Refusal by global-warming activists to address core issues has gone from tiresome to annoying. President Barack Obama committed the dodge in his State of the Union address on Jan. 28 when he declared, “Climate change is a fact.”
Well, who says it’s not?
The climate changes. Everyone knows that. Globally averaged temperature is higher now than it was at the start of the Industrial Age, when human emissions of carbon dioxide began an increase still under way. Everyone knows that, too.
Yet activists disparage discussion beyond those points as denial of the evident. They turn the issue into a moral conflict between believers and deniers. They proceed from confessions of faith—Global warming is real!—to propositions for open-ended increases in energy costs to limit combustion of hydrocarbons.
The president, after affirming that climate changes, said, “And when our children’s children look us in the eye and ask if we did all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world, with new sources of energy, I want us to be able to say yes, we did.”
Actually, the grandkids might regret all-we-could environmental regulation and its inescapable legacy of higher-than-necessary energy costs.
A supremely important question about climate is the degree to which greenhouse gases of human origin contribute to observed warming. The answer indicates the extent to which people can mitigate warming by lowering GHG emissions.
That answer remains stupendously unclear. Recent temperature observations tend to invalidate theories based on assumptions of strong human influence. The theory needs adjustment. More needs to be learned about how the climate works.
Obama and the environmental activists who back him ignore too much when they leap from uncontroversial assertions about the fact of climate change to costly proposals for restructuring energy use. They either don’t know the scientific questions that still lack answers or ignore questions to evade resistance to their agenda.
Either way, the plunge-ahead approach deserves suspicion. Climate policy deserves more-sophisticated debate than it typically receives.
(This article appeared first online at www.ogj.com on Jan. 31, 2014; author’s e-mail: [email protected])