Climate confusion in Hong Kong

Dumb arguments rear their heads yet again

Posted by Joseph Romm (Guest Contributor) at 2:28 PM on 25 Jul 2007

Read more about: energy | coal | coal-to-liquid fuel | climate | climate change skepticism

A reader pointed me to a letter in the South China Morning Post, "Cold water on the warming debate" (subs. req'd). The writer, a senior research fellow of the HK Institute of Economics and Business, rehashes a number of mistaken arguments I hear all too often:

Many people fail to knit together these two strands - climate change and the exhaustion of fossil fuels. If they did, they would see that the energy crisis, which is predicted as a result of the exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves, contains the seeds of the resolution of the global warming crisis. As fossil fuels become scarcer, their price is sure to rise. We see this already. Under market forces, this will accelerate substitution, largely towards nuclear energy. This will, in turn, redress the climatic concerns.

No. Conventional oil may be peaking, but the world has plenty of affordable coal, far more than is needed to destroy the climate (which is Hansen's point). The climate problem is not self-resolving. Indeed, peak oil may drive us to liquid coal, a climate disaster. The article continues:

The timescales are, of course, unclear. The process may not be without some pain - with, for example, pollution persisting in some places and famine in others. But, at the end of the day, market forces are a more dependable mechanism than government diktat.

But why would market forces lead to reduced carbon dioxide emissions until carbon dioxide has a price? There's more:

We should be particularly vigilant not to allow catastrophic forecasts justify far-reaching interference in our lives. To paraphrase Mr. Klaus: beware any proclaimed "scientific consensus", as it is more often the product of the vocal minority than the silent majority.

Silly. Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, has said: "The global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem." Problem is, he's not a scientist. Nor is he terribly well informed -- though I guess to use the adverb correctly he is terribly informed.

The scientific consensus is not more often the product of a vocal minority -- and there is no "silent majority" in science, there is only the published peer-reviewed literature. Those who remain silent on an issue in science are either not expert in that field or unable to disprove the consensus. So much recognition is given to people who are able to overturn a dominant theory that scientists have a huge incentive to do so if it's possible.

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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Climate Confusion

Market forces, highly esteemed though they are, has not served us well in the emergent climate
confusion. Allowing the price dictates of the system to rule us lets Global Warming build-up proceed without restraint. In order to avoid the imminent disaster, we must first admit that the market is not the only option we can choose. Then we can divert what is not helping us in the long run to confront the global problem looming over our future. We must eliminate, and quickly, the various incarnations of the internal combustion engine and substitute clean elecrical energy sources. Only nuclear plants produce heat without burning fuel, which produces carbon dioxide. Nuclear power in many small plants (eschewing the market rule that one large anything is cheaper than many small anythings) which use hot water to make electricity, which in turn can power vehicles, etc., is the only source of flameless heat we know of right now. And it would help if someone could come up with a good way to break down carbon dioxide into powder carbon and plain old oxygen to be released into the atmosphere.

Des Emery

by Des Emery at 9:23 PM on 25 Jul 2007

Zero Sum

Ultimately, the argument against Anthropomorphic Global Warming is an argument against people and the amount of energy they use.

We could cut our energy use -- of whatever type -- back vastly if we changed our lifestyles...or we could let evolution take it's course and reduce our numbers down (through starvation, scarcity, lowered birth rates) until world population drops back to the hundreds of millions.

by jabailo at 1:10 AM on 26 Jul 2007

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