Pardon Me for Breathing

To get back to original metaphor, what is it we’re talking about?  Is it too much human carbon dioxide emission?  Is it emissions from the United States?  From Western Industry?  From Human Activity in general, including incremental actions from quickly industrializing nations like China, India, Brazil and Russia?  As warming seems to have taken a holiday, can we use this respite to develop less affluent regions while holding the line in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan and other industrialized nations?

While we’re at it, let’s ask if anything that we do would have any effect at all on global warming.  Pat Michaels pointed out that if the Waxman-Markey (the bill passed by the House earlier this year) standards were to be held worldwide, per capita carbon footprints would decline by 83% by 2050.  If this were to occur, the projected rise in global temperatures would decrease by 7%.  Afterwards, when I asked Professor Pollack if he disagrees, he said no.  I remarked that the decrease seemed hardly worth the grief.  He disagreed.  He mentioned that the still miniscule amounts of carbon dioxide in the air would be a bit high.  It still confused me. You see, there are two things to keep in mind about an 83% reduction in carbon dioxide use per capita.  First is that not even Kyoto contemplates such a severe reduction, so this represents a ceiling, not a floor.  Secondly, an 83% reduction in carbon would be equal to the American per capita “emission” in 1867.

If I were to categorize the panel members, Pat Michaels might be called an anthropogenic “skeptic”, although that’s not really true.  Similar to Dane Bjorn Lomborg, Pat thinks that the projected rise in global temperatures will continue to be mild.  Significantly, human contribution to this cyclical rise is between negligible and nil, and that the draconian changes in human activity being called for will only increase poverty and misery.  Prof. Pollack was much an activist in this regard, but when pressed privately afterwards, he agreed with Pat’s 7% estimate.

Skip Pruss from the State was full-on in advocating the Governor’s wind, solar and alternative policies.  He leaned on the anthropogenic theory as “settled”, as if he hadn’t heard of the East Anglia scandal.  While it was brave to push for alternative energy sources, we are still an automotive state with hundreds of thousands of both salaried and hourly jobs in the balance.  A little more balance would have been nice.

Kathryn Clay from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers was a classic fence sitter.  To some degree, this makes sense as the industry doesn’t want to seem to be getting in the way of progress, as it was perceived over pollutants and airbags.  Also, if everyone has to meet equivalent targets, then each OEM is equally disadvantaged.  She did mention, though, that given current straightened circumstances, continued government support in re-tooling the entire industry at an accelerated pace would still be appreciated.

Myron Ebell was perhaps the most strident skeptic on the panel.  He brought a great deal of realism throughout the discussion regarding the total picture of jobs, economic growth, and the one thing different from past regulatory forays.  And that difference is that, beyond the auto industry, the competitive position of the U.S. and other industrialized nations are beggared in comparison to aggressive growth in China and India by so-called “green” policies.

Michigan’s Fred Upton was trying hard to be bi-partisan, although he did get a dig in that Committee Chairman Henry Waxman did not permit hearings where both sides of the climate debate were heard.  His attitude seemed that he was being assigned to pass legislation on policies having to do with climate, energy and the economy without benefit of the entire story.

Henry Pollack’s plea at the beginning that politics be left out of the debate was well received, but in the end infeasible.  In the end, whether the folks at the Climate Research Unit in East Anglia had a central or tangential role in setting the tone for climate science, the well is truly poisoned at this moment.  When the peer-review process has been corrupted and politicized, then Politics and Policy are in the saddle, and climate arguments need to be seen through that prism.

So we have, “Please, let us discuss things on a pure scientific basis.”

Then it becomes, “Please let’s agree on what few things we know to be true.”

And then, “Even if causation cannot be proved, we must have some effect.”

Which devolves to, “Surely, we must remove the human carbon footprint as much as we can.”

Then, “We think by putting people to work on inefficient energy production, we can preserve many jobs.”

I suppose this all shows how we all about to be screwed.

Such an argument stream, though, disarms Western and the American economy from exploiting considerable energy sources at our fingertips, including vast oil reserves in Alaska, off shore and in the upper Mid West and equivalent natural gas reserves as well. Not to mention still large reserves of coal and the vast potential of nuclear energy.  Then there’s the comparison between carbon-based energy sources being exploited now around the world, such as off shore Brazilian source,, in means perhaps not up to ecological standards for pollution, for eventual importation to the United States, while our own sources and our own jobs are not being exploited.  

Then there’s the historic record of global temperatures.  No one at the “Debate” would say whether or not the Medieval Warming Period was slightly warmer or cooler than today.  But it was brought out that periods substantially warmer than today have existed in the past 11,000 years or so.  Ancient trees buried in the Arctic sands attest to summer temperatures in the Arctic 7 degrees Celsius higher than now, no doubt melting the ice cap.  And yet the polar bears survived.

In the end, the argument is not about science, it is about policy.  The Planet has endured worse things than us.  We will adapt to whatever the Earth throws at us.  We may even be able to “terra form” Earth itself.  

In the end, though, are we willing to put up with the sort of mandatory social engineering being contemplated by people trying to alter human behavior “for our own good”?

One gentleman got up to ask a question to the panel, but rather used the opportunity to make a point.  He had been a researcher, I believe he said at Ford, and was a peer reviewer for the original IPCC Report from the UN.  The document he signed off on, saying that human causation was unlikely, was changed when the report finally emerged.  Science, he maintained, has been subverted to social engineering.

This is the danger of what’s happening at the UN, in many in the scientific community, and among the simple-minded in schools and in journalism.  A fallacy that because of human emissions of what is otherwise a life-giving chemical, carbon dioxide, the whole planet is at some sort of risk.  Alternatives are being narrowly focused on a command economy and forced obedience to a doubtful creed.  Not far underneath the arguments for climate change, there’s a subtext of guilt, fault-finding and societal self-flagellation.

Another gentleman noted how only industrial societies had really managed to clean up their environments.  He asked Prof. Pollack if these societies be given consideration for their achievements, and that we should challenge the developing world on real toxic emissions.  Prof. Pollack replied that in terms of carbon dioxide, the whole world still treated the atmosphere as “an open sewer”.

Faced with such reasoning, the man replied, “Pardon me for breathing.”



How’s your climate knowledge?  See:

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/GlobWarmTest/start.html