Chapter 23: Global Warming
I. A Guy’s Got To Eat
While I was working on finding a way to express ethical concerns in a way that would engage the minds of others, I had to eat. So did my wife. Even the cats would complain if the quantity of food in the house got a little low.
If any should want to identify shyness as a mental illness, I would not disagree. Recall, consistent with the analysis of value given in Chapter 12, a ‘mental illness’ is an aspect of mental functioning that interferes with the fulfillment of the agent’s other desires. Shyness certainly does that. Had I been an outgoing, extroverted character I would have hundreds of friends and acquaintances and would feel no inhibition on summoning their aid in acquiring a job that I liked. Instead, I had to go out on the job market, and accept whatever I could get.
After all, what else does a formal education in ethics train one to do, other than run a cash register at Wal-Mart or flip hamburgers?
That route eventually landed me in a job running a Document Productions department for a private environmental and energy consulting firm. The technical staff in this firm would do their research, and the documents would come to my department to prepare for final release.
It turns out that spending all of those years writing had some benefit. I could type very quickly, and I knew how to run a word processor.
The firm did a lot of work on climate change, so I had an opportunity to review a great many studies on this subject. This exposed me to an element of what I can only describe as free-roaming evil.
I had first encountered it when I was working for the Libertarian Party, and which I had since forgotten about. There are people out there who make their living perfecting the art of deception — convincing others into doing things not in their interest and, instead, to serve the interests of those who can afford to pay them. They practice a science of deception that is proudly taught at the best universities.
It is the science of ‘public relations’.
We often hear of the dangers of increasing our technological knowledge without increasing our moral appreciation for the ways of using that knowledge. We hear it with respect to atomic energy or biological research. Yet, the field of study where the disconnect between technical knowledge and moral appreciation is greatest is in the field of public relations. Here, those with the most money pay experts to convince the masses to agree to their own self sacrifice for the benefit of those with the money to pay the experts.
II. Flashback
When I was working with the Libertarian Party in Montana, the party adopted the project of ending price supports on milk. In Montana, a government Milk Control Board determined milk prices. As a result, Montanans were paying significantly more for a gallon of milk than people anywhere else in the country (with few exceptions). The state’s elderly, its poor, its young couples and single parents with children, were being forced to choose between sacrificing a basic food product, or sacrificing a larger portion of their income than people elsewhere.
I remember a specific newspaper advertisement associated with that campaign. This advertisement contained a chart, comparing Montana’s recent milk prices to milk prices in Wyoming. Both lines started at the same point (as if, ten years earlier, the price of milk in Montana and Wyoming were equal). It then showed the price of milk in Wyoming climbing faster than the price in Montana.
What the chart actually showed is that the price of milk in Wyoming went from being 75 cents per gallon cheaper than in Montana, to being 50 cents per gallon cheaper. The reason that happened is because the milk control board, afraid of losing its power, was not allowing milk prices to go up as fast as they used to.
The public relations company that placed that graph knew these facts. They also knew that the average voter would simply glance at the graph, would not investigate the graph in detail, and walk away with a false belief. They would belief, falsely, that this was a graph showing that the people in Wyoming pay far more for milk than the people in Montana.
This is the only sensible explanation for starting the two graphs at the same point. A more honest graph would have started milk prices in Wyoming much lower than those in Montana, and ending with Wyoming prices slightly less lower.
III. A Definition of Lying
A lie is any written or spoken statement, picture, graph, hand signal, smoke signal, telegraph signal, gesture, or even moment of silence that one can reasonably expect others to interpret to mean something that one knows is false.
The concept of a ‘literal truth’ is, itself, a deception. It is a smoke screen that liars use to conceal their lies.
In one sense, this chart was technically accurate. A person who studied it carefully can divine the truth contained within it. However, it was inserted in the paper for the purpose of deception. If its designers had been interested in communicating truth, they would have designed it differently. Its purpose was to deceive, and this means that those who presented it were liars.
Words, phrases, graphs, hand signals, smoke signals, and the like have meanings as a result of social convention. In learning to communicate with another person, one does not learn a set of definitions dictated by natural law and discovered within nature. We simply agree, ‘When the light is red, this means stop; when I use the symbol ‘house cat’, think of those four-legged creatures people keep as pets that go ‘meow’.”
