Climate change and global warming are huge environmental wellness concerns, but is it all as scary as you think? Grassroots Conservative and historian of science Dr James Hannam believes that global warming is getting us concerned for our wellbeing unnecessarily.
According to Dr Hannam, ‘We all know that the world’s average temperature hasn’t changed much for ten or fifteen years. As a result, warnings about dangerous global warming appear to have been awry. Static temperatures for the last decade don’t disprove the predictions of pessimistic climate models, but they do make them less likely. Admittedly, the problems with predicting climate are manifold. As well as increases in carbon dioxide, you have to factor in the ocean’s capacity to absorb heat, the formation of clouds and the importance of other greenhouse gases. But the more factors you build into your model, the higher the uncertainties attached to it.’
In The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver writes that there is a tendency to “over fit” models so that they accidentally reflect past noise, which makes them less effective at forecasting the future. ‘This seems to have happened to climate models,’ says Dr Hannam. ‘There was relatively rapid warming in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, there was more warming than you’d expect from rising carbon dioxide levels alone. To reflect the data, the models built-in positive feedback, whereby increasing temperatures gave rise to knock-on effects that make the world even hotter. These models necessarily expected this rapid warming to continue. But it looks likely that the big increases in temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s were noise rather than signal. The cooler 2000s were just a return to a more modest trend. In that case, the models had been over fitted to the data.’
Dr Hannam asserts, ‘As Matt Ridley has been saying for some time, scary increases in temperature look unlikely this century. Environmental activists who want to return us to the Neolithic won’t be happy. Neither will renewable energy subsidy junkies. But the rest of us should breathe a sigh of relief. Slower increases in temperature mean we have more time to adapt. Replacing coal with gas is the most sensible option. Natural gas produces about half the carbon per unit of energy as dirty coal. We don’t have to bankrupt ourselves with inefficient solar power, ugly windmills or expensive nuclear plants. In fifty years or so, we will need an alternative to gas. Until then, global warming shouldn’t be a crisis. We will only make it one if we increase the cost of energy for no good reason.’
Comments are closed.