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.

One of the most famous images in this debate is the graph of correlation of global temperature and amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. While it’s true that there’s a large amount of correlation between CO2 and global temperatures, the relationship is often confused: CO2 levels have lagged behind global temperatures. It has been historically far easier to predict CO2 level changes using global temperature changes rather than the other way around.

The most popular anti- CO2-driven climate theory is the solar theory. When analyzing the data, a far closer and more predictive correlation can be found between solar activity (measured in amount of flares, sunspots, etc.) and global temperatures. And, contrary to the CO2 theory, this correlation works the right way around.

Both of these, unfortunately, confuse correlation with causation. The first thing that any basic statistics class will teach you is the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc (roughly after this, therefore because of this). Just because one event follows another doesn’t mean that they are necessarily causing each other. With the incredibly confusing and complicated climate, it’s no surprise that this simple fact is often forgotten. Both of the theories make intuitive sense (carbon dioxide is hot, so more of it equals a warmer world… the sun is hot, so more solar activity might reflect upon the Earth), but stop at the level of correlation. And, of course, historical CO2-planetary temperature correlation has temperature as the independent variable with CO2 being dependent.

Predictions over what will happen in both the near and far future fluctuate almost as much as historical CO2 levels. Those estimates that have received the most press are often some of the scariest and least grounded in the statistical modular world. We’ve heard biblical end-of-days predictions of drought, famine, pestilence, and wars over scarce natural resources as well as measured-by-inches sea level rises and gently warming coasts. Obviously, the degree of severity with which our planet would warm greatly affects our decisions about what to do about it now. If our affect upon the planet approaches the world-ending calamity that some have predicted, we should obviously spare no expense in planning our survival. However, if the warming is more moderate, careful cost-benefit analyses are needed.

And this is where the global warming picture muddies almost beyond prediction. Predictive climate models are notoriously unreliable and border on random. It’s been much-publicized that, thirty years ago, scientists, the media, and climate models were predicting the same life-threatening global changes, but in terms of a cooling planet. Many counter this objection with the assertion that predictive knowledge and technology is better than the 1970s (true, obviously), and placate this objection with the notion that they’ve got it right this time. However, what we’ve learned over the past thirty years is simply that the climate is so complicated that it is impossible to predict with any authority or absolution. Climate models are at the mercy of an almost-unending string of variables due to the incredible complexity that defines our atmosphere. Changing one or two by the slightest amount often plunges the entire predicted future of our planet into chaos. A cliché holds true here: the only constant is change.

Previously, we visited the so-called “consensus” on global warming and the fact that it rests largely on postulation and anecdote. The always-vague group of “scientists” disagrees incredibly, and it cannot be claimed in any way that the debate on the topic is over. Now to examine some of the harder science and numbers involved.

The next question to ask is whether the planet is warming beyond what may be called a natural cycle. In the past, the Earth has warmed and cooled many different times, varying from periods where a huge segment of the planet was covered in ice to periods where Siberian Russia has been temperate, and all of these occurring well before humans ever laid so much as a footprint upon this world.

Looking at any major graph that has analyzed data, it must be concluded that the world has not currently warmed beyond what would be possible in a natural cycle. Depending on whom you ask, the world has been warmer than now no more than five hundred years ago during the “Medieval Warm Period,” and would be difficult to claim that the Earth has never been warmer. Indeed, the hottest years on record, according to NASA, are 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, and 1931. This all must be taken with a grain of salt, as measuring “global temperature” is difficult and often inaccurate, but the point is that we have gone through comparably warm spells before. Records, by the way, only began to be kept 150 years ago. In the past 150 years we’ve gone through comparable warm spells, not to even take into account the past 150 million!

This is not to discount the fact that humans and our way of life could influence the environment. It’s not possible to argue that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are not warmer than our current atmospheric make-up (just stand behind the exhaust pipe of a truck to see how warm our emissions can be). However, the greenhouse gas that is identified as the main culprit in the current warming trend, carbon dioxide, currently composes about 0.04% of the atmosphere, up from approximately 0.03% one hundred years ago (and the number has been projected to be about 0.05% in 2100).

Many environmentalists have attempted to make our planet out to be a precariously balanced chemical concoction, with any error one way or the other poised to tip it into oblivion. Some conservative skeptics, on the other hand, have invoked God in arguing that our planet could not have been created so dangerously and believe that mankind is arrogant and self-centered to think that we could so harm a wondrous and divine creation.

The truth is most likely somewhere in the middle. Earth’s atmospheric chemistry is certainly not such a combustible mixture as to overload or reach some kind of tipping point if we slightly alter the overall combination. It is naïve to think, however, that humans should not be stewards of the planet for future generations. Because carbon dioxide is the principal agitator in the global warming investigation, it’s been researched more thoroughly than many other elements in the atmosphere. And, indeed, it has had a pretty variable degree of fluctuation over the years due to many different factors. While humans have been the principal driver of CO2 variance in recent years, its incidence in the atmosphere has been higher in the past than it is now. To think that the recent human additions to the atmosphere will seriously cause catastrophic climate changes on a global scale is to invest in hyperbole.

 

Supporters of drastic action often prop up what they claim to be a scientific consensus on our changing climate. This consensus looks shakier when prodded. There may be a majority of climatologists that agree on the most general of climate questions, but the inaccuracy of predictive indicators combined with the harm that many global warming policies would do to our world means that more research should be devoted to the matter, and drastic action would certainly be ill-advised.

Indeed, it is disingenuous to simply claim that there’s a consensus. Most consensus claims come from circumstantial and anecdotal evidence without a real survey of scientists. The most famous and relevant actual survey comes courtesy of Dr. Naomi Oreskes, whose survey Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change concluded that 75% of peer-reviewed climate literature either explicitly or implicitly endorsed the anthropogenic global warming. The survey has been scrutinized and become the subject of intense controversy. Attempts to replicate her survey have yielded substantially different results than those that Dr. Oreskes found. Putting aside the subjectivity of judging an “implicit” endorsement, the study’s methodology and detailed results have never been made available. Additionally, there have been new studies that put the number of recently-published peer-reviewed abstracts that contain “explicit or implicit” support for human-induced global warming at below 50%. And this isn’t even addressing whether or not even the 75% number can be called a consensus, enough to declare “the debate is over.”