the Grand Hyatt Hotel gardens, I told the very nice Vicky Pope that I plan to do the same thing with the Hadley Centre predictions. Check back in 2014.

Disclosure: I would like to express my deep appreciation to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation for providing a grant to pay for my travel expenses to cover the COP-13 meeting.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Sen. Kerry Warns: Everybody Must Participate in New Climate Treaty

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:28:00 EST

Nusa Dua, Bali, Monday, December 10—Another side show, er, side event, orchestrated by the U.S. Climate Action Network (USCAN) on Monday featured former Democratic presidential candidate and current Massachusetts Senator, John Kerry. (Incidentally Kerry flew in on the same flight that I did from Singapore, although he was seated in a different section of the aircraft.) The venue at the Grand Hyatt was packed with people eager to get a look at the anti-George W. Bush, or at least the best stand-in until newly minted Nobel Peace Laureate Al Gore arrives later this week. Just before the Eagle of Boston Commons showed up, USCAN representatives passed out as souvenirs adorable white teddy bears wearing green T-shirts with the slogan "Save the homeless." Get it? Polar bears are about to be homeless as the Arctic melts away.

Kerry gravely told the group that he was delighted to be in Bali at this "transformational moment." He thanked the nations that persevered to push the Kyoto Protocol without the participation and leadership of the United States. Kerry assured the audience that all of us are here because for the past 20 years, the world's best scientists have gathered evidence showing that humanity is on a dangerous path. "There is no more serious issue than climate change," said Kerry. Since the USCAN session was devoted to updating action to address climate change in the U.S., Kerry happily could describe the new Lieberman-Warner Climate bill which had just been reported out of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee on December 5.

The bill calls for the U.S. to cut its CO2 emissions by 70 percent by 2050 using cap-and-trade auctions. Initially, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions must be cut to 2005 levels by 2012 and thereafter reduced by 2 percent per year until 2020 which would result in a 15 percent reduction below 2005 levels. The bill initially allocates 12 percent of the emissions permits free to industries such as gas, utility, and oil refiners. Free permits are gradually phased out completely by 2035. Other permits are given to states and localities which can sell them to raise money for mass transit or low income fuel assistance projects and the like. Finally, the largest share of permits is auctioned directly to emitters, eventually rising to 73 percent of the total by 2035.

Auctioning permits is a lot like imposing a carbon tax, except with less price certainty. In this case, the government sets an overall emissions limit and emitters have to buy most of their allowances from the government every year. The political beauty of the Lieberman-Warner bill's permit allocations is that it allows Congress to buy off some parts of industry, states and local governments, and still raise substantial amounts of money through an annual auction to spend on other projects, all without using the taboo "tax" word.

"I can't guarantee that this bill will pass," admitted Kerry. However, he did promise that a climate change bill with mandatory emissions reductions would be adopted after the 2008 elections. Kerry endorsed setting a target date for a final post-Kyoto deal in 2009. However, he reminded the audience that the Senate had voted 95 to 0 in 1997 against submitting the Kyoto Protocol for a vote of ratification because it did not impose obligations on developing countries. Kerry warned that all countries must participate in any post-Kyoto climate agreement, or "we're not going to be able to pass it."

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Do the Rich Owe the Poor Climate Change Reparations?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 13:16:00 EST

Nusa Dua, Bali — The second week of the U.N.'s annual Climate Change conference, also known as the 13th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP-13), took off on Monday. I have covered four previous meetings—Milan, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Nairobi—and I must say that the 10,000 or so U.N. bureaucrats, diplomats, and environmental lobbyists have outdone themselves this time. The conference center facilities at the Nusa Dua beach resort on Bali are spectacular. If it were up to me, I would make Bali the permanent climate meeting site. (I, on the other hand, am ensconced in a perfectly serviceable business hotel about 7 miles from the resort area. In the spirit of multiculturalism, the lobby features a large artificial Christmas tree and an elaborate Santa figure on the reception desk.)

