[asa] Pursuing the Prudent Path-Energy, Carbon Dioxide and Earth's Future

Bottom line excerpt:

"Proper use of the precautionary principle suggests we stay the
course of non-atmospheric intervention. In view of these
observations, what does the precautionary principle tell us about
programs designed to curtail the use of fossil fuels? It says, most
clearly, "Don't bite the hand that feeds you," especially when there
is absolutely no evidence that there is anything but blessings that
come from that hand. Indeed, since CO2 is what sustains the
biosphere and makes life possible for us, it would be an affront to
reason to do anything else, and especially to impose draconian
measures that would bring severe economic hardship upon nearly all
the people of the world.

In summary, let well enough alone. The Industrial Revolution has
been a tremendous boon to humanity, as it has lifted large numbers of
our kind from poverty to prosperity. It has also helped the rest of
the biosphere - and thereby us once again - via the powerful aerial
fertilization effect of the carbon dioxide that has gone into the
atmosphere as a consequence of the burning of fossil fuels. Indeed,
it's been win, win, win for all of life; and if there's ever been a
recipe for success, this is it. Therefore, in invoking the
precautionary principle one last time, our advice to policy makers
who may be tempted to embrace Kyoto-type programs is simply this:
Don't mess with success! Fossil-fuel-derived energy has served us
well in the past, and it will serve us well in the future. Letting
nature and the market place take their unimpeded courses is the path
of prudence that will bring unbounded prosperity to generations yet unborn."

~ Janice ... ...... "[Wallace S.] Broecker sees coal as our
near-term energy future. "We have enough coal to fuel everything we
do for centuries," he says. Gasoline can now be produced from coal
for $40 to $45 a barrel. ..." ~ Froma Harrop 24 February, 2006 Seattle Times

Energy, Carbon Dioxide and Earth's Future
Pursuing the Prudent Path

C. D. Idso and K. E. Idso
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change

Cheap energy fuels the economic engine that is reducing poverty
around the world at an unprecedented rate; yet the fossil fuels from
which the lion's share of that energy is derived are claimed by some
to be major threats to the environment. Even though energy from
coal, gas and oil makes possible the processes that sustain the
wonderful standard of living with which much of today's world is
blessed, these fuels are often castigated as being inimical to our
future well-being, due to their presumed propensity to enhance the
planet's natural greenhouse effect and elevate global temperatures to
dangerously high levels. But is a little rise in the air's CO2
content really that big a problem?

CO2, a tiny but essential component of the atmosphere, wields nowhere
near the climatic power often ascribed to it. As presently
constituted, earth's atmosphere contains only 370 parts per million
(ppm) of the colorless and odorless gas we call carbon
dioxide. That's just a little over three-and-a-half one-hundredth of
one percent, i.e., 0.037%. Even if its concentration were tripled,
carbon dioxide would still comprise only a little over a tenth of a
percent of the air we breathe, which is far less than what wafted
through earth's atmosphere eons ago, when the planet was a virtual
garden place. Nevertheless, and as illogical as it would seem (and
truly is!), a mere doubling of this minuscule amount of CO2 is
perennially predicted to produce a suite of dire environmental
consequences, including dangerous global warming, catastrophic sea
level rise, reduced agricultural output, ravaged natural ecosystems
and dramatic increases in extreme weather events, such as droughts,
floods and hurricanes.

Inadequate computer climate models are the sources of multiple
environmental misperceptions. As strange as it may seem, the
frightening prophecies of doom and gloom that are regularly served up
to society on a wide variety of environmental topics by an
all-too-happy-to-oblige media are invariably derived from a single
source of information: the ever-evolving computer climate models that
presume to reduce all of the physical, chemical and biological
processes that combine to determine the state of earth's climate to a
set of mathematical equations out of which the field's practitioners
claim to be able to squeeze a reliable forecast of a host of
unpalatable things to come. But does any reasonable person think
that we even know what all of those complex and interacting processes
are? Or that we can reduce them to such a neat and manageable package?

Apparently, some people answer these questions in the affirmative,
especially those who seek to remake the world into a political
structure more to their liking.

And they are willing to gamble all that humanity has achieved in the
way of modern economic progress on their belief - for we hope it is
nothing more sinister - that the admittedly imperfect climate models
are basically correct in what they are telling us about future
weather. Throwing caution to the wind, therefore, they would have us
embark upon a retrogressive policy that would deny us the many known
benefits that we and the rest of the biosphere could readily reap
from continued and even expanded usage of coal, gas and oil as our
primary sources of economically-important, safe and reliable energy generation.

