Sometimes
it pays to refresh one’s memory – or rediscover missed information relating to certain
vital issues.
Written
in 1999 - Global
Warming: How It All Began by Richard S Courtney
Note: Go to site to see full
text with diagrams – but blog stationery leaves a lot to be desired!
Imagined
risk
All available evidence
indicates that man-made global warming is a physical impossibility, but if the
predicted warming could be induced it would probably provide net benefits.
However, there is a widespread imagined risk of the warming and politicians are
responding to it. Responses to imagined risk are often extreme and dangerous. For example, somebody with a fear of mice may
see a mouse and as a response try to jump on a chair causing damage to the
chair and injury to himself. There is no
point in telling the injured person that mice are harmless because fear is
irrational so cannot be overcome by rational argument.
Widespread imagined risk is
to be expected as the end of the twentieth century (the end of the second
millennium) approaches. Prophets of doom
have occurred when the end of each past century approached. They always proclaimed that “the end of the
world is nigh” unless people changed their ways and accepted great hardship. So, history suggests that the global warming
scare or something like it can be expected at this time.
Global warming proponents
call for reduced Co2 emissions and this equates to a call for cuts in the use
of energy, but the energy industries have done more to benefit mankind than
anything else since the invention of agriculture. And global warming proponents often call for
use of ‘renewables’ to replace fossil fuels, but that is a call for a return to
pre-industrial society: the industrial
revolution occurred when fossil fuels replaced biomass and wind-power. It is physically impossible for wind and solar
energies to supply the energy needs of the developed world and the peoples of
the developing world are insisting on their right to develop too.
The past prophets of doom
have all been wrong, so it is reasonable to expect today’s doom-mongers to
justify their arguments. And this is
especially the case when they attack something as clearly beneficial to mankind
as the use of fossil fuels. But imagined
risk is not rational, so reasonable expectations do not apply. The simple fact that it is physically
impossible for Co2 emissions to cause man-made global warming has no effect on
imagined fear of global warming. It is a
simple fact that a mouse cannot eat a person, but some people try to jump on
chairs at the sight of mice.
Also, some global warming
proponents are accepting a good financial income from the global warming scare
and have become global warming propagandists to promote their interests. These include some researchers who obtain
research grants and some environmental organisations who need donations. They are making a living by promoting fear of
man-made global warming. Their behaviour
is similar to that of the ‘snake oil salesmen’ in the nineteenth century. Snake oil salesmen sold snake oil that did not
require real snakes to make it. Global
warming propagandists are selling fear of man-made global warming and that does
not require real man-made global warming to make it.
The success of the global
warming propaganda has induced some observers to argue that a conspiracy has
created the imagined risk in the public’s perception (e.g. Böttcher, 1996). But, consideration of the origins of the
global warming scare denies the existence of any such conspiracy. Interests
coincided and supported each other. And
a coincidence of interests usually has a more powerful effect than a group of
conspirators. The origins of the scare
are political and have resulted in political policies that now threaten serious
economic damage for the entire world.
The origins of the global warming scare
The hypothesis of man-made
global warming has existed since the 1880s. It was an obscure scientific hypothesis that
burning fossil fuels would increase Co2 in the air to enhance the greenhouse
effect and thus cause global warming.
Before
the 1980s this hypothesis was usually regarded as a curiosity because the
nineteenth century calculations indicated that mean global temperature should
have risen more than 1°C by 1940, and it had not. Then, in 1979, Mrs Margaret Thatcher (now
Lady Thatcher) became Prime Minister of the UK, and she elevated the
hypothesis to the status of a major international policy issue.
Mrs Thatcher is now often
considered to have been a great UK politician: she gave her political party (the
Conservative Party) victory in three General Elections, presided
over the UK’s conduct of the Falklands Conflict, replaced much of the UK’s
Welfare State with monetarist economics, and privatised most of the UK’s
nationalised industries. But she had yet
to gain that reputation when she came to power in 1979. Then, she was the first female leader of a
major western state, and she desired to be taken seriously by political leaders
of other major countries. This desire seemed difficult to achieve because her
only experience in government had been as Education Secretary (i.e.
a Junior Minister) in the Health administration that collapsed
in 1974.
