One sidelight of the Climate Change Conference was the byplay between Copenhagen city authorities and the local sex-workers’ union (SIO). The Mayor’s office ran a postcard campaign exhorting delegates to “Be Sustainable: Don’t buy Sex".
Annoyed at this attempt to exclude them from the largesse spread by tourists, the SIO responded by offering a free sample of their wares to delegates who turned in postcards. Being eco-aware Scandinavians, the SIO also issued a press release pointing out sex didn’t contribute to global warming.
That is one of very few factoids unlikely to be disputed at Copenhagen. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) — global warming caused by human action — is the religion of the post-religious. Much hot air is generated debating it.
The Earth is getting hotter. Greenhouse effects are caused by rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere, since CO2 traps heat. The debates are about the possible consequences of and the reasons for higher CO2 levels.
According to believers, it is the burning of fossil fuels (FF) that is responsible. FF emissions include CO2. Even among believers, there is wide diversity of opinion about consequences. Some say that, within decades, ice-caps will melt, destroying polar habitats and drowning low-lying coastal areas. Others say the effects will be less apocalyptic and apparent only over centuries.
The global climate is a multi-variable, dynamic non-linear system, described in scientific shorthand as “chaotic”. In chaotic systems, small initial changes can cause large end-effects. In theory, a butterfly flapping in Beijing could cause a hurricane in Washington. Or not. Chaotic systems are tough to model and multi-variate chaos models involve cherry-picking and massaging data that looks relevant. That can mean bias, due to funding trends, or political opinion.
Human action contributes 5 per cent of total CO2 output — will cutbacks make a difference? That depends on your model. A volcanic explosion can pump out more CO2 in hours than several years worth of global FF consumption. The results of higher emissions can also be surprising.
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When Mt Pinatuba exploded in 1991, it reduced global temperatures. Upper atmosphere debris cut down sunlight. In some pre-industrial periods, the Earth has been warmer and colder and CO2 levels have fluctuated for reasons we don’t quite understand. In the 10th century, Norse settlers cultivated vineyards (Mediterranean crops) in now-freezing Newfoundland. There was a mini-Ice Age across Europe in the 17th-19th centuries.
Hence, disputes about causes and consequences. The Copenhagen policies also appear sub-optimal. Every nation is supposed to cut back emissions. This would retard economic development in India, China and other southern nations, where vast populations dwell in poverty.
Amortised over 2010-2100, the Copenhagen-Kyoto Plan could cost $40 trillion per annum in lost global growth. So there’s enormous resistance and obfuscation about emission cutbacks. Carbon credit (CC) trading markets create incentives but CC trading doesn’t really reduce emissions, it reduces the rate of growth of emissions.
There is another way: fund R&D in green technologies. If low-emission energy was cost-effective and efficient, it would be adopted anyhow. During 2005-2008, global wind and solar capacities jumped as fossil fuel prices went through the roof.
According to leading AGW sceptic Bjorn Lomborg, the global R&D spend on green energy is currently $2 billion. It could be increased to $100 billion — that is just 0.2 per cent of global GDP and much cheaper than Copenhagen-Kyoto. The payoffs could be much closer to optimal. A focus on green R&D would cause less of a North-South divide.
AGW believers and sceptics alike agree going green is sensible. Eventually, the world must move to post-FF technologies. Offering the carrot of positive incentives rather than using the stick to arm-twist people into lower FF consumption is more likely to work.