Cicero in Pants. Climate Change Denier??

Heya! Did you miss me, my pretties? I've spent most of the last two weeks or so with my head buried in the technical regulations of jurisdictions where I do not live - good phys-ed for the head, I guess. But not really interesting to write about. In the broader world though, the global climate change debate continued building up its head of steam with the release of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on Global Climate Change.

If we can't cool the planet can we at least cool the rhetoric? Am I the only one who is sick of this very non-ideological issue being made into something ideological? I pride myself on having what I vulgarly call a "Bullshit Detector". It isn't ideological. There's plenty of bullshit on all sides of the political spectrum, but the global warming debate constantly sets mine off. I wonder why? I mean - I have no vested corporate interests - and at the same time I am pretty sure I don't want to die in some freak hurricane caused as a byproduct by GM cars. So I'm a pretty fair minded observer of this stuff. But it is the Pro-climate change crowd, as numerous as they are, that keep setting off my bullshit detector. Over and over and over again.

The headlines with respect to the Fourth IPPC Assessment Report were "with 90% Certainty Humans Cause Global Warming!" Reading the paper more closely though it actually reads as a dial back of the earlier alarmism as found in An Inconvenient Truth and the third IPCC report. Good for them. Too bad about the alarmist spin. In order to make real decisions policy makers need real facts. I was pleased to see the IPCC report chairperson Susan Solomon NOT advocating. Better late than never for the scientists to take a position of neutral observation. It was a refreshing change. There is a funny parallel between the War in Iraq and Global Warming. In one case there was an open and shut case "slam dunk" for WMDs. In this case there is an open and shut case for anthropogenic climate change. My bullshit detector told me that they wouldn't find WMDs in Iraq and my bullshit detector forces me to remain skeptical of the position that global climate change is a catastrophic issue that must be addressed immediately with radical measures.

The climate change scientists have had what they consider to be a good reason for exaggerating and for making claims they could not prove. It is called the Precautionary Principle. It is the idea that since there is a chance this will happen we need to take policy measures just in case. To a pure climate scientist this idea makes sense. And exaggeration in support of the precautionary principle is seen as no vice. Its better safe than sorry. In addition, pollution control is good anyway, right? Emissions are bad, right? Our gluttonous ways will destroy us, right? Why do you care about this Cory MacDonald? You're one of THEM after all aren't you! You are in the pocket of big business, you greedy greedy little man.

...oh shut up.

I just want the right answer.

Nobody wants a tsunami created by a hurricane created by cow farts and your 12 year old car to wash New York city into the sea. Its not good for business if the 9 million consumers who buy your X-boxes and microwave dinner and cars are underwater.

But Cicero, you contrarian conservative ostrich with your head in the sand - the vaunted united nations has told us that there is a 90% chance that human carbon is causing global warming!

Yeah...so? Who's arguing? What people are arguing about isn't whether carbon has ANY effect. Even on the off chance that it doesn't that debate is moot at this point. The real debate is how much of an effect and what the proper policy answer to dealing with it is - especially when competing with MANY other issues before us. But the environmental movement, and to some extent the media have done themselves - and us - a grave disservice with respect to this and other issues by exaggerating. Over and over and over again. We have a fable we teach our children called The Boy Who Cried Wolf for a reason. Credibility is important. And when Malthusian predictions fail to come true again and again people start to tune out. Way back when I was a bouncing baby debater I was taught how to address issues. Its a simple formula.

• Is there a problem?
• Does your plan to fix the problem fix the problem?
• What further problems does your plan create?

Sorry to be pedantic. But as an honest policy thinker there you go. The holy grail of thinking things through and fixing the world. And when it comes to climate change we are being railroaded in a particular direction without proper consideration of those three questions.

The truth is there isn't one climate change debate. There are many if you apply the formula above.

• Is the climate changing?
• In a way that is bad?
• Are we causing it?
• Can we fix it?
• Is fixing it going to cause more problems than fixing it is worth?

Why don't we look at where the answers to those questions really lie in the non-alarmist debate. I will blog more about each of these questions in the future - one post at a time - but here's where I think things sit at the moment. I reserve the right to change my mind with more study, like any good student should.

