Environment

As I continue to read the book I mentioned in my last post, I become more wary of the politics surrounding it.  Man’s contribution to global warming is “settled science”, or in other words, no more debate folks the discussion is closed.  The suggestion from a politician in Australia that any Australian that doesn’t believe in man made global warming should be stripped of their citizenship until the are re-educated.  Does that kind of talk scare you?  It scares me.  The American Meteorological Society (AMS) has issued a statement on climate change that reads:

“There is convincing evidence that since the industrial revolution, human activities, resulting in increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and other trace constituents in the atmosphere, have become a major agent of climate change.”

Heidi Cullen, the Weather Channel’s climatologist believes that any meteorologist who carries an AMS certification should lose that certification if they do not toe the company line.  If their science and their logic are so convincing, why resort to the threats and coercion?

There is an alternate theory that is not even addressed in the book and that is that the temperature increase that we are seeing is caused by solar activity.  In the book the author touches on the effect of the sun, but only with regard to the position of the earth relative to the sun, not solar activity and since the position hasn’t changed that much, he says it is not a factor.  But it is not the position of the sun that is the factor, it is the amount of solar activity.  There have been very high levels of solar activity between 1940 and 2000.  That activity has since decreased and has been low for several years now.  If you listen carefully you will hear news stories that global warming peaked about ten years ago.

The book states that from 1990 to 1999 global CO2 emissions increased at a rate of 1.1 percent per year.  In the years 2000 to 2006, the rate tripled to over 3 percent per year.  So with such a dramatic increase of CO2 being released into the atmosphere and it being “settled science” that CO2 causes global warming, why did the temperature peak in 1998, and begin falling while the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere accelerated?  Another study concludes, “if you shut down all the world’s power plants and factories, ‘there would not be much effect on temperatures.’”

My concern is that we have a rush to solve a problem that may no longer exist, or worse may be going in the opposite direction, and our “leaders” are clamoring for massive spending and changes to our economy.  But what about all the proof of CO2 emissions leading to increases in temperature?  The question should be what is the cause and what is the effect?  Has the increase in CO2 caused the increase in temperature or has the increase in temperature, caused by solar activity, led to an increase in CO2?

The author unintentionally makes this point when he mentions that increasing temperature in the oceans caused CO2 to bubble up and be released into the atmosphere.  He also mentions that if the arctic tundra should start to thaw then methane, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 will be released into the atmosphere.  I think he was trying to say that an acceleration effect would occur where CO2 warms the earth and thereby releases more CO2, but if this was the case we would have baked long ago.  There is a study that indicates that based on past data going back 250,000 years that CO2 concentrations actually lag temperature change, meaning the temperature increase caused the CO2 increase and not the other way around.

With this in mind, any proposal to immediately change to renewable fuels on a massive scale could actually have the opposite effect.  I believe we should convert to renewable fuels when and as they become economically viable.  We recently saw a dramatic climb in the price of a barrel of oil.  With that there came an economic incentive to switch to hybrid cars, build wind farms, install solar systems, etc.  With the housing bubble and the subsequent fall off in economic activity, the price of a barrel of oil has decreased just as dramatically.  Sales of hybrids have sharply curtailed.

So if we artificially push to change from oil to renewable energy now: 1) it will be disruptive to the economy; 2) if the Indians and Chinese do not increase their consumption as fast or faster than we would wean ourselves off, the price of a barrel of oil will continue to fall.  As the price of a barrel of oil falls, the economics of renewable energy will get worse not better, and therefore more coercion would be required through tax incentives and regulations to continue the process.

I believe we should put our energy in driving down the cost of the technology through manufacturing improvements and R&D, so that alternative energy can compete with fossil fuels without subsidies, and let the market determine the pace of the conversion.  We tried the massive government energy program with the Synfuels Project in the late 1970s and every one of those projects failed because they were not economically viable. An enormous amount of money was spent in that effort but it was shut down.  Command and control economies do not work, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the injection of capitalism in China have proved that.  Markets do work, if artificial constraints are not placed upon them by bureaucrats.