The mass-production of sturdy, weather-proof buildings … the universal availability of heating and air conditioning … the ability to flee the most vicious storms through modern transportation … the protection from drought through modern irrigation … the protection from disease through modern sanitation–all of these have led to a 99 percent reduction in the number of climate-related deaths over the last century.

Given how obsessed America is about climate change (or some intellectuals/politicians want us to be), these facts should be well-known and incorporated into every discussion of industrial policy. Those who claim to care about a livable climate for the future should strive to understand the mechanisms by which industrial capitalism has already created the most livable climate in history.

If they did so, they would learn from such thinkers as Ayn Rand and Ludwig Von Mises how capitalism, by permitting only voluntary associations among men, unleashes the individual human mind–and that millions of such minds, free to associate and trade however they choose, will engage in stupendously intricate, collaborative planning for everything from how to make sure they can always get groceries to how to account for nearly any conceivable weather contingency.

Armed with an understanding of individual freedom and individual planning, the climate-concerned would suspect that any preventable problem in dealing with weather–such as widespread vulnerability to flooding–is caused by government interference in voluntary trade, such as taxpayer-financed flood insurance that encourages people to live in high-flooding areas.

Center for American Regress?

Unfortunately, an understanding of capitalism and climate is sorely lacking at the Center for America Progress, the hottest left-wing think-tank today. On its blog, ThinkProgress, the Center recently ran a piece by Christian Parenti entitled Climate Action Opponents Are Ensuring the Outcome They Claim to Oppose: Big Government.

A little translation is in order. From an individualistic perspective, “climate action” refers to the actions that free citizens take to make their climate as livable as possible–the kinds of actions that decreased climate vulnerability 99% in the last century.

But from the collectivist, statist perspective of CAP, “Climate Action” refers to dramatic caps on energy generated from hydrocarbons–the energy source that runs the industrial capitalist system that has increased our life expectancy from 30 to 80 years.

How will banning the vast majority of modern energy production help us oppose “Big Government”? Because otherwise we would face so many catastrophic storms, the article argues, that the government would necessarily become a disaster-recovery Leviathan.

After all, Mr. Parenti takes as given, government is the only entity that can adapt to storms: “To adapt to climate change will mean coming together on a large scale and mobilizing society’s full range of resources. In other words, Big Storms require Big Government.”

Big Storms Require Limited Government

In fact, the larger-scale a problem, the more freedom is essential. As economist George Reisman brilliantly explains in his landmark essay on global warming economics,

Even if global warming is a fact, the free citizens of an industrial civilization will have no great difficulty in coping with it—that is, of course, if their ability to use energy and to produce is not crippled by the environmental movement and by government controls otherwise inspired. The seeming difficulties of coping with global warming, or any other large-scale change, arise only when the problem is viewed from the perspective of government central planners.

It would be too great a problem for government bureaucrats to handle (as is the production even of an adequate supply of wheat or nails, as the experience of the whole socialist world has so eloquently shown). But it would certainly not be too great a problem for tens and hundreds of millions of free, thinking individuals living under capitalism to solve. It would be solved by means of each individual being free to decide how best to cope with the particular aspects of global warming that affected him.

Individuals would decide, on the basis of profit-and-loss calculations, what changes they needed to make in their businesses and in their personal lives, in order best to adjust to the situation. They would decide where it was now relatively more desirable to own land, locate farms and businesses, and live and work, and where it was relatively less desirable, and what new comparative advantages each location had for the production of which goods. Factories, stores, and houses all need replacement sooner or later. In the face of a change in the relative desirability of different locations, the pattern of replacement would be different. Perhaps some replacements would have to be made sooner than otherwise. To be sure, some land values would fall and others would rise. Whatever happened, individuals would respond in a way that minimized their losses and maximized their possible gains. The essential thing they would require is the freedom to serve their self-interests by buying land and moving their businesses to the areas rendered relatively more attractive, and the freedom to seek employment and buy or rent housing in those areas.

Given this freedom, the totality of the problem would be overcome. This is because, under capitalism, the actions of the individuals, and the thinking and planning behind those actions, are coordinated and harmonized by the price system (as many former central planners of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have come to learn). As a result, the problem would be solved in exactly the same way that tens and hundreds of millions of free individuals have solved greater problems than global warming, such as redesigning the economic system to deal with the replacement of the horse by the automobile, the settlement of the American West, and the release of the far greater part of the labor of the economic system from agriculture to industry.

Conclusion

We should be thankful that previous generations were not governed by the “ThinkProgress” philosophy of regarding government coercion as the solution to future changes, whether economic or environmental. Had they followed the near religious state-worship of Center for American Progress, we would have had the equivalent of Barack Obama or Christian Parenti dictating to millions of Americans when, how, or if they could transition to automobiles or go West or leave their farms. If we do indeed face worse weather ahead, then nothing is more important in preparing than more industry and more freedom.

————————-

Alex Epstein is a Principal at MasterResource and Founder of the Center for Industrial Progress.

[Editor's note: This is Part II (Part I here) of a two-part analysis examining projections of increasing human mortality to accompany projections of increases in temperature resulting from greenhouse gas emissions produced from burning fossil fuels to produce energy. Such studies typically give short shrift to the effectiveness of rather simple adaptations and the power of cheap, and reliable electricity.]

In my post yesterday, I discussed the seemingly incongruent fact: the more frequent heat waves, the fewer the number of people who die from them. This results from adaptive measures that the people who live in hot places incorporate into their lifestyles. These adaptations include access to air-conditioning which is facilitated by the availability of cheap, reliable, and abundant electricity.

Today, I’ll look more in detail at a new paper which projects a rapid rise in human mortality across Europe to accompany projections of rising temperatures there—contrary to observations.

Promulgating the Myth

Underplaying our adaptive power and our innate desire not to want to die is essential in order to support such a finding, and this way of thinking (along with some misapplied statistics) is on display in the just-published paper by Joan Ballester and colleagues which appears in the new journal Nature Communications. And just in case this idea is not readily apparent in the actual article, the Associated Press’ Seth Borenstein—not one to let a good global-warming-is-going-to-be-bad-for-you story pass by—played up the negative and played down the positives in his widely distributed coverage “Heat will kill more than cold in Europe, eventually.” The ‘independent’ expert on Seth’s go-to list on heat-related mortality, Jonathan Patz, is happy to oblige Seth’s want of confirmation of the study’s conclusions that rising temperatures are going lead to rising temperature-related mortality and goes on to add that this new study “is really an essential paper in the field of climate change and health.”

