On the Treatment of 5th-Graders

Man, if Al Gore was right about one thing, it was those Internets. Without them, my intellectual contributions to the community of Thinking Men would be limited to my own head. If Gore was right about another thing, it’s that the use of fuel has become quite inconvenient. Clearly, with the price of a gallon of gas exceeding $4.00, oil, at least, is increasingly economically inconvenient. Despite claims and popular opinion to the contrary, though, the extent of its ecological inconvenience is still debatable.

Through the efforts of Gore and his audible legions, inquisitions into the actual danger and existence of man-made global warming have regrettably become taboo. Question any aspect of the Green movement and expect to be met with dismissive derision. To do so is to risk being called a conservative. Direct the question at Al Gore or Dartmouth College’s members of the Big Green Bus, two highly intelligent and extremely visible advocates of the movement, and they’ll treat you as though you’d lose magnificently in Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?

For example, the Big Green Bus’ website, in an attempt to explain the wondrous effects of operating on vegetable oil rather than standard gasoline, employed the following illustration of the carbon cycle:



Of course, the suggestion here is that carbon emissions from an automobile using vegetable oil would have no net effect on the environment. Indeed, it seems to be a natural process. However, if the carbon cycle functioned in this perfectly cyclical manner, then how could carbon emissions from burning petroleum be harmful?

As it happens, many forms of biofuels, including that on which the Big Green Bus runs, are actually more pollutive than gas. However, the existing discourse suppresses this insubordination to the Green cause.

Meanwhile, Gore rebuts questions about the validity of his claims in An Inconvenient Truth and the existing debate in the scientific community about the extent of anthropogenic contributions to global warming with the following:

There's really not a debate in the mainstream scientific community. It is the most serious threat that our civilization has ever faced. Look at the fires out in California right now. Look at the epic flooding in the Midwest. Look at the stronger storms, and all predicted. The, the entire North Polar ice cap, Tom. Been there three million years, it's the size of the lower 48 states, and the scientists now say that there's a 75 percent chance it'll be completely gone during the summer in, in as little as five years. This is happening on our watch. We have got to respond.

There have never been floods or storms before? There have never been wildfires before? Strange, because it seems (please forgive my anecdotal evidence, Mr. Gore) that almost every summer there are rampant fires in California. And they are so dangerous because Californians are too afraid to permit necessary, controlled burns of underbrush.

Gore bases many of his assertions on a climate model developed by the UN, whose accuracy has been significantly discredited. A new study published in Physics and Society, a publication of the American Physical Society, notes that, at best, that model overstated the effect of CO2 on temperature by 500-2000%, if it isn’t completely unreliable. Meanwhile, despite Gore’s claims, several more studies reveal that the span and thickness of ice in the arctic is at near-record highs and that average earth-surface temperature has actually decreased in the last couple of years. Clarifying Gore’s claim of a consensus, a recent polling by the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta of more than 51,000 scientists found that only 26% attributed global warming to “human activity like burning fossil fuels.”

So much for a consensus.

Now, I don’t doubt global warming exists or has existed until recently. I’ve seen enough seemingly reliable evidence to indicate that it is. Indeed, the world warmed and cooled on its own long before the avarice and recklessness of the Industrial Revolution provided us with the means to destroy the world ourselves. However, as an individual with a background merely in the social sciences, I do not purport to understand, in even the vaguest manner, the complexities of the hard sciences like Gore or most advocates of the Green Movement.

If the emission of greenhouse gasses does have an adverse effect on the climate, “emissions trading” is the most efficient policy to both deter pollution and then rectify the harm it causes. However, the efficient application of that policy requires that policy-makers understand the cost to society of a unit of pollution. And it seems that, as of yet, the members of the American Physical Society aren’t close to agreeing on the harm of a unit of pollution.

Considering that about 10% of United States’ GDP is expended on energy, overstating the effects of energy in an emissions-trading marketplace would represent an incredible waste of resources and could be economically disastrous. Unfortunately, many individuals and groups interested in “spreading awareness” about global warming have displayed an inclination for hyperbole and fabrication with the details of global warming.

Before proper policy can be made, further investigation into the causes and effects of global warming must first occur, while both politicians and their constituents must maintain an open mind about the actual ramifications of human activities.