Samuelson's Wishful Thinking on Global Warming: BLOG: SciAm Observations

My good-cop colleague George Musser is doing the saintly work of reasoning with global-warming skeptics by calmly laying out the evidence for them. That leaves an opening for somebody to be bad cop in responding to the prattle of more politically influential skeptics and deniers. In the words of the late Vernon Wormer (dean emeritus, Faber College): "That foot is me."
This past Wednesday, Robert J. Samuelson, contributing editor to Newsweek and columnist for the Washington Post, published "Global Warming's Real Inconvenient Truth." You can read it all here. Shorter version: "Trying to do anything about global warming now would be hard, and therefore stupid; the smart strategy is to wait for a magical technology to make our problem go away effortlessly."
Several points on this:
1. Samuelson does a fine job of keeping to the hardcore skeptic game plan of denial-in-depth, which you may recall goes like this:
(a) Global warming is not real.(b) Even if it is real, it is entirely natural.(c) Even if people are causing it, it is nothing to worry about.(d) Okay, it is something to worry about, but there's nothing we can do about it (optional: anymore) except adapt. Economic growth and technology will eventually make it all okay.-- Start at the top and work down only as necessary; whenever possible, find opportunities to jump higher up the list again and repeat.
Samuelson's column perches at (d) but he manages to make a backward swipe at (b) and (c) when he writes,
I'm unqualified to judge between those scientists (the majority) who blame man-made greenhouse gases and those (a small minority) who finger natural variations in the global weather system. But if the majority are correct, the IEA report indicates we're now powerless.
Bravo! Well played, sir!
[More:]
2. Several times in his column, Samuelson seems to invoke an odd definition of "hypocricy." He approvingly quotes himself from 1997:
Global warming may or may not be the great environmental crisis of the next century, but -- regardless of whether it is or isn't -- we won't do much about it. We will (I am sure) argue ferociously over it and may even, as a nation, make some fairly solemn-sounding commitments to avoid it. But the more dramatic and meaningful these commitments seem, the less likely they are to be observed. Little will be done. . . . Global warming promises to become a gushing source of national hypocrisy.
And follows up with:
Ambitious U.S. politicians also practice this self-serving hypocrisy. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a global warming program. Gore counts 221 cities that have "ratified" Kyoto. Some pledge to curb their greenhouse emissions. None of these programs will reduce global warming. They're public relations exercises and -- if they impose costs -- are undesirable.
Samuelson wants to paint saying one thing while doing the opposite and trying but failing to accomplish something as morally equivalent. Only by denying the sincerity of people working against global warming can he deride acts meant to show leadership and commitment as empty "public relations exercises." Similarly, he writes:
Al Gore calls global warming an "inconvenient truth," as if merely recognizing it could put us on a path to a solution. That's an illusion.
If Gore were only asking that everybody recognize the fact of global warming, Samuelson might have a point. But since Gore is asking that we all try to do something about it, it sounds like he is trying to "put us on a path to a solution."
Samuelson's underlying goal seems to be not merely to vilify those campaigning against global warming as hypocrites. He is also implicitly casting those like himself who counsel doing nothing as models of reason and moral consistency. A good trick, if he can manage it.
(James Hrynyshyn at The Island of Doubt has more to say about Samuelson's rebuff to the moral aspects of fighting global warming.)
3. He cites the most recent International Energy Agency report as the factual basis for his gloomy assessment that there is no hope in trying to curb CO2 emissions.
But if the majority are correct, the IEA report indicates we're now powerless. We can't end annual greenhouse emissions, and once in the atmosphere, the gases seem to linger for decades. So concentration levels rise. They're the villains; they presumably trap the world's heat. They're already about 36 percent higher than in 1800. Even with its program, the IEA says another 45 percent rise may be unavoidable. How much warming this might create is uncertain; so are the consequences.
Strangely, the IEA's own conclusions from its work seem to be rather less dour. From the IEA's own press release:
"Technologies can make a difference", said Claude Mandil, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA) today in Paris, presenting the key findings of a new IEA publication: Energy Technology Perspectives: Scenarios and Strategies to 2050. "A sustainable energy future is possible, but only if we act urgently and decisively to promote, develop and deploy a full mix of energy technologies -- including improved energy efficiency, CO2 capture and storage (CCS), renewables and -- where acceptable -- nuclear energy. We have the means, now we need the will", Mr. Mandil added.
But will seems to be what Samuelson is most interested in undermining.
4. The real hope for the future, according to Samuelson, is yet-to-be-identified technology. In his words, global warming is really just "an engineering problem." The practical conclusion is that if global warming is a potential calamity, the only salvation is new technology. What that new technology might be and when it might emerge, Samuelson doesn't really know and doesn't seem disposed to fret about. He's confident that it will arrive, however. So the Samuelson plan for global warming in a nutshell (no jokes, please!) works like this:
Do nothing to curb CO2 emissions now because only hypocrites would want to try.
Invent new technologies that make CO2 go away.
Enjoy world saved from global warming.
At least it sounds realistic.
Implicit in Samuelson's optimism about what a future technology could do is his apparent confidence that it would not turn out to be as disruptive and inconvenient as all the current CO2-reduction options would be. But that would not necessarily be the case. New technologies could be cripplingly expensive, or wreck the environment, or carry other adverse consequences, such as making terrorism easier. But by delaying doing anything about global warming, we leave ourselves fewer options about how to deal with it later.
5. Now the bad news for Samuelson and other techno-utopians who are waiting for radical new energy technologies or atmospheric-processing technologies to save the day. The people working to fight global warming now? They're already factoring the existence of such technologies into their strategies. In the long run, as standards of living continue to rise, energy technologies that have not yet been developed will be essential.
But we will need to start mitigating our CO2 production now anyway because any realistic assessment says that we are decades away from creating and deploying those technologies widely (yes, even advanced nuclear fission technologies). The accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, meanwhile, will keep pushing global climate into the red and disrupting the human world as it does so. Lowering CO2 emissions now thus makes sense not only because it will reduce the burden that our future technologies will have to cope with, but because the problem of global warming will keep gathering momentum at an unchanged or faster rate as long as we do.
To quote again from the IEA press release:
"Improved energy efficiency is an indispensable component of any policy mix", said Mr. Mandil, "and it is available immediately". Accelerating energy efficiency improvements alone can reduce the world's energy demand in 2050 by an amount equivalent to almost half of today's global energy consumption. To achieve this, however, "governments, in both OECD and non-OECD countries, must be willing to implement measures that encourage the investment in energy-efficient technologies", Mr. Mandil added.
I'll have more to say about all this in a few weeks when the September single-topic issue of Scientific American debuts. It is dedicated entirely to energy technologies that can help with global warming--including technologies new enough to gladden Samuelson's heart. And it will help to explain further why Samuelson's solution for global warming is no solution at all. Posted by John Rennie 6 comments
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