A Rational Approach to the Global Warming Issue

All ten of the propositions listed below must be proven true before any significant time, effort, and resources should be expended on costly policy measures in what (even if it were necessary) would be a doomed effort to mitigate the supposed threat from climate change – measures like mandatory limits on emissions (Al Gore), cap-and-trade (EU), or wartime carbon rationing (United Kingdom).

If climate scientists are not agreed that the debate on climate change is over, then we ought not to spend the $500 billion per year advocated by Stern (2006) to mitigate its effects. If the most vociferous doomsayers can be shown to have acted other than in good faith, we ought not to pay the heavy cost of believing them. If temperature has not risen significantly above its natural increase following the end of the cold period of the Damon Minimum in 1910, then there is little we can do to influence the temperature, because natural variability is beyond our control. If the Sun is a major cause of the observed temperature increase, we cannot affect it. If greenhouse gases are not the main reason why temperature is rising, stabilizing them will only make a marginal difference. If temperature will not rise far enough to do more harm than good, there is no cause for alarm.

If continuing emissions are not likely to be harmful to life, there is no reason for action. If the proposed carbon-emission limits and other costs of remedial action would outweigh the benefits, taxpayers should not be burdened with them. If the new polluters of the third world will not deny themselves the growth we have enjoyed, nothing we do will make enough difference to be worth doing. If the “precautionary principle” can be shown in other fields to have done more harm than good, then there is no a-priori justification for applying it to the “global warming” scare. Finally, if the increasing desperation of the alarmists as their scientific case unravels leads them to try to throttle the academic freedom of scientists whose research shows that there is little to fear and much to gain from a warmer world, the resulting misallocation of resources towards addressing this non-problem will – as always – hit the poorest hardest.

For the protection of the poor from the waste of many thousands of billions of dollars which may well arise if the “global warming” scare is permitted to continue unchallenged and if the majority of the mass media is permitted to continue to allow the alarmist viewpoint to dominate, then it is necessary that the falsity of the ten propositions upon which the “consensus” case rests be clearly demonstrated.

Since Arrhenius (1896) the potential effect of increased CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere has been exaggerated. It is time for the exaggeration to stop, the non-problem of “global warming” to be set aside as irrelevant, and the real problem of impending worldwide energy shortage to be properly addressed.