BC: GLOBAL WARMING A LIBERTARIAN VIEW
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Libertarian Solutions: Making sense of the global warming 'crisis'
Bill Winter
Global warming is going to kill your children. At least, that's the claim of a significant number of scientists and politicians.
They say global warming will cause the world's temperature to rise by as much as 5.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. That, in turn, will cause the ice caps to melt, sea levels to rise, epidemics of tropical diseases to rage across the globe, and cataclysmic storms and droughts to destroy crops and cities.
Are they correct? To answer that, we must first answer four other questions:
1) Is the earth really getting warmer?
2) If it's getting warmer, is human activity causing it?
3) How much warmer might it get?
4) How bad might the effects be?
Environmentalists get indignant if you ask the first two questions. They say the science is so definitive that anyone who questions global warming is a crackpot.
For example, former vice president and amateur climatologist Al GORE compared critics of global warming to tobacco company executives who lied about the dangers of cigarettes. Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) called ABC News commentator John Stosell a "free-market zealot" for questioning global warming doom-and-gloom scenarios.
Environmentalists also say they know the answers to the third and fourth questions. GORE claimed in his 1993 book Earth in the Balance that "every coastal country will suffer adverse effects" from rising sea levels, and that "pests, germs, and viruses [will] migrate with the changing climate patterns," threatening the lives of "hundreds of millions of people."
Raising the rhetorical ante even more was Sir John Houghton, co-chair of the U.N.'s Scientific Assessment Working Group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who proclaimed that "human-induced climate change is a weapon of mass destruction."
Are they correct? Are we polluting ourselves into an environmental apocalypse?
But first: What exactly is "global warming"?
It's the theory that gasses -- primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N02) -- created by burning fossil fuels like oil and coal collect in the atmosphere, trapping heat and causing global temperatures to rise.
The theory was first expounded by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1896. At the time, Arrhenius was concerned about smoke caused by coal, which was burned to fuel the industrial revolution.
No one paid much attention until the 1950s, when some hotter than usual summers prompted Scripps Institution of Oceanography Director Roger Revelle to revive the theory.
However, by the 1960s, global warming had been supplanted by a new theory -- global cooling. A two-decades long chill caused scientists to warn that atmospheric smoke and dust were leading inexorably to a new Ice Age. The only debate, noted John Shanahan in a Heritage Foundation Backgrounder (May 21, 1992) was "how soon it would come and how devastating the cold would be."
To the surprise of many, glaciers failed to cover the earth. Instead, temperatures crept back up, leading to another revival of the global warming theory. In 1975, the first computer-simulated climate model (called a General Circulation Model, or GCM) was introduced. It predicted that CO2 would cause sustained temperature increases.
In 1988, James Hansen, chief of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the U.S. Senate that global warming had arrived, and "we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship" to human activity.
Alarmed, the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to study "human-induced climate change."
The panel issued a report that declared a "balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on the global climate." Using computer models, it predicted that global temperatures could increase by 5.8 degrees by 2100.
That prognostication inspired the Kyoto Protocol (named after the Japanese city in which it was negotiated). The treaty called for industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse gases by 7% by 2012. However, the Kyoto Protocol can't take effect until it is ratified by 55 nations, including industrialized nations that produce 55% of the world's greenhouse gases.
The U.S. Senate has refused to ratify it, citing the massive cost of compliance. By some estimates, the curbs in energy production mandated by the Kyoto Protocol could cause the U.S. GDP to fall by $318 billion and could destroy 3.1 million jobs.
Meanwhile, the global warming debate goes on. Which leads us back to our four questions...
Is the earth really getting warmer?
Probably. But only a little.
Over the last 100 years, the Earth's temperature has increased about one degree Fahrenheit, according to S. Fred Singer in Environment News (November 21, 2003).
However, as noted in the Cato Handbook for the 107th Congress, a significant portion of that warming occurred between 1910 to 1940 -- "and likely had little if anything to do with changes in the earth's greenhouse effect, as three-quarters of the greenhouse emissions occurred in the [post-World War II] era."
Since then, temperatures have flattened out. In fact, by 1996, 100 climate scientists signed the Leipzig Declaration, which stated, "Most scientists now accept the fact that actual observations from Earth satellites show no climate warming whatsoever."
If it's getting warmer, is human activity causing it?
Possibly. There is evidence that human-created CO2 has nudged global temperatures up slightly in the 20th century.
But the proof is not conclusive; other evidence suggests that the rise in temperature is part of long-term, natural cycles.
We do know this: Levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% -- from 280 parts per million (ppm) to about 365 ppm -- over the past millennium.
However, human beings play only a small role in the production of CO2. As a documentary on England's Channel 4 Television noted in 1997: "Oceans emit 90 billion tons of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, every year. Decaying plants throw up another 90 billion tons, compared to just six billion tons a year from humans."
A study of historic records, tree rings, and ice cores also reveals that there have been significant climate fluctuations through the ages.
For example, there was a centuries-long warming spell -- called the Medieval Warm Period -- that allowed Vikings to settle in Greenland in 982 A.D. The now-snow covered island had pockets of lush greenery and a hospitable growing season back then, and more than 1,000 Scandinavians thrived there.
Thrived for about 200 years, that is. Then, the so-called Little Ice Age chilled the entire Western hemisphere. By 1480 A.D., all the Greenland Vikings had fled or starved to death during icy winters.
