Cynic, Skeptic or Scientist
This week, during a public meeting of a Council on which I sit, and while discussing how to evaluate county-level responses to global warming, I was accused of being a cynic. Hmmmmm. Probably not.
Cynic: One who believes all people are motivated by selfishness. (That's not me.)
Skeptic: One who instinctively or consistently doubts, questions, or disagrees with assertions or generally accepted conclusions.
Scientist: A person learned in science and especially natural science – a scientific investigator who tests and rejects hypotheses.
I’m a Ph.D. environmental scientist (really, here’s my vita). As a scientist, from time-to-time I must also be a skeptic. It’s in the nature of the job. When it comes to global warming, I’m a skeptic because the conclusions about the cause of the apparent warming stand on the shoulders of incredibly uncertain data and models. Here are a couple of reasons why I’m more unsettled than not on global warming.
Temperature and warming estimates are highly uncertain
According to scientists who study this question, “the term ‘global temperature’ is fundamentally meaningless and models built on this concept are inherently just as meaningless.” See: Does a Global Temperature Exist? . I’ve already written about this (here) and would now point readers to a still more recent finding that the fundamental data set on which the international community has based its models has been challenged and the keepers of the data have had to downward adjust their numbers, the first of several downward adjustments, apparently. You can access that discussion here. As a policy matter, one has to be less willing to take extreme actions when data are highly uncertain. So, for this reason alone, I’m also skeptical about governmental responses.
According to some, we can’t avoid a catastrophe, but we shouldn’t panic
Although there remains much valid debate on the subject, many folks believe there is a ‘tipping point’ beyond which life as we know it will forever change, (discussed earlier here). Those who believe in a tipping point suggest we will reach it if carbon dioxide concentrations exceed 450 parts per million in the lower atmosphere. The Natural Resources Defense Council made that claim to the Fairfax County Environmental Quality Advisory Council as recently as August 1, this year. You can see this in each of the following graphs as well. The solution offered is to have the entire world reduce CO2 emissions by 80 percent by 2050, a mere 42 years from now.
Well, that just isn’t possible. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program, a federal government program, has reached that conclusion. (See it here.) http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap2-1/finalreport/default.htm There are only two ways to make the 80% reductions, a massively revolutionary technological discovery and/or massive reductions in energy use. Here is a graph that explains the sacrifice people would have to make, barring a revolutionary change in technology that no one predicts will occur. Notice what this graph means – that the poor nations must remain poor, and the rich nations must become poor.
There is no consensus that technology will get us where we need to go. Most of the problem comes from cars and our propensity to use electricity from coal-fired power plants. I’ve discussed (here) that even the environmentalists don’t think we can reduce the car contribution by more than 45% (we’d need more than 80% reduction). For those who think the $100,000 Telsa electric car is going to be the answer, just contemplate how fast the price can come down or the technology will spread when the Telsa folks refuse to license their technology to manufacturers with the capacity to mass produce their cars. I suppose we could nationalize their business, but that’s not quite American and no one is looking in that direction. Nor are we going to see speedy reduction in CO2 from coal-fired power plants. The first test of possible controls won’t come on line until 2011, and that’s no more than a field test at a small facility. A full field test will be a few years thereafter, and from the looks of it, that technology won’t work at the majority of facilities, as most of these plants just aren’t built over the top of the right kind of geology. (See that news here.)
Indeed, of the passel of Congressional bills intended to accomplish a major reduction through compulsory regulatory programs, most don’t result in sufficient reductions for the U.S. Here’s a comparison of those bills. 
So, I’m skeptical that we will be able to avoid the “tipping point”, if there is one. I’ll discuss what I think are sensible approaches a county could take in a future posting, but in the mean time, some might like to see what Cass Sunstein (University of Chicago) thinks about how to steer a path between willful inaction and reckless overreaction – between panic and utter neglect. He’ll be discussing his latest book on the subject on September 6th and AEI-Brookings will have a video webcast available thereafter (register here).
