In God We Trust - about catastrophic man-made global warming (Calvin Beisner, Cornwall Alliance)

Link: https://cornwallalliance.org/2018/12/is-fighting-climate-change-really-fightingpollution/?utm_source=Cornwall+Alliance+Newsletter&utm_campaign=c62cdbc3c1EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_12_07_11_47&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b80dc 8f2de-c62cdbc3c1-153356321&mc_cid=c62cdbc3c1&mc_eid=7b6b1bcd37 Please see link above for original document, embedded hotlinks and comments.

Is Fighting Climate Change Really Fighting Pollution?

December 5, 2018 By E. Calvin Beisner

This is the second in a series of posts answering a popular way of defending drastic efforts to reduce global warming that I encountered recently on social media. For the first, click here.

The second point “Bob” made was this: “Whether you think climate change is manmade or not, I don’t know a single person who likes pollution. Everyone I know loves experiencing the beauty of our planet and thinks it’s a good idea to preserve and conserve what we have. No one wants a mini-continent of plastic in the pacific, pollutants in the air, or the destruction of so many incredible parts of our country—much less the world!”

That’s a common argument, and it certainly sounds like common sense. But is it? Five points suggest otherwise.

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First, true enough, no one “likes pollution.” But we also all recognize that there are diminishing returns to how much we should do to reduce it, and we all make cost/benefit analyses that lead us to accept certain levels of pollution. For example, if you spent ten times as much time cleaning and disinfecting your kitchen and bathrooms as you do, you would reduce, by some undeterminable percentage, your risk of contracting a germ-borne disease. But you don’t do that.

Why? Because you consider the benefit not worth the cost in terms of time (and cleaning agents).

The interesting question is “How clean is clean enough?” And the appropriate answer is “As clean as when the cost of getting any cleaner exceeds the benefit of getting any cleaner.” The answer to that question changes with time, circumstances, and technology, but in principle that question is unavoidable, and we all live by it all the time—or at least we try to.

Second, what those who demand action to reduce anthropogenic global warming want us to curb is our emission not of anything traditionally known as pollution (gases, liquids, and solids that put those in contact with them at risk of harm/disease) but of carbon dioxide. But carbon dioxide is an odorless, colorless gas that isn’t toxic at levels that could ever be reached in the open atmosphere.

Occupational exposure standards for CO2 are 0.5% (5,000 ppm) average through a 40-hour work week and 3% (30,000 ppm) for short-term exposure. But those standards are overcautious.

The National Research Council reports that “Data collected on nine nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines indicate an average CO2 concentration of 3,500 ppm [0.35%] with a range of 0–10,600 ppm [0–1.06%], and data collected on 10 nuclear-powered attack submarines indicate an average CO2 concentration of 4,100 ppm [0.41%] with a range of 300–11,300 ppm [0.03– 1.1%].” And we trust those submariners with control of nuclear ICBMs. The breath we exhale contains about 40,000–53,000 ppm (4–5.3%) CO2. Exposure to CO2 only becomes dangerous to life if prolonged more than a few minutes at (40,000 ppm).

Yet, (a) every breath you exhale contains about 40,000 parts per million carbon dioxide, and (b) ambient concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now is about 410 parts per million, about 1/13th the 5,000 ppm occupational safety standard for average exposure in a 40-hour work week—a standard that, as just noted, is unjustifiably too restrictive.

Further, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is essential to all plant growth. Plants use it in photosynthesis, and the more of it they get, the better they grow. On average, every doubling of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere in which plants grow causes about a 35% increase in plant growth efficiency. They grow better in warmer and cooler temperatures and in wetter and drier soils. They make better use of soil nutrients, and they resist diseases and pests better.

Consequently, they increase their range, and they improve their fruit/fiber ratio. That means more food for everything that eats plants—and for everything that eats anything that eats plants.

Who benefits the most from that? The world’s poor, who need more abundant and affordable food.

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In short, carbon dioxide isn’t pollution, it’s the elixir of life. The world needs more of it, not less.

(The 280 ppm of pre-industrial times was near the threshold below which photosynthesis stops— about 175 ppm—and far lower than the 4,000 to 8,000 ppm that prevailed in past geologic times, when vegetation was far more abundant on the earth.) The increasing atmospheric CO2 over the past 200 years, and especially, the past 60 years, has contributed to the greening of the planet and the production of trillions of dollars’ worth of food.

Third, I don’t want a mini-continent of plastic in the ocean, either—and the idea that it’s there is a myth. Yes, there is far more plastic in our oceans than we should want to see there, but it’s a manageable problem that will be overcome as developing countries (mostly in Asia) become richer and control their plastic emissions better. (Comparatively few emissions come from developed countries.)

