大象传媒

Do remember that Kyoto was signed by America during the Clinton presidency, and it was Clinton, not Bush, who refused to send it to Congress for ratification. Whilst in Britain a treaty may be entered into simply by signature of a duly authorised minister of the Crown, this does not apply in the US and congressional ratification is required. The President (or VP) can sign anything they want, but it is only valid if Congress approves.

The American view appears to be that properly understanding the changing climate and developing technology to cope with the effects of any change is a more useful long term solution than embarking on the hair-shirt approach of self-denial hitherto generally favoured by Europe. Interestingly enough, much of Europe is now coming to recognise that the hair-shirt approach simply doesn't work. Some, like Italy, have explicitly said they will not renew Kyoto obligations. Others are more muted, but the upshot is likely to be the same - Kyoto is dead and an alternative, more realistic method of dealing with the issues is needed.

Now it says 10 but only shows 8...

Tom, it seems pretty much undeniable that global warming is in fact happening. Only the blindest reactionary will deny it. However, there is in reality not very much evidence that this is exclusively or even largely down to human activity. There is a deal of evidence that it is being caused principally by factors outside our control, such as solar fluctuation - the strongest indication of this is that Mars is also warming, as one would expect if the sun is the principle cause. It is also undisputed that warming and cooling follow natural cycles that have nothing to do with man, and that in the past it has been variously very much hotter and very much colder than now.

The problems with the hair-shirt approach are these:

1. If warming is not caused to any significant extent by anthropogenic carbon emission, restricting these emissions will not affect the warming trend. It's therefore pointless.

2. Given 1, the only effect will be to increase human poverty and hardship. This is not a net benefit.

3. If we concentrate on emissions reduction, but that is pointless, we will be neglecting the development of technologies to mitigate the effects of warming, believing instead that we can arrest it through throttling the economy.

4. If all that happens, we will be stuck with warming we cannot stop, we won't have the technology to deal with it, and we'll have eroded much of the technical and economic base from which to generate such technology. This means we'll suffer a lot more than any other scenario.

I don't see anything wrong with making our use of energy more efficient and less polluting. However, I do not accept that the only answer to the problems we are likely to face is to reduce our energy use and miraculously all will be well. I simply don't think man is capable of having that much effect. I do think, though, that deluding ourselves that we do have such a great effect will only mean that we will ignore the true causes and will not develop useful means of coping with the effects. I see this as the bigger danger.

Finally, it doesn't achieve anything to blame America for all the world's ills, however fashionable such an approach may be.

Ed,

1. Not as much as you seem to think. There is near (though not total) unanimity that warming is happening, but division on just how far, if at all, it is the fault of man. Even so, science is not about appeal to a consensus - that's for democratic politics - it is rather about dispassionate analysis of evidence.

2. You're wrong. Water vapour from entirely natural sources is a far more significant warming factor, and cutting energy use would make no difference to this. Eliminating the entire human species at the flick of a switch would make no difference to it either. Cutting energy use *would* make a difference in CO2 output (depending on how it is done), but about 95% of net atmospheric CO2 comes from natural sources (i.e. nothing to do with man). The maximal effect of human energy use reduction on the warming trend is infinitesimally small, as even Kyoto supporters recognise - achieving the Kyoto targets would result in the best case in a temperature change so small as to be lower than the limits of experimental error, which is to say unmeasurable.

3. No, it's unnecessary. Suitable technological and engineering changes might be widespread use of desalination plants, conversion to clean nuclear power to provide the large quantities of extra energy needed, further genetic modification of crops, swamp drainage, land reclamation, and so on. No need to be melodramatic about it.

4. This is an issue only if it becomes significantly warmer, and only then if the effect is significant rises in sea level resulting in land loss and significant reductions in crop yields using current techniques.

Given this and looking at the subject logically and with the benefit of an engineering education, it is my conclusion that the call for energy use reduction is pointless and will not affect the situation one little bit. I believe it is also motivated by a separate political agenda based largely around anticapitalism and primitivism, which manifests itself pragmatically in anti-Americanism and dislike/distrust of technology. It is EXACTLY analogous to the global cooling hysteria of the 1970s, and doubtless comes from the same factors.

