According to the program, our purpose is to think long-term about dealing with climate change, which I’ll do in a moment.

Visiting Fellow Kenneth P. Green

First though, I want to clarify how I view the problem.

Do I believe in global warming? Sure--I’ve read the reports of the UN climate panel and the major journal articles, and I think it’s safe to say that the atmosphere and surface of the earth (at least the Northern Hemisphere) have warmed up since 1850, by about 1 degree F.

I also think that the National Academy of Sciences was right, when they recently clarified that historically, reporting that the last few decades have been the hottest in the last 400 years, though nobody knows what that really means in any kind of historical context.

And, I think the theory linking human activities to climate change is plausible, and that humans may have contributed to some of the surface warming seen since about 1970.
 
I'm less convinced that we know enough to quantify how much humans have contributed to the warming, via which activities, or how much change we could avert by modifying those activities.

And, you can blame some really good science and economics professors, but I learned not to trust forecast models, either in climate, stocks, energy prices, or whatever.

Lest that seem overly skeptical, let me read the opening paragraph for a brand new book by the National Academy of Science, titled: Completing the Forecast: Characterizing and Communicating Uncertainty for Better Decisions Using Weather and Climate Forecasts:

All prediction is inherently uncertain and effective communication of uncertainty information in weather, seasonal climate, and hydrological forecasts benefits users’ decisions. The chaotic character of the atmosphere, coupled with inevitable inadequacies in observations and computer models, results in forecasts that always contain uncertainties. These uncertainties generally increase with forecast lead time, and vary with weather situation and location. Uncertainty is thus a fundamental characteristic of weather, seasonal climate, and hydrological prediction and no forecast is complete without a description of its uncertainty.

So, about as far as I'm willing to go in predicting the future is to trust in Newton’s observation that objects in motion tend to remain in motion, and so, I'd guess we can expect similar changes for the next decade as we saw for this last one, which would be about 3 tenths of a degree Fahrenheit. Now, if that were to hold all the way through 2100, we’d see another 3 degrees Fahrenheit added to the global average--probably not a global catastrophe, but regionally, probably enough to cause serious problems.

So, what does it mean to “deal with” climate change? Well, I'd argue that there are basically two options, and we’ve been wasting a huge amount of time, money, and energy on an approach that was doomed from infancy, that being mitigation, or the rollback of greenhouse gases to pre-industrial levels.

Why was mitigation dead on arrival?

First, the microeconomic seeds of failure have always been clear: people want more and better stuff, more energy, more cars, more housing, more medical care, and they want it now. They don't value doing without to save speculative great-grandkids from speculative climate change.

The macroeconomic seeds of failure were also clear. Energy use and economic growth are at the very least co-dependent, if not a matter of straight dependency. It was a foregone conclusion that governments that rationed energy or raised energy costs would make their national economies less economically competitive against countries that didn't, and would be forced to back away from the controls by companies fleeing to less-regulated places, and people voting their pocketbooks.

The political seeds of failure were also clear: with the incentive to free-ride so huge, to actually implement world-wide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would require a global body with binding authority to set and enforce limits on the energy use of all countries. Most countries (particularly the successful ones) won't submit that kind of authority to distant, unelected bodies of European bureaucrats.

And finally, the scientific pitfalls of mitigation have been clear all along. There are a dozen things humans do that can alter the climate, and we know very little about most of them, and even less about what we'd accomplish by changing any of them. We could easily make things worse--and in fact, we probably did, when we eliminated sulfur aerosols from the atmosphere that were cancelling out some of the warming of the 1960s and ‘70s. Nobody was going to invest serious money voluntarily based on so little assurance of success.

None of these dynamics (save perhaps the state of scientific understanding) are going to change, and I’m against waste, so, I’d argue that it’s time to look past mitigation, and explore what adaptation to climate change means.

In the big picture, adapting to climate change would mean figuring out how to make our cities more drought-resistant, flood resistant, and temperature tolerant, and how to help our ecosystems to be resilient.

First, we could stop doing things that make the risks worse. For example, we should eliminate the subsidized flood insurance that leads people to live in flood plains and on eroding coastlines. We should end the subsidized hurricane insurance that leads people to live in areas prone to hurricanes, where even small increases in force could cause major harms. We might eliminate the water and farm subsidies that lead people to live and farm in areas where even small increases in drought cause hardship. And we should eliminate fire insurance subsidies that lead people to live in areas that tend to burst into flames during warm periods.

And then we could get aggressive about things. We could put our critical infrastructure on a market basis, rather than having it run by inefficient governments. Look at California and New York, facing blackouts now years after the deficiency in energy infrastructure were laid bare by a series of energy crises from California to the eastern seaboard.
 
At the very least, we should streamline the thousands upon thousands of regulations that slow the ability of the energy, manufacturing, and transportation sectors to respond quickly to changing climate circumstances.

Now, what about ecosystems? The best thing we can do to protect ecosystems is to make sure they’re healthy and resilient, and there’s only one way to do that, which is to build wealth around the world. Only wealthy countries can afford to leave biological resources untapped, reduce the strain on local ecosystems and help build up their resilience. We need to figure out how to spread the wealth-building institutions of liberal democracy around the world.

Finally, in case we do conclude that we want to roll back atmospheric carbon levels, we should look into things like carbon sequestration, or geo-engineering, that might let us influence the climate without plunging ourselves back into an economic stone age.

Now, to the moderator’s questions:
 
What are the major international efforts to stopping global warming?

I'd say they’re about 90% talk, and about 10% actions that barely nibble at the edges of greenhouse gas emission growth. Even at that, the costs of nibbling are revealing themselves to be as high as critics said they’d be, and more of the talk is turning to back-peddling, rather than pouring on more money.

What are the prospects for a bipartisan approach to U.S. involvement in the major international initiatives?

I'd guess that’s slim to none. The Republicans may well move to the center, and embrace some kind of domestic greenhouse gas control scheme (which would be a bad idea for the same reasons discussed earlier), but I’d say there’s little or no chance they’ll ever join in the United Nations process. It’s possible that more countries will join the Asia-Pacific Climate Coalition that the Bush Administration has created as an alternative to the UN process as they realize how impossible the UN approach is, but I haven’t detected momentum yet one way or the other.

Kenneth P. Green is a visiting fellow at AEI.