Limit Carbon Dioxide Emissions, Harm The Economy, Harm The Environment

Who would ever have thought wealthier countries have cleaner air and water than do poor underdeveloped nations? This is heresy to radical environmentalists, but a lot of people don't seem to realize that a robust economy is good for our health and well-being. Limiting and taxing carbon dioxide, (which the Obama Administration seems hell-bent on doing) will damage our economy and thus be bad for our health and well-being. This is exactly the opposite of what the supposed goals of the EPA are when they declare carbon dioxide (CO2) a pollutant.

The following article comes from The New York Times and shows that they, or at least the writer Mr. Tierney, realize this global warming alarmism we're hearing may have a very serious negative downside.
Peter

April 21, 2009
Findings
Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet
By JOHN TIERNEY
When the first Earth Day took place in 1970, American environmentalists had good reason to feel guilty. The nation’s affluence and advanced technology seemed so obviously bad for the planet that they were featured in a famous equation developed by the ecologist Paul Ehrlich and the physicist John P. Holdren, who is now President Obama’s science adviser.

Their equation was I=PAT, which means that environmental impact is equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied by technology. Protecting the planet seemed to require fewer people, less wealth and simpler technology — the same sort of social transformation and energy revolution that will be advocated at many Earth Day rallies on Wednesday.

But among researchers who analyze environmental data, a lot has changed since the 1970s. With the benefit of their hindsight and improved equations, I’ll make a couple of predictions:
1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because...

2. The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run.

I realize this second prediction seems hard to believe when you consider the carbon being dumped into the atmosphere today by Americans, and the projections for increasing emissions from India and China as they get richer.

Those projections make it easy to assume that affluence and technology inflict more harm on the environment. But while pollution can increase when a country starts industrializing, as people get wealthier they can afford cleaner water and air. They start using sources of energy that are less carbon-intensive — and not just because they’re worried about global warming. The process of “decarbonization” started long before Al Gore was born.

The old wealth-is-bad IPAT theory may have made intuitive sense, but it didn’t jibe with the data that has been analyzed since that first Earth Day. By the 1990s, researchers realized that graphs of environmental impact didn’t produce a simple upward-sloping line as countries got richer. The line more often rose, flattened out and then reversed so that it sloped downward, forming the shape of a dome or an inverted U — what’s called a Kuznets curve. (See nytimes.com/tierneylab for an example.)

In dozens of studies, researchers identified Kuznets curves for a variety of environmental problems. There are exceptions to the trend, especially in countries with inept governments and poor systems of property rights, but in general, richer is eventually greener. As incomes go up, people often focus first on cleaning up their drinking water, and then later on air pollutants like sulfur dioxide.

As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy. This global decarbonization trend has been proceeding at a remarkably steady rate since 1850, according to Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

“Once you have lots of high-rises filled with computers operating all the time, the energy delivered has to be very clean and compact,” said Mr. Ausubel, the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller. “The long-term trend is toward natural gas and nuclear power, or conceivably solar power. If the energy system is left to its own devices, most of the carbon will be out of it by 2060 or 2070.”

But what about all the carbon dioxide being spewed out today by Americans commuting to McMansions? Well, it’s true that American suburbanites do emit more greenhouse gases than most other people in the world (although New Yorkers aren’t much different from other affluent urbanites).

But the United States and other Western countries seem to be near the top of a Kuznets curve for carbon emissions and ready to start the happy downward slope. The amount of carbon emitted by the average American has remained fairly flat for the past couple of decades, and per capita carbon emissions have started declining in some countries, like France. Some researchers estimate that the turning point might come when a country’s per capita income reaches $30,000, but it can vary widely, depending on what fuels are available. Meanwhile, more carbon is being taken out of the atmosphere by the expanding forests in America and other affluent countries. Deforestation follows a Kuznets curve, too. In poor countries, forests are cleared to provide fuel and farmland, but as people gain wealth and better agricultural technology, the farm fields start reverting to forestland.

Of course, even if rich countries’ greenhouse impact declines, there will still be an increase in carbon emissions from China, India and other countries ascending the Kuznets curve. While that prospect has environmentalists lobbying for global restrictions on greenhouse gases, some economists fear that a global treaty could ultimately hurt the atmosphere by slowing economic growth, thereby lengthening the time it takes for poor countries to reach the turning point on the curve.

But then, is there much reason to think that countries at different stages of the Kuznets curve could even agree to enforce tough restrictions? The Kyoto treaty didn’t transform Europe’s industries or consumers. While some American environmentalists hope that the combination of the economic crisis and a new president can start an era of energy austerity and green power, Mr. Ausubel says they’re hoping against history.