I'd be fully behind carbon reduction if I thought it would make a difference. I don't see any plausible mechanism by which it would make a measurable difference, and therefore I suggest that intentionally making our lives harder, more disease prone and poorer for no benefit is to be opposed.

The correlation between global temperature and the solar cycle is uncannily close. The correlation between changes in carbon emissions and changes in temperature is not at all close - in fact, during the first half of the period of rapid increase of carbon emission from the 1940s onwards, temperatures actually fell, prompting the global cooling hysteria mentioned above.

There is no doubt that man pumps CO2 into the atmosphere, and there is no doubt that some (slight) warming is taking place, and there is no doubt that recent warming happens to have taken place roughly in line with the period of human industrialisation. This leads to the post hoc ergo propter hoc mistake in assuming that these things are linked.

It could just be coincidence. In fact, given that the solar cycle matches warming so closely, it's very likely indeed that it is in fact no more than coincidence.

The IPCC's current position is hedged around with numerous caveats, qualifications and uncertainties. The carbon cycle is poorly understood, there are huge gaps in the science, nobody knows where fully half of man's carbon output goes but it hasn't shown up in the atmosphere, man only contributes 1% of the total CO2 produced, etc, etc. Those parts of their detailed reports don't get quoted too often by environmentalists, who seem to prefer quoting the shock & horror parts of the executive summaries. Read the whole thing, as they say.

In the mediaeval warm period, temperatures were markedly higher than today, sea levels were higher. People even farmed on Greenland, which is extremely difficult today. Indeed, the temperature difference between then and now is actually greater than the doom-laden scenarios given for our future. Man survived. In the later "mini ice age" temperatures and sea levels were markedly lower. Man survived. Today, man lives in areas with temperatures from -50 to +50 Celsius, from Siberia to the Sudan. Man is adaptable and will survive rising temperatures in the future just as he did in the past. This is simply not the big issue environmentalists say it is, because we *already* cope with situations far more extreme than their predictions and have done for centuries.

As for the unsustainable part, this is modern day Malthusian scare-mongering. It falls into the trap of assuming there is a fixed quantity of everything and that alternatives and improvements cannot be found or will not work. For example, land area dedicated to crop production is expected to *fall* as more efficient techniques are introduced. Fossil fuels are ending their useful period as scarcity drives up the price and makes alternatives such as nuclear rather more attractive. Many non-renewable resources are being superseded - a few years ago we were going to run out of copper, now there's a glut of the stuff as we use fibre-optics instead. Remember Ehrlich's bet on resource prices?

Instead of acknowledging reality, we are berated by the religion of environmentalism, and it is indeed a religion. It has its own ancient state of grace (simple life in "harmony" with nature), its fall from grace (eating of the tree of knowledge in the form of industrialising), its own apocalypse (warming, flooding, we're all doomed), and its own salvation mechanism ("sustainable" development and the abandonment of technological civilisation). Its god is called Gaia, and its priests are the Luddite primitivists and localists of the radical environmental movement. Like all religions, when the predicted apocalypse fails to turn up (overpopulation in the 1960s, global cooling in the 1970s, resource exhaustion in the 1980s, GM crops in the 1990s), a new apocalypse is threatened. Today's apocalypse is global warming. Even then, from what I read I sense a cooling off, if you'll forgive the pun, in the ardour of anti-warming plans. I think the environmentalists have been rumbled on this one, and I think its dying off. Soon, though, there will be another scare, and the same old faces will be assuring us that this time its for real. Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, on the next alarmist scare story...

Graham Bowkett might like to ponder the fact that the mechanism that will drive us away from large engined SUV type vehicles is not Gaia but good old fashioned market capitalism - as petrol gets more expensive, we'll start using cheaper alternatives.

Maria,

When CO2 is released into the atmosphere, it doesn't just stay there heating the planet up. Not that it actually heats it up all that much, though.

It is not the case that it simply disappears without doing anything. Much of the carbon cycle is poorly understood, but it is certainly the case that about half of the CO2 emitted by your son's school runs is consumed in some way that the sages of the IPCC don't know about. This is determined from the fact that the estimated total of anthropogenic carbon emission is NOT reflected in the measured increased atmospheric concentration of CO2, nor is it satisfactorily accounted for in other known methods of CO2 use.