At COP-13 the 192 countries that are signatories to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are supposed to hammer out a "roadmap" for negotiations leading up to a new agreement by 2009 to replace the Kyoto Protocol. Under the Kyoto Protocol, 36 industrialized nations pledged to lower their greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) to 5 percent below the level they emitted in 1990. That treaty expires in 2012. Negotiators are now aiming to mandate a further cut of 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by industrialized countries by 2020. Of course, most countries have yet to make the cuts they agreed to under the Kyoto Protocol. But why wait until 2009 to cut a deal? Because that's when George W. Bush—an opponent of the Kyoto Protocol—will no longer be president of the United States. Among other things, the new roadmap aims for an agreement that will corral the United States into making steep cuts in its greenhouse gas emissions after 2012.

Last year at the Nairobi conference, I detected a bit of frustration and anger among the self-styled civil society climate campaigners. Here in Indonesia, the atmosphere is almost triumphal. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (4AR) issued earlier this has further confirmed the "climate crisis" and, of course, everyone's spirits are buoyed by Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize. Gore is scheduled to visit the COP-13 for an adulatory victory lap on Thursday. Another notable, and welcome, shift in activist rhetoric is the increased expression of concern for the economic development of the world's poor.

The week started off with a cornucopia of "side events." These are sessions in which various climate lobbying organizations tout their proposals for solving the "climate crisis." As my first foray into the climate change meeting, I attended a session sponsored by the World Council of Churches on "The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework," a report supported by the Heinrich Boll Foundation and Christian Aid.

The report outlines an "emergency climate program" that aims to keep the earth's average temperate from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Keep in mind that average temperatures have already risen by as much as 0.8 degrees Celsius over the past century. In addition, some scientists believe that the amount of GHG already in the atmosphere will lead to an average temperature increased of 1.5 degrees Celsius even if there were no more emissions. So what allegedly must be done?

According to the study, global GHG emissions must peak by 2015 (seven years from now) and then begin to drop by 6 percent per year until 2050 to reach a level that is 80 percent below 1990 levels. The rich developed countries must cut their emissions by 90 percent by 2050. Even poor countries must cut their emission by 30 percent between 2020 and 2030. Note that these cuts are dramatically deeper than what is actually on the table here at the COP. Martin Khor, head of the international left-wing activist group the Third World Network said during the panel discussion that the latter cuts would come as a "shock" to developing nations such as India, China, and Brazil.

The study's authors argued that there is not only a climate crisis, but also a "development crisis." As evidence, they pointed out that 2 billion people lack clean cooking fuels, 1.5 billion are without electricity, 1 billion have no access to fresh water, and 2 million children die each year of diarrhea. Clearly, the first priority of people living in these conditions must be development. Interestingly, while environmental lobbyists tend to avoid saying words like "wealth" and "growth," "development" means that the world's poor need more wealth generated by economic growth.

Without going into the details, the Greenhouse Development Rights Framework (GDR) proposal foresees levying the equivalent of a climate "consumption luxury tax" on every person who earns over a "development threshold" of $9,000 per year. The idea is that rich people got rich in part by dumping carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels into the atmosphere, leaving less space for poor people to dump their emissions. In one scenario, Americans would pay the equivalent of a $780 per person luxury tax annually, which amounts to sending $212 billion per year in climate reparations to poor countries to aid their development and help them adapt to climate change. In this scenario, the total climate reparations that the rich must transfer annually is over $600 billion. This contrasts with a new report commissioned by the U.N. Development Program that only demands $86 billion per year to avoid "adaptation apartheid."

The authors do not go into any specifics about what kinds of institutions—private, public or partnerships—would annually transfer $212 billion to poor countries from the U.S. Considering that the $2.3 trillion spent on foreign aid in the past 50 years has largely failed to generate economic growth or permanent improvements in living standards for most people living in poor countries, the institutional question is not trivial. By some estimates lifting trade barriers could produce benefits of $600 billion annually, reducing the number of people living on $2 per day by 144 million. A woman from Papua New Guinea in the audience warned that such climate aid was likely to disappear into the corrupt pockets of poor country politicians rather than lift poor people out of poverty. But the touching faith of climate campaigners in the efficacy of international and national bureaucracies is immune to such realities.

It is not also clear whether the authors think that rich countries must cut their emissions by lowering their living standards, or by adopting not-yet-invented low-carbon energy technologies, or both. One person in the audience was overheard to ask why we don't just divide up all the wealth equally anyway? Of course, the entire "climate crisis" could have been avoided if today's rich countries had eschewed the industrial revolution in the first place. In any case, while a $780 per person climate luxury tax would be painful, it would not bankrupt the U.S., even if bundles of dollar bills were shipped abroad and burned in bonfires.