As I write this chapter, I search for those symbols that I can reasonably expect will cause those ideas to rise in the mind of the reader that I think are true. If I use symbols to that I can reasonably expect will cause those ideas to rise in the mind of the reader that I think are false, then I am engaging in deception. I would be lying. If I resort to the concept of “literal truth” to defend those statements, this still does not change the fact that my intention, and my reasonable expectation, is deception.
The PR company responsible for that ad used a symbol that they could reasonably expect would cause an idea to rise in the minds of the reader that they knew would be false. They were lying, and no reliance on the concept of “literal truth” can save them from this charge.
Furthermore, the lie that this company placed in the paper was designed to deceive elderly people, poor people, and parents into sacrificing their health and well being for the sake of the organizations that could afford to pay the agency’s wage.
What we have here is the moral equivalent of a grifter (confidence man, con artist) working legally on a statewide level (in this case), offering his skills to the highest bidder, bilking the elderly and poor out of their wages and well being, giving the money to their sponsor, taking a cut, and heading off to the bar to celebrate their success.
In Chapter 22, I described an email from a friend critical of Wal-Mart that provided an example of intellectual recklessness. However, here, I am talking about intentional deception for money. The moral difference is like the difference between a person driving recklessly (speeding, talking on a cell phone) who hits another car, and the person who buys a tank and goes out looking for other cars to crush.
IV. Climate Change Deception
A. Will Kill For Money
When I started to see the reports crossing my desk on the issue of climate change (a.k.a., ‘global warming’, though this is a bit of a misnomer), I saw the same pattern in the writings of those who criticized the scientific findings that I saw in Montana. I saw the telltale signs of the work of a group of professional con-men hired to run a scam on the average person in order to profit their sponsors (those who can afford to handle such confidence men) and to pocket a percentage of the take.
The only difference between this and the milk control case is that, while the con men in Montana were willing to fleece the elderly and poor of a few hundred dollars, the con men working on the issue of global warming were willing to risk the destruction of entire cities and countries — all for the sake of some money in their pockets.
To prove deception, all I need to do is show that it is reasonable to believe that these people used symbols in such a way, that they sought to manipulate their listeners and viewers with arguments they knew to be flawed.
I always thought that people like this only existed in bad movies.
B. The Basis of Global Warming
One small piece of non-controversial science is needed for this argument. If you shine light through a container filled with CO2 and split it up to look at its spectrum, you will see a few black lines in the resulting spectrum. This is called an absorption spectrum. The black lines are caused by the CO2 absorbing some of the energy that was passing through.
The more CO2 you add to the container, the thicker these lines become, as the CO2 absorbs more or less energy.
The earth emits energy, mostly infrared energy. CO2 and other greenhouse gasses absorb certain frequencies of infrared energy. The more greenhouse gas we add to the atmosphere, the more energy the atmosphere will absorb, unless something else happens to reduce the amount of energy going through the atmosphere.
This falls into the realm of scientific law. Anybody who says that this is false must believe in magic, because magic is the only thing that will keep a greenhouse gas from absorbing more energy under these conditions.
No scientist will claim that these black lines represent anything other than a gas absorbing energy, or deny that the lines will get thicker as more of the gas is added to the chamber. In fact, anybody who denies this particular fact, would have trouble successfully completing Chemistry 101.
This non-controversial fact was known over 100 years ago — back when the most common forms of transportation was by foot and by horse. Even then, they knew, increased CO2 in the atmosphere means that the atmosphere will absorb more energy — unless something else changes to reduce the amount of energy going through the atmosphere.
Now, how much more energy will the atmosphere absorb and what will it do with that energy? These questions are complex. These are the questions that require complex computer models and which will be difficult to answer with any sort of precision.
However, these sorts of issues are not relevant to this particular discussion. The proof of deception (or willful ignorance at a level that it is extremely unlikely) requires only the uncontroversial part of this theory — dark lines in an absorption spectrum represent a gas absorbing energy, and the thickness of the lines increase as the amount of gas increases.
Now, I will examine the arguments used by the professional critics of global warming.
V. The Forecasted Ice Age Claim
One argument for the immorality of those criticizing global warming starts with the fact that, 30 years ago, some articles appeared in some popular news magazines concerning the possibility of a new ice age. The atmospheric temperature had been on a thirty-year downtrend. Some people extrapolated this trend and started to wonder, “What would happen if this continues, and the earth’s temperature plummets?” There is no law of nature that rules out another era of glaciation, with New York, Detroit, Minneapolis, and other cities being swept away by a continental ice sheet.
