Column: Global warming is a heated debate

By Asim Thakore

Published Sept. 14, 2007

There are plenty of good places to start from in a serious academic debate over global warming. For instance, this gem from Ann Coulter, a serious news analyst who makes the well warranted claim that "global warming is the left's pagan rage against mankind." I personally believe that Ann Coulter looks more like a man than I do, and I fear she might be some kind of angel of death, or at least the angel of extreme sexual frustration.

For what it's worth, I suggest starting with the debate over Bjorn Lomborg, an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School. His work contains foundational arguments for those who believe that any fixes for global warming would be too costly, at least in terms of increasing the quality of life human beings around the globe.

His argument could be concisely summed up as:

1. Global warming is not going to be devastating.

2. Fixes for global warming trade off with the kinds of economic growth that the Third World needs. That is, pollution is good, because it is an indicator of economic growth, which is key to raising global living standards.

Such an argument is justifiably problematic. The most cogent critiques of Lomborg's work come from the world's best economists, who argue he's missed the boat on calculating the costs and benefits of solutions to global warming, and from scientists, who argue that he cherry-picks his data and relies on singular climatic projections.

For example, where Lomborg argues that there'll be a 4.7-degree increase in global temperature over the next century, there's no discussion of the (quite likely) possibility that this increase might be greater. A better statistician or economist would argue here that a cost-benefit calculation should thus rely on an expected value calculation, imputing each range of likely temperature increases to its probability.

Additionally, Lomborg fails to acknowledge the existence of global feedback loops that are triggered at some specific point. For example, when rising temperatures melt the Siberian permafrost and release the millions of tons of methane locked up in the landmass there it will supercharge the greenhouse effect. The existence of even one such feedback loop throws a wrench into the predictions of anyone who claims that even a limited amount of warming won't be so bad.

Yale economist William Nordhaus argues that Lomborg's arguments against the (costly) establishment of institutions like the Kyoto Protocol are wrong, based on the grounds that it's not necessarily the direct effects of the Kyoto Protocol that are likely to make a difference, but rather the establishment of the international institutions (and the legal mechanisms for enforcement) through which better solutions would presumably be enforced. That is, it's probably true the Kyoto caps won't really work in terms of markedly slowing either carbon dioxide emissions or warming itself. But, we'll have better ideas and better technology soon, and we don't want hold it up by wrangling over the mechanisms of enforcement.

Harvard economist Martin Weitzman expresses the consensus of a good number of economists (if not the majority) who argue that if we're concerned at all about the welfare of future generations and we recognize a non-negligible risk of global catastrophe (not to mention the specter of extinction), we need to leave the next generation with options. This means, at the very least, policies for gradually cutting down on carbon emissions.

Alternatively, we could all become pagans and start eating babies.