For nearly a century, Californians have fashioned themselves the
innovators the United States and the world follow. Not so on global
warming. The California Legislature and Governor Schwarzenegger
have just passed and signed global warming legislation that looks
an awful lot like a watered-down version of the failed Kyoto
Protocol. That’s soooo 1990s.
Kyoto was supposed to reduce our emissions of carbon dioxide,
the main human-generated global warming gas, to 7% below 1990
levels by 2008-2012. Nationally, carbon dioxide emissions have
risen about 18% since then. California legislation cuts state’s
emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, a much larger effective cut than
Kyoto because of expected population growth in the next fifteen
years.
Why on earth did they do this, and what will it accomplish?
California’s global warming legislation is all politics. Arnold
is up for re-election, and California is (and has always been)
politically green. Hint: “Sierra Club” stands for Sierra Nevada
Mountain Club. While everyone back east pretty much yawns over its
antics, people in California pay attention to it much the same way
Euros worship Greenpeace (another organization simply ignored
here).
Greens are in record high dudgeon over global warming. Al Gore’s
movie has them pumped. The California public is alarmed, and
scientists don’t see any incentive to quell the hysteria — after
all, it’s quite a living. So it’s totally logical that there has
been a political response.
Specifically, the current clamor revolves around a scientific
absurdity: that unless we drastically cut our emissions of carbon
dioxide in the next nine years, there will be an irreversible
climate catastrophe caused by the rapid shedding of Greenland and
Antarctic ice. (While climate populists still say “ten years,”
they’ve been making this claim for a year now. Time marches
on.)
It’s science fiction. The slight loss of Greenland ice in the
last few years is hardly unprecedented. Its cause is thought to be
a reversal of a fifty-year cooling trend that ended in the late
1990s over the southern (melting) part of the landmass. For several
decades in the early 20th century — before humans could be
considered a factor in climate change — Greenland was much warmer
than it has averaged in the last decade. Look for yourself. The
UN’s climate history is at this site.
In the early 20th century, Greenland had to have been shedding
ice at a much higher rate than it is today (or, God forbid, today’s
loss isn’t being driven by warmer temperatures!), and indeed this
is documented. Check out “The Present Climate Fluctuation,”
published in 1948 by Hans Ahlmann, in Geographic Journal,
a peer-reviewed periodical of the Royal Geographical Society.
Antarctica? Suffice it to say that every recent climate model
for the 21st century predicts that it will gain, not lose, ice.
Another big driver of the current hysteria is the notion that
hurricanes are getting worse because of global warming. Again,
there’s little that’s unprecedented. Today’s frequency of Category
4 and 5 storms, the worst kind, is mathematically indistinguishable
in the Atlantic and Western Pacific (the world’s most active
hurricane regions) from what it was a half-century ago…right
around the time Ahlmann published his paper.
The idea is simple. Warmer water yields more energy for stronger
storms. But that notion is simplistic, as other factors that
correlate with warmer water serve to mitigate storms.
Further, the oceans just haven’t been cooperating recently. An
upcoming paper by John Lyman in Geophysical Research
Letters has the scientific cheerleaders for Gore’s apocalypse
worried. It shows, inexplicably, that in the last two years the
world’s oceans lost 20% of the heat they had gained in the last
half century.
It’s easy to say that California’s global warming bill rests on
nonsensical overkill. But if people insist that all of these
horrible things are being caused by global warming, what will
California’s leadership do about it?
The answer, in the rosiest of policy scenarios, is easy:
absolutely nothing. Further, if global warming is bad on the whole
(a debatable hypothesis), California’s law could easily make things
worse.
Let’s be really rosy, and say that California does lead the
nation, and Congress passes a similar law. Further, let’s say that
California leads the world, and every nation that has to reduce
emissions under the Kyoto Protocol — quotas that virtually no one
has met — indeed adopts and meets the California mandates.
According to scientists from the U.S. National Center for
Atmospheric Research, the amount of global warming the law would
prevent by 2060 is .05 degrees Celsius. That’s right, one-twentieth
of a degree.
That’s a reasonable estimate, because Kyoto is predicted to
prevent .07 degrees of warming along this timeframe, and
California’s law doesn’t reduce emissions quite as much as Kyoto.
But in any case, there’s no network of global thermometers or
satellites that will ever be able to detect such a change, because
global surface temperature fluctuates about .15 degrees Celsius
from year to year.
Will California itself meet its own legally imposed emissions
limits? Doubtful, unless there will be some chicanery whereby
carbon dioxide is fobbed off on, say, power plants in neighboring
states. California would have to reduce its emissions substantially
while, thanks to immigration, its population rises rapidly. The
entry-level car for entry-level Californians will not be a $30,000
hybrid. While the chi-chi may buy them, they will sell their
existing cars to the newcomers. Thanks to California’s climate,
those beaters will live long lives in the Golden State.
If people think that current hurricanes are being juiced by
global warming, if they think that the calving of Greenland is
unprecedented (despite decades of warmer temperatures in the early
20th century), then they will expect some return for their grief.
But hurricanes will continue, and more people will be exposed to
them. The earth’s temperature trajectory won’t be altered a
measurable iota. Despite their efforts to lower emissions, people
will see absolutely no current weather change that could possibly
be ascribed to this policy.
Basing policies on hysterical exaggerations is a sure recipe for
failure, particularly when the policies will do nothing but sour
people on carbon dioxide emission restrictions. So much for
Californian leadership. Sounds much more like politics as usual:
full of sound and fury, accomplishing nothing. How retro.