From this, the deceivers argue that we should not trust contemporary peer-reviewed science. The argument says, “30 years ago, scientists were predicting an ice age. Today, they are predicting global warming. Obviously, they have no idea what is going on, so we should not be listening to them. You should just shut out their doomsday screams and go on with your lives. There is nothing to look at over here. “
This argument contains two lies.
I want to remind you that the purpose of this discussion is not just to claim that the argument is flawed. It is to claim that it suffers from such a basic flaw that those who advance the argument fully understand, or ought to understand, the problem. At best, those who advance this argument do not care about what is true or false, because if they cared about truth they would see the flaw. At worst, those who advance this argument are aware of the flaw but are more than happy to advise others to destroy their own lives and the lives of others where it is profitable to do so.
I also want to point out that by ‘those who advance the argument’ I do not refer to the casual listener who hears this argument and than parrots it to his or her friends. I am talking about the person who claims to be a professional — the person called before Congress or invited onto a news program or who creates a documentary for the Science Channel, who includes this argument in their testimony.
A. Ice Age Lie Number 1
The first lie can be found in the claim that scientists were predicting an ice age 30 years ago. There is no body of peer-reviewed scientific literature from this era predicting a new ice age. There are, instead, articles in news magazines and other popular periodicals. Those periodicals are not peer reviewed, and have a revenue stream that depends on the number of people pick up their magazine. They put articles in their magazines and features on their covers that they think will cause individuals passing by to pick the magazine up and part with a bit of cash. A warning about the upcoming ice age is just the type of thing that could bring about this end.
Those who claim that scientists 30 years ago were predicting an ice age are either lying or so intellectually irresponsible that they do not care to do any research to determine if what they are saying is true.
This is all I need to show. None who argue in defense of these deceivers can show that those who advance this argument made any attempt to learn what scientists were actually saying 30 years ago.
In addition, those who deny global warming frequently claim today that the stories about global warming that appear in the news magazine are simply placed there in order to sell papers. Alarmism sells, they say, so you cannot trust what the news magazine or television news program is saying. Yet, these are exactly the types of stories they point to in arguing that scientists 30 years ago were claiming the start of a new ice age.
No person with even a slight interest in the truth could fail to see the problems with this line of reasoning.
B. Ice Age Lie Number 2
To see the second lie, let us assume that there was a body of scientific information 30 years ago suggesting the possibility of a new ice age.
So what?
It is the very nature of the practice of science that it continues to collect new information and, on the basis of that information, modify and improve its theories. Would it make any sense to say, “Look, two hundred years ago scientists were saying that malaria was caused by bad air. Now they’re saying that malaria is caused by mosquitoes carrying germs. Obviously, they have no idea what is going on, so their claim that we should drain the swamp and get rid of the mosquitoes is pure nonsense. We should not listen to them.”
Even if scientists held a different view at some time in the past, it is complete and total nonsense to imply that their contemporary theory is to be treated as false. Such a laughably absurd chain of reasoning would have us holding out even today that scientists who claim the earth is round should not be trusted, for only a few thousand years ago they were saying it was flat — or we should not trust those who say the Sun is the center of the solar system, since we can find scientific articles written in the past where they said the Earth was the center of the solar system.
The list is endless.
I said that I do not need to prove that global warming is a threat to categorize these arguments as lies. I don’t. The fallacious reasoning in these two lies remain lies regardless of whether global warming is a fact or not.
C. True Scientific Debate
I can well imagine two people, both equally concerned with the truth, getting into a heated argument as to which theory is best. It happens in science all the time. Presently, for example, there is a debate going on as to whether the Tyrannosaurus Rex was a hunter or a scavenger. This is a matter of heated debate. People lose their tempers, shout, and make threats concerning who will get funding and who will not.
However, in a true scientific debate, the debaters stick to observed evidence and sound reasoning. The hunter theorists look at how the T-Rex’s body is built — it is built like a hunter for speed with its eyes fixed forward like those on a cat or a wolf, and its head and jaws were designed to inflict grievous wounds. The scavenger theorists note that the brain is structured for a particularly well-developed sense of smell, and the contemporary animal with the best-developed sense of smell is the buzzard.
This is what intellectually honest debate is about. This is how a person with good desires would pursue any controversy. Because a person with good desires is interested in what is in fact the case, and not interested in conning people into sacrificing their well being for the sake of the person who can afford to pay the con man.
