Environmentalists also tend to worry
a lot about carbon emissions from human productive activity because of the
possibility of them causing ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’. Most climate
scientists agree that carbon getting trapped in the atmosphere will have a
warming effect. What they disagree about is the climatic feedback effects of
this warming. Some theorize that the climatic feedbacks will amplify the
carbon/greenhouse warming effect by three times, as more evaporation from the
oceans leads to even more heat-trapping than the carbon greenhouse effect
because water vapour itself is the main greenhouse gas. More skeptical
scientists theorize that the climatic feedbacks will actually dampen the carbon
warming effect by half, as the extra water vapour from the direct warming effect
of the carbon condenses into clouds, which reflect sunlight back out to space
and cool the earth. The empirical data collected so far is probably not
conclusive enough to directly lead to one theory or the other, but the extent
of warming predicted in the 1980s based on the former theory has not shown up in
the empirical data, lending some legitimacy to the skeptical position.
(Note: All of this information is from the short article, The
Skeptic’s Case, by climate scientist David M.W. Evans, found at https://mises.org/daily/5892/
)
I
am not a climate scientist, and which theory is correct is an issue to be
solved by the physical sciences, not the social sciences. Despite this, this
scientific question has some political implications, which can be analyzed as a
social science question.
Essentially,
there are three ways of dealing with the potential anthropomorphic climate
change issue, which I will outline and evaluate. The first is to politicize the
issue and throw it as a bone of contention into the cesspool of party politics.
Some interest groups and political groupings will be interested in exaggerating
the threat; some will be interested in downplaying the threat, depending on
their economic positions or general political ideologies. Sympathetic
scientists will be enlisted by both sides, and scientists of the other
viewpoint will be denounced, making a political/ideological issue of a physical
science issue that in truth either goes one way or the other, and that is
decidedly not a ‘matter of opinion’. There will be strong forces operating to
undermine the scientific integrity of the climate science field. Based on shaky
scientific theories influenced by general political ideologies, governments
will enact policies with serious ramifications for the productiveness of the
economy. This ‘solution’ is decidedly the worst, and it is the solution being
pursued at the moment.
The second
way of dealing with the issue is through a courts and property rights approach,
similar to the way of dealing with air pollution outlined previously. It could
be argued that along with property rights in the quality of the air which can
be protected against polluters, people also have property rights in a climate
not substantially changed for the worse by the actions of other humans. Thus,
someone would have the right to bring a lawsuit regarding climate change to the
courts. If it could be proven, according to the normal rules of evidence and
beyond a reasonable doubt, that other humans were causing climate change, the
nature and extent of that change, and that the change would negatively impact
the property of the plaintiff, the courts could then authorize the government
to set up some kind of carbon cap and trade system to prevent or mitigate this
change. These kinds of cases would bring climate change science under the
scrutiny of the judicial system, and the rigorous rules of evidence would apply.
Hopefully, this would allow climate change policy to be less politicized and
more based on objective scientific evidence. The problem is that by recognizing
people’s absolute right to an unchanged climate, this could, assuming the
evidence were there, lead to some pretty rigid carbon caps which might have
serious implications for productivity.
The third
way of dealing with the issue is probably, given that the science seems to
suggest that the theories of the global warming alarmists are either not correct
or exaggerated, the one I currently prefer. This is to treat any
anthropomorphic climate change that might occur as a natural phenomenon, and
thus not a violation of anyone’s rights, just like an earthquake is a violation
of no one’s rights. The fact is that, whether caused by humans or not, the
world’s climate will substantially change at some point in the future. The
coming and going of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1550 to 1850
AD, with different effects in different regions of the world, represented a
serious climate change that occurred relatively recently. The richer, the more
capital-intensive, and the more technologically-advanced the people of the
world are, the better they will be able to deal with any dislocations which
climate change might cause. Crippling production through strict anti-carbon
emissions laws will lead to less of these things, the things that people need
to effectively adapt to any climate change, man-made or otherwise. Thus,
perhaps the best solution is just to let people press on with un-crippled
production and hence be more ready for any climate change when it occurs.
Of these
solutions, I think that one is the worst, while two and three both have their
merits. Given the current state of the science, I think approach three would be
the simplest and the best overall, but if the science clearly indicated a
serious problem that climate change might cause, perhaps taking it to court and
allowing a carbon cap and trade system if the case was successful could be called
for. In either case, climate change is certainly not something that should make
us rethink our entire economic system and substantially cripple our productive
potential as some radical environmentalists claim.
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