Had Seth interviewed me, he would have gotten a completely different take.

Something like, “This new study is statistically flawed, based on overly pessimistic assumptions, and as such, does not give a proper perspective on the future relationship between climate change and temperature-related mortality. The prospects for the future are much brighter than this paper portrays.”

Here’s why.

Summer vs. Winter Mortality

For starters, the new study by Joan Ballester and colleagues makes a rather large error in developing the temperature-mortality relationships across Europe. They assume that since there is a close correlation between daily temperatures and daily mortality across the year, that daily mortality must be caused by daily temperature. In doing so, they fall into the old “correlation does not imply causation” trap.

This is an easy trap to fall into in this case because there is a seasonality to human mortality—more people die in the winter than in the summer. Thus it seems logical to conclude that there is a strong temperature component to human mortality which suggests that cold kills more people than heat.

But such logic will get you in trouble and lead to incorrect suppositions and results—as it has in the case of Ballester et al. study.

Ballester et al. assume that cold temperatures on a daily timeframe lead to a large signal in the daily mortality numbers. But this is largely untrue—with the exception of very rare extreme cold outbreaks. You wouldn’t necessarily know this by plotting up daily temperatures vs. daily mortality—which is what Ballester et al. do.

For example, Figure 2 is taken from their paper and apparently shows a strong relationship between daily temperature and daily mortality. This roughly U-shaped relationship suggests that lower temperatures lead to elevated mortality and higher temperature lead to elevated mortality, with a minimum somewhere in the middle. And Ballester et al. model this apparent relationship for locations across Europe. Then, using temperature projections from the 21st century produced by climate models run with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, they produce mortality projections under for the future climate conditions.

Figure 2. Observed relationship between daily temperatures and numbers of deaths in Europe (source: Ballester et al., 2011).

But like I said, the relationship that they are observing is incorrectly captured by their statistical model. In fact, daily temperature only detectably influences daily mortality on a few of the hottest days of the year in some places. And the impact of even monthly temperatures is debatable.

In another study from the same research group I was involved with which was doing temperature-related mortality research (being led by Dr. Robert Davis from the University of Virginia) we set out to examine the seasonality of temperature/mortality relationships. What we found was that the U-shaped relationship between daily temperatures and daily mortality illustrated in Figure 2, largely disappeared when daily temperatures were plotted against daily mortality anomalies. Figure 3 shows our results for an example city (in this case Kansas City). Due to scale considerations, the original U-shape (the top panel in Figure 3) that you get when you plot daily temperature against daily mortality doesn’t appear as distinct as in Figure 2, but it is still present and strong. But when we plot daily temperatures against daily mortality anomalies (bottom panel in Figure 3), all sense of a relationship disappears with the exception of the very hottest days. In other words, the time of the year is far more important at driving daily mortality than is the actual temperature.

Figure 3. (a) Population-adjusted daily mortality vs 07:00 h local standard time (LST) temperature (°C) for the Kansas City metropolitan statistical area (MSA). A linear regression line is superimposed. (b) Same as in (a) but for de-seasoned, population-adjusted daily mortality (source: Davis et al., 2004).

Now you might say, well aren’t the two (temperature and season) closely related? Well, yes and no. In the Northern Hemisphere, it is colder in the winter than it is in the summer, but it is not always the case that the temperature is dangerously cold in the winter or dangerously hot in the summer. A good example of this is to consider the mortality seasonality observed in Detroit, Michigan with that in, say, Miami, Florida (Figure 4). In both cases, the seasonally amplitude of mortality is similar—about 3 more people die on an average winter day than on an average summer day in both locations. But, the average winter morning temperature in Miami is not that dissimilar from the average summer morning temperature in Detroit. In fact, the average low temperature during the winter in Miami is about 65°F (18.5°C)—not all that different from what many folks set their thermostats to in the winter. The cold is not killing people in Miami.

Figure 4. (top) Average standardized daily mortality (per million people) during the winter (December-February) and during the summer (June-August) for the cities of Detroit and Miami. (bottom) Average daily 7am temperature during the winter and summer for the same locations (data from Davis et al., 2004).

This is what we wrote in our paper:

After de-seasoning the data by subtracting from each observation the median mortality rate for the month in which it occurred, the summer mortality peak becomes even more pronounced but the winter peak is diminished [Figure 3b above]. This result, which is consistent across all cities examined, suggests that there is little relationship between daily weather and mortality in the winter despite winter’s higher overall death rate. Although some winter research has uncovered relationships between extreme cold and mortality at time lags of 1 wk or more (Laschewski & Jendritzky 2002), the excess mortality is small and the relationship does not seem to be universal (Glass & Zack 1979, Larsen 1990a,b, Frost & Auliciems 1993, Gorjanc et al. 1999). These seasonal-mortality patterns produce the apparent quandary that, whereas cold days are not associated with high mortality, winter months are. [emphasis added]

And

[T]here are few intercity (or climate-related) differences in mortality seasonality across the US—in other words, the average annual mortality cycle, which is similar across US cities, is largely independent of climate. The overarching implication of this result indicates that there is no net mortality benefit to one’s place of residence derived from the location’s climate. This finding is apparently contrary to the general perception within the populace that one’s longevity can be increased by moving to warmer locales. [emphasis added]

Or if the climate itself warms.

So, the commonly-held belief, that since more people die in the winter than in the summer, climate warming will lead to fewer deaths, is by and large a myth—born from an improper analysis and understanding of the data.

And it is this myth that is perpetuated by the analysis of Ballester et al. and the reporting of Seth Borenstein. But Ballester and Borenstein even take it one step further by claiming that this (largely false) “benefit” of global warming will, within a few decades, be eclipsed as heat-related deaths increase faster than cold-related deaths decline under a typical global warming scenario.

Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right

Sorry guys, but two wrongs don’t make a right.

You are wrong about rising temperatures making a significant dent in cold-related deaths and you are wrong about rising temperatures leading to a sustained rise in heat-related deaths.

To be fair, the Ballester team actually does perform an analysis which examines the sensitivity of their results to varying scenarios of adaptation. What they find, is that under the assumption that people quickly adapt to rising temperature, the future temperature-related mortality declines as the climate warms (just like I said). However, Ballester et al. are quick to dismiss this result as entirely improbable as they discount the probability that human populations can adapt at the pace necessary to keep up with the rising temperatures. Interestingly, in their list of citations, they include neither Palaecki et al. (the Chicago study) nor Fouillet et al. (the France study) which clearly demonstrate a high level of adaptation occurring with the period of only a few years.

Ignorance, apparently, is bliss.