Science reveals the difference between biological fact and climatic
speculation. Why are we so confident that what many people accept as
absolute truth, i.e., that the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content
will be detrimental to the biosphere, is actually a hundred and
eighty degrees out of phase with reality?

Because science tells us that putting more CO2 in the air would
actually be good for the planet, and because even the best climate
models are manifestly incapable of delivering what we require of
them, i.e., correct climate forecasts.

In the case of the biospheric benefits of atmospheric CO2 enrichment,
it is an indisputable fact that carbon dioxide is one of the basic
building blocks of life, comprising the major "food" of nearly all
plants on earth. With more CO2 in the air, literally thousands of
experiments have proven, beyond any doubt, that plants grow bigger
and better in almost every conceivable way, and they do it more
efficiently, with respect to the availability of important natural
resources, and more effectively, in the face of various environmental
constraints. And when plants benefit, so do all of the animals that
depend upon them for their sustenance, including us humans. Without
question, therefore, CO2 is the elixir of life, the rock-bottom
foundation of nearly all that lives on the planet, be it in the
ground, in the oceans, or in the air.

In the case of the climate models, on the other hand, all one needs
to do to discover their inadequacies is compare their predictions
with the reality of the recent past. Even though the world has
warmed substantially during the period of the industrialization of
the planet - due to who-knows-what (for it cannot be proven that the
contemporaneous rise in atmospheric CO2 was responsible for the
warming) - none of the environmental catastrophes that are supposed
to accompany that warming, according to the climate models, has come to pass.

History and simple logic reveal climate model predictions of
CO2-induced global warming to be untenable. The fact that there have
been no significant increases in either droughts, floods or
hurricanes over the past two centuries of modest global warming poses
an important question. What should be easier to predict: the effects
of global warming on extreme weather events or the effects of
elevated atmospheric CO2 on global temperature? The first part of
this question should, in principle, be answerable; for it is well
defined in terms of the small number of known factors likely to play
a role in linking the independent variable (global warming) with the
specified weather phenomena (droughts, floods and hurricanes). The
latter part of the question, on the other hand, is ill-defined and
possibly even unanswerable; for there are many factors - physical,
chemical and biological - that could well be involved in linking CO2
(or causing it not to be linked) with global temperature.

If, then, the climate models cannot correctly predict what should be
relatively easy for them to correctly predict (the effect of global
warming on extreme weather events), why should we believe what they
say about something infinitely more complex (the effect of a rise in
the air's CO2 content on mean global air temperature)? Clearly, we
should pay the models no heed in the matter of future climate -
especially in terms of predictions based on the behavior of a
non-meteorological parameter (CO2) - until they can reproduce the
climate of the past - based on the behavior of one of the most basic
of all true meteorological parameters (temperature). And even when
(or if!) the models solve this part of the problem, we should still
reserve judgment on their forecasts of global warming; for there will
yet be a vast gulf between where they will be at that time and where
they will have to go to be able to meet the much greater challenge to
which they aspire.

Proper use of the precautionary principle suggests we stay the course
of non-atmospheric intervention. In view of these observations, what
does the precautionary principle tell us about programs designed to
curtail the use of fossil fuels? It says, most clearly, "Don't bite
the hand that feeds you," especially when there is absolutely no
evidence that there is anything but blessings that come from that
hand. Indeed, since CO2 is what sustains the biosphere and makes
life possible for us, it would be an affront to reason to do anything
else, and especially to impose draconian measures that would bring
severe economic hardship upon nearly all the people of the world.

In summary, let well enough alone. The Industrial Revolution has
been a tremendous boon to humanity, as it has lifted large numbers of
our kind from poverty to prosperity. It has also helped the rest of
the biosphere - and thereby us once again - via the powerful aerial
fertilization effect of the carbon dioxide that has gone into the
atmosphere as a consequence of the burning of fossil fuels. Indeed,
it's been win, win, win for all of life; and if there's ever been a
recipe for success, this is it. Therefore, in invoking the
precautionary principle one last time, our advice to policy makers
who may be tempted to embrace Kyoto-type programs is simply this:
Don't mess with success! Fossil-fuel-derived energy has served us
well in the past, and it will serve us well in the future. Letting
nature and the market place take their unimpeded courses is the path
of prudence that will bring unbounded prosperity to generations yet unborn.

http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/about/position/energy.jsp

Supporting references. This brief was written in 1999. References
to the voluminous scientific literature that supports the many
factual statements of this position paper may be found on our website
- http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/Index.jsp - which
we update weekly.

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Sun Feb 4 16:19:42 2007