Joel Schwartz, environmental consultant and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently produced the “N.C. Citizen’s Guide to Global Warming” and participated in the John Locke Foundation’s five-city Global Warming Tour from Charlotte to Wilmington. Recently, he discussed the citizen’s guide with Mitch Kokai for Carolina Journal Radio. (Go to http://www.carolinajournal.com/cjradio/ to find a station near you or to learn about the weekly CJ Radio podcast.)
Kokai: Joel, I’m going to start with a quote right from this new report. It says, “The greatest threat we face from climate change is the danger of rushing into foolish and costly policies driven by ill-founded climate change hysteria.” Is this a really big problem?
Schwartz: I think it’s a big problem, both in North Carolina, around the U.S., and around the world. The kinds of things that climate activists want us to do would be very costly. That means there’d have to be “wrenching transformation” of our way of life, as Al Gore likes to say. It would mean that we would have to stop using energy in almost all the ways we use energy now — most of the driving, most of the things, the benefits we get from energy. It also means that people in developing parts of the world wouldn’t be able to increase energy use, and that’s something that they need to do in order to become, to develop the healthy, safe, and comfortable lives that we enjoy in Europe and the United States and other parts of the world. So I think it’s a big problem.
In addition, the kinds of things that people are talking about doing in North Carolina, even if they’re implemented worldwide, it wouldn’t actually have any effect on temperature 50 or 100 years from now. And so we’re talking about all pain and no gain.
Kokai: In the report itself, you rebut about 17 different claims that are made by people who are on the alarmist end of the global warming debate. We’re not going to have time to go through all 17, but I do want to hit some, especially those that have particular interest for North Carolina. North Carolina has dealt quite a bit with hurricanes in the past, and there are several of these claims that deal with hurricanes and the impact of global warming on hurricanes. What do we know about the impact of global warming or climate change on hurricanes in terms of danger, frequency, or anything else?
Schwartz: Well, in terms of climate change, the theory is that with greenhouse gases, if it causes warming, it causes the oceans to warm, and those warmer sea surface temperatures increase hurricane intensity and frequency. But another thing that climate models predict for greenhouse warming is that the climate changes in other ways that actually offset the effect of sea surface temperatures, and that effect from greenhouse warming really shouldn’t — should be kind of a wash.
The irony is that just a couple a weeks ago the journal Nature published a paper that looked at hurricane frequency and intensity going back three centuries in the Atlantic and concluded that it was actually the quiescent period during the 1970s and ’80s that was unusual, and the current increased hurricane activity in the Atlantic over the last 10 years is typical of the long-term norm.
And also if you look worldwide, even though we’ve seen an increase in hurricane intensity and frequency in the Atlantic in the last 10 years, worldwide there’s actually been no overall change, and in fact hurricanes are actually decreasing in some parts of the world. So probably there’s really no effect.
Kokai: There is another piece in your report that deals with the issue of the coasts, and there are some who contend that greenhouse warming is going to flood the Outer Banks and wipe out some of the state’s coastal areas. You point out that there’s no evidence that would point to that happening.
Schwartz: Well, sea level is rising, but sea level has been rising for more than 100 years. In fact, it’s been rising since the end of the last ice age thousands of years ago. We have good data going back more than 100 years on sea level rising in many places of the world, and the sea level was rising before we had emitted many greenhouse gases, even back in the early 1900s. We’ve emitted about 95 percent of our greenhouse gases since the 1920s, and yet sea level was rising before that, and in fact the rate of sea level rise has been declining during the 20th century, even as greenhouse warming has supposedly increased. So those two things don’t wash, this claim that we’re going to have—that we’re having dangerous sea level rise, and that it’s being caused by global warming.
Kokai: So as people go through your report and see some of the claims, some of the real evidence, is there a pattern that they’ll see about the ways in which the evidence that’s put forward by alarmists is not quite right?
Schwartz: Yeah, I think there are a number of ways. One of them is hurricanes. You never hear about the other side of the issue on hurricanes, the fact that they’re not increasing, that greenhouse warming actually should act in ways that would reduce the intensity of hurricanes and so on. But there are a number of other things that people probably aren’t aware of.
One is that just about every week there is a paper published in one of the major research journals that is inconsistent with — or even directly contradicts — claims based on greenhouse warming. So the pattern of warming around the earth is not consistent with the warming being due to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. There is research suggesting that other factors, including human factors like soot emissions, could be a major factor, natural factors like the sun. Other research shows that climate models do a lousy job of predicting real world climate, which suggests that the things that they’re telling us about the future probably aren’t right. Even if the model matches some trends from the past, they do such a poor job on others that maybe they’re matching those trends for the wrong reasons and there are offsetting errors in the models.
And so, there are lots of reasons to believe that the supposed consensus that climate change is due to greenhouse gases and is going to be disastrous is wrong, and that we could go headlong into these policies that would be very costly and won’t do us any good, and of course would take away our resources from other things that are important to us.
Kokai: One of the things you point out is that you’re not saying that there is no warming. You’re also not saying that there is no impact from man. But if there is some sort of warming, if there is some sort of danger, we could and should do different things than having increased taxes or regulations that will limit our options in the future.
Schwartz: Yeah, I think that the danger is overblown. And I think also that the attribution of the warming to greenhouse gases, almost solely to greenhouse gases, is probably incorrect. But also, the kinds of things that environmentalists and Al Gore are trying to get us to do are among the most costly policies that you could possibly implement. And so if you want to solve the problem, you want to solve it in the cheapest way possible.
So one of the things that some scientists are actually even researching is something called geo-engineering, where you try to offset any warming effects — whatever is causing the warming. So even if it’s not greenhouse gases, even if it’s human activities other than greenhouse gases, if it’s natural factors, one thing you could do would be to spray, essentially, glitter above the poles. This is something that volcanoes already do every once in awhile, and it does cool the earth. It’s something that would probably be a lot less expensive than the vast reductions in energy that would be required to reduce carbon dioxide. It would work to reduce temperature regardless of what’s causing the warming.
So that it makes more robust than greenhouse gas reductions. It wouldn’t require these wrenching transformations in our way of life. It wouldn’t prevent people in developing countries from getting a higher standard of living and greater safety and longer lifespans and greater health. So that has potentially a lot of advantages over reducing greenhouse gases, but of course this all assumes that the amount of warming is going to be large and that it’s going to cause awful dangers like floods and hurricanes, and I don’t think there’s evidence that that’s going to happen any way.
Kokai: There will be some people in the audience who will say, “Okay. If global warming is a danger, we should do something now.” Are they right? And if so, what should we do?
Schwartz: Well, first of all you can string together a whole bunch of improbable events in a whole bunch of different directions, not just climate change, and imagine all these different disasters that could befall you, and if you say, “Well, let’s throw all of our resources into dealing with all these improbable events, you’re not going to have much left to deal with real dangers.” And so blowing global warming out of proportion means that you are wasting your money, you’re wasting your effort on things that aren’t going to do you any good, and that just means that you’re going to make yourself worse off. So just because environmentalists cook up these scares doesn’t mean that we have to totally change our way of life without getting any benefit in return.