You don’t see scientists putting their information in front of focus groups to try to discover which evidence is most likely to convince a target audience that the T-Rex was a hunter or a scavenger. What convinces the average person is irrelevant in science. However, it is not irrelevant to those who argue against global warming. This is because those who argue against global warming are not interested in truth. They are only interested in what will convince people, regardless of whether it is true or false.
VI. The Catastrophic Global Warming Straw Man
Recently, I have been testing a hypothesis. Whenever I hear the term ‘catastrophic global warming’, I look to see how far one has to go to find the same person using the “Ice Age” argument or any of the other market-tested fallacies involved in the criticism of global warming. They typically are not far apart.
Curiously enough, ‘catastrophic global warming’ is the view that the critic of global warming claims to be arguing against. This is curious, ‘catastrophic global warming’ is not what any scientific theory is defending. This is just the type of term a public relations firm would invent and seek to put into the public mind. The reason is that, once this term is in the public mind then, like a Trojan horse, it can be used to subvert any number of rational defenses.
The power of ‘catastrophic global warming’ is that it is such a vague phrase that it can be easily manipulated. It can be used to argue against one type of global warming theory (e.g., a claim that global warming will wipe out all live on Earth), and then reapplied to any theory that suggests any possible harm at all.
Shorten the argument down to its bare components, and it says, “All life on Earth will not be destroyed. Therefore, catastrophic global warming theory is false. Since global warming theory is false, we can ignore these claims that global warming may cause increased violent storms with subsequent loss of life, health risks, loss of agricultural land and a need to alter traditional farming practices, and massive coastal flooding in some countries with its own subsequent loss of property and life.”
Of course, the argument is never condensed like this, because it makes the absurdity too obvious. So, those who use it spread out the claims a bit. “Look there have been times in Earth’s past when the CO2 levels were several times higher than they are today. The Earth survived. The Earth has a tremendous ability to adapt. This ‘chicken little’ claims of the environmentalists are simply annoying noise. You have nothing to worry about. Go about your business.”
It’s true, there have been times in Earth’s history when CO2 levels were very high. It is also true that the Earth did survive. However, it is also true that people living on the Earth back then could have bought property on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico — by buying property in what is now Great Falls, Montana. This subtle little slip from, “The Earth will survive” to “You have nothing to worry about” ignores a great many things worth worrying about other than the destruction of the Earth.
Instead of using vague terms that can mean anything, rational debate requires more specific terms. ‘Marketing’ a term like ‘catastrophic global warming’ is a trick used to manipulate people. It is just the type of trick that would be employed by somebody who would sacrifice a continent for the sake of a paycheck, and rationalize that they did nothing wrong because, after all, it’s not like something really bad happened. “Sheesh, it’s not like I destroyed all life on earth; just some of it. What’s the big deal?”
VII. The Sun Did It
When the tobacco companies were faced with evidence that smoking causes cancer, one of the first tricks they pulled was to look for another cause. “It is not smoking that causes cancer — because some people who smoke do not get cancer. Instead, there must be some genetic cause. How do we explain the higher incidence of cancer among smokers? Well, it just so happens that this gene that causes cancer also causes people to love smoking.”
“WELL, IT COULD HAPPEN!” whines the tobacco company.
So, if your industry is facing evidence that your products are harmful to others, the first thing you do is hire a bunch of “scientists” more interested in money than morality to find and defend some sort of alternative cause. You make sure that their research is well funded and that they sign up to attend all of the best conferences, and you release them on the world. With luck, you can throw the world off the scent, and you can go about your business of killing people and destroying their health and property for profit.
Again, it is not a strategy that a good person would employ.
The ‘smoking gene’ argument is actually a more defensible claim than “solar induced global warming’ argument. Why? Because ‘CO2 absorbs energy’ is something a 9th-grade science student can be shown, while ‘smoking causes cancer’ is dissertation-level work.
The sun certainly has an effect on the Earth’s climate. However, this effect is not ‘instead of’ the effect of CO2. It is ‘in addition to’ — because CO2’s capacity to absorb energy cannot be denied.
The people who assert these particular theories have the credentials of scientists — that is part of the reason they were hired and groomed for these jobs. As scientists, it is reasonable to believe that they know you cannot increase CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere without increasing the amount of energy the system will absorb. Yet, these people are attempting to seduce their victims into believing the opposite, that no matter how much CO2 we add to the system, it cannot or will not absorb additional energy.