CO2 is an essential part of the atmosphere. It is vital for plant growth, and even though it constitutes rather less than one twentieth of one percent of the atmosphere, we depend upon it being there to the extent we depend on natural plant growth. If there was no atmospheric CO2, we'd have to make it artificially and grow crops in a sealed environment with this extra gas in its atmosphere. Interestingly enough, this is done already in some cases where certain fruits and vegetables are grown in sealed greenhouses with an enriched CO2 content (up to about 7%, way over the toxic limit for man) in order to boost vegetative growth.

It's entirely possible that rather more CO2 than the IPCC thinks is being taken up in vegetative growth. This is the CO2 fertilisation effect, well known and, as shown above, used commercially. Not all plant species benefit from this, but it is to be expected that rising atmospheric CO2 would favour plants which can, although many food crops don't - this perhaps is where IPCC may be missing something, they may not be considering plant growth that doesn't directly interest humanity.

You may also be interested to know that the blanket effect of CO2 is not linear nor is it of infinite capacity. CO2 does absorb heat radiation, preventing loss to the cosmos. It also prevents some radiation from the sun reaching the ground here, by the same mechanism. However, the rate at which this absorption increases is logarithmic, which is to say each additional amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has significantly less effect than the previous same amount - doubling CO2 does not anything like double the greenhouse effect. Also, once the absorption process reaches saturation - i.e. when the atmospheric CO2 cannot absorb any more heat - the heat radiation simply passes through and is lost to the cosmos. This effectively means that there is an upper limit to the "greenhouse" effect of added CO2, and interestingly the CO2 level needed to reach radical temperature increase is way above the toxic limit for man (and many other species). We'd gas ourselves to death long before we overheat ourselves. But the plants would love it.

This inconvenient truth doesn't exactly help the environmentalist case, so you don't hear them talk about it very much. I wonder why?

Read the rest of it, Ed. You'll soon see all the caveats and doubts.

I don't think anyone serious any longer disputes the fact that some slight degree of warming is taking place. That is non-controversial, outside certain groups with a different agenda.

The controversy concerns whether or not the cause, or a major cause, is man. Given that warming closely tracks phenomena man cannot control and does not influence (solar, sea circulations, etc), given that it has been warmer in the past with lower CO2 levels and indeed colder with higher CO2 levels, given that CO2 levels above minimal don't actually have all that much effect on temperature, given that we don't even understand the carbon cycle terribly well, given that the link between man-made emissions and temperature change in the 20th century is hardly strightforward, there is more than adequate reason for being extremely sceptical of the notion that it's all our fault. Much of the "evidence" showing human culpability is circumstantial at best and of the form post hoc, ergo propter hoc. It's highly likely that the link between industrialisation and warming is one of coincidence rather than causation.

It is to my mind suspicious that the people and organisations pushing the global warming agenda on the basis of flimsy science and poor understanding of global systems and cycles are the same people and organisations who earlier warned of mass starvation due to overpopulation (hasn't happened), a coming ice age (hasn't happened), the exhaustion of critical resources (hasn't happened) and the dire consequences of GM crops (hasn't happened), all on the same basis of flimsy and later disproved science and poor understanding. Given the same people, the same Luddite primitivist agenda, the same dodgy science, I confidently predict that the same result will come about - it will be discredited and then ignored as alarmist hysteria (I think this is already starting to happen), and behold the same people will come up with something else.

Possibly a lack of carbon dioxide due to capitalistic exploitation of alternative energy sources threatening plant diversity and thus dooming us all to starvation. You read it here first.

Yes, Ed, the future will tell. Pound to a pinch of snuff it will show (a) industrialisation and the current warming are linked only by coincident timing and (b) anthropogenic global warming is just another dismal episode in the litany of self-loathing Luddism which calls itself the environmentalist movement. It's just the same as all the other millenarian scare stories of recent decades.

There will always be floods, earthquakes, plagues and so on, just as there always have been. We can minimise some things, we can develop techniques to mitigate others. This is basically the story of human progress over the past 10,000 years.