To get a somewhat different perspective, I attended the International Energy Agency's (IEA) side event, "Energy Policy in a Greenhouse World." The IEA was created in 1974 by the world's rich countries to advise them on energy supply and demand problems. The IEA issues an annual World Energy Outlook (WEO), which looks at various scenarios for energy supply and demand until 2030. This year's report was quite sobering.

IEA analyst Laura Cozzi noted that the world currently emits 27 gigatons of CO2 to produce energy. In a business-as-usual scenario, in which energy demand increases by 50 percent by 2030, CO2 emissions are projected to rise to 42 gigatons. To achieve CO2 atmospheric stabilization at 450 parts per million by 2050, emissions would have to be cut by 19 gigatons to only 23 gigatons by 2030. Such cuts, according to Cozzi, would mean that every electric power plant built after 2012 would have to emit no CO2. That would require the development of a robust carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology to bury CO2 in the ground, building vastly more nuclear power plants, the invention of second-generation biofuels, and improvements in energy efficiency at twice the rate that we've seen in the past 25 years.

Just to lift everybody's spirits, Cozzi told the audience that the IEA is "quite worried" about the oil supply/demand balance for the next 7 years. New oil fields to supply an additional 12 million barrels per day must come online by 2016. "We can't rule out a supply crunch in the oil market," said Cozzi.

Cozzi's IEA colleague, Debra Justus, was even more cheery. Justus is working on an energy technology perspective report for 2008. She began with a baseline case in which CO2 emissions would increase to 62 gigatons, or 137 percent by 2050. She outlined two alternative scenarios, one in which the goal is to keep average temperatures from rising more than three degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (ACT scenario) and another which aims to stabilize CO2 in the atmosphere at 450 ppm by 2050 (Blue scenario). Achieving the ACT scenario would require an additional $20 trillion over an above projected energy infrastructure costs for the next 50 years and the Blue scenario would cost $50 trillion more. Justus calculates that first scenario implies a price of $50 per ton of CO2 and in the second, CO2 costs $200 per ton.

At the end of the World Council of Churches' discussion, one panel member, Mohamed Adow from drought-stricken northern Kenya, asked the audience to please "remember the suffering and poverty caused by greenhouse gas emissions." But is climate change really the biggest challenge facing the world's poor? When droughts hit rich countries, people do not starve, and few farmers lose their livelihoods. I do not doubt the suffering that recent weather disasters have inflicted on Adow's people, but even Kenya's share of $600 billion in climate reparations is unlikely to make up for that country's rank of 150th out of 179 countries on Transparency International's global corruption index.

Finally, I mentioned at the beginning that the mood of the climate activists here in Bali was triumphal. I suspect that's because many now really believe that an impending climate crisis will at last endow them with the power to completely remold the world's economy in a more egalitarian direction. And that's what they've always wanted, anyway.

Disclosure: I would like to express my deep appreciation to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation for providing a grant to pay for my travel expenses to cover the COP-13 meeting.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Condom Carbon Credits

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:55:00 EST

In the news today, an Australian medical expert who wants a $5,000 baby tax at birth on families with more than two children and an annual carbon tax of up to $800 a child.

Hilariously implausible on its own, the plan's finer points are where it really shines:

Professor [Barry] Walters, clinical associate professor of obstetric medicine at the University of Western Australia and the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Perth, called for condoms and "greenhouse-friendly" services such as sterilisation procedures to earn carbon credits.

Me, I'd rather plant a tree.

The plan won praise from high-profile doctor Garry Egger. "One must wonder why population control is spoken of today only in whispers," he wrote.

Perhaps such things are only spoken of in whispers so that people like Prof. Walters won't come over and start talking about condom carbon credits, thus causing everyone involved in the discussion to dissolve in helpless hysterical laughter. Just a thought.

Ron Paul on the Environment

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:37:00 EST

I've noticed a disconnect between the seeming cultural hugeness of global warming anxiety and how comparatively absent it has been from presidential politics this season. Ron Paul, who totally avoids this stuff in his standard stump speeches, is called on to explain free-market approaches to environmental problems in this Salon interview (which originally ran last month at the enviro mag Grist.)