She had achieved nothing
notable as Education Secretary but was remembered by the UK public for having
removed the distribution of milk to schoolchildren (she
was popularly known as ‘Milk Snatcher Thatcher’.)
Sir Crispin Tickell, UK
Ambassador to the UN, suggested a solution to the problem. He pointed out that almost all international
statesmen are scientifically illiterate, so a scientifically literate
politician could win any summit debate on a matter which seemed to depend on
scientific understandings. And Mrs
Thatcher had a BSc degree in chemistry.
This is probably the most important fact in
the entire global warming issue; i.e. Mrs Thatcher had a BSc degree in
chemistry.
Sir Crispin pointed out
that if a ‘scientific’ issue were to gain international significance, then the
UK’s Prime Minister could easily take a prominent role, and this could provide
credibility for her views on other world affairs. He suggested Mrs Thatcher should campaign about global
warming at each summit meeting. She did,
and the tactic worked. Mrs Thatcher
rapidly gained the desired international respect and the UK became the prime
promoter of the global warming issue. The
influences that enabled this are described in Figure 1 and the following
paragraphs.
Overseas politicians began
to take notice of Mrs Thatcher’s campaign if only to try to stop her disrupting
summit meetings. They brought the matter
to the attention of their civil servants for assessment, and they reported that
- although scientifically dubious - ‘global warming’ could be economically
important. The USA is the world’s most
powerful economy and is the most intensive energy user. If all countries adopted ‘carbon taxes’, or
other universal proportionate reductions in industrial activity, each non-US
industrialised country would gain economic benefit over the United States. So, many politicians from many countries
joined with Mrs Thatcher in expressing concern at global warming and a
political bandwagon began to roll. Mrs Thatcher had raised an international policy issue and thus become an
influential international politician.
Mrs Thatcher could not have
promoted the global warming issue without the support of her UK political
party. And they were willing to give
that support. Following the General
Election of 1979, most of the incoming Cabinet had been members of the
government which lost office in 1974. They
blamed the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) for their 1974 defeat. They, therefore, desired an excuse for
reducing the UK coal industry and, thus, the NUM’s power.
Coal-fired power stations emit Co2 but nuclear
power stations don’t. Global warming
provided an excuse for reducing the UK’s dependence on coal by replacing it
with nuclear power.
The Conservative Party
wanted a large UK nuclear power industry for another reason. That industry’s large nuclear processing
facilities were required for the UK’s nuclear weapons program and the
opposition Labour Party was then opposing the Conservative Party’s plans to
upgrade the UK’s nuclear deterrent with Trident missiles and submarines.
Unfortunately, the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl
accidents had damaged public confidence in nuclear technology. Then, privatisation of the UK’s electricity
supply industry exposed the secret that UK nuclear electricity cost four times
more than UK coal-fired electricity. Global
warming became the only remaining excuse for the unpopular nuclear power
facilities needed for nuclear weapons. Mrs Thatcher had to be seen to spend money at
home if her international campaign was to be credible.
So, early in her global
warming campaign - and at her personal instigation - the UK’s Hadley Centre for
Climate Prediction and Research was established, and the science and
engineering research councils were encouraged to place priority in funding
climate-related research. This cost
nothing because the UK’s total research budget was not increased; indeed, it
fell because of cuts elsewhere. But the Hadley Centre sustained its importance
and is now the operating agency for the IPCC’s scientific working group
(Working Group 1). Most scientists’ work
depends on funds fully or partly provided by governments. Also, all scientists compete to obtain their
share of this limited resource.