Incidentally, you might care to note that the death toll in horribly advanced technological civilisations in the west - the ones that are going to kill us all - from natural disasters is orders of magnitude less than in the much less developed third world when the same thing happens. Why do you think this should be? Why do you think that a lower technology localist and primitivist civilisation would do better?

I *will* enjoy the future, because I am not afraid of change and don't imagine for a moment we can preserve the world in aspic just the way it is, or just any other way we might like it to be. Change is what drives human progress.

Yes, the present situation will also change. Everything changes, including climates. In fact, especially climates - the only constant factor in climate is the presence of change.

Generally speaking, mechanisation/automation will indeed increase as human labour is removed from more and more jobs. This is to be expected. Also to be expected is that growth and trade will continue. Trade is not trade for its own sake, but rather for the sake of you giving me something I want in return for me giving you something you want, perhaps via a series of intermediate steps. This is normal, because nobody can provide for themselves everything they want, at least not once you get past the hunter/gatherer stage of human development.

I'd point out that the Wendell Berry idea of an "economy based on waste" being violent and leading inevitably to war is hopelessly wrong.

We do indeed need a peaceable economy, but it is trade that promotes this peace. Although many anticapitalists and socialists don't seem to realise it too well, capitalist trade does not want, need or even like war, since war disrupts trade and hence depresses profit.

That apart, the economy is not based on waste, it is based on choice and the ability to exercise that choice within practical limits. You might see it as waste if you have a choice of say thirty different models of cooker, but the alternative is a one-size-fits-all cooker that attempts to be all things to all cooks and ends up being nothing to anyone. Consider the environmental degradation caused by economies that actually do operate on your basis, such as China up until recently and the USSR. That's where planning and absence of choice gets you.

What ended the Great Depression? Hmm, clearly you aren't an economist, but simplifying a little here goes:

Suppose you feel uncertain about the economy and start putting money aside as savings rather than spending it. That's fine, but suppose lots of people feel the same way at the same time. The same effect can be had by investors liquidating their stock holdings and not spending the money. When enough people do this, the effect on the economy of reduced expenditure and/or stock overpricing becomes measurable and business suffers because it isn't selling and doesn't have investment capital. Some businesses close as a result, laying off staff which further depresses economic activity. This is a natural correction in the normal economic cycle, but when it becomes significant enough to cause negative economic growth it is called recession. A very severe recession is termed a depression. A stock market crash triggered by substantial liquidation of investments often precedes depression. It can be defeated most readily by state expenditure or by inflating the money supply to provide investment capital and spending money. However, in an economy based on a commodity currency system (e.g. the gold standard, as was common in the 1920s) it is difficult or even impossible for the state to inflate the money supply, and so the recession lengthens and deepens, becoming a prolonged depression. This is what happened in the 1920s, and it is why the depression took so long to clear in the USA, although it should be noted it cleared faster in other economies, including Britain.

Depression will clear itself naturally without intervention as the corrections in the economic cycle are made. However, this can be painful and can take a long time, which is why most economies now use what is termed fiat currency, which is not gold based and which can be easily inflated or constricted as required, thus evening out the fluctuations in the economic cycle. The advantage is that we avoid unnecessary personal hardship, unemployment, etc. The current thought behind this is called "neo-Keynesianism" and you may wish to research this.

What actually ended the Great Depression was a combination of state intervention in the economy (somewhat clumsily handled in the US due to inexperience) and the completion of the natural corrective mechanism. War and military spending have nothing to do with it, as any glance at the facts of economic history for the period clearly shows.

Note also that the US markets crashed in 1987, wiping far more money off the value of the market than in the 1920s, BUT because by then the economy was on neo-Keynesian lines with a fiat currency, the incident passed with barely a tremor. Had we still used the gold standard, it would have been far worse than the 1920s.

Might it have had anything to do with orders for cruise missiles and fighter planes? In a word - no.

With respect, I do suggest you read up on some economic facts rather than long-discredited anticapitalist theories about capitalism inevitably leading to war. It doesn't.

Ed, in your list of waste you could perhaps define "hazardous" and you could break down the forms of waste to show what they actually are. Given the environmentalist tendency to hyperbolic exaggeration, you might wish to list what you consider to be "toxic" waste. You also don't appear to say anything about how much of these various types of waste are subsequently used in other processes, neutralised safely and cleanly, or are identical to naturally occurring substances.

