A winner's view on global warming

I haven't blogged about the ludicrous selection by the Nobel Peace Prize committee of Al Gore and the IPCC for this year's award because I've been so absolutely appalled by it and have found silence a helpful way of dealing with the ridiculousness of it all.

One of the award winners (as a member of the IPCC) had an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this week discussing his own disappointment with the alarmism that has built up around this issue.

I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never "proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

There are some of us who remain so humbled by the task of measuring and understanding the extraordinarily complex climate system that we are skeptical of our ability to know what it is doing and why. As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don't find the alarmist theory matching observations. (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data we analyze at the University of Alabama in Huntsville does show modest warming -- around 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit per century, if current warming trends of 0.25 degrees per decade continue.)

In the piece, he helpfully reminds us that the true heart of this debate is a debate over energy, and that so many of the called upon changes will do drastic bits of damage to our economic prosperity by significantly increasing the costs of energy production while doing precious little for climate.



Christy is an excellent scientists, but he also brings a real-world perspective to this discussion.

My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit "global warming."

Given the scientific uncertainty and our relative impotence regarding climate change, the moral imperative here seems clear to me.

Here here.