That is, until it kills you.

To avoid such a fate, my suggestion it to adapt to the ever-changing world around you.

For the case of dealing with rising temperatures across Europe, I would think that increasing the availability of air-conditioning would be a good place to start. I imagine that more Europeans would be more open to this solution if only the price of electricity weren’t so darn high.

So, the bottom line:

People don’t really die in high number from the cold. It is heat that really gets you. But avoiding the heat (at least to the degree necessary to avoid dying), is fairly straightforward (and made easier by access to cheap and reliable electricity). And the more you face the heat, the better prepared you become, and the less your chance of dying. So, if global warming pushes the thermometer up, it should push mortality down.

That doesn’t sound like such a bad outcome–let’s hope the do-gooders (like the EPA and folks advocating for greenhouse gas emissions controls) don’t mess things up.

References:

Ballester, J., J-M Robine, F. Herrmann, and X. Rodo, 2011. Long-term projections and acclimatization scenarios of temperature-related mortality in Europe, Nature Communications, doi:10.1038/ncomms1360.

Davis, R. E., P. C. Knappenberger, P. J. Michaels, W. M. Novicoff, 2003. Changing heat-related mortality in the United States. Environmental Health Perspectives, 111, 1712-1718.

Davis, R. E., P. C. Knappenberger, P. J. Michaels, and W. M. Novicoff, 2004. Seasonality of climate-human mortality relationships un US cities and impacts of climate change. Climate Research, 26, 61-76.

Fouillet, A., G. Rey, V. Wagner, K. Laadi, P. Empereur-Bissonet, A Le Tetre, P. Frayssinet, P. Bessemoulin, F. Laurent, P. De Crouy-Chanel, E. Jougla, and D. Hémon, 2008. Has the impact of heat waves on mortality changed in France since the European heat wave of summer 2003? A study of the 2006 heat wave. International Journal of Epidmiology, doi:10.1093/ije/dym253.

Palecki, M.A., S.A. Changnon, and K.E. Kunkel, 2001. The nature and impacts of the July 1999 heat wave in the midwestern United States: Learning from the lessons of 1995, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 82, 1353–1367.

[Editor's Note: This is Part I of a two-part analysis examining projections of increasing human mortality to accompany projections of increases in temperature resulting from greenhouse gas emissions produced from burning fossil fuels to produce energy. Such studies typically give short shrift to the effectiveness of rather simple adaptations and the power of cheap, and reliable electricity.]

Increased use of air-conditioning, made possible by access to affordable, reliable electricity, goes a long way towards counteracting the acute effects of excessive heat events, a.k.a. heat waves, on human mortality and morbidity. Projections of rapidly rising human heat-related mortality under a warming climate, such as those made in a recent paper published by Joan Ballester and colleagues, fail to acknowledge the power and reality that this and other (even simpler) adaptations can have at protecting human life.

When it comes to energy and climate policy, one cannot make an ‘other things equal’ assumption. More climate policy means less energy, period.

As an increasing frequency, intensity, and duration of heat waves is anticipated as the climate warms from the combination of a build-up of atmospheric greenhouse gases and growing urban and suburban environments, expanding the availability of affordable, abundant, and dependable energy should be one of our highest high priorities. Instead, there is a deluge of proposals (in part fuelled by results like those of Ballester et al.) aimed at limiting the emissions of greenhouse gases produced from the combustion of fossil fuels—actions which threaten the quality and quantity of our energy supply, and thus run counter to the practices which best allow adaptation to climate and climate changes.

Thankfully, of the many proposals which have been, well, proposed, only one with any teeth has really stuck (thus far)—the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now has the ability to regulate the emissions of greenhouse gases, an ability which was predicated by its finding that such emissions “threaten” our “health and welfare.”

From where I sit, our health and welfare is more under threat by regulations, laws, and/or treaties which (would) act to hold one hand behind our back as we try to best protect ourselves from the vagaries of climate (and to a far lesser degree, climate change). And the justifications for doing so ring hollow, as virtually all analyses of the impacts of such proposals show them to be ineffective at producing any meaningful mitigation to projected climate changes—that is, without the bulk of the work being done by developing countries such as China and India. Of course, developing countries realize that the positives from expanding the availability of affordable and reliable electricity, including the adaptive power that they afford us, outweigh the negatives from climate changes that any resultant greenhouse gas emissions may produce. Therefore, electricity from fossil fuels continues to lead the way into the future.

Extreme Heat and Human Mortality Projections

For some reason, a lot of people seem to doubt, or at least greatly underestimate, the innate desire of humans not to want to die. How else can you explain future projections of heat-related mortality that predict an ever-rising number of deaths as the temperature increases? Especially in light of the fact that observations from the real world clearly show that the more frequent extreme heat becomes, the fewer people die from it?

But real world observations of adaptation seem to have done little stem the tide of projections of increasing heat-related mortality. The U.S. EPA incorporates them into the justification for their endangerment finding, and a new paper making the rounds is making dire projections for Europe.

Dumb People Scenario

The steps necessary to avoid dying from the heat are fairly straight forward—seek out air conditioning (having access to reliable cheap energy helps out a lot here), drink plenty of water, wear appropriate clothing, limit outdoor activity. This really isn’t rocket science.

The only way to predict more deaths from more heat is for researchers to dig their heels in and doggedly assume that the way people react to high temperatures now is the way that they will forever, and thus they will die in record numbers as high temperatures occur more often. I guess this is the “dumb people scenario” which is akin to the “dumb farmer scenario” that similarly leads to projections that we’re all going to die from lack of food as the climate changes and farmers don’t adjust their crops, planting methods, etc.

Basically, the way to make the future look bad is to paint coming conditions different than today’s while assuming that today’s behaviors remain unchanged. No doubt that is a recipe for disaster, for humans and everything else, but it is just not the way things work—if it were, the earth would be a pretty lifeless place, as conditions are in a constant state of change. Our very existence proves that we are not “dumb.”

Proof of Adaptation

And if the philosophical argument doesn’t sway you, here is some actual data on the evolving relationship between extremely high temperatures and human mortality.

Research study after research study reveals two strong patterns—one spatial and the other temporal—of heat-related mortality across the United States. The first is that the hottest places in the country are the places with the least amount of heat-related mortality. The second pattern is that over time (even as temperatures rise), the rate of heat-related mortality declines. In fact, the declines are the greatest in the years immediately following major heat-waves in which a lot of people die. These patterns are strong indication that people not only adapt to high temperature extremes, but that such adaptation can occur in a very short amount of time.

