Last summer, British economic consultants Lombard Street Research issued a report in which it concluded the cost of measures required to avoid global warming would be in the region of $18 trillion (£9.9 trillion,) and that was a conservative estimate. The reports author, Charles Dumas said “This is orders of magnitude greater than the cost of dealing with higher sea levels and freak weather, net of land gains in Canada, Siberia and other cold areas in thousands of square miles.” He added “the proposed Kyoto treaty limits would in no way prevent global warming. In reality, nobody seriously proposes a cure for global warming, because adequate measures would cause economic catastrophe and probably world war.”
The view expressed by Lombard has echoes across the pond. Back in the late ’90s, Thomas Gale Moore of the Hoover Institute said that moderate global warming could actually make the US better off, and said “The costs of doing nothing appear to be quite small, and the costs of a commitment to limit the emissions or atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases appear to be very large.” Around that time William A. Niskanen Chairman of The Cato Institute told the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that “My judgement, however, is that many political officials have over-reacted to this warning, and that many scientists have themselves been swept up in this momentum…There are too many scientific, economic, and political issues yet to be resolved, however, to support an early commitment to control the emissions of greenhouse gases. A global warming treaty in the next decade or so would be a rush to judgement.”
But these cynics of global warming spoke before last year’s hurricane season, and before a raft of reports were published talking about Greenland melting and Polar bears going extinct - surely today, a consensus is emerging.
Yet, even in the last few days there have been plenty of arguments against being too hasty on climate change. According to The Rev Jerry Falwell, US TV show host and chancellor of Liberty University “global warming is an unproven phenomenon and may actually just be junk science being passed off as fact… In addition, I believe that so-called solutions to global warming - and particularly the Kyoto Protocol, which is the politically correct international agreement to fight greenhouse gas emissions - would devastate the American economy if adopted by our nation. Further studies have shown that costly efforts to stem greenhouse gas emissions would just barely reduce global temperatures. ”
Elsewhere is it was recently argued that while there is evidence for global warming, arguments this is a man made phenomenon are probably false. According to Senator Robert Pittenger, a Charlotte Republican and member of the N.C. Legislative Commission on Global Climate Change: “A study by Jager and Barry from 1990 found that over the past 1 million years, there have been eight periods of glaciers and ice caps advancing and retreating - all of this occurring without automobile and power plant pollution from humans. In fact, on a much smaller scale, there is evidence of warming and cooling every 1,500 years. Typically, proponents of global warming point to the past century following the increase in carbon emissions from the Industrial Revolution to present time and blame humans solely for the increase in temperatures. However, from 1860 to 1940 the climate warmed, followed by a cooling period from 1940 to 1975, and subsequently has warmed since then (Fred Singer, “Climate Policy from Rio to Kyoto”). Supporters of global warming have been unable to explain this cooling during a period of economic growth and increased output of carbon emissions.
Many in the US fear that the Kyoto agreement requires the US to cut back on global warming gases while the likes of India and China have carte blanche to pollute. It may be time for the US to seize the mantle of global responsibilty and lead by example.
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