Interviewer Amanda Griscom Little sums him up, with a bit more respect than I would have expected:

Some of those ideas arguably have environmental merit. Paul is known for his zealous opposition to the Iraq war, which he duly notes causes pollution and the "burning of fuel for no good purpose." He wants to yank all subsidies and R&D funding from the energy sector, which many believe would benefit the growth of renewables. A cyclist himself, he has cosponsored bills that would offer tax breaks to Americans who commute by bicycle and use public transportation. Still, his libertarian presidency would, among other things, allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, boost the use of coal, and embrace nuclear power. Moreover, it wouldn't do diddly about global warming because, Paul reasons, "we're not going to be very good at regulating the weather."

Excerpt from Paul's own comments, sounding like a classic old-school Rothbardian:

Imagine that everyone living in one suburb, rather than using regular trash service, were taking their household trash to the next town over and simply tossing it in the yards of those living in the nearby town. Is there any question that legal mechanisms are in place to remedy this action? In principle, your concerns are no different, except that, for a good number of years, legislatures and courts have failed to enforce the property rights of those being dumped on with respect to certain forms of pollution. This form of government failure has persisted since the industrial revolution when, in the name of so-called progress, certain forms of pollution were legally tolerated or ignored to benefit some popular regional employer or politically popular entity.
When all forms of physical trespass, be that smoke, particulate matter, etc., are legally recognized for what they are -- a physical trespass upon the property and rights of another -- concerns about difficulty in suing the offending party will be largely diminished. When any such cases are known to be slam-dunk wins for the person whose property is being polluted, those doing the polluting will no longer persist in doing so. Against a backdrop of property rights actually enforced, contingency and class-action cases are additional legal mechanisms that resolve this concern.
........
To the extent property rights are strictly enforced against those who would pollute the land or air of another, the costs of any environmental harm associated with an energy source would be imposed upon the producer of that energy source, and, in so doing, the cheap sources that pollute are not so cheap anymore.

And global warming? Maybe we've got more immediate concerns, Paul says:

If you study the history, we've had a lot of climate changes. We've had hot spells and cold spells. They come and go. If there are weather changes, we're not going to be very good at regulating the weather.
To assume we have to close down everything in this country and in the world because there's a fear that we're going to have this global warming and that we're going to be swallowed up by the oceans, I think that's extreme. I don't buy into that. Yet, I think it's a worthy discussion....I think war and financial crises and big governments marching into our homes and elimination of habeas corpus -- those are immediate threats. We're about to lose our whole country and whole republic! If we can be declared an enemy combatant and put away without a trial, then that's going to affect a lot of us a lot sooner than the temperature going up.

Congratulations to Al Gore

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:23:00 EDT

Former Vice President Al Gore has received this year's Nobel Peace Prize (shared with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC]). Gore has been an indefatigable campaigner, warning against the real dangers posed by man-made global warming. In acknowledging the honor today, Gore added, "We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level."

He's wrong to characterize global warming as a moral and spiritual problem. Man-made global warming is not some kind of environmental sin. It's just another commons problem that has emerged as human civilization continues to develop. Most environmental problems arise in what are called open-access commons. That is, people pollute air and rivers, overfish lakes and oceans, cut down rainforests, and so forth because no one owns those natural resources and therefore no one has an interest in protecting them.

The point is clearest in the case of tropical forests and fisheries. No one owns the forests or fisheries, so anyone may exploit them. No one has an incentive to leave any trees or fish behind because, if they do, someone else will harvest them and get the benefits for themselves. In other words, those who immediately benefit from exploiting the resource do not bear the long-run costs of its ultimate destruction. This mismatch between benefits and costs is a recipe for disaster. Similarly, no one owns the global atmosphere, so there is no incentive for anyone to protect it from various pollutants, including greenhouse gases that tend to raise average global temperatures.

Generally, humanity has solved environmental problems caused by open-access situations by either privatizing the relevant commons or regulating it. It will not surprise anyone that I generally favor privatization. That's because I believe that the overwhelming balance of the evidence shows that centralized top-down regulation tends to be costly, slow, often ineffective, and highly politicized. For example, fisheries which had previously been mismanaged by government agencies greatly improved after fishers were given property rights to fish in Iceland, New Zealand and off the coast of Alaska.