Figure 1 (taken from a paper I was a co-author on) nicely illustrates these two patterns in the U.S. Notice that 1) the places with the hottest summer climate have the lowest rate of heat-related mortality—places such as Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, Tampa, Miami; and 2) that over time, the rate of heat-related mortality (in a standardized population) has declined across nearly all of the cities that we studied—despite rising summer temperature.

Figure 1. Annual heat-related mortality rates (excess deaths per standard million population on days in which the decadal-varying threshold apparent temperature (AT) is equaled or exceeded) by city and decade, and long-term trend in summer afternoon AT. Each histogram bar indicates a different decade: from left to right, 1960s–1970s, 1980–1989, and 1990–1998. Decades without histogram bars exhibit no threshold ATs and no heat-related mortality. Decades with gray bars have mortality rates that are statistically significantly different from the decades indicated by black bars. The average excess deaths across all 28 cities is shown at the lower left. AT trends are indicated beneath each city abbreviation. Click to enlarge. (source: Davis et al., 2003)

That a decline in heat wave sensitivity can occur rapidly following a wake-up call type of event (i.e., a major heat wave that kills a lot of people because they were not adequately prepared for it) is evidenced from the greatly depressed mortality response during the next big heat wave to hit the same location. This has been documented to have taken place in Chicago after the 1995 heat wave (Palecki et al., 2001) and in France after the 2003 heat wave (Fouillet et al., 2008).

So, with these two pieces of information in hand—hotter places have lower mortality rates and mortality rates are declining over time (even as temperatures rise)—how would you go about forecasting the evolution of the patterns of heat-related mortality in the future assuming a warming climate?

Well, I would think that as the temperature climbs, humans will increasingly try to avoid dying from it. The more commonplace heat waves become, the better we will become at dealing with them (as current patterns indicate). Certainly, there would be a few surprises in places not used to experiencing extremely high temperatures—like Chicago in 1995 and Europe in 2003—which will sharply elevate the numbers of heat-related mortality during those particular individual events, but I imagine that folks will pretty quickly learn what not to do and will be much better prepared when the next heat wave comes around. Over the long run, then, I would project that hotter summers will lead to lower rates of heat-related mortality (in a standard population—that is, not taking into account changes in population demographics such as age structure—which are not climate-related changes).

But this is not how some other folks seem to see things—especially those who are of the pre-disposition to think that human-fuelled global warming is a bad thing. Their take on things is something like this—assume that the existing relationships between high temperatures and heat-related mortality remain constant (or are slow to change), and therefore projections of higher future temperatures lead directly to projections of sharply rising heat-related mortality. Such is the methodology used by the EPA to justify their finding that human emitted greenhouse gases act to “endanger” human health and welfare:

“The impact on mortality and morbidity associated with increases in average temperatures, which increase the likelihood of heat waves, also provides support for a public health endangerment finding.”

And this way of thinking is on display in the just-published paper by Joan Ballester and colleagues which appears in the new journal Nature Communications. And just in case it is not readily apparent in the actual article, the Associated Press’ Seth Borenstein—not one to let a good global-warming-is-going-to-be-bad-for-you story pass by—played up the negative and played down the positives in his widely distributed coverage “Heat will kill more than cold in Europe, eventually.” The ‘independent’ expert on Seth’s go-to list on heat-related mortality, Jonathan Patz, is happy to oblige Seth’s want of confirmation of the study’s conclusions that rising temperatures are going lead to rising temperature-related mortality and goes on to add that this new study “is really an essential paper in the field of climate change and health.”

Had Seth interviewed me, he would have gotten a completely different take.

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you why.

References:

Ballester, J., J-M Robine, F. Herrmann, and X. Rodo, 2011. Long-term projections and acclimatization scenarios of temperature-related mortality in Europe, Nature Communications, doi:10.1038/ncomms1360.

Davis, R. E., P. C. Knappenberger, P. J. Michaels, W. M. Novicoff, 2003. Changing heat-related mortality in the United States. Environmental Health Perspectives, 111, 1712-1718.

Fouillet, A., G. Rey, V. Wagner, K. Laadi, P. Empereur-Bissonet, A Le Tetre, P. Frayssinet, P. Bessemoulin, F. Laurent, P. De Crouy-Chanel, E. Jougla, and D. Hémon, 2008. Has the impact of heat waves on mortality changed in France since the European heat wave of summer 2003? A study of the 2006 heat wave. International Journal of Epidmiology, doi:10.1093/ije/dym253.

Palecki, M.A., S.A. Changnon, and K.E. Kunkel, 2001. The nature and impacts of the July 1999 heat wave in the midwestern United States: Learning from the lessons of 1995. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 82, 1353–1367.

My response to this announcement was “Terrific! The biosphere was responding the way it should to changing conditions.”

To my surprise, this enthusiasm wasn’t shared by the study’s authors. In fact, lead author Patrick Gonzalez seemed downright glum:

“Globally, vegetation shifts are disrupting ecosystems, reducing habitat for endangered species, and altering the forests that supply water and other services to many people.”

A very negative spin on what should be cause for celebration.

Despite how much we, humans, have sliced and diced the landscape, natural systems are still doing their best to respond to climate changes—just like they always have.

The only way to see this in a negative light would to hold the belief that everything that humans do to the world is bad. This seems like an odd philosophy, for more than likely the holder of such a philosophy wouldn’t exist today had it not been for everything that humans have done to make the world a better place and vastly improve our health and welfare. Just 150 years ago, as the industrial revolution was set to take off, the population of the world was about 5 times less than now and the average human lifespan was about 30 years. 

I am not saying that there aren’t some negatives for some species when the climate changes. Of course there are. But what I am saying is that there are plenty of positives as well. And it takes no more imagination to come up with positives than it does for negatives.

But for some reason, there is a fixation on the negatives. And it is this fixation, and practically only this fixation, which has led to “global warming” becoming the prominent issue that it has.

Just imagine what the attitude of the day would be like if we were under a constant barrage of all the good things that climate change may bring, instead of the bad. We’d all be driving SUVs, eating platefuls of meat, and keeping our thermostats set to comfortable levels. OK, but, we’d be feeling a bit less guilty about it.

The Gonzalez paper includes a prime example of this pervasive negativity. It quantifies the impacts of future climate change on vegetation biomes in units of “vulnerability”—employing the IPCC definition as “the degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, adverse effects.”

Nowhere, however can I find a quantification of “opportunity”—by my definition “the degree to which a system is able to expand or flourish under new conditions.”

The word “vulnerability” occurs more than 70 times in the article (including the title) and the word “opportunity” occurs only once.