Over the past century, he says, nothing has drastically altered the long-term trends in the way Americans produce or use energy — not the Great Depression, not the world wars, not the energy crisis of the 1970s or the grand programs to produce alternative energy.
“Energy systems evolve with a particular logic, gradually, and they don’t suddenly morph into something different,” Mr. Ausubel says. That doesn’t make for a rousing speech on Earth Day. But in the long run, a Kuznets curve is more reliable than a revolution.

Global Climate Modeling: What Temperatures To Use, What Variables Are There?

John Tierney, a columnist for the New York Times is beginning to ask some probing questions about global warming and the science behind the global climate models used for predictions. He is expressing a good deal of doubt. Of course skeptics (like me) have more than just a little doubt, as even a brief review of material on my blog will show. I think it is a positive sign that the large, liberal, mainstream media like the New York Times is beginning to question the Al Gore and United Nations views on climate. It is about time.
Peter

source:

January 10, 2008, 8:58 am
A Spot Check of Global Warming
By John Tierney


How do predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change jibe with reality? The solid brown line shows the warming projected by the IPCC, with a range of uncertainty bounded by the dotted brown lines. The other lines show the actual temperatures recorded during the past seven years by different methods on the ground and by satellite. (The lines show the amount of warming, in degrees Celsius, relative to the average temperature during the last two decades of the 20th century.) (Source: Roger A. Pielke, Jr.)



Last week I asked if there were any good weather omens to look for. I raised a question originally posed by Roger A. Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado: Are there any indicators in the next 1, 5 or 10 years that would be inconsistent with the consensus view on climate change?

Lab readers contributed some ideas (and much invective), but I think the most useful one came from a climate scientist who wrote directly to Dr. Pielke and suggested comparing what has happened since 2000 with the predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Dr. Pielke took up the suggestion and looked at the increase in global average temperature projected by the IPCC from 2000 to 2007. (The IPCC projected various scenarios, depending on the rate of greenhouse emissions; Dr. Pielke chose the scenario that most closely matches the actual emissions since 2000.)

The hard part was figuring out what has actually happened the past seven years, because it all depends on who’s doing the measuring, and whether it’s being done on the surface or by satellite. As you can see from the blue line in the graph above, the recent surface measurements by NASA (the blue line) are warmer than those by the United Kingdom Met Office (the green line), and there are different satellite measurements from Remote Sensing Systems and the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Dr. Pielke calls it “a feast for cherrypickers.” In the Prometheus blog, where you can read the details of his computations, he writes: “One can arrive at whatever conclusion one wants with respect to the IPCC predictions. Want the temperature record to be consistent with IPCC? OK, then you like NASA. How about inconsistent? Well, then you are a fan of RSS. On the fence? Well, UAH and UKMET serve that purpose pretty well.”

No matter which line you prefer on the graph, you can’t draw any firm conclusions about the IPCC’s projections — a few years does not a trend make, and the global temperature is just one of the indicators to look at. But the different lines on the graph are certainly evidence of how complicated the climate debate is. If scientists can’t even agree on what has happened in the past, imagine how much more difficult it is to figure out the future. I’m not suggesting that the global warming isn’t real, or that the uncertainties justify inaction — we take out insurance all the time against risks that are uncertain. I’d like to see a carbon tax. But I’d also like to see fewer dogmatists claiming that the scientific debate is over.

Dr. Pielke suggests that more scientists do reality checks on other predictions by the IPCC, and that the IPCC make it easier for its predictions to be tested by specifying in detail what the variables are, who is measuring them, and what to look for in the future. “If weather forecasters, stock brokers, and gamblers can do it, then you can too,” he urges the IPCC in his blog post. Dr. Pielke told me that scientists have been focusing on the predictions for the summer ice melt in the Arctic — which called for less dramatic change than what has actually occurred — but not paying enough attention to other indicators.

“Rather than select among predictions, why not verify them all?” he said. “Seven years is not a lot to allow much to be said, but certainly 10 and 15 years will be. Once predictions are made, they should not be forgotten, but evaluated against experience. This is not skepticism at work, just the good old scientific method.”

If you’ve got any thoughts on how to interpret the results on Dr. Pielke’s graph — or how to look for other indicators — let me know. I’d be glad to hear suggestions from scientists at the popular Real Climate blog on a short list of variables (beyond temperature and sea ice) that might be used to compare with specific IPCC predictions and point interested readers to where data on them can be found.