Fourth, about whether anyone wants pollutants in the air, I repeat my first point above. Then I add this: Pollution emission rates and ambient concentrations tend to rise, peak, and fall in what’s called the environmental Kuznets curve.” In early industrialization, pollution emissions and concentrations rise, and so do the risks they impose, but the benefits of the industrial activity— higher agricultural yields, better housing, safer transportation, etc.—far outweigh the risks of the pollution. How do we know that? Because which mortality rates decline during the same time.

But as societies reach various levels of GDP per capita, their citizens begin to demand—because they can now afford it—reduced emissions through the adoption of more expensive production techniques and emission controls than were affordable in the earlier stage. Consequently, the emissions soon peak (at various income levels, and various emission levels for different pollutants, because the processes required to control them differ in expense). Then they begin to decline. Eventually, the air, water, and land are less polluted than before industrialization.

That’s historical fact traceable in every country that has industrialized—although there are certain factors about culture and governance that make the process go more or less quickly from place to place. (I discuss that in my chapter “Is Capitalism Bad for the Environment?” in the book Counting the Cost: Christian Perspectives on Capitalism, edited by Arthur Lindsley and Anne Bradley and published by the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics.)

Fifth, neither I nor any skeptic of “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming” (CAGW) I know wants “the destruction of so many incredible parts of our country” or the world. What we contest is the notion that such destruction will ensue from continued use of fossil fuels to generate the abundant, affordable, reliable energy that is absolutely indispensable to lifting and keeping any whole society out of poverty.

Before I expand on that, let me point out something else. The risks from poverty are far greater than any from climate. On income equivalent to about the bottom tenth of Americans anyone can thrive in any climate from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert. On the equivalent of $1.50 to $2.00 per day, no one can thrive even in the best tropical paradise. We Americans, so long and so far out of poverty, have no institutional memory of how deadly deep poverty is.

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But to continue with the direct response. The computer models on which the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the various government agencies that basically take their cue from it rely predict, on average, two to three times as much warming as actually observed over the relevant period, which means the empirical evidence falsifies them. They therefore provide no rational basis for any predictions about future global average temperature, and therefore no rational basis for any policy related to global average temperature. The best empirical evidence suggests that “equilibrium climate sensitivity” (the amount that global average surface temperature would rise in response to doubled CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, after all climate feedbacks have had their effect, i.e., in about 200 years) is more on the order of 0.5 to 1.8 degrees C (0.9 to 3.24 degrees F), not the 3C (5.4F) “best estimate” of the IPCC, let alone the 4.5C (8.1F) upper bound of the IPCC’s estimates of what would happen in what it paints as the worst-case scenario of CO2 emissions, and even the IPCC doesn’t forecast serious harm from warming in that range. In all other respects, a warmer world is a healthier world, for both people and all the rest of life on earth—a truth well established historically.

Bob’s third point was this: “For most people, I think this would be a no-brainer issue if it weren’t politicized. But if the above two points are true, your political party affiliation doesn’t matter.

Desiring to see the world less-polluted is non-partisan.” For my reply, click here.

Photo by tam wai on Unsplash. ================================================================ Note 1: Alarmists proclaim certainty and consensus about catastrophic man-made global warming. They call those who don’t lock arms with them all kinds of mean names. Here are some photos of nature in Denver, Colorado with help from humans, namely: water management, weed control and proper plant spacing. In nature plants tend to crowd each other out.

Denver Botanic Gardens at dawn on cloudy day, September 7, 2018 4

Denver Botanic Gardens at dawn on cloudy day, September 7, 2018

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Denver Botanic Gardens at dawn on cloudy day, September 7, 2018

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Denver Botanic Gardens at dawn on cloudy day, September 7, 2018

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Denver is located in a near semi-arid, treeless, short grass prairie. First time visitors observing the terrain outside Metropolitan Denver when landing are shocked at the vast barren ground.

Then they go to downtown where people have been planting trees and tending gardens for over 120 years and see tremendous lush natural beauty. Above are two photos of the High Line Canal and nearby neighborhoods. Life can flourish with the presence of people. Climate change alarmists should not deprive the world of energy from fossil fuels to help make the world beautiful. Wildlife and birds flock to Denver to live as well: foxes, coyotes, racoons, deer, mountain lions, Canadian geese by the hundreds of thousands, herons, hawks, eagles, butterflies by the millions. Don’t let scientifically unqualified man-made global warming alarmists ruin this.

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Note 2: Here is a true story, seemingly unbelievable today with all the media coverage of catastrophic man-made global warming etc.

IN GOD WE TRUST The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from the Consulate at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard of temperatures in the Arctic zone.

Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the Gulf Stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.

Very few seals and no white fish are found in the 9

eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coast cities uninhabitable.

I must apologize. I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922, as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post 96 years ago. This must have been caused by the Model T Ford's emissions or possibly from horse and cattle emissions.

Check with Snopes: True. A 1922 newspaper article reported that "radical change in climatic conditions" was melting Arctic ice and disrupting wildlife.

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Man at light house when ocean is wild after storms. Nature is amazing.

Catastrophic man-made climate change is an unproven media darling.

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