George Will Takedowns

His central arguments against the warming picture are skepticism of temperature measurements (which he does not substantiate) and bringing up "global cooling" (amusing, but a red herring).

However, he does ask a fair question: "Are we sure there will be proportionate benefits from whatever climate change can be purchased at the cost of slowing economic growth and spending trillions?"

I don't know the answer. What are the authoritative references on the subject?

How about the column by Robert Novak in Mondays' Washington Post?

To answer that question, Sourav, we need to know the value of the irreplaceable species and ecosystems that will be wiped out by climate change. You'll need to provide a figure to recompense people for the misery and grief of being driven from their homes and forced to abandon their traditional ways of life.

Would you trust George Will to give you a straight and authorative answer to those questions? Would you trust any of the answers that come from the "pro growth" crowd that has been running the greenhouse-denial "F.U.D." campaign?

re: possible benefits of global warming: I'm not aware of any possible benefits of global warming. I recall seeing a couple of recent news stories reporting that forests don't grow any faster with increased CO2, but that was one or two experiments in particular ecosystems. It may be the case that green things do grow noticeably better with more CO2, but I'm not aware of any proof for this yet.

OTOH, we're getting more bad news about CO2 & the oceans. First, more CO2 means lowering the pH of the ocean, which is hard on corals and plankton. I believe that plankton are, statistically speaking (ignoring vent communities & other marginalia), the base of the food chain for everything in the ocean. So that's bad.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0909/p13s01-sten.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3605908.stm

Also bad is the news of widespread bleaching and death of perhaps as much as 30% of Carribean corals last year. National Park Services Fisheries biologist: "The mortality that we're seeing now is of the extremely slow-growing reef-building corals. These are corals that are the foundation of the reef ... We're talking colonies that were here when Columbus came by have died in the past three to four months."

Also this: "The Caribbean is actually better off than areas of the Indian and Pacific ocean where mortality rates -- mostly from warming waters -- have been in the 90 percent range in past years, said Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance. Goreau called what's happening worldwide "an underwater holocaust.""
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/03/31/coral.death.ap/

It might also be fair to ask whether there might be benefits to hitting the ground once one is pushed from a great height, but I don't think there's any more point to that question than Will's.

Doug

Stefan,

We already put a price on ecosystems: we work with them, and compete with them for space and resources to make modern life possible. Of course technology and greater understanding of ecological processes and agricultural techniques will reduce impact, but this does not invalidate the calculus.

And, it's no more fair to appeal to guilt by association with conservatives than it is with academia and American left. I'll believe whomever makes the cogent argument and shows me the data.

We do? What is the market value of the coral reefs, then? I don't recall ever seeing such a calculation.

Will showed his absurdity on this issue on ABC's This Week. The column was a reprise.

I blogged about it:
http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/read_a_book_george_will_10283.html

Of course technology and greater understanding of ecological processes and agricultural techniques will reduce impact, but this does not invalidate the calculus.

This is a false premise.

Up to this moment, the burden on ecological processes by technology has increased, not decreased. There is no evidence that technology reduces impacts. Certainly some technologies do, but we don't distribute them to be effective.

Best,

D

Steve,

If coral reefs were for sale, there might be. However, they do have a preservation value weighed against alternative uses: fishing, tourism, allowing polluting runoff, etc. Prohibiting these activities has real economics costs. As do rainforests versus logging and agriculture, and so on.

***

Dano,

It's true that technologies that are increasingly cheap to manufacture have only enhanced the demand for energy and raw materials. I agree that technology in general has done nothing to reduce impact. However, I was referring to technologies and ecological knowledge being applied specifically to reducing impact. Perhaps the real question is how to incentivize their use.