http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2007/08/20/sibleyed_0821.html

Global warming: Don't take skeptics at face value

By JOHN SIBLEY

Published on: 08/21/07

Global warming and climate change will move to the front burner in
Georgia today in a hearing before the state House Energy, Utilities,
and Telecommunications Committee. A vigorous public discussion is
overdue.

In three reports issued this year (the work of more than 2,500
scientific experts), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has
concluded that the Earth is warming at a rate that cannot be explained
by natural cycles, that human activities (particularly the release of
CO2 into the atmosphere) are a major cause, and that the possibility
of severe consequences is real. Georgia should care. As a coastal
state, risks such as sea level rise and intensified tropical storms
should be important to us. As an agricultural state, so should the
possibility of new extremes of temperature and drought.

(ENLARGE)
John Sibley directed the Growth Strategies Commission under former
Gov. Joe Frank Harris and was president of the Georgia Conservancy for
seven years.

There is a growing business consensus that this scientific analysis
supports action now. The Business Roundtable is an association of
chief executives whose companies represent nearly a third of the total
value of U.S. stock markets. The Roundtable has adopted a formal
position which states: "Because the consequences of global warming for
society and ecosystems are potentially serious and far-reaching, steps
to address the risks of such warming are prudent now, even while the
science continues to evolve."

General Electric and other leading businesses have gone further and
joined with nonprofits to propose action steps. The Climate Action
Partnership has called for a national cap and trade system to regulate
CO2 emissions. This group also includes BP, DuPont and Alcoa, as well
as our neighboring utilities Duke Energy and Florida Power & Light.

Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, has gone further with a personal
commitment that his businesses will become climate neutral. In a
recent speech, he stated his reason plainly. "I am no scientist. But I
do know how to assess a risk - and this one is clear. Climate change
poses clear, catastrophic threats. We may not agree on the extent, but
we certainly can't afford the risk of inaction."

Given this weight of scientific analysis and business leadership,
let's not allow the discussion in Georgia to be skewed by a well-oiled
effort that Sens. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and Jay Rockefeller (D-W.V.)
have called the "denial community." In a letter last year, the
senators called upon Exxon Mobil to stop funding this "small, but
influential, group of climate skeptics." The press release for today's
Atlanta hearing announces four participants. News reports place three
of them, Joel Schwartz, Patrick Michaels, and John Christy, among the
organized skeptics.

For example, Schwartz will represent the American Enterprise
Institute, which has been a principal beneficiary of the Exxon Mobil
funding and is vice chaired by the company's immediate past chairman.
A recent Newsweek article about the "denial machine" features Michaels
and states: "The coal industry's Western Fuels Association paid
Michaels to produce a newsletter called World Climate Report, which
has regularly trashed mainstream climate science." Michaels and
Schwartz joined together with other skeptics in filing an unsuccessful
brief in the U. S. Supreme Court opposing the regulation of CO2 as a
pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Christy is a contributor to "Global
Warming and Other Eco-Myths," a publication of the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, another principal beneficiary of Exxon Mobil's
funding.

The other participant announced in the press release is Robert
Dickinson, a Georgia Tech professor well-known for his work on climate
modeling, but he is not our only local talent before the committee.
For example, other scientists at Georgia Tech have advised Florida on
the risks in that state, particularly the possibility of more intense
hurricanes.

It will be important to the success of the public conversation for the
committee to be sure that the overwhelming weight of scientific
analysis - as typified by the IPCC reports - is fully and fairly
presented. The well-organized deniers certainly have a point of view
to add, but they should be recognized for whom they are and not
treated as if they represent the mainstream. It appears that this
first hearing is heavily overweighted in their favor.

Global warming: No urgent danger; no quick fix

By PATRICK J. MICHAELS

Published on: 08/21/07

It's summer, it's hot and global warming is on the cover of Newsweek.
Scare stories abound. We may only have 10 years to stop this! The
future survival of our species is at stake!

OK, the media aren't exactly nonpartisan, especially on global
warming. So what's the real story and what do we need to know?

(ENLARGE)
Patrick J. Michaels is a senior fellow in environmental studies at the
Cato Institute and is on leave as research professor of environmental
sciences at the University of Virginia. He is scheduled to testify at
today's hearing in Atlanta.

Fact: The average surface temperature of the Earth is about 0.8 C
warmer than it was in 1900, and human beings have something to do with
it. But does that portend an unmitigated disaster? Can we do anything
meaningful about it at this time? And if we can't, what should or can
we do in the future?

These are politically loaded questions that must be answered
truthfully, especially when considering legislation designed to reduce
emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas.

Unfortunately, they'll probably be ignored. Right now there are a slew
of bills before Congress, and many in various states, that mandate
massively reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Some actually propose
cutting our CO2 output to 80 percent or 90 percent below 1990 levels
by the year 2050.

Let's be charitable and simply call that legislative arrogance. U.S.
emissions are up about 18 percent from 1990 as they stand. Whenever
you hear about these large cuts, ask the truth: How is this
realistically going to happen?

I did that on an international television panel two weeks ago. My
opponent, who advocated these cuts, dropped his jaw and said nothing,
ultimately uttering a curse word for the entire world to hear. The
fact of the matter is he had no answer because there isn't one.

Nor would legislation in any state or Washington, D.C., have any
standing in Beijing. Although the final figures aren't in yet, it's
beginning to look like China has just passed the United States as the
world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide. Like the United States,
China has oodles of coal, and the Chinese are putting in at least one
new coal-fired power plant a month. (Some reports have it at an
astonishing one per week.) And just as it does in the United States,
when coal burns in China, it turns largely to carbon dioxide and
water.

What we do in the United States is having less and less of an effect
on the concentration of carbon dioxide in the world's atmosphere.

We certainly adapted to 0.8 C temperature change quite well in the
20th century, as life expectancy doubled and some crop yields
quintupled. And who knows what new and miraculously efficient power
sources will develop in the next hundred years.

The stories about the ocean rising 20 feet as massive amounts of ice
slide off of Greenland by 2100 are also fiction. For the entire half
century from 1915 through 1965, Greenland was significantly warmer
than it has been for the last decade. There was no disaster. More
important, there's a large body of evidence that for much of the
period from 3,000 to 9,000 years ago, at least the Eurasian Arctic was
2.5 C to 7 C warmer than now in the summer, when ice melts.
Greenland's ice didn't disappear then, either.

Then there is the topic of interest this time of year - hurricanes.
Will hurricanes become stronger or more frequent because of warming?
My own work suggests that late in the 21st century there might be an
increase in strong storms, but that it will be very hard to detect
because of year-to-year variability.

Right now, after accounting for increasing coastal population and
property values, there is no increase in damages caused by these
killers. The biggest of them all was the Great Miami Hurricane of
1926. If it occurred today, it would easily cause twice as much damage
as 2005's vaunted Hurricane Katrina.

So let's get real and give the politically incorrect answers to global
warming's inconvenient questions. Global warming is real, but it does
not portend immediate disaster, and there's currently no suite of
technologies that can do much about it. The obvious solution is to
forgo costs today on ineffective attempts to stop it, and to save our
money for investment in future technologies and inevitable adaptation.

Nation/World | Metro | Sports | Entertainment | Living | Travel |
Business | Obituaries | Opinion | Health | Site map
© 2007 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution | Customer care | Advertise
with us | Visitor agreement | Privacy statement | Permissions | Our
partners |