Good news from the front lines: the Senate was unable to advance the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill today, as it failed to pass cloture 48-36. This, of course, raises a good question: granting the catastrophic environmentalists their arguments about the impending disaster, what can actually be done about global warming?

Even assuming that future climate models hold any degree of accuracy, and taking about the median assumption in between world-catastrophe scenarios and nothing-will-really-happen scenarios, how much could possibly be done to combat the incidence of warming?

The United States and most of the industrialized West have done the bulk of their carbon damage and could afford, at high cost, to curb their CO2 emissions to benign levels. But what of the rest of the world? China has recently passed the United States as the largest CO2 emitter in the world. India is rapidly rising. Are we, the industrialized West, to wag our fingers at these rising powers and demand that they go through the same things that we did a few years ago in a far more costly (eco-friendly) manner, perhaps handicapping their economies and solidifying our own advantage against them? And even if their governments do agree to such radical carbon-limiting proposals, is it moral for them to hinder their own and their (sometimes impoverished) people’s industrial development for the sake of a climate pact with the West?

Looking past the rapidly-industrializing second world, there’s the great moral problem that the third world creates. Huge segments of Asia and almost the entire population of Africa have been mired in a cycle of war, poverty, and disease for centuries. If carbon-based industrialization provides the cheapest, fastest, and most effective way to bring about positive change, should we place limits on what kinds of energy they can use and how they can use them? If it costs 1,000 people the ability to live in a heated home in a given year, risking death, can we do that? If it costs a single extra life per year, can we do that? We see our own action on global warming in terms of dollars and cents, but the third world views emissions curbs in terms of lives lost.

This is where the muddy predictive ability of climate models and the world of reality intersect and cause a great predicament. If Earth really is teetering on the precipice of destruction, of course we need to do every little thing possible to limit greenhouse gas production. However, if it’s viewed in more realistic and moderate terms, it is morally imperative that we take the human lives that are at stake in the developing world into account.

The United States and the West can, therefore, undertake their own attempts at curbing greenhouse emissions with the possibility of it having a negligible effect on their populations. The rest of the world would have to invest in the unknown numbers of future lives weighted against the tangible and visible poverty of current people. We run the risk of sacrificing many for the sake of none.

Scientific consensus, if there ever is or was one on the issue, cannot own the debate. Science, after all, can only take us so far. There are 2,500 members, political and scientific, on the IPCC panel. They agree that warming is occurring and that humans are probably the drivers of the change. Agreement ends there. Predictions of what will happen in the coming years, how much we can really affect the change at this point, and what policies should be undertaken all vary wildly. The IPCC, furthermore, is not the only voice on the issue. Many more exist on both sides, with the IPCC dealing with allegations that it’s too conservative and too extreme in its estimates and conclusions. And this is before taking into account the infighting that has occurred at the panel. The IPCC is not authoritative; it is but one voice in the night.

The global warming question is an endlessly complicated one. Those on the side of drastic action frame the question in moral terms. Those on the side of little or no action put it in economic terms. It must be dealt with on both these bases, and neither side has the right to sole ownership of either economics or morality.