Is It Getting Hot In Here?

“The world is getting warmer,” the high priests of science intone. No legitimate dissent is possible, we are told, since the science is effectively conclusive. I am not a climatologist, and so I will take these scientists at their word that the warming is real, and that human action — in particular, industrial emission of carbon dioxide — has made the world somewhat warmer than it otherwise would be. Therefore, so the environmentalists tell us, the United States needs to implement the Kyoto treaty and cut our national CO2 emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels. But the same science that demonstrates the reality of global warming demonstrates the futility of the Kyoto treaty, and of the whole emissions-cuts approach.

The Kyoto treaty caps CO2 emissions from the developed world slightly below their 1990 levels. The nations of the “developing world,” including China (the number two emitter of CO2) are under no obligations even though their CO2 emissions are rising rapidly. Sun Podcast: A podcast is available for this column. Click here [1] to listen to or to download it. China and India have both made clear that they do not intend to impose emissions caps to control CO2 output at any time in the foreseeable future. Indeed, China is building a large number of new coal power plants to keep up with rapidly rising power demand. By the most conservative estimates, the new emissions from these plants will offset all of the emissions cuts imposed by Kyoto. That’s China alone. Add in the rest of the “developing world,” and it’s pretty clear that even if Kyoto were implemented perfectly, world CO2 emissions would still rise for some time to come.

The Kyoto target is “5 percent below 1990 emissions levels”; recall that even in the late 1980s, quite a number of environmentalists were hysterical about global warming. More fundamentally, atmospheric CO2 levels will keep rising even if emissions start to fall. Emissions cuts that are deep enough to really tackle the problem would dwarf the Kyoto regime in cost and difficulty. Kyoto is a very small step towards “solving” the problem. Indeed, according to the most frequently cited study on the topic, published in Geophysical Review Letters by Wigley in 1998, the Kyoto treaty would reduce warming by around 7 percent, with most of the benefit taking decades to become apparent. As Greenpeace and most other major environmental groups freely admit, Kyoto is a purely symbolic first step.

It is, however, a very costly symbol. The vast bulk of CO2 emissions are from energy and transportation. Reducing CO2 emissions will put significant strain on the economy, and is projected to have an astronomical cost. One estimate by Nordhaus and Boyer of the Yale economics department, published in The Energy Journal a few years ago, puts the cost to the U.S. at half a trillion dollars. That’s a lot of money diverted from other worthy causes — such as poverty and disease — for a benefit that will not even be detectable for decades. Kyoto represents a level of emissions cuts that was too high to be politically feasible in the U.S., and too high for China and India to even consider. Kyoto promises too little and asks too much.

If the emissions-cut route were the only imaginable path forward, environmentalists might be justified in straining every muscle to convince the U.S. to start down it, no matter what the cost. In fact, however, there is another way.

Our understanding of climatic science is improving rapidly, and as models become more sophisticated, it is becoming increasingly apparent that a number of variables strongly affect climate. The earth is a very complicated system, and we have, or will have, more tools at hand to influence it than trying to limit civilization’s CO2 output. Atmospheric dust, surface land use and methane and other gas emissions all have substantial influence on world climate. Whereas CO2 is an inevitable byproduct of combustion, these other emissions are essentially waste products from inefficient processes. Consequently, they are likely easier to reduce than CO2 emissions.

As long as we’re turning civilization upside down to prevent future global warming, we should examine alternatives to emissions cuts. There has been promising research into a number of options. The most obvious is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester it in some stable form. This might be done by promoting plant growth, perhaps through large-scale fertilization of barren ocean regions. Another and still bolder approach would be to reduce the solar radiation falling on earth with stratospheric aerosols or orbital mirrors and diffraction gratings. These approaches are as of yet unproven; however, the savings from not embarking on a futile emissions control regime ought to more than cover the necessary research and development costs. The environmental movement is gravely remiss in failing to forcefully advocate this sort of research, which offers a good chance of preventing the many damaging consequences of global warming.

Carbon sequestration and reduction of solar radiation would require ambitious engineering and large expense. Of course, reducing CO2 emissions globally would require vast re-engineering of transportation, energy production, and the whole global economy. This would also be fabulously expensive. As long as we’re doing mega-scale engineering, we might as well pick the approach that has the best chance of working.

Environmentalists cannot have it both ways. If they demand that the world unhesitatingly follow the current best predictions of climatic science, then they cannot in good conscience demand that the world implement a treaty that has been scientifically shown to be utterly inadequate for preventing global warming yet so expensive as to strangle the search for better approaches. The environmental movement is right to push for alternatives to oil, but it should also push for alternatives to Kyoto.

Ari Rabkin is a graduate student in Computer Science. He can be contacted at asr32@cornell.edu [2]. Between the Lines appears Thursdays.