Available research funds were shrinking, and
global warming had become the ‘scientific’ issue of most interest to governments. Hence, any case for funding support
tended to include reference to global warming whenever possible. Much science in many fields may be conducted
under the guise of a relationship to global warming. Activities which have obtained funds by this method
include biology, meteorology, computer science, physics, chemistry,
climatology, oceanography, civil engineering, process engineering, forestry,
astronomy, and several other disciplines. Now, funds for this work are provided to most
UK Universities and several commercial research establishments.
Much peer pressure deters
scientists from damaging potential sources of research funds. There is especial pressure - loss of future
career - to avoid being the first to proclaim the scientific truth of global
warming and thus damage the research funding of colleagues. But failure to proclaim the scientific truth
does not mean that many scientists believe in the global warming hypothesis. In 1992 - at the height of the global warming
scare - Greenpeace International conducted a survey of the world’s 400 leading
climatologists. Greenpeace had hoped to
publicise the results of that survey in the run-up to the Rio summit, but when
they completed the survey, they gave very little publicity to its results. In response to the survey, only 15
climatologists were willing to say they believed in global warming, although
all climatologists rely on it for their employment. Also, the Leipzig Declaration disputes the
IPCC assertions about man-made global warming. It was drafted following the Leipzig Climate
Conference in November 1995 and has been signed by over 1,500 scientists from
around the world.
The
global warming issue is political. It induced the ‘Earth Summit’ that was
attended by several Heads of State in Rio de Janeiro during June 1992 and is
the reason for the Kyoto Summit in Japan in December 1997. Governments have a variety of motives for
interest in global warming. Each
government has its own special interests in global warming but, in all cases,
the motives relate to economic policies. In general, the USA fears loss of economic
power to other nations while this is desired by those other nations.
Universal adoption of ‘carbon taxes’, or other
universal proportionate reductions in industrial activity, would provide
relative benefit to the other nations. Unfortunately,
if a few nations adopted the changes they would increase their manufacturing,
transportation and energy costs and thus lose economic competitiveness and
industrial activity to all other nations. Developing nations cannot afford technological
and economic advances that would benefit them and also reduce their increases
to CO2 emissions as they develop, so they are seeking gifted technology
transfers and economic aid from developed countries.
The press are interested in
selling papers and the TV companies want to gain viewers. Threat of world-wide disaster makes a good
story, and the statements and actions of politicians together with great
increase in scientific publications gave global warming an apparent authority. The media began to proclaim the worst imagined
horrors. For example, massive floods
were predicted due to melting of polar ice.
And one UK TV program went
so far as to assert that the polar bears would die out because their habitat
would melt. The public rely on the media
to provide them with their information, so they came to believe the global
warming scare because they were only given one side of the story. Politicians respond to public concern, so the
politicians’ actions began to gain popular support.
On face value global warming
is an environmental issue. Many
environmentalists joined the bandwagon. Governments
were offering money and the public were concerned at global warming. Any
environmental issue which could be linked to global warming was said to be
involved in the matter. But the
environmentalist interest was aroused by the impact of the issue. Contrary to
common belief, environmentalists did not raise awareness of global warming,
they responded to it. Simply, environmentalist organisations were part of the
general public and decided to use the issue when it became useful to them.
Aspects of the global
warming issue began to feed on each other. Many positive feedback loops exist in the
system and the major ones are shown in Figure 2. The system amplifier is the politicians’
support of global warming. The issue is assisted by gaining political approval
each time it passes around a loop shown in Figure 2.
The UK Government lost
interest in global warming when Mr John Major replaced Mrs Thatcher as Prime
Minister. The flow of Government money
began to stop for conduct of global warming research. UK scientists then began to speak out in
denial of the global warming hypothesis. It seemed that the issue was dying a natural
death. Then the ‘coal crisis’ arose in October 1992 when the public protested
at the scale of pit closures. This gave
the UK Government a new need to find an excuse for its policy of closing coal
mines.
Global warming fitted this need and so the Government committed £16,000,000
to an advertising campaign which scare-mongered about global warming, and
re-established the funding priorities for climate research.