During the Little Ice Age, the Thames river in London froze, famines became more frequent as crops failed because of shorter growing seasons, and glaciers advanced out of the Swiss Alps.
(Interesting historical side note: Researchers now think that Antonio Stradivari made such heavenly sounding violins because of the Little Ice Age. USA Today reported on December 2, 2003 that the cold winters and cool summers stunted Alpine Spruce tree growth in Europe, making the wood denser, and giving it special acoustic properties. Stradivari made his famous violins from 1700 to 1720, right in the middle of the Little Ice Age.)
Scientists who measure today's temperatures against the colder-than-average Little Ice Age, which lasted from the mid-14th century until about 1850, are "exaggerating the significance of today's temperature rise," said the Wikipedia Encyclopedia.
If the planet is getting warmer again, what is turning up the thermostat? One possible answer: The sun.
In a study in the journal Physical Review Letters and publicized in the Washington Times (November 3, 2003), European scientists reported that the sun has been more active during the last half-century than at anytime in the last 1,150 years.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Aeronomy and the University of Oulu say sunspots are at a millennium-high level. They calculated this based on radioactive isotopes preserved in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica.
The European scientists did not claim that the sunspots contribute to global warming. However, as the Washington Times reported, "Their work will probably be noted by those who claim temperature rises during the past century are the result of changes in the Sun's output."
How much hotter might it get?
According to the latest "best guess" by the IPCC's computer models, the Earth's temperature will increase by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
However, as Joseph L. Bast noted in Heartland Policy Study No. 88 (October 1, 1998), the IPCC's computer models are "unable to replicate past climate trends."
In other words, when they run the models backwards, and attempt to recreate the temperature fluctuations that have actually occurred over the past 100 years, the computer generates numbers that "do not even overlap" with reality. Such "unreliable" results show that the computer models are "too crude to predict future climate changes," wrote Bast.
Other scientists say the temperature increase could be 2.25 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Jerry Taylor, the director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute.
If temperatures continue to creep upwards as they have during the last century, the increase could be as little as 1.35 degrees Fahrenheit, said Patrick J. Michaels, author of The Satanic Gases.
Why the big difference in projections? Because "climatology is perhaps one of the most complex and uncertain of all scientific fields," wrote the Heritage Foundation's John Shanahan. "It is not possible to run controlled experiments for the whole planet in a laboratory test tube. Thus, scientists are forced to use models to predict the consequences of various influences, and to try to disentangle the effect of one factor from a myriad of others."
The bottom line: No one knows for sure.
How bad might the effects be?
If you believe Al GORE, the effects of global warming will rival those of the Black Death.
Real scientists aren't so sure. Writing in Heartland Policy Study No. 88, Bast noted that a "a slightly warmer world would probably be greener and a little cloudier than our world today, but otherwise not much different."
Dennis T. Avery, writing on www.GlobalWarming.org (September 1, 1998), said a two degree increase in temperate would mean "milder winters, fewer storms, only a slight increase in daytime summer temperatures, and more carbon dioxide to fertilize crops and pastures."
Higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere would "improve agricultural production," agreed the Heritage Foundation's Shanahan. "Studies conducted by the Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service show that doubling the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would improve cotton yields by 80%, wheat and rice by 36%, soybeans by 32%, and corn by 16%."
However, those benefits could be tempered by flooding and more unpredictable weather, say other researchers.
In other words: No one can be sure "whether any changes in global temperature would be beneficial or detrimental," said Shanahan.
Conclusion
There is no "official" Libertarian position on the debate over global warming.
Libertarianism -- a political philosophy -- cannot say whether the Earth is warming, or what causes long-term climate change, or what the impact of a warming planet might be. Ultimately, those are scientific questions that will be answered by scientists.
However, most libertarians will view global warming through a libertarian sensibility.
That sensibility was best summarized by H.L. Mencken, who said, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamoring to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
For politicians, global warming is the perfect hobgoblin.
Politicians like Al GORE tell us that only government (and the Kyoto Protocol) can save future generations from an environmental plague of Biblical proportions.
Without new taxes on energy sources (oil, gasoline, and coal); without new regulations on automobiles and power plants; without government-funded research into alternative energy sources -- in other words, without a raft of new taxes and regulations -- the planet is doomed, they say.
As Bast wrote in Heartland Policy Study No. 88, "Virtually all economic activities involve the use of energy and consequently the release of greenhouse gases." Therefore, he wrote, politicians' proposals "to limit greenhouse gases is a license for governments to monitor, tax, regulate, or ban virtually any activity."
Giving that power to politicians -- to "monitor, tax, regulate, or ban virtually any activity" -- is not something that any Libertarian could endorse.
That's why the best solution to the possible threat of global warming may be what Bast calls the "no regrets" policy.
It consists of investing "in atmospheric research to determine whether a genuine threat exists, and [investing] in reducing emissions only when such investments make economic sense in their own right."
Under such a plan, government could help by reducing taxes and eliminating regulations to "encourage new investments in capital and technology, thereby speeding up the process of phasing out inefficient machinery [that produce greenhouse gasses]."
Such a policy, wrote Bast, "promises much superior results without the enormous social costs and losses of liberty" that would result from giving politicians the almost unlimited power they say they need to "fix" global warming.
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