VIII. The Heat Island Effect
If your industry is facing evidence that your products are harmful to others, another strategy to try to pull is to question the evidence — to find something else that the evidence could be showing.
The Heat Island Effect argument attempts to do just this. It uses the fact that cities absorb sunlight and convert it into heat more efficiently than the surrounding countryside. They further argue that most of the temperature readings are being taken in these heat islands, so that these increased temperature readings do not reflect any global warming at all. They reflect the existence of heat islands.
Once again, there are two lies in this argument.
A. Heat Island Lie 1
The first lie is that taking temperature readings in these ‘heat islands’ and noting an increased temperature disproves global warming. Once again, the skeptic is ignoring the fact that CO2 has an energy absorption band that corresponds to an energy level released by the earth, and will absorb additional energy as a matter of fact. The more CO2, the more energy it will absorb. Nothing short of magic will prevent this. Pretending that the measurements taken in these ‘heat islands’ is a problem for global warming is like pretending that the existence of hot air balloons calls into question the theory of gravity — because the theory that CO2 absorbs energy is not one iota less solidly grounded than the theory of gravity.
B. Heat Island Lie 2
The second lie in the heat island argument is the lie that scientists are either too stupid to know about, or too criminally minded to consider, the existence of these heat islands. There may have been a moment, in the far distant past, when somebody could have gotten a scientific paper published in a peer reviewed publication saying that temperature readings do not consider the heat island effect. Today, the heat island effect is known and factored into the research.
The scientific community is built of people in competition with each other, whose reputations are made or broken on their ability to expose the errors that others offering competing theories have made. To argue that the whole community has failed to expose such an obvious error requires assuming nothing less than that the bulk of the scientific community is made up of people with an intellectual capacity less than that of the average high school student, or that they have gathered in back rooms and secretly agreed to preserve and defend a lie.
The charge of gross stupidity or gross evil is far more likely against those who propose that the heat island effect remains a problem for scientists than for the scientists themselves. Of these two options for global warming skeptics, the charge of gross stupidity would be hard to defend — a grossly ignorant person could not successfully run a large multinational corporation. So, gross evil is the more reasonable charge — gross evil in the sense that these people favor propagating a myth that has the potential to bring significant harm to hundreds of millions of people for the sake of profit. What is worth exposing people to such a risk? Cash in the bank, nothing more.
IX. Danger: No Bigots Allowed
Though it should be implicit in what I write, I want to explicitly state that none of these arguments are suitable for blaming all individuals associated with any given industry.
Not all individuals who question global warming participate in this campaign of deception. Let this not be taken as an argument that condemns a whole class of people.
A good person — a person with good desires — has an aversion to blaming the innocent, and any who do not actually use these arguments are, indeed, innocent, regardless of their position on global warming or their profession. If they are guilty of other evils, those evils need to be proved separately.
Yet, the instant you see any of these arguments in use by anybody professing to hold a position of authority on the subject, be ready to take names. The names that you take are the names of individuals who have proved themselves guilty.
X. Purpose
This chapter has not actually been about global warming. It has been about the evil of those who claim to be experts in a field promoting arguments that any expert could see to be flawed. It has been an essay against intellectual recklessness and outright deception.
Those who assert that they are authorities on the subject of climate change, and advance the arguments listed above, simply provide a perfect example of the type of evil that this chapter is about. Tobacco-company experts are another example.
I could have used those who falsified evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the Iraqis in order to justify a war. Here, again, we see people accepting arguments because those arguments support the conclusions that they hope to be true (in this case, hoping to see something that would justify attacking another country), rather than looking at the evidence objectively.
I could have used Christian fundamentalists who argue for creationism, or its uptown cousin Intelligent Design, and seek to coercive power of the state to turn all public schools into public churches, indoctrinating all children into their religion, and coercing all children into pledging allegiance to their God under the disguise of patriotism.
I could have used the examples of countless fad diets, get-rich-quick schemes, and psychic friends who plague the airwaves.
The fates happened to have put me in a job where I became familiar with the deceptive practices of the critics of global warming, so that is what I used.
XI. Moral Principles At Play
Now, I am going to shift gears and actually speak about the ethical issues relevant to climate change. Surprisingly, I still do not have to make any substantive science claims on the degree of climate change and human responsibility — I can leave it to trained scientists to fill in those blanks. The principles described below will still apply.