What Gonzalez and colleagues find so “disrupting,” according to their press release is that there is ample evidence that

“over the past century, vegetation has been gradually moving toward the poles and up mountain slopes, where temperatures are cooler, as well as toward the equator, where rainfall is greater.”

And,

“Moreover, an estimated one-tenth to one-half of the land mass on Earth will be highly vulnerable to climate-related vegetation shifts by the end of this century, depending upon how effectively humans are able to curb greenhouse gas emissions, according to the study.”

This is an example of using “vulnerable” instead of a neutral word like “responsive” or even a positive such as “receptive.”

A few years ago, researcher Ramakrishna Nemani and colleagues took a look at global vegetation and found that the combination of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and a changing climate has led to an increase in the “greenness” of the earth.

As to be expected.

Carbon dioxide is a plant fertilizer—the more of it there is in the atmosphere, the better plants grow. Aspects of climate can act in a similar way. More sunshine in cloudy areas, more rainfall in dry areas, and higher temperatures in cold areas can all act to boost plant growth. And it is precisely these types of climate changes that have taken place over the past 20-30 years. And as a result, the world’s plants have responded positively. Figure 1 shows the trends in net primary productivity (NPP)—the ultimate measure of how much plant growth is taking place. Upward trends in NPP (green areas in Figure 1) mean that plants are growing better. This is occurring across most land areas across the globe.

Figure 1. Trends in net primary productivity (NPP) from 1982-1999. Green areas indicate increasing NPP, red areas indicate decreasing NPP (source: Nemani et al., 2003).

So from a global perspective, it doesn’t seem like the planet’s plant life is responding negatively to climate change. Are some species suffering? Undoubtedly. But, as is also the case, many others are flourishing. And in net, the change in plant growth since the early 1980s is positive.

Gonzalez sums up his “vulnerability” study with this:

“Approximately one billion people now live in areas that are highly to very highly vulnerable to future vegetation shifts… Ecosystems provide important services to people, so we must reduce the emissions that cause climate change, then adapt to major changes that might occur.”

He’s definitely got the second part of what we need to do right. As to the first—reducing emissions in an effort to stave off future changes in vegetative growth patterns—that one is a value judgment that is comes down to the value placed on change. And as far as the net global vegetative response, that value would seem to be positive.

References:

Gonzalez, P., et al., 2010. Global patterns in the vulnerability of ecosystems to vegetation shifts due to climate change. Global Ecology and Biogeography, doi: 10.1111/j.1466-8238.2010.00558.x

Nemani, R.R., et al., 2003. Climate-driven increases in global terrestrial net primary production from 1982 to 1999. Science, 300, 1560–1563.

Although he technically said nothing demonstrably false, Krugman gives the impression that there is widespread consensus that drastic action is needed to avert catastrophic climate change. This is simply not true, and all we have to do is actually read the consensus reports to see that Krugman is misleading his readers.

Krugman’s Summary of the Climate Science

After giving a good summary of the standard issues in the economics of climate change, Krugman pauses to comment on what the natural scientists (as opposed to the economists) have to say on the subject:

This is an article on climate economics, not climate science. But before we get to the economics, it’s worth establishing three things about the state of the scientific debate.

The first is that the planet is indeed warming. [I]f you look at the evidence the right way ­— taking averages over periods long enough to smooth out the fluctuations — the upward trend is unmistakable: each successive decade since the 1970s has been warmer than the one before.

Second, climate models predicted this well in advance, even getting the magnitude of the temperature rise roughly right. While it’s relatively easy to cook up an analysis that matches known data, it is much harder to create a model that accurately forecasts the future. So the fact that climate modelers more than 20 years ago successfully predicted the subsequent global warming gives them enormous credibility. [Krugman page 3, emphasis added.]

Now Krugman’s summary above is either accurate or not, depending on how much error we will tolerate in the predictions. But fair enough, we’ll agree with Krugman that climate models 20 years ago predicted higher average global temperatures, and that’s indeed what we’ve experienced.

Yet look at the move Krugman makes two paragraphs later:

And this brings me to my third point: models based on this research indicate that if we continue adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere as we have, we will eventually face drastic changes in the climate. Let’s be clear. We’re not talking about a few more hot days in the summer and a bit less snow in the winter; we’re talking about massively disruptive events, like the transformation of the Southwestern United States into a permanent dust bowl over the next few decades. [emphasis added.]

This is completely misleading. After establishing the rock-solid reliability of climate models that have made predictions 20 years out, Krugman changes his focus to “models based on this research” and then discusses their apocalyptic projections. But these aren’t the same models! It is simply not the case that there is a broad-based, modeling consensus on the imminent danger to the United States.

Yes, there are some alarming projections in new models; in one of his NYT op eds Krugman referred to recent work by a group at MIT. But to repeat, these alarmist projections do not have a 20-year track record; they are new projections that Krugman and other alarmists are pointing to, in order to say, “Things are worse than we thought!”

For one thing, to the extent that the 20-year projections have been verified (more or less), this is only true if we look at macro predictions such as globally averaged temperatures. It is not true that climate models have been developed which reliably predict local events (such as the temperature in the Southwestern United States) over a 20-year period. My point isn’t to suggest that these predictions are wrong, but merely to show that Krugman’s earlier point about forecasting reliability is largely irrelevant.

The Consensus Is Not Alarmist, Especially for the United States

I’m not asking the reader to take my word for it. Here is what the most recent Economic Report of the President [.pdf] had to say about the dangers of unmitigated climate change–meaning this is what they predict will happen if the government does nothing:

The…projected losses for the most likely range of temperature changes are relatively modest. For example, at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most likely temperature increase of 3°C for a doubling of CO2 concentration…the projected decline is 1.5 percent of GDP. [Box 9-2, p. 242, emphasis added.]

And even on the matter of American farmers, things are not as grim as Krugman led us to believe:

Although warmer temperatures may extend the growing season in the United States for many crops, large increases in temperature also may harm growth and yields…

That said, another study finds that expected changes in temperature in the United States will have a relatively small impact on overall agricultural profits (Deschênes and Greenstone 2007). Neither study accounts for the possible increase in yields from elevated carbon dioxide levels or the possible decrease in yields from increased pests, weeds, and disease.

Climate change is also likely to bring increased weather uncertainty. Extreme weather events—droughts and downpours—may have catastrophic effects on crops in some years. Growing crops in warmer climates requires more water, which will be particularly challenging in regions such as the Southeast that will likely face decreased water availability.

