Some Thoughts on Global Warming

The January 22nd issue of

Newsweek—with a cover story suggesting that global warming might be responsible for the season’s intense blizzards—arrived about the same time as a letter from my father-in-law. “So much for global warming,” he noted with a jab, in response to the harsh weather we were enduring.

If you look hard enough, you can still find lingering vestiges of debate about global climate change within the scientific community. A lot of these doubters are scientists who keep one hand firmly planted in the pocket of industries that have a vested interest in not taking action to stem the build-up of greenhouse gases. The folks at the University of Virginia come to mind who put out the glossy biweekly newsletter

World Climate Report, which is funded by the Western Fuel Association and seems to be devoted solely to demonstrating that global warming could not possibly be occurring.

My own perspective is rather simple. I’ve been strongly arguing for doing everything we can to reduce the potential for global warming because—even if global warming is not occurring—reducing greenhouse gas emissions makes a great deal of sense for all sorts of other environmental reasons. If the threat of global warming is enough to convince people to conserve energy, great. Let’s link energy conservation measures with reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. Even if scientists later demonstrate that global warming is not occurring, the conservation measures were a good idea anyway, because they saved money, they reduced pressure to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, they reduced SO2 and NOx emissions from coal-fired power plants, and they reduced risk of new oil spills.

I was pleasantly surprised recently to see this approach spelled out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in one of their Working Group Reports. They used the term “No Regrets.” No Regrets measures are defined by the

Global Environmental Change Report as “those measures whose benefits, such as reduced energy costs, equal or exceed their costs to society, excluding any benefits associated with climate change mitigation.”

It so happens that the IPCC report was making the case that we now have enough evidence to warrant going

beyond no-regrets measures, but it seems that as a first step we should all be able to get behind a policy of promoting at least the no-regrets measures that offer easily quantifiable economic and environmental benefits for us all. We might benefit so much through such measures that we will be willing to take the more significant steps needed to deal with what most scientists consider to be a very real threat of global warming. But I’ll wait for a little heat spell to try this idea out on my father-in-law.

– Alex Wilson