The Citizen

By Anthony Stinton, MPP2

Al Gore's recent Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change has intensi!ed the calls for drastic measures in the United States and abroad to suppress carbon emissions and slow what he and others call "global warming." His supporters propose a litany of taxes and regulations to achieve this end. But before governments reach into taxpayers' wallets to fund these proposals, they should consider a few common sense conditions necessary for Gore's costly proposals to make sense.

The most obvious condition requires evidence that the climate is actually changing. This may be widely accepted, but we should also note that the climate has changed constantly over time.

If the climate is actually changing, we reach the second condition: for any government action to be productive, human carbon emissions must cause global warming. According to Gore's scienti!c supporters, this link is proven fact. However, these scientists have yet to produce a model which accurately uses carbon emissions to explain past temperature variation. Considering carbon emissions as the control knob on the global thermostat when current science is unable to use carbon emissions to accurately model past climates is irresponsible public policy.

Thirdly, even if scientists eventually establish the causal link between carbon emissions and warming, it is not worth government intervention unless the change is proven to have negative effects. The global climate is an incredibly complex system, and any change may make the world a more or less hospitable place. Some places will bene!t, others will suffer. But the idea that halting climate change is in all ways preferable rests on the dubious condition that the current global thermostat is set just right.

Fourth, even if bright scientists can show that the coming humancaused warming will have signi!- cant net negative effects, action is only justi!ed if it has a good chance of stopping the transformation. This is often not the case.

My home state of Oregon, for example, recently set state carbon reduction targets and plans to embark on an ambitious and expensive plan to build power plants that emit zero carbon. Even if limiting carbon emissions is the key to turning down the global thermostat, Oregon's carbon emissions are only a tiny fraction of the global total. Without an effective global carbon control regime, therefore, Oregon's actions will be expensive to state residents, businesses and taxpayers but meaningless on the global scale. What's more, assembling an international carbon control would require countries like the U.S. to ask the developing world to forego the same technologies that brought our economies into the industrial age. We should be morally uncomfortable making this request unless the gains are certain and considerable.

Even if Al Gore could solve the collective action problems and orchestrate a global reduction in carbon emissions to prevent any harmful climate change, it may not be the wisest move. The costs of preventing climate change may be orders of magnitude greater than the costs of adapting to it.

Two frequently cited negative effects of climate change are higher sea levels and the spread of tropical diseases like malaria. If these problems actually materialize, building levees and buying DDT and malaria nets are likely to be cheaper than forcing the wholesale abandonment of energy sources that have powered progress since the Industrial Revolution.

This discussion of cost also sets aside the fact that there are !nite resources for any social program. Spending to prevent global warming may divert funding from other programs like HIV prevention, sanitation or vaccinations which yield higher rewards per dollar.

Calls to action to prevent climate change are an updated and equally "awed version of political economist Frederick Hayek's "fatal conceit." The term describes the arrogance of socialists who thought that, with enough power in the hands of the right planners, men could engineer economies to achieve greater prosperity than the supposed chaos of the free market. But every locale in which the planners tried their system ended up in despair, hence a "fatal" conceit. Planners could not even plan tiny Cuba out of abject poverty.

Today, we see planners like Gore promise that, with enough money and power, they can optimize an even more complex system: our climate. If planners could not get Cuba's economy right, we shouldn't trust or fund big governments' efforts to control the weather.

…But inaction is a gamble we can't afford

By Adam Ruder, MPP2

The debate over climate change is over. Climate change is real - and it's a man-made problem. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of the leading climate scientists from around the world that recently shared the Nobel Peace Prize, has come to a consensus that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal" and state with "very high con!- dence" that humans are the primary cause. Since humans started burning fossil fuels, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen almost 40 percent above their highest levels in the past 450,000 years, and global average temperature has risen 0.7 degrees Celsius, a remarkably large shift over such a short period.

So why do some still dispute the reality of climate change? Because uncertainty is frightening. But while there is still some uncertainty as to how drastic the effects of climate change will be, there is no question that the consequences will be dire.

If we accept that climate change is real and caused by human activity, it is irresponsible and immoral not to act to limit it as soon as we can. We only have three options: mitigation, adaptation or suffering. The more mitigation we do now, the less adaptation and suffering we'll have to do later.

We are already seeing severe effects of climate change. The World Health Organization attributed 165,000 premature deaths to climate change in 2000, mainly through the geographic expansion of vector-borne diseases like malaria. Major "oods and wild- !res have more than doubled on each populated continent since 1950. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have accelerated their melting, and the Arctic summer ice cover has been shrinking at a quickening pace - 43 percent since 1979. Melting permafrost in Alaska and Siberia releases more carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere that had been stored in the soil, producing even more warming. And this is just the beginning.

What will happen if we do nothing? Regions around the world will see a greater frequency of extreme weather events, such as drought, torrential downpours and wild!res. These will have severe effects on soil quality and drinking water, imperiling the survival of millions. Warming temperatures and further melting of the polar icecaps will cause mass displacement of hundreds of millions of people in coastal areas around the world and continue to drive species out of their traditional habitats, leading to the extinction of up to 25 percent of the world's plant and animal species.

Despite these near-apocalyptic consequences, some detractors say we should wait. Everything is too uncertain, they say. It's too costly to act now. Future technology will make it easy to address climate change. These arguments are patently false. Waiting only worsens the problem, making any solutions more expensive and less effective.

Even if humans never burn another pound of coal, we will have already emitted enough greenhouse gases to cause the global average temperature to rise another degree Celsius over the next century. If we do not act, climate models predict temperatures may rise as much as 6 degrees Celsius in the same time. To give an idea of how drastic this is, the last ice age involved a drop in global temperatures of only 4 degrees Celsius.

The argument that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is too costly relies on false comparisons. To reduce emissions on the scale necessary to combat climate change will come with a cost, estimated to be between 0.5 and 1 percent of the gross global product. This sounds expensive, but the cure for human-caused climate change generates positive side effects that we should be pursuing anyway, like reducing our dependence on oil and !nding cleaner sources of energy. Most importantly, addressing climate change will force us to use our limited resources more ef!ciently, a practice that should already be standard. Waiting for a lower-cost solution will only increase the need for adaptation to warmer temperatures and more severe weather. But if we act now, we can avoid the worst damages while also addressing other pressing needs.

Uncertainty over the precise outcomes of climate change does not mean we should bet that all will turn out well. Adverse climate change is real, and it's happening, so let's deal with it. If we act now, we'll be doing ourselves, our children and the rest of life on Earth a big favor. Keeping our !ngers crossed is not a sensible policy.

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