American farmers have substantial capacity for innovation and are already taking steps to adapt to climate change. For instance, they are changing planting dates and adopting crop varieties with greater resistance to heat or drought. They can also undertake more elaborate change. In areas projected to become hotter and drier, some farmers have returned to dryland farming (instead of irrigation) to help the soil absorb more moisture from the rain. How well the private sector can adapt to the effects of climate change and at what cost is still an open question. [Box 9-1, p. 241, emphasis added.]

Conclusion

Paul Krugman is a very smart guy, and has a gift for explaining technical issues in terms that the layperson can understand. Unfortunately, Krugman’s recent “summary” of the state of the climate science is very misleading. He makes it seem that only anti-empirical “deniers” can doubt that crisis is upon us, when in fact the case for climate alarmism is weak indeed.

Editor note: On November 10, 2009, Mr. Green testifedbefore the Senate Committee on Finance about global warming. During the course of his testimony, an obviously agitated Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) challenged Ken on different aspects of the climate debate. His responses are printed here. [Part I of this series ran yesterday.]

1. Peer-Reviewed Publishing Revisited

Kerry seemed to think it somehow damning that I do not choose to publish in the peer-reviewed climate literature. First—as I pointed out when I introduced myself—while I am an environmental scientist by training, I have chosen to work on policy analysis, which I believe is as important as, or more important than, the science.

However, I would challenge his very premise, which is that peer review is a meaningful indicator of trustworthiness. Plenty of research suggests that peer review is deeply flawed, biased in favor of both extreme and “positive” claims, resistant to nonconfirmation studies, and highly incestuous, because review committees regularly screen out divergent viewpoints and consist of peers who coauthor work with each other. While most research on problems with peer review involves medical literature, there is every reason to believe the same problems plague climate research.

As Drummond Rennie, M.D., deputy editor (West) of the Journal of the American Medical Association writes, “There seems to be no study too fragmented, no hypothesis too trivial, no literature too biased or too egotistical, no design too warped, no methodology too bungled, no presentation of results too inaccurate, too obscure, and too contradictory, no analysis too self-serving, no argument too circular, no conclusions too trifling or too unjustified, and no grammar and syntax too offensive for a paper to end up in print.” Peer review determines where rather than whether a paper should be published, Rennie says. However, from time to time, “shoddy science” ends up even in the most prestigious journals.

Examining peer review in the context of genetically modified food, Robert Horton, editor of the medical Journal Lancet has observed that “the mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability—not the validity—of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.”

For additional information on the limitations of peer review, I point you to the following papers:

John P. A. Ioannidis, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. After examining the various elements that can lead to studies being published in peer-reviewed literature despite failing to accurately represent reality, the author concludes that “most research findings are false for most research designs and for most fields.”

Neal S. Young, John P. A. Ioannidis, and Omar Al-Ubaydli examine current publication practices in an economic framework, and conclude: “The current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic. This system can be studied by applying principles from the field of economics. The “winner’s curse,” a more general statement of publication bias, suggests that the small proportion of results chosen for publication are unrepresentative of scientists’ repeated samplings of the real world. The self-correcting mechanism in science is retarded by the extreme imbalance between the abundance of supply (the output of basic science laboratories and clinical investigations) and the increasingly limited venues for publication (journals with sufficiently high impact).” As an example, they point out that “an empirical evaluation of the 49 most-cited papers on the effectiveness of medical interventions, published in highly visible journals in 1990–2004, showed that a quarter of the randomised trials and five of six non-randomised studies had already been contradicted or found to have been exaggerated by 2005. The delay between the reporting of an initial positive study and subsequent publication of concurrently performed but negative results is measured in years.”

Jeffrey D. Scargle has studied what is called the “file-drawer” problem in scientific research. That is, if a laboratory runs one hundred experiments that obtain a negative result and only one that reaches a positive result (which can happen by chance), the laboratory can simply publish the one study and relegate the others to the file-drawer or trash can. The authors conclude: “Publication bias arises whenever the probability that a study is published depends on the statistical significance of its results. This bias, often called the file-drawer effect because the unpublished results are imagined to be tucked away in researchers’ file cabinets, is a potentially severe impediment to combining the statistical results of studies collected from the literature. With almost any reasonable quantitative model for publication bias, only a small number of studies lost in the file drawer will produce a significant bias.”

In a study of articles from Nature and the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Emili Garcia-Berthou and Carles Alcaraz looked for erroneous statistics. They found that “at least one such error appeared in 38% and 25% of the papers of Nature and BMJ, respectively. In 12% of the cases, the significance level might change one or more orders of magnitude.”

In a column by David F. Horrobin, the long-time critic of peer review observes that “far from filtering out junk science, peer review may be blocking the flow of innovation and corrupting public support of science.”

For a specific example of the incest problem in climate research, see the report to Congress prepared by Edward J. Wegman, David W. Scott, and Yasmin H. Said. In this report, solicited by Congress itself, leading statistician Edward J. Wegman and colleagues were asked to study claims disputing the iconic “Hockey Stick” chart famously produced by Michael Mann at the University of Virginia. The “Hockey Stick” is a “reconstruction” of global average temperatures stretching far into the past (over 1,000 years) that shows a relatively smooth decline in temperatures over that time until about 1900, at which time temperatures appear to increase sharply. Not only did the Wegman panel uphold criticisms of that chart, it found improprieties in the review process: “In particular, if there is a tight relationship among the authors and there are [sic] not a large number of individuals engaged in a particular topic area, then one may suspect that the peer review process does not fully vet papers before they are published. Indeed, a common practice among associate editors for scholarly journals is to look in the list of references for a submitted paper to see who else is writing in a given area and thus who might legitimately be called on to provide knowledgeable peer review. Of course, if a given discipline area is small and the authors in the area are tightly coupled, then this process is likely to turn up very sympathetic referees. These referees may have coauthored other papers with a given author. They may believe they know that author’s other writings well enough that errors can continue to propagate and indeed be reinforced.”

Wegman, Scott, and Said then set to examine whether or not such close relationships existed in the paleoclimate community, and they note that “in our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface.”

Such incestuous relationships almost certainly also exist in other subcommunities of climate research, including predictive modeling, climate sensitivity estimation, greenhouse gas residence times, dendro-climatology, and more.

2. Climategate: Kerry’s Shoe on the Other Foot?

The existence of such “tribalism” in climate science has recently been thrown into stark relief by the public release of a vast quantity of files and e-mails that were either taken from the computer system of the University of East Anglia by hackers, or posted to the Internet by a whistle-blower. The University of East Anglia is home to the Climatic Research Unit, until recently considered one of the most important climate research institutions in the world, and is a supplier of information to the United Nations IPCC.

