Ordinary Gweilo

Al Gore is in Hong Kong to promote his film An Inconvenient Truth, and to mark this occasion, the SCMP published a sceptical piece on global warming [all SCMP links require a subscription] by Bjorn Lomborg.

I have Lomberg’s original book The Skeptical Environmentalist and I think he puts forward some interesting ideas.  I have also read countless magazine articles on the subject (The Economist has a survey entitled The heat is on this week, and there is extensive coverage in New Scientist).

However, we don’t really know whether global warming is going to continue, what (if anything) we can do about it, or what impact it will have. 

It doesn’t help that there are shrill voices on both sides, arguing either that we need to take drastic action or that we should do nothing.  In the latter camp, you won’t be surprised to hear, is our old friend Simon Patkin, and he’s back in the SCMP letter column: 

As Al Gore comes to Hong Kong to rewrite reality and morality with his movie An Inconvenient Truth, one of his mantras will be that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus that global warming is man-made. Of course, Mr Gore has also declared that he is responsible for the internet, and questioned whether ancient trees should be cut down to produce a life-saving drug for women with ovarian cancer.

Mr Gore ignores the more than 17,000 scientists who signed a petition declaring that global warming is not caused by man and that the Kyoto Protocol would cause severe economic hardship. These include Robert Carter of Australia’s James Cook University, who has said: “[Mr] Gore’s circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention.”

This would be the Robert Carter who works in the oil industry?  

Dr Robert Carter really is a well known oil industry stooge: :::[Global warming denial funded by ExxonMobil]. He is a geologist, paid to find oil and coal, so how can you believe his impartiality?

In today’s SCMP, Richard Fielding responds to Simon Patkin’s claim that 17,000 scientists had signed the petition:

Letter writer Simon Patkin accuses former US vice-president Al Gore of ignoring a 1990s petition denying global warming is man-made (“An inconvenient truth – however you look at it”, September 12). The signatories – 17,000 right-wing politicians, businessmen, entertainment stars and a few academics – were hardly scientists, as he claims. The petition is part of a sustained campaign sponsored by the energy industries to deny global warming.

Big tobacco companies generously funded obscure researchers to question links between cigarettes and disease, and along with economic shroud-waving, delayed tobacco control for decades. The energy industries follow suit, use the same public-relations agencies to mobilise tens of thousands of “citizens” to oppose any threat to their interests, buy political influence and even air TV adverts that wrongly claim carbon dioxide levels are actually falling (read Sharon Beder’s Global Spin).

I think that it’s entirely possible that at some time in the future people will look back at the arguments about global warming and wonder why it was such a controversial subject.  The question is whether they will wondering why we were worrying about it, or why we failed to do anything about it before it was too late.  Surely common sense dictates that we should take the problem seriously and do something about it, but it doesn’t have to be the scary things that some people seem to fear.  From The Economist’s survey (Where to start  – susbcription required): 

But there is no silver bullet. If an answer is to be found, it lies in using a combination of economics and a broad range of technologies.

Robert Socolow, an economist at Princeton University, offers an encouraging way of thinking about this. His “stabilisation wedges”  show how different ways of cutting emissions can be used incrementally to lower the trajectory from a steep and frightening path towards a horizontal one that stabilises emissions at their current level.

One wedge might be carbon sequestration (storing carbon dioxide underground or below the oceans) to deal with emissions from coal-fired power plants. Sequestering CO₂ emissions might raise the price of coal-generated power by 50%, but coal is such a cheap source of power that it might still be attractive. And it may have huge potential: a paper just published by Harvard’s Daniel Schrag and colleagues argues that thousands of years-worth of American emissions could be stored under American coastal waters.

Another might be renewable energy sources. They supply around 14% of world energy now and the figure is unlikely to increase sharply in the near future. But their share can rise enough to bring the trajectory down a little.

Now, that wasn’t painful, was it?  I think I’d have to agree with The Economist:

…although the science remains uncertain, the chances of serious consequences are high enough to make it worth spending the (not exorbitant) sums needed to try to mitigate climate change.