A. Destruction
If I were to build a dam on my property, which broke and flooded your property, I would be responsible for the damages, would I not? This is not some liberal, left-wing socialist propaganda. This is, in fact, a central tenant of capitalism — a tenant of personal responsibility whereby an individual is held accountable for the harm his actions do to others.
We do not have to trace the action back to a single person to assign responsibility. If a group of us owned the property on which we built the dam, and the dam broke, we are all responsible for the harm done and owe compensation to those made to suffer by our actions.
In fact, the dam does not even have to break for those of us who built it to be held responsible. If we create a risk of harm, thus reducing the security of those who live downstream, we are responsible even for this. People who live downstream are not obligated to live in fear until our dam actually breaks. They are morally entitled to demand that steps be taken to reduce the risks to their lives and property, or that they be compensated for taking those risks.
What if, instead of building a dam that put at risk a few families living down stream, I performed some action that risked flooding 40% of the land in a small country, driving millions of people from their homes and their livelihood, and putting hundreds of thousands of lives at risk?
One potential effect of global warming is a rise in sea level of up to 1 meter. It doesn’t seem like much — but a substantial part of the country of Bangladesh, which is built on a river delta, is within 1 meter of sea level. Raise the sea level by that amount, and 40% of the country disappears. People lose their property. They lose their businesses. They lose their lives. Storm surges related to tropical storms are a leading cause of death in Bangladesh. They killed nearly 400,000 people in the 1990s. Increase the sea level, and the storm surges get worse. People die who would have otherwise lived.
If I were to build a dam that burst, destroying 40% of a country and killing hundreds of thousands of people, I would have given up my rights to everything I own — perhaps even my own life. The moral principles at play on the issue of global warming are no different. There is an evil involved in a carelessness where somebody knowingly risks so much damage to others, and cares so little about it that he hides the fact in falsified records and doctored reports.
B. Internalized Costs
Capitalism is an economic system that requires that costs and benefits be internalized as much as possible. To the degree that costs and benefits are not internalized — to the degree that any good or service has costs, which are forced onto others against their will — to that degree a free market does not exist. To that degree, the economy is burdened by a market distorting, inefficiency producing, unjust, unfair, redistribution of wealth from those who suffer the cost to those who obtain the benefit.
This is what capitalism has to say about the ethics of global warming.
The way to introduce efficiency into the marketplace is to make sure that those who obtain the benefits suffer the costs. They will then quit purchasing the product in question at that point where the costs of purchasing additional units exceed the benefits.
If, instead, the state subsidize those purchases, then they will cause a situation where people purchase more of the product than the free market would have allowed. If the government pays timber companies to cut trees, or the government absorbs the cost of cutting trees, then the lumber companies will cut more trees.
The result of government subsidies is that the world becomes a worse place than it otherwise would have been, as wealth and, more importantly, well-being gets transferred by the government’s hand from those who suffer the costs to those who obtain the benefit.
These costs involved in these wealth-redistribution schemes are not limited just to money. If a company is allowed to perform actions that makes innocent people sick or kills them, then those made sick or killed suffer a cost, and the corporation obtains a benefit. This is no less of a wealth-transfer (mostly from the poor and elderly to the affluent) than welfare.
If there are costs associated with CO2 emissions, capitalist principles say that the individuals who are responsible for the emissions should shoulder those costs. They should compensate those who are made worse off by those emissions. This includes those who suffer the loss of their property due to sea-level rise. It includes those who suffer additional risks from more severe storms. This includes those who become sick and die as a result of heat stress. It includes farmers who have to shift their agricultural practices from those compatible with the old climate to those compatible with the new climate. It includes recreational industries such as skiing that suffer a loss of tourism. It includes construction costs in polar regions that have to accommodate the fact that the permafrost on which they built their structures is now melting.
Of course, to be fair, benefits associated with climate change should also be internalized. Land in northern climates which become available for farming, the potential for expanding a northwest passage across North America, and other benefits should be credited to global warming.
The way to do this is to spread the cost of compensating those who will be harmed out, so that they include not only those who consume energy, but those who use the expanded Northwest Passage and who farm the land that global warming makes usable.
These are the policies that capitalism says should be put into place for the market to work efficiently and for us to obtain the benefits that an efficient market produces. Any who argue against these types of policies are not truly interested in establishing the principles of a free market. They are interested in a coercive redistribution of wealth – typically a redistribution of wealth that flows from the poor to the rich.