More than one thousand e-mails and two thousand other documents were posted to the Internet; it will likely take months to fully explore the archives, and verifying the authenticity of individual documents may be impossible (WSJ). But from early inspection, there are strong suggestions that the researchers at the Climatic Research Unit, along with their colleagues elsewhere, actively sought to prevent contrary findings from being published in the peer-reviewed literature.

Here are some examples:

From: Tom Wigley, January 20, 2005. If you think that [James E.] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU [American Geophysical Union] channels to get him ousted. [Author’s note: Saiers, the editor of Geophysical Research Letters, was later ousted.]

From: Michael E. Mann, March 11, 2003. This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature.” Obviously, they found a solution to that—take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.

From: Edward Cook, June 4, 2003. I got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. They use your Tornetrask recon as the main whipping boy. . . . If published as is, this paper could really do some damage. It is also an ugly paper to review because it is rather mathematical, with a lot of Box-Jenkins stuff in it. It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically. . . . I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review—Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting—to support Dave Stahle’s and really as soon as you can. Please.

From: Tom Wigley, April 24, 2003. Mike’s idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work—must get rid of [Hans] von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like [David R.] Legates, [Robert C.] Balling, [Richard S.] Lindzen, [Patrick J.] Michaels, [S. Fred] Singer, etc. I have heard that the publishers are not happy with von Storch, so the above approach might remove that hurdle too.

From: Phil Jones, July 8, 2004. I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!

3. Adaptation Policy is Not ‘Do Nothing’

Finally, Sen. Kerry implied that I had not said what I would do about the risk of climate change. This is incorrect. In my response to him, and other members of the committee, I offered to provide my latest paper on adaptation to the committee. The summary is as follows: “The Earth’s climate is prone to sharp changes over fairly short periods of time. Plans that focus simply on stopping climate change are unlikely to succeed; fluctuations in the Earth’s climate predate humanity. Rather than try to make the climate static, policymakers should focus on implementing resilience strategies to enable adaptation to a dynamic, changing climate. Resilience strategies can be successful if we eliminate current risk subsidies and privatize infrastructure.”

A PDF of the original article this material was published in can be found here.

In this post I will link to some of the major commentary on the book so far, and then focus on U.C. Berkeley economist Brad DeLong’s specific claims that Levitt and Dubner’s arguments in support of geoengineering are somehow “bad economics.” As we’ll see, Levitt and Dubner might be wrong, but if so they are wrong because of the numbers. DeLong is painting their views as self-evidently absurd, but that’s only because he himself is overlooking a basic economic point.

The Background

Not surprisingly, the climate scientists and economists who are most vocal about the need for drastic emissions cutbacks were furious when the book’s contents began circulating. Joe Romm got the ball rolling with this fiery post; his ally in such matters, Paul Krugman, soon followed suit. Dubner defended himself and co-author Levitt against Romm’s accusations of intentional distortion in this post, and one of the primary sources for the chapter, physicist (and all-around guru) Nathan Myhrvold, defended himself from Romm’s accusations of ignorance here.

In the present post, I don’t want to take sides in the charges of intellectual dishonesty. The interested reader can explore both sides from the links above. The problem with a book like Superfreakonomics–and I said as much of their first book in this review–is that Levitt and Dubner try to (a) synthesize a huge amount of information to challenge the conventional wisdom on some point, be it parental influence on children’s success, the effects of abortion on crime rates, or the feasibility of geoengineering; and (b) write in a snappy, cutesy way that doesn’t tax the average reader’s attention span.

The result is pretty predictable: If the reader agrees with the unorthodox view that Levitt and Dubner are pushing, then their analysis seems wonderful (if incomplete). On the other hand, if the reader happens to endorse the “conventional wisdom” that is subject to their irreverent attack, then Levitt and Dubner will come off as sloppy amateurs, dabbling in an area better left to true experts.

So when it comes to the issue of climate alarmism, I would simply caution fans of limited government to tread lightly in their support for our bestselling authors: Let’s not forget how Levitt dealt with John Lott and his arguments against gun control. Even though Joe Romm et al. are certainly over-the-top in their denunciations, it’s still possible that Levitt and Dubner really did do a slipshod job summarizing the climate science in their new book. I would argue that it’s happened before.

As an economist, I’m not qualified to judge whether they have fairly summarized the state of the climate science per se. However, in the remainder of this post I do want to defend Levitt and Dubner from some of Brad DeLong’s sweeping criticisms regarding their economics.

DeLong Forgets That Time Is Money

In a series of posts (one, two, and three), DeLong heaps extreme criticism on our authors. Under normal circumstances, DeLong’s criticisms would be described as “scathing,” yet compared to Romm’s treatment, it’s kid-glove stuff. For our purposes here, I want to focus on just two of DeLong’s (many) complaints. First DeLong quotes Levitt who said (during an NPR interview):

Mr. LEVITT: …[I]f you look at the history of modern mankind, I think you will be hard pressed to find any particular problem that was serious that was solved by a behavioral change, as opposed to by a technological solution…

DeLong is astounded by this claim, and responds:

That’s just not economics: economics is that incentives change, and as incentives change people’s behavior changes.

DeLong is right, what Levitt said is “not economics.” Rather, it’s a historical claim. Maybe it’s right, maybe it’s wrong, but DeLong can’t trump it by citing a tautology from microeconomics. I am sure that Levitt would concede the narrow point, that if governments around the world instituted a massive carbon tax, and enforced it with draconian penalties for evasion, then global emissions would indeed fall quickly.

But one of Levitt’s main points is that governments around the world are not going to do this, that it is naive to expect them to sacrifice their own economies when (in Levitt’s opinion) the climate science is not nearly certain enough to justify this painful step. Levitt is making a prediction–based on his interpretation of history–that if manmade global warming really does require drastic measures in the next few decades, that the response will involve various forms of geoengineering, which (Levitt predicts) will cost a tiny fraction of what the carbon mitigation proposals would require. To repeat, I’m not saying I necessarily endorse Levitt’s glib proclamations on these points, but DeLong is wrong for dismissing them as somehow “not economics.”

Finally let’s deal with another point on which DeLong completely misses Levitt’s valid argument. He first quotes Levitt:

LEVITT: Now, in the long run, perhaps you’ll want to deal with the [high] carbon[-dioxide] issue [even with geoengineering] because we’re going to have acidification of the oceans and the coral reefs will die if we don’t do something about the carbon. But if you just buy the time to keep the Earth cool for a while longer, I am certain that if we invest we will come up with technology that will allow us much more effectively in the future to pull carbon out of the air than we currently have….

