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The Scientific Case against the Global Climate Treaty by S. Fred Singer A Report from The Science & Environmental Policy Project Fairfax, Virginia July 1999 TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE OVERVIEW EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Climate is Forever Changing Computer Models Don't Work Other Human Influences Have Been Ignored Rising Temperatures Could Have Positive Effects Higher CO2 Levels May Not be "Dangerous" Drastic Reductions in Energy Use… … And Huge Economic Burdens on the Poor Adapting to Climate Change Farming the Ocean THE UNDERLYING SCIENCE. There is No Detectable Anthropogenic Warming The Climate Treaty Goal Natural Climate Variations Human Influences Explaining the Discrepancy Satellite vs. Surface Data Climate Observations vs. Computer Results Historically, a Modest Warming is Beneficial Control of Atmospheric CO2 Adjusting to Climate Change UPDATE(1999) Update on Climate Science Economic Benefits from Global Warming: A Post-IPCC Re- Evaluation The Kyoto Protocol is Ineffective REFERENCES PREFACE The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate the absence of a sufficient scientific basis for the Global Climate Treaty or for the kind of hasty and drastic bureaucratic "solutions" arising from the December 1997 Conference of the Parties (COP-3) in Kyoto, Japan. During more than two dozen seminar lectures presented in the United States and Europe during the past two years, I found that audiences - both scientists and non-scientists responded most favorably when they could see the actual data supporting some of the major scientific conclusions about climate change. Those conclusions are that: • There is no current global warming and little to be expected in the future. • The past, both recent and geologic, has seen large and rapid natural changes in temperature. • Any onset of warmer temperatures would be expected to produce a drop in sea level, not a rise. • The science of climate change is not "settled" or "compelling," and there is hardly any consensus within the informed scientific community. At this point, policymakers who promote the Kyoto Protocol appear determined to impose severe economic hardships on much of the world's population through energy taxes and energy rationing. The United States Senate, which ultimately must be persuaded to ratify the Protocol, has voted 95-0 against such schemes, in the absence of scientific justification. Many labor unions, industries and thoughtful citizens appear to agree with the Senate. It is my hope that readers, after examining the evidence for a manmade climate change or rather the lack of it - will reach the same conclusion. S. Fred Singer, Ph.D., July 1999 OVERVIEW The announced objective of the 1992 Global Climate Treaty (officially known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) is to "achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system" (emphasis added). The problem for policymakers is that no one knows what constitutes a "dangerous" concentration of greenhouse gases. There exists, as yet, no scientific basis for defining such a concentration, or even for knowing whether it is more or less than current levels. Just the same, efforts are now underway to establish a protocol for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, focused mainly on carbon dioxide (CO2) from the burning of fossil fuels by industry, electric power plants, home heating and cooking, automobiles, and other road and farm vehicles. To effectively reduce CO2, such an emission control scheme, with its legally binding targets and timetables still to be decided, will be extremely costly and have a detrimental economic impact on much of humankind. It risks ruining national economies, driving manufacturing and other industrial operations into less regulated countries (with the perverse effect of harming the environment in those countries), and ultimately costing citizens hundreds of billions of dollars. Regulatory costs, although initially borne by industrial and agricultural producers, will eventually be passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices. The loss of jobs, combined with a higher cost of living, will cause severe hardship, especially for the poorest among us. Such economic sacrifices cannot be justified by current scientific evidence. Indeed, scientists continue to put forth new theories to explain why global temperature is not rising, even though greenhouse theory says it should. The Global Climate Treaty, signed at the 1992 "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro, rests on three propositions that are either questionable or demonstrably false. 1: The Climate Treaty supposes that a human influence has been detected in the climate record of the last hundred years, thereby validating the computergenerated predictions of a major future warming. But the climate has not warmed significantly over the last half-century, and not at all over the last 20 years, in contrast to theoretical predictions. 2: It further supposes that any future warming would produce catastrophic consequences, including droughts, floods, hurricanes, rapid and significant sea level rise, the collapse of agriculture, and the spread of tropical disease. But the climate record of the past 3,000 years appears to contradict all these assertions. Historically, warmer temperatures have been beneficial for human welfare and the development of civilization. 3: It presumes - with no scientific definition - to know which atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases are "dangerous" and which are not. To stabilize CO2 concentration at present levels, 30 percent above pre-industrial values, would require a drastic reduction of emissions and of energy use - more than 60 percent worldwide. But again, the historical record indicates that higher levels of CO2 - and they have been much higher in the past - may in fact provide benefits. Some scientists, including the late Roger Revelle, known as the father of greenhouse warming, have speculated that some of these benefits have already turned up in improved agricultural yields. Let's take a broader look at these points. The main conclusion of the UN-sponsored science advisory group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This artful but essentially meaningless phrase has been misread by policymakers as proof that computer models predicting a warming of 1 to 3.