As a skeptic of government action, I had hoped that the scientific evidence would lead to the conclusion that global warming would not be much of a problem, so that humanity could avoid the messy and highly politicized process of deciding what to do about it. Although people of good will can still disagree about the scientific evidence for climate change, I now believe that Gore has got it basically right. The balance of the evidence shows that global warming could well be a significant problem over the course of this century. But a significant problem is not a "planetary emergency."

In fact, the latest scientific report from the IPCC release in February generally lowered the range of possible future temperature increases. The IPCC Summary offers six scenarios for possible temperature increases by the end of this century. In the low scenario, the likely range of temperature increase is between 1.1 degrees to 2.9 degrees Celsius (2 degrees to 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit) with a best estimate of 1.8 Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit). In the worst case scenario, average temperature rises to between 2.4 degrees and 6.4 degrees Celsius (4.3 degrees to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit) with a best estimate of 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). Except for the worst case scenario, the top temperatures are lower than the maximum projected by the IPCC Third Assessment Report in 2001.

In addition, the IPCC's new Summary continues the trend of lowering possible sea-level increases that it found in its previous scientific assessments. Again, depending on the scenario chosen, projected sea-level rise by 2100 could be between 18 centimeters to 59 centimeters (seven inches to 23 inches). The report notes that sea level rose about seven inches during the 20th century. No one much noticed the 20th century rise and an increasingly wealthy and more resilient 21st century will be able to handle the IPCC projected rise without too much difficulty.

How much will it cost to address man-made global warming? First, Yale economist William Nordhaus estimates that the Gore's proposals would reduce climate change damages by $12 trillion, but at a cost of nearly $34 trillion. Not a very good deal.

On the other hand, Nordhaus calculates that the optimal policy would impose a carbon tax of $34 per metric ton carbon in 2010, with the tax increases gradually reaching $42 per ton in 2015, $90 per ton in 2050, and $207 per ton of carbon in 2100. A $20 per metric ton carbon tax will raise coal prices by $10 per ton, which is about a 40 percent increase over the current price of $25 per ton. A $10 per ton carbon tax translates into a 4 cent per gallon increase in gasoline. A $300 per ton carbon tax would raise gasoline prices by $1.20 per gallon. Following this optimal trajectory would cost $2.2 trillion and reduce climate change damage by $5.2 trillion over the next century.

In his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, Gore argued, "We must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization." Man-made global warming is an economic and technical problem of the sort that humanity has solved many times. For example, forests are expanding in rich countries because they have well-developed private property rights. Also in rich countries, regulations have helped once polluted rivers and lakes to become clean and have drastically cut air pollution. One of the keys to solving environmental problems is economic growth and wealth. Economists have identified various income thresholds at which various air and water pollutants begin to decline, with many indicators improving once GDP per capita in a country reaches around $8,000 per year. So keep in mind that anything that unduly retards economic growth also retards ultimate environmental clean-up, including global warming.

In any case, global warming is not the result of environmental sin; it is the result of human progress creating another commons problem. We do not need to "lift global consciousness"; we need to find a cheap, low-carbon source of energy. I have no doubt that man-made global warming is an economic and technical problem that an inventive humanity will solve over the course of the 21st century.

Still, congratulations are in order to Al Gore for being recognized by the Nobel committee for his persistence in trying to get humanity to pay attention to this new commons problem. But here's hoping that the solutions that are ultimately adopted don't end up creating even more problems.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Some Background on this Al Gore Guy, Who Just Won the Nobel Prize...

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 08:26:00 EDT

Some reason stories over the years about Al Gore, who has been awarded this year's Nobel Peace Prize and has generally (though not always) been roundly booed in our print and web pages:

Free Speech for People Who Think Like Me: Al Gore, besserwisser chicken hypnotist (June 12, 2007)
Al Gore: Power Hungry (February 26, 2007)
An Inconvenient Truth: Gore as climate exaggerator (June 16, 2006)
Whose Media Is Gored?: Where Al Gore's TV channel went wrong (August 9, 2005)
Ironic Processing (November 2000)
Albert Agonistes: What Gore's winning storyline tells us about politicians (June 2000)
Source Code: Al Gore says he invented the Internet. What does he mean? (May 1999)
That's Fog Coming From Al Gore's Smoke-Free Guns: When Politicians Claim to Speak With Conviction, Voters Should Be Especially Wary. (August 1996)

Much more here.