Do I believe in “Global Warming”? Maybe, though this week’s single digit temperatures in Chicago are a serious test of faith. Do I believe in climate change? Absolutely.
As everybody is aware, but doesn’t often think about, the Earth has been successively warmer and colder ever since the molten proto-planet cooled enough to have a climate. In some eras, it has been quite a bit warmer than now, in others much cooler.
That natural progression didn’t halt at the birth of human civilization. Much of Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance is a potted history of how climate change has affected past societies. The Sumerians didn’t have SUV’s, but they did suffer from rising temperatures and drought.
We know, as assuredly as we can know anything, that weather conditions in the 30th Century will not replicate those of the 20th, now matter what mankind does or doesn’t. If we worry about what the effect of the changed environment will be on posterity, we have two ways to ameliorate their lot.
One approach is to try to predict the climatic future and then take measures to offset unfavorable trends. That is the rationale of the Gore-Pelosi strategy. The best thinking in climatology tells us that the Earth is getting warmer, that warming results from the increased release of carbon into the atmosphere, and that we can, through drastic reductions in the usage of oil and coal, slow that increase. It’s conceded that warming won’t stop, even if human-generated carbon emissions are reduced to zero, that we have no way to know how much difference our efforts will make, and that the negative economic impact of carbon restriction will be huge. The optimum outcome is that our surroundings will be somewhat less warm than otherwise, while we will be significantly poorer.
The alternative is to worry less about trying to change the climate and more about readying society to adapt to whatever comes. Proponents of this strategy (likened to Holocaust deniers by the bien-pensants) doubt that we can accurately forecast the future climate or gauge how human activity will alter it. In the 1970’s, after all, the best thinking in climatology was that the next big change would be a new Ice Age. Should we have acted on this scientific consensus by pumping carbon emissions up in order to counter the cooling trend?
What we can do for our descendants is promote, or at least avoid retarding, economic growth. Wealthy societies cope with any contingency, including climate change, more effectively than poor ones. The Gore-Pelosi recessionary formula will work if and only if a great many theories and guesses about climate dynamics turn out to be unanimously correct. In any other case, it will leave the world less well fitted to deal with whatever really does occur.
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