Later, at the start of May
1997, the Conservative Party lost office to the Labour Party and Mr Tony Blair
became UK Prime Minister. The UK had
initiated the global warming issue and a change of UK policy may have had a
significant effect on the widespread imagined risk, but by then the global
warming issue had become important in its own right. Many countries had a stated global warming
policy, 122 of them had signed a declaration of intent to reduce Co2 emissions
at the Rio Summit, and the Kyoto Summit was scheduled. The UK was one of the very few countries that
had reduced its Co2 emissions since the Rio Summit because the UK had replaced
coal-fired generating capacity by gas-fired generating capacity. This provided the UK with a position of
authority in this international affair, and Mr Blair committed the new UK
government to strict action to cut Co2 emissions.
Governments’ global warming
policies
Man-made global warming has
become a major international political issue. The imagined risk has become a real risk in
the form of proposed government policies to inhibit Co2 emissions. The Rio Summit in 1992 proposed actions to
constrain the emissions and the Kyoto Summit in December 1997 is intended to
establish binding agreements that will commit nation states to the constraints.
Although there are no real and potential risks of the global warming, the
effects of the constraints will cause real and severe economic damage.
All industrial and economic
growth requires an abundance of available energy supply. Anything that inhibits energy supplies reduces
economic activity. At Kyoto, governments
will be pressured to reduce Co2 emissions to far below their 1990 levels. This requires cutting fuel supplies and,
therefore, economic activity. The
effects would be much more severe than the ‘oil crisis’ in the 1970s because
the constraint on fossil fuel usage would be greater, the increases to energy
costs would be larger, and energy demand has increased since then.
Already, OECD countries
(Europe, Japan and the US) have agreed in principle to adopt the ‘Berlin
Mandate’ that requires them to cut their Co2 emissions to 15% below their 1990
levels by year 2010. The US Department of Energy (DoE) estimates that this would
increase US domestic energy prices by between 80 and 90% and would increase the
coal price to US consumers by 300%. Also,
the DoE study determines that the Berlin Mandate would not reduce world-wide
emissions of Co2. Energy intensive
industries would be forced to move from the US to places where the emission
constraints did not exist or were not enforced. This could even result in an increase to the
emissions because the less-controlled places are likely to have less energy
efficient industries. The DoE study goes
further by saying that its findings are not specific to the US but apply to
every industrialised country.
The US DoE study is
supported by a similar study commissioned by the German government. That determined the cost to Germany of
fulfilling the Berlin Mandate would be about US$500 billion and the loss of
250,000 jobs.
Industrialised countries
would not suffer alone. The economy of
every country is affected by the performance of the world economy. The economic disruption in the developed world
would harm economic activity everywhere. The largest affects would be in the developed
countries because their economies are largest. But the worst effects would be suffered by the
world’s poorest peoples (people who are near to starvation are starved by economic
disruption).
A rational assessment of
appropriate policies would include cost/benefit analysis, but imagined risk is
not rational. All the proposed responses
to the imagined risk of man-made global warming would increase starvation and
poverty while inhibiting economic development throughout the entire world. And
Co2 emissions would not be reduced and may be increased. In practice, politicians are accepting the
predictions of climate models as being predictions of the future, and they are
acting to change that future.
This is similar to the behaviour of people
who believe horoscope predictions of future harm so they avoid situations where
that harm could happen.
If you want to check out
Richard S Courtney – go to: http://www.desmogblog.com/richard-s-courtney
Reading List:
Environmentalists:
Henry David Thoreau - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau
George
Perkins Marsh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Perkins_Marsh
On
Margaret Thatcher: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7823477/Was-Margaret-Thatcher-the-first-climate-sceptic.html
Miscellany
of Climate Change articles: http://www.greatglobalwarming.com/
Statecraft
by Margaret Thatcher – see Thatcher’s
views on climate change – she later changed her thinking because the so-called ‘science’
was suspect.
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