• Is the climate changing? Yep. Sure seems to be. But less than they told you last time. Last time they were 60% sure it was going to be cataclysmic. Now they are 90% sure that it is well within adaptable limits. The eastern seaboard underwater was an exaggeration. Our bad.
• In a way that is bad? Well - its going to be a little bit bad for some folks for sure. But its really quite preferable to global cooling. Humans will do a much better job of dealing with warmth then cold. In fact in order for global warmth to grow to the extent where there's ANY flooding, the world economy will have to grow enormously. This has the byproduct of lifting billions of people out of poverty and increasing their ability to adapt. In Any event, there is a religious aspect to all of this. Assume that solar radiation was shrinking. A new ice age was coming. And the answer was to pollute as much as possible so that we could keep our climate steady. Would you? No? Because you take it on faith that pollution is bad. Exactly. Not science. Faith.
• Are we causing it? Yep. Some of it. Even most "climate change deniers" agree that CO2 and methane are greenhouse gasses. Gasses that are a byproduct of EVERYTHING WE DO TO FEED AND CLOTHE AND HOUSE THE WORLD.
• Can we fix it? Nope. Uh oh. Here's the real rub! Can we fix it? NO! Why not? Well because the two most populous nations on earth - China and India - are going to pull themselves up out of poverty. And they aren't going to let climate change stop that. And absolutely nobody else is going to cripple their economies in the short term in order to MAYBE fix the climate at some point when they are dead. Oh sure, we'll irritate businesses with some more government regulation - and that's fine I suppose. They are used to that to a certain extent and cutting down on waste is great. cleaner processes are excellent. But aren't the same global warming alarmists the people warning us that we are running out of dirty fossil fuels. Someone want to explain to me why peak oil (or more correctly, the rising price of oil until it becomes uneconomical to use it and it is displaced by another technology) is never addressed at the same time as global warming? Where's the paper factoring that in to the causation matrix? Please?
• Is fixing it going to create more problems than it is worth? Most probably. See below.

You know, it's no surprise that you don't have to go far among climate change skeptics before you find an economist. Economists believe in an opposite precautionary principle. Its stated: unless you have a REALLY good reason, don't futz with the feeding people formula. Burden of proof for really good reason = very high. Because as much as climatologists are scared of Florida underwater, economists are afraid of Florida at war. The concerns of economists are not hollow. They don't exist because they are in the pocket of some shady global capitalist Illuminati. They exist because we've spent the last 300+ years figuring out how an economy works. Whenever we forget and start passing laws that declare that people have wings cuz we say they do people start dying. Remember things like The Great Depression? How about hyper-inflation in Weimar (pre-Hitlerian) Germany, How about the long recession of the 1980s? These things weren't natural occurrences. They were as anthropogenic as climate change could ever hope to be. Bad government policy leads inevitably to real human misery. The kind of human misery that manifests itself through increases in suicides, higher violent crimes, and more dead babies. LOTS of dead babies. When you hear that the average life expectency in Russia was 54 in the immediate post communist era, it wasnt because of all the adults dropping dead. It was the piles of dead babies.

Now I know some of you don't believe in the capitalist market place. You really believe that if government just beats its wealth creating class with a stick it can take their money and redistribute it. Whenever that fails, you should beat them harder. Whatever your issue of the day is - social housing, more roads, global climate change - if you just beat the donkey harder it'll eventually shit gold. But you are very very wrong. As stickswingers the world over find out over and over again.

The real fact is that Stephane Dion is 100% right (and should be applauded for saying...) that it's NOT easy to make priorities in government - at least if you're doing it right. That's a fact we could stand to grow up about. And putting our political will into cutting emissions in Canada to an extent that would make a global difference needs to be honestly costed out. Well actually, it is arguably impossible, but whatever. Apparently shiny boyscout Canada needs to set an example. In the meantime we are creating regional strife as Alberta begins to feel the feds staring at their oil sands and there is opportunity cost as other issues go unaddressed while everyone climbs on the latest hip policy bandwagon. Which, of course, means we need to embrace the Kyoto Plan. Even though it doesn't address the problem at all. Instead it excludes India and China and allows developed polluters to pay to pollute and underdeveloped countries get paid to not develop. Its a perverse incentives circus. But hey - never forget the battle cry of the left "At least we TRIED!". Whether the policy will actually work or not is far less relevant to them than having their hearts in the right place. By my way of thinking that's disgusting.

What really needs to happen now is that the two solitudes of climatologists and economists have to stop attacking each other. They need to sit down and work together on developing honest information. No more science papers by consensus and radical accusations. No more ideological hatchet swinging. No more hiding your data because you were exaggerating to buy time in service of the precautionary principle and your distaste for capitalism. No more policy maker summaries that come out months before the actual report that has footnotes we can follow. No more denial studies on the other side either. Just honest, transparent, reproducible science. I'm naive, I know.

Then maybe they could come back to us and tell us what will really happen. And how much fix we can get for our bucks. If any.

And whether its really best that we start building an arc.

What a refreshing change.