Response to "The Cooling World"

I’m sorry this has taken so long.  The holidays and what not have gobbled up my time.  I’ll try to get to water boarding in a more timely fashion.

I’m glad I asked about your intent, because my original assumption was that you were trying to suggest an equivalency between one article in 1975 and the overwhelming consensus by the scientific community today.  I hope you’ll indulge me in addressing this false equivalency just because I’d already looked into it somewhat before you clarified your intent.

The one Newsweek article is essentially what every climate change denier trots out in order to suggest that some elusive “they” predicted widespread cooling in the 1970s.  It was cited by James Inhofe on the floor of the Senate and has been referenced by Rush Limbaugh at least a thousand times.

Despite how widely it’s been cited, the fact remains that it is only one article.  The reality is that anthropogenic global warming due to emissions of greenhouse gases was being discussed in scientific literature as early as 1896 [7].  Sometime around the late 1960’s / early 1970’s the question was being asked by many people whether the pollution we were pumping into the air may have widespread climatic ramifications.  As all of you know, the scientific method suggests that the appropriate response to a question is to make observations and propose hypotheses to answer the questions being asked.

A great many hypotheses were suggested and the Newsweek article reflects one of them.  A survey of peer reviewed scientific journals undertaken by the American Meteorological Society of articles addressing climate change from 1965 to 1983 found only seven articles suggesting global cooling and 44 warning of global warming, so even in the 70’s, global cooling was not viewed by the scientific community as the dominant threat. [3] Over the years, experimentation and observation eliminated many of the hypotheses suggested and a broad based consensus coalesced around the current understanding of Global Warming as evidenced by the similar survey of peer reviewed journals undertaken in 2004 which identified 928 articles on climate change published between 1993 and 2003.  I’ll quote the author of the survey, Naomi Oreskes, here :

The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position. [9]

This progression of numerous hypotheses being systematically eliminated to arrive at consensus is exactly the way science is supposed to work.  Unfortunately science is ill suited to the clean ideological narrative style of political propagandists as is evidenced by the fact that in spite of an overwhelming scientific consensus on an issue that is clearly a scientific question, this question still rages in the political theater.

The consensus on the IPCC report [8] in the scientific community today is overwhelming.  For a well documented article on the consensus, I’ll point you to reference 10.  I’d also encourage you to look at that entire series as every objection I’ve ever heard a climate change denier employ is addressed in some detail therein.

As to the idea that it is foolish to make economic decisions based on climate predictions that may or may not be accurate, I’d ask you to consider the shipping industry, the airline industry, the construction industry, owners of swimming pools and anyone in the tourist industry.  All of these industries and hundreds of others make economic decisions based on scientists best guesses about what the weather will do all of the time.  They certainly seem to believe that the risk mitigation inherent in paying attention to such data is worth the risk of unnecessarily losing revenue due to inaccurate predictions.  

The idea that the taxation of carbon emissions would destroy our nation’s economy is simply absurd in the face of the historical record.  Our nation has taxed all sorts of stuff throughout its history [11], and no tax has managed to cripple or even seriously hinder our economic progress yet.  To attribute some sort of mystical quality to the carbon tax that it will be the one to bring our nation to its knees is just silly.

The more serious threat to our economy is that we are ceding our position as a high tech leader in the field of energy production and efficiency to other nations.  Our nation has always been well served by being on the leading edge of technological advancements, but while we remain mired in a fossil fuel funk [12], Germany is becoming the world leader in solar power [13]; France is the undisputed leader in nuclear power [14]; Europe, Japan and China are out developing us in high speed rail [15] and the most fuel efficient vehicles are being made by Japanese and European automakers [16].  All of these are technologies in which the US was an early pioneer but has now allowed itself to be surpassed.

I really have no doubt that our economy can survive one more tax as it’s survived all past taxes.  I do not believe for an instant that our economy will survive us insisting on being dinosaurs clinging to the energy production and transportation paradigms of the previous century.  To allow ourselves to be left behind is truly against the American spirit of being pioneers in innovation that has made our country the economic powerhouse it is today.  I believe if we do not act it will be the ruin of our once great nation.

1. http://www.grist.org/article/they-predicted-global-cooling-in-the-1970s/
2. http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/
3. http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/Myth-1970-Global-Cooling-BAMS-2008.pdf
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling
5. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/
6. http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/nas-1975.html
7. http://web.lemoyne.edu/~giunta/Arrhenius.html - 1896 discussion of global warming
8. http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm
9. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1686.full
10. http://www.grist.org/article/there-is-no-consensus/
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_history_of_the_United_States
12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France
15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail
16. http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bestworst.shtml