"Cancun will not be Copenhagen"

Sydney M. Williams

Thought of the Day

“Cancun will not be Copenhagen”

November 15, 2010

A year brings big changes. In 2009, newly elected President Obama traveled three times to Scandinavia. The first was a plea before the International Olympic Committee meeting in Copenhagen that Chicago be the venue for the 2016 summer Olympics. His bid fell flat, and Rio de Janeiro was selected. Two months later he was in Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize – not for any peace he had brought the world, but for what the committee hoped he might accomplish. Just over a week later, on the 18th of December, he was back in Copenhagen to “crack the whip”, as the Christian Science Monitor put it in a headline at the time, “on the need to get a new global warming deal here before the clock runs out this weekend.” The clock ran out and the participants went home empty handed.

A problem inherent with climate alarmists is their implicit assumption that without man’s interference the status quo would remain. It is akin to the story of the boy who cried “wolf”. “An Inconvenient Truth”, in my opinion, did more harm than good to the cause of global warming. Mr. Gore and friends accuse all those who disagree with them as “deniers”. Most of the dissidents are merely skeptical as to whether man or nature is the primary or critical cause. Additionally, they are concerned as to the cost and its impact on economic growth. Bjorn Lomborg, director of Copenhagen Consensus and author of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal: “This time a year ago, passionate climate activists told us we had just weeks left to save the planet.” Activists at last year’s summit in Copenhagen saw that convention as, “our last chance to avert global warming.”

Freeman Dyson of Princeton’s Institute for Advance Study, a noted skeptic on global warming, is profiled in the current (December) issue of Atlantic by a somewhat sanctimonious Kenneth Brower. In the body of the report he did write: “Dyson did not deny that the world was getting warmer. What he doubted was the models of the climatologists, and the grave consequences they predicted.” But in foreword to the article Mr. Brower wrote: “In the range of his genius, Freeman Dyson is heir to Einstein – a visionary who has reshaped thinking ion fields from math to astrophysics to medicine…And yet on the matter of global warming he is, as an outspoken skeptic, dead wrong: wrong on the facts, wrong on the science.”

Global warming, or climate change, attracts very strong opinions. What is absent is rational discourse. Most everybody agrees that man has impacted the environment; the question is one of degree. Also, most everyone acknowledges that the earth has warmed and cooled over the millenniums. Justin Gillis had a fascinating article in Sunday’s New York Times. He wrote: “With the waxing and waning of ice ages, driven by wobbles in the earth’s orbit, sea level has varied by hundred’s of feet, with shorelines moving many miles in either direction.”

There is a cost associated with cleaning up the environment and reducing carbons that alarmists tend to ignore. The policy choice is “incredibly expensive”, as Mr. Lomborg wrote. He adds, “…alternative energy technologies are far from ready to take over from fossil fuels.”

The Kyoto Protocol (developed under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – the UNFCCC), negotiated and adapted in 1997 and never ratified by the United States, expires in 2012. It set binding targets for industrialized nations to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gasses, but gives a free pass to developing nations. Despite the adamancy of its supporters and the specificity of its demands, compliance has been less than total. President Clinton refused to submit the Treaty to the Senate “until developing countries are subject to binding emission targets.” President Bush, in February 2002, announced a U.S. policy that relies on voluntary actions to reduce the ratio of emissions to economic output by 18% over a ten year period. According to the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, the growth in greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. rose 16% between 1990 and 2004, with almost all of the increase coming in the first ten years – during a time of rapid economic growth.

After the hype of a year ago when one hundred heads of state showed up in Copenhagen and the excitement over newly elected President Obama’s appearance electrified much of the world, expectations for the meeting in Cancun (November 29-December 10, 2010) are far more subdued. Heads of state will be replaced by bureaucrats and there has been little buildup in the Press. That may well prove a blessing. There is little chance that the upcoming meeting will be the public relations fiasco of a year ago. The Ontario, Canada based Kingston Whig Standard a month ago quoted George Monbiot, “the world’s most famous global warming journalist.” According to the paper, Mr. Monbiot predicted in his column in the Guardian: “Climate change enlightenment was fun while it lasted. But now it is dead.”

The benefits of reducing carbons must be weighed against the costs of implementation and their impact on economic growth. As Mr. Lomborg suggests” “If green technology is not ready to take up the slack, then forcing carbon cuts through taxes will simply hurt growth and development – particularly painful to developing nations.”

Whether man is the principal cause of climate change or not, mankind must be ready to adapt to changing conditions. A focus on blame detracts from the more important consideration of the millions of people living in low-lying areas, where only modest increases in sea level could have devastating effects. It is in man’s self interest to keep his environment clean and developed nations have decidedly moved in that direction over the past several decades. It is in the interest of all people to protect the environment as best they can and to be aware of the conditions and the risks that surround them.

Emissaries meeting in Cancun, while trying to extend and improve the Kyoto Protocols may well be forced to tackle the mundane problem of economic cost and the need to adapt to the changing nature of the world. A lack of pre-meeting publicity may serve to make the Cancun meetings more of a success than the hype and expectations did a year ago in Copenhagen.