One may complain about the difficulties in reaching these types of decisions and striking a balance. However, in a capitalist system, making the tough decisions to make sure that costs and benefits are internalized falls under the heading of “protecting property rights”. To say that it is too difficult to do these things is to say that capitalism is not a practical economic system (which, in fact, it may not be). However, if capitalism is impractical and some other system is required, the person making this argument would be contradicting himself if he labels his opponent an anti-capitalist liberal. It is he who has abandoned capitalism.
If the same person were to argue against this type of policy, while at the same time complain that wealth transfer schemes are not legitimate, the kindest word that we could use for such a person would be ‘hypocrite’.
C. Quotas
I must add that I am no fan of emission quotas and similar government micromanagement techniques. I have two significant concerns about these types of machinations.
First, quotas and similar government fine-tuning are likely to become yet another commodity that politicians buy and sell in the political market place in exchange for campaign contributions. I have very little confidence that the levels will be set at a point that is best for humanity. I have a great deal of confidence that the levels will be set that a point that is best for those who can get the politician re-elected, or who can promise them a well paying job after their tour of “public service” comes to an end.
Second, politicians respond very slowly to new information. It could take years for new information to manifest itself in new policy. All along the way, there are those who would not benefit by the new information who will seek to cloud the policy, distort it, and push policy away from the direction that the new information recommends.
Markets, on the other hand, can start to respond to new information immediately. This is easy to see. Spend some time watching a market news channel, and then spend a day watching C-Span. In the former, you will see news effecting prices instantly. The instant that an oil pipeline is destroyed by terrorists, oil prices rise — because we have to immediately start conserving fuel if we are going to have less of it to use. On C-Span, that same shortage will not manifest itself in a change in policy for months or years, if ever.
Rather than quotas and other micromanagement techniques with their near certainty of failure, the government is better off acting to internalize the costs of fossil fuel into its price. The best way to do this is to set up some sort of market, where those who use fossil fuels will pay in, and those who can show that they suffer losses as a result of manmade climate change can obtain compensation or take preventative action to protect their life, health, liberty, and property.
XII. I Don’t Know
I think that a lot of progress could be made if people were a little bit more honest about using these three words: “I don’t know.” I do not know what the specific effects of global warming will be. I have seen enough reports to know that there is some very sophisticated scientific work being done in the field. I have seen enough reports to know that it would be a full time job to sort through all of that evidence and come to a reasonable, reasoned, informed conclusion. I know that very few people have that kind of time or talent. I know that a lot of people who say that they know are lying; perhaps to themselves.
I haven’t devoted my life to reading and studying climatology reports. I have spent my time reading and studying the principles of sound reasoning and how it applies to the field of ethics. So, I know that the Ice Age argument, the Solar Cause argument, and the Heat Islands argument are all lies — or, at best, malevolent ignorance. I know this, not because these arguments represent bad science. I know this because they represent poor logic – unsound reasoning that nobody in the field concerned with getting a good answer on a solid foundation could accept, morally or intellectually.
XIII. Summary
“Scientists once believed that we were entering a new ice age” is false — that is easy enough to prove. But even if true, it does not prove that the science of today is not to be trusted. It only proves that scientists today have more information than they did 30 years ago. This argument no more valid than arguing that scientists once believed the earth was flat, so we should not trust them today when they say the world is round.
“CO2 does not cause global warming because the sun is responsible,” is a lie. Nothing short of magic can prevent CO2 from absorbing energy. The sun’s influence on climate (which certainly does exist) will either add to, or subtract from, the effect of CO2. It cannot be used to argue that CO2 has no effect. Such an argument would require proving that the little black bands in the CO2 energy absorption spectrum are not really energy absorption.
“The temperature increase is caused by scientists taking temperature readings in heat islands.” If this is true, would somebody mind explaining to me why the greatest increases in temperature are recorded in the most rural, isolated parts of the planet — the Arctic and Antarctic? But that’s not the most important criticism. The most important criticism comes from the assumption that scientists are either too stupid or too corrupt to have incorporated this into their research. People who bring up heat islands today are not trying to explaining temperature rise. They are trying to cloud the facts of the matter and distract people away from taking action that is in their own best interests.
The principles of morality tells us that people who would say things like this, who would make these clearly flawed arguments, are people who… shall we say… seem to somewhat lacking in moral virtue.