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100 have been validated. Such confusion is understandable. The IPCC Policymakers Summary juxtaposes that phrase with the results of climate model calculations of future warming, even though such a connection is specifically denied in the body of the 1996 IPCC report (p. 434). Such misinterpretations to the contrary, the global temperature record of this century, which shows periods of both warming and cooling, can best be explained in terms of natural climate fluctuations, caused by the complex interaction between atmosphere and oceans, and perhaps stimulated by variations of solar radiation that drives the Earth's climate system. [Fig. 1] The weather satellite record of global temperatures, now spanning nearly twenty years, shows no global warming trend, much less one of the magnitude that computer models have led us to expect. The discrepancies between satellite observations and conclusions drawn from computer calculations are so large as to throw serious doubt on all computermodeled predictions of future warming. Yet this discrepancy is never mentioned in the IPCC Policymakers Summary; indeed, the Summary does not even admit the existence of satellites. Extrapolate the maximum allowed temperature trend from satellites to the year 2100 - the "worst-case" scenario - and one might estimate an increase in global average temperature of close to 0.5 degree Celsius - one-half the very lowest IPCC estimate. But 0.5 degree C is barely detectable and completely inconsequential. Moreover, any calculated warming will be reduced by the cooling effect of volcanoes. Even though we cannot predict the occurrence of a volcanic eruption, we have sufficient statistical information about past eruptions to estimate their average cooling effect; yet this is one of several factors not specifically considered by the IPCC. Are warmer temperatures necessarily bad? History shows us that human health and human activities, especially agriculture, thrive during warm periods and falter during cold ones. Infectious diseases are not related to temperature, but to poor hygienic practices, lacking public health services, and, ultimately, poverty. A warming trend should lead to a reduction in severe storms as the equator-to-pole temperature differences diminish. Also, new research indicates that warmer temperatures would likely cause sea levels to fall, not rise, as ocean evaporation increases precipitation over the poles and thickens the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica. With climate change - and climate has often changed - the traditional route for humankind has been simply to adapt. What is more, if it should become advisable to limit the increase of atmospheric CO2, it might be more cost-effective to speed-up CO2 absorption into the oceans than to resort to energy rationing. Recent successful experiments in fertilizing the ocean with micronutrients indicate that in the near future it may be possible to not only draw down CO2 but to increase phytoplankton and fish populations at the same time, thereby deriving commercial benefits from what was once considered a problem. Fig. 1 Global temperature versus time, as determined from surface measurements. The temperature changes are referred to an arbitrary baseline. Three different compilations are shown: IPCC [1996]14, GISS [Hansen and Lebedeff, 1987] and Hasselmann [1997]27. While all three records show the remarkable warming before 1940, likely a natural recovery from the cooling of the "Little Ice Age," the records differ considerably after 1940. The differences between these records illustrate some of the uncertainties in the "global" climate record caused by the selection and treatment of the data. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Climate is Forever Changing We start with the observation that climate is forever changing, in many cases for reasons we do not yet understand. External changes are brought about by the variability of the sun, by volcanic eruptions, and, more rarely, by impacts of large asteroids or comets. But on the time scale of years and decades, the most important changes arise from complicated interactions between the atmosphere and the ocean; the El Niño events that cause global changes in temperatures and rainfall are a good example. On a longer time scale, the Earth has experienced some seventeen glacial episodes - Ice Ages - in the last 2 million years. The variability of this past climate can be demonstrated by examining tree rings, ice cores, and ocean sediment cores, all of which show evidence of large and rapid temperature changes, even in recorded history - i.e. during the past 3,000 years. "Global" thermometer records have been available only since about 1880, and much of the world (particularly in Asia and Africa) temperature data were logged only sporadically, if at all. Even today large portions of the southern hemisphere and the oceans are not monitored regularly. It is only in the last 20 years that we have had truly global temperature data of the lower atmosphere from weather satellites. Here is what the temperature data tell us: There has been a sharp warming from about 1880 to 1940, which is generally assumed to be a natural recovery from the "Little Ice Age," a period of much colder temperatures that began around 1450. After the 1940 peak, temperatures fluctuated, generally declining till about 1975 when there may have been a sudden increase [Fig. 1]. Surface thermometers show such an increase lasting into the middle 1980s; satellite data, however, backed up by observations from balloon-borne instruments, show no increase whatsoever since 1979, and even a slight cooling. There is still fierce debate about the discrepancy between surface data and satellite temperature trends, but there is considerable evidence that the surface-based thermometers, generally located at airports near cities, have been contaminated by the "urban heat island" effect, which produces warmer temperatures locally. Climate records corrected for this effect show maximum temperatures occurring around 1940, rather than in the 1980s. Computer Models Don't Work Three-dimensional climate models that run on fast computers, the so-called General Circulation Models (GCMs), have become much more sophisticated but still do a poor job of representing the atmosphere. Their results differ widely, some showing a warming of 1.5 degrees C or less, others of 4.5 degrees C or more. Because these models suffer from poor spatial resolution - about 300 km - and an incomplete knowledge of cloud physics, computer modelers cannot depict actual clouds but must instead "parameterize" cloudiness, which accounts for much of the wide range of GCM results. The GCMs also implicitly incorporate a positive feedback from atmospheric water vapor (the most important greenhouse gas), which greatly amplifies the effect of a CO2 increase. In reality, the feedback may well be negative, instead of positive. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has tried to explain the discrepancy between observed and calculated temperature changes. In its first assessment, in 1990, it simply ignored the satellite data and pronounced the observations and calculations to be "broadly consistent." The second and most recent assessment, published in 1996, no longer uses this phrase. Instead, the IPCC tries to explain the difference between observations and theory by introducing the cooling effects of anthropogenic sulfate aerosols, i.e. particles derived largely from sulfur pollution produced by burning coal. It reduces the calculated "best" warming trend from 0.3 C down to 0.2 C per decade, which is still in disagreement with the satellite results. The IPCC also appeals to a supposed similarity of observed and calculated temperature patterns and concludes that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This ambiguous phrase has been widely used to argue that the climate models produce results validated by observations. The models are still inadequate in representing the real atmosphere, however, and no such validation has occurred. Just a year after the IPCC published its 1996 report, it has become apparent, on the basis of recent computer studies, that the discrepancy between observations (showing no warming trend) and theory (projecting a 0.2 to 0.3 C temperature increase per decade) can no longer be explained by the assumed cooling effects of sulfate aerosols. So what could be causing the gap? One set of explanations relies on effects internal to the models, principally their inadequate treatment of clouds and water vapor. It is thought that, if the models are improved, the positive feedback from water vapor would be reduced, or even reversed, resulting in a climate sensitivity (i.e., temperature increase for a CO2 doubling) of perhaps less than 1 degree C. Such temperature changes would be barely detectable in view of the noisiness of the natural variations, and would be quite inconsequential in their impact on climate. The other set of explanations relies on external effects, principally caused by the 11-year cyclical variations of solar ultraviolet radiation, or on the corpuscular emission from the sun, the so-called "solar wind." Ultimately, these solar variations produce changes in cloudiness or in atmospheric ozone, which can more directly affect the climate. These two sets of explanations have very different consequences, and call for very different policy responses. With the science largely unsettled, there is urgent need for further research. Other Human Influences Have Been Ignored There are other greenhouse gases, in addition to carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels: nitrous oxide from agricultural fertilizers, various halocarbons, and methane from oil and gas operations, cattle raising and rice growing. International control efforts focus almost exclusively on CO2, yet methane has increased more than 100 percent in the past century and, on a per-volume basis, is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. Aside from raising the level of greenhouse gases, an expanding population is changing the ratio between cropland and forests, and thereby the reflecting power ("albedo") of the surface. Growing air traffic is changing the chemical composition of the lower stratosphere and may be producing sufficient contrails and cirrus clouds to show climate effects. Even the diversion of river water can affect ocean circulation, and thereby climate. It is the task of research scientists to decide which of the many human influences are important enough to be incorporated into climate models. For example, if the Aswan Dam, by reducing the flow of the Nile, increases the already high salinity of the Mediterranean, can its outflow through Gibraltar disturb the North Atlantic circulation and affect North American and European climate, as has recently been suggested? Rising Temperatures Could Have Positive Effects Possible climate changes from human activities need to be considered from the perspective of natural changes. The geologic record shows natural changes that were larger and more rapid than those predicted by many computer models, and certainly larger than can be expected on the basis of extrapolation of observed temperature trends. Nevertheless, one should examine the potential impact of even a moderate temperature increase. Judging from the climate record of the last 3,000 years of human history, climate consequences of a greenhouse warming should be generally beneficial. One would expect severe weather to be less frequent because of (calculated) reduced equator-to-pole temperature gradients. In fact, the frequency and intensity of hurricanes have decreased over the past 50 years, although the reason for this is not known. The most feared consequence of global warming has been a catastrophic rise in sea level, resulting in coastal flooding and the disappearance of some islands. But new research indicates that increased ocean evaporation would lead to more rain--and therefore to more ice accumulation in the polar regions. As such, sea levels may actually drop. An empirical study of sea level change and sea-surface temperatures of the past century appears to point in that direction. As far as agriculture is concerned, the combination of warmer weather and increased CO2 would be beneficial. More CO2 promises rapid plant growth and, at the same time, reduced water consumption because of reduced evapo-transpiration from leaves. The climate warming that has been calculated would be most noticeable at higher