The depression started with the stock market crash of 1929, which resulted from a progressive loss of investor confidence in the preceding period, culminating in a sudden liquidation of investment in not only overpriced and speculative ventures but also in solid and established business. The 1920s are the key to it.

To say business seeks war inevitably because it is more profitable than peace is at best far too simplistic - simplistic enough to be described as plain wrong, in fact.

It is true that one can make a larger profit from making lots of tanks than from making not very many tanks, so in that sense increased military expenditure is more profitable for the businesses making military hardware. However, and this is where people like Berry get it wrong, it is simplistic to say that business wants to make more tanks purely because it is more profitable than making no tanks at all. That's trivially true, but misses the point - the resources not used for making tanks are instead directed at making cars, washing machines, bicycles, and so forth. The choice is not between more tanks or no tanks, it is rather between tanks and something else that is not a tank.

Furthermore, because one can sell "not tanks" to a wider range of people than just the army, because "not tanks" can be just about anything non-military, because "not tanks" can be more readily exported and sold to foreign markets, and because "tanks" although expensive are generally made in small quantities and sold to a single supplier in an artificial market, the rewards of making "not tanks" and marketing them widely are far, far greater than the rewards of making tanks.

And furthermore again, warfare disrupts those profitable markets for "not tanks" with the result that although the maker of tanks is doing jolly nicely, everyone else who is making "not tanks" is suffering. And there are more makers of "not tanks" employing more people and making bigger profits than those making tanks.

All this "business wants war to make profits" stuff is long since discredited simplistic rubbish. It belongs in the same intellectual scrapheap as the ideas of the inherent contradictions of capitalism dooming it to extinction and Malthus' idea of rising population resulting in mass starvation. It's just plain wrong, however much Mr Wendell Berry may think otherwise.

As for the waste outputs, I cannot find the data you cite on the EPA website, but I'll take your word for it. I'd like to know how much of this stuff is formally or informally recycled, though, and how much may be hazardous but is simply a natural product.

Finally, on the stock market crash of 1929, the point is that although the crash itself was sudden the loss of confidence built up over a few years and the underlying causes go back to the horrendous costs of WW1 and its aftermath of economic dislocation.

Ed,

America is the world's greatest military and strategic power. Inevitably the means for this are very expensive, but you do have to see it in the context of disproportionately low defence expenditure in virtually all other western nations (America carries a lot of their defence burden) and also in relation to the 12 trillion dollar American GDP. Military expenditure in America runs at about 9% of GDP, markedly higher than most European countries, Canada, etc.

In both Britain and America the concept of social security as a trust fund is little more than an accounting fiction. Social security in the American sense means pensions only, as you doubtless know. In both Britain and America, current taxpayers fund current pensioners - it is not really a trust fund at all, merely redistribution. Thus, the War Resisters rejigging of the pie chart to remove that aspect makes their headline chart fundamentally inaccurate and misleading. But better suited to their message, of course.

As for Eisenhower, I'm sure you're aware that his comments on the scale of the military-industrial complex were not a boast but rather a warning - the matter was something of an anxiety for him. Again, though, see this in context - had America in the 1940s and 50s not spent such vast sums and allocated so many people to this purpose, we'd quite possibly be having this discussion in Russian with the NKVD monitoring the exchange. Perhaps you think that would have been a better, more peaceable outcome? And the legacy of the expenditure then is the existence of the USA as the global power now.

And by the way, the USSR spent up to 30% of GDP on the military - you think this should not have been countered by anything? Do you think if we had just been nice to them they'd have gone away, withdrawn from Eastern Europe?

Ed, your comment on government contracts and subsidies is perfectly correct, but this applies pretty much to all government sectors and not just the military.

Consider the profit opportunities for government computer projects - 450 million pounds for the Child Support System to calculate 15% of take-home pay and it still doesn't work. Who needs war when you have computer contracts?

The notion that we would still be in the great depression but for WW2 is absolutely risible. Economic recovery was already underway in Europe even before re-armament started. In America it took a little bit longer, but it was still happening.

So, John, how do you propose reducing the population?