Shaken faith

Clive Crook at The Atlantic has been a stalwart supporter of the doctrines of global warming.

Now, being a man of integrity, he's not so sure.

In my previous post on Climategate I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take that back.

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Remember that this is not an academic exercise. We contemplate outlays of trillions of dollars to fix this supposed problem. Can I read these emails and feel that the scientists involved deserve to be trusted? No, I cannot. These people are willing to subvert the very methods--notably, peer review--that underwrite the integrity of their discipline...

The IPCC process needs to be fixed, as a matter of the greatest urgency. Read David Henderson or the Wegman report to see how. And in the meantime, let's have some independent inquiries into what has been going on.

NOTE: It's not just the science that needs to be fixed, it's the entire orientation of the climate change enterprise. To become a serious attempt to deal with AGW, what's required is a cost-benefit framework, one that will judge the desirability of proposed interventions according to their projected balance of costs and benefits. Absent that, there is nothing useful for policy making and the choices that requires; instead, all you get is a series of absolutist judgments appropriate to religious belief, not to the real-world trade-offs required by any application of technology. Bjorn Lomborg has been making this argument from the very beginning. Even though he accepts the reality of AGW, he's been treated like an enemy heretic by the warming religionists (his treatment by Scientific American was especially shameful). But on the cost-benefit approach, he was right then, and he's right now.

Or he would be if this were really about global warming, which it isn't. AGW is merely a convenient weapon in a larger ideological war against capitalism. And that's why the following, for example, cuts no ice whatsoever and merely makes Lomborg more hated:

Lomborg:

We should invest dramatically more, say 0.2 per cent of GDP every year, in research and development into green-energy technologies. This would be 50 times more than what the world spends now, yet it would be half the price of Kyoto and much less than what any new treaty coming out of Copenhagen will cost.

People say, you shouldn't be a climate-science denier, and I agree. But likewise you shouldn't be a climate-economics denier. And in doing the numbers, we're saying that if you want to keep the temperature rise at two degrees centigrade by cutting carbon emissions, by the end of the century it's going to end up costing 13 per cent of the global GDP. And the benefit will be that for every dollar you spend, you end up avoiding two cents worth of climate damage. That's an incredibly bad deal.

But if you spend money investing in research and development and green-energy technology, for every dollar you spend, you end up avoiding $11 of climate damage. So you end up doing 500 times more good.

Sorry, Bjorn, you're missing the point of what this fight is really all about...

Byron