latitudes, primarily in the winter and at night, and would result in fewer frosts and a longer growing season. Farmers can adjust to local climate changes - as they have in the past - with improved technology and proper crop selection. Higher CO2 Levels May Not Be "Dangerous" One of the often expressed concerns has been that ongoing atmospheric changes could reach a "dangerous" level that might cause climate to become extremely unstable, or precipitate a sudden switch to a new climate state that would be detrimental to human existence. Again, looking at the climate record, there have been many large climate fluctuations, but nothing that would lend support to the idea of a climate "surprise." If anything, the variability of climate was greater during the last Ice Age, when CO2 levels were less than 200 parts per million, than during the most recent 10,000 years of the warm interglacial (the Holocene), with CO2 levels at 280 ppm. The geologic record does not indicate that CO2 levels higher than the present level (of 350 ppm) would be "dangerous." In fact, some 500 million years ago the planet experienced CO2 levels as high as 15 times the present level: they have been declining ever since, reaching a secondary peak of about 1500 ppm some 200 million years ago. If we cannot tell whether higher levels of carbon dioxide are better or worse than present or pre-industrial levels, there is little point to mounting elaborate schemes to control CO2 emissions. Drastic Reductions in Energy Use... The IPCC has determined that maintaining the present atmospheric concentration would require that CO2 emissions be reduced by well over 60 percent worldwide and kept at that value. Any lesser reduction would only slow down the ongoing increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. But even a politically more palatable target of 550 ppm, much talked about in the IPCC report, would require a CO2 reduction of some 50 percent, with a corresponding reduction in the use of energy. When the Conference of Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change (Global Climate Treaty) held their first meeting in Berlin in 1995 (COP-1), it was decided to exempt, or at least defer, developing countries from the obligation to stabilize or reduce CO2 emissions. But since their emissions will very rapidly exceed those of industrialized countries - by the year 2010 - emission control schemes become purely a political exercise without any scientific basis. This is quite evident from the fact that there is no scientific guidance on how to define and avoid a "dangerous" level of CO2 - the announced goal of the Climate Treaty. ...And Huge Economic Burdens on the Poor Reducing the emission of CO2 - or even stabilizing CO2 at the present level - would put huge economic burdens on the industrialized nations and their citizens. If an emissions trading scheme is put in place, which allows industrialized nations to buy unused permits from developing nations, it may do little to reduce global emissions. Depending on how national emission quotas are set, emission trading may simply develop into a giant scheme to transfer wealth between nations, or - as some have put it - taking from the poor in the rich countries and giving to the rich in the poor countries. It is, of course, obvious that oil-exporting nations will suffer economic losses if demand is reduced by industrialized countries. It is less well known that developing countries, relying on trade and foreign investments, may also incur losses if the economies of the industrialized nations falter . There is considerable concern, particularly in the United States Senate, that imposing energy restrictions will not only raise energy prices to consumers, but cause industries to transfer operations to nations that do not incur these restrictions. The current U.S. administration has attempted to reassure the Congress that economic losses will not occur or will not be too severe if they do. But if it becomes apparent that a global warming could produce net benefits rather than net losses, it may be difficult to construct a benefitcost analysis to convince the public and the Congress to go along with restrictions on energy use through what amounts to a hidden energy tax. Adapting to Climate Change The recommended policy to meet any consequences of growing atmospheric greenhouse gases is to rely on human adaptation to any climate change, coupled with a "no-regrets policy" of energy conservation and increased energy efficiency. ("No-regrets" energy policies are those that make economic sense even if no climate change occurs.) Common sense is the key. Over-conservation can waste energy if it destroys energy-imbedded capital stock that requires new energy expenditures to replace. Adaptation has been the traditional method of meeting climate changes; it has worked over thousands of years for human populations that were not as technologically advanced nor as materially endowed as those at present. The resources saved by not restricting energy use through rationing or taxing can be applied to make human societies more resilient to climate change, whether manmade or natural. After all, any effects from climate change over the next century will be minor compared to societal changes brought about by new technology, rising incomes and population growth. Farming the Ocean In spite of the absence of observed global warming, and in spite of the expectation that warm temperatures would likely produce net benefits, governments may still feel politically compelled to reduce the ongoing increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. As an alternative to controlling emissions, the idea of sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere by creating tree plantations has been widely discussed. An equivalent scheme - potentially much more effective and with much lower cost than controlling emissions - would speed up the absorption of excess CO2 into the ocean. It has been successfully demonstrated recently that fertilizing certain regions of the ocean with micronutrients, like iron, can significantly increase the populations of phytoplankton. In addition to enhancing a basic food source for fisheries, ocean farming can also serve to absorb atmospheric CO2. In short, it may soon be possible to turn excess CO2 into a resource, making it no longer a menace.