DeLong points out that whatever mechanism our descendants use to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, it will require power generation. He then argues:

So now we have (a) our normal power plants to power our civilization, plus (b) our atmosphere carbon-scrubbing industry, which is (c) powered by even more carbon power plants to generate the power to break the carbon-oxygen bonds that our first set of power plants made. But plants (c) put more carbon into the atmosphere than plants (a) did.

I know, says Steve Levitt, we can power our carbon-scrubbing industry (b) by power plants (c) that use nuclear or solar or… But then why not power our original civilization-sustaining power plants (a) by nuclear or solar or whatever?

Now this is frankly silly. Let’s be clear, I think Levitt and Dubner made some major goofs in their chapter, and DeLong (as well as Romm and Krugman) nailed them. But here DeLong is making an obvious mistake. He is neglecting the fact that it will be much much (relatively) cheaper to engage in carbon-free energy production the longer we wait. Does DeLong really not see that elementary point, and how it makes Levitt’s argument perfectly sensible?

For an analogy, consider people who contract a terminal illness and then elect to have their bodies cryonically frozen, so that they can be resuscitated and cured in the future. Now maybe that’s a good idea or maybe it’s not, but would it really make sense for someone to say, “That’s just bad economics! Why go to the trouble of having your cancer cured in the future? Just do it now.” ? Yet that is exactly the argument DeLong has deployed against Levitt.

Conclusion

There is a reason that the energy infrastructure in today’s market economies is so heavily based upon fossil fuels: They are by far the cheapest, most reliable forms of energy, given the needs of modern society. Regardless of their (alleged) sloppy scholarship, Levitt and Dubner raise an interesting possibility that deserves careful scrutiny, not ridicule: Even if it turns out that unfettered use of fossil fuels will spell unacceptable climate damages to future generations, it does not follow that the only solution is immediate and drastic reductions in carbon emissions. Another possibility is to buy a few decades’ worth of “breathing room” (Myhrvold’s phrase in the book) through pumping SO2 into the stratosphere or some other techniques, and then make the transition to carbon-free energy production when it will not be so terribly costly.

It’s surprising that some of the very people who literally warn that the fate of the planet itself is it stake, are so dismissive of what could be a crucial component of humanity’s response to the dangers of which they’re warning.

In general, the mainstream response to the issue of climate change has been reactive, pessimistic, authoritarian, and resistant to change. Those alarmed about a changing climate would stand athwart the stream of climate history and cry “stop, enough!” Rather than working to cease human influence on climate, they want to find a way to make the climate stand still. This focus on creating climate stasis has led to policy proposals that would have been laughed at or dismissed as wacky conspiracy theories in the 1980s. But mainstream anti-climate-change activists are proposing nothing less than the establishment of global weather control through energy rationing, regulations, and taxes, all managed by a global bureaucracy with a goal of leading humanity into a future that will become smaller, more costly, and less dynamic over time. Environmental groups, along with organizations like the United Nations IPCC, are calling for nothing less than imposing climate stasis on a chaotic system.

Consider the climate bill now before Congress: the Waxman-Markey American Climate and Energy Security Act. Waxman-Markey sets the ambitious target of reducing total U.S. GHG emissions by 83 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2050 (with intermediate benchmarks at 2020 and 2030). Thus, the cap and the allowances sold pursuant to it will be lowered from a peak of 5.4 billion tons in 2016 to just a little over 1 billion tons in 2050. As my colleague Steven F. Hayward and I have pointed out elsewhere, these targets are absurd.   From Department of Energy (DOE) historical statistics on energy consumption, it is possible to estimate that the United States last emitted 1 billion tons in the year 1910, when the nation’s population was only 92 million people, per-capita income (in 2008 dollars) was only $6,196, and total GDP (also in 2008 dollars) was about $572 billion—about one-twenty-fifth the size of the U.S. economy today. By the year 2050, however, the United States is expected to have a population of 420 million, according to Census Bureau projections—more than four times the population of 1910. In order to reach the 83 percent reduction target, per-capita carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will have to be no more than 2.4 tons per person—only one-quarter the level of per-capita emissions in 1910.

When did the United States last experience per-capita CO2 emissions of only 2.4 tons? From the limited historical data available, it appears that this was about 1875. In 1875, the nation’s GDP (in 2008 dollars) was $147 billion, per-capita income (in 2008 dollars) was $3,300, and the population was only 45 million.

My colleague Kevin A. Hassett, Hayward and I have also written elsewhere about the problems with cap-and-trade and suggested that a revenue-neutral carbon tax would be preferable,  but that, too, represents an effort to impose stasis on a dynamic system simply using more efficient means. A carbon tax is, to be sure, vastly superior to a cap-and-trade system, but there are doubts that it is politically possible to enact one in a way that is actually revenue-neutral and is not abused by politicians who will look to tax those they dislike and rebate the taxes to groups they favor, namely, those which are most inclined to vote for their party.

A more forward-looking, optimistic, and free-market approach to the risks of climate variability accepts that the climate has been, is, and will be variable; focuses on the risks of variability; and looks for ways to build resilience in the face of that change, regardless of cause.

Aaron Wildavsky’s Resilience Paradigm

Aaron Wildavsky, one of the great policy analysts of the late twentieth century, wrote extensively about the benefits of resilient social institutions. Wildavsky observed that possible risk-reduction interventions lie along a spectrum from resilient to interceptive. Resilient approaches maximize our ability to cope with risk by maintaining a dynamic, market-based, knowledge-building strategy. Interceptive interventions emphasize specific risk-reduction efforts that require certain specific actions and prohibit or restrict others.  But how do we decide, for a given risk such as climate change, whether an interceptive approach is more likely to provide greater safety than a resilient approach?

Employing both theory and empirical observation, Wildavsky observed that uncertainties about the likelihood or extent of any given risk and about the effectiveness of any intervention constrain risk-reduction decisions.  He clearly demonstrated that a strategy of risk-interception is likely to be successful only in situations of truly excellent information.

So, for example, for a power plant owner who knows that a particular part is going to burn out every 150 days an interception strategy of replacing the part every 149 days to prevent the risk is likely cost-effective. But where less information exists, more resilient strategies are likely to succeed, because interception will be either infeasible or expensive in such situations. If a power plant had 8,000 critical pieces of equipment that would create a fire upon failure but the plant owner did not know the failure rates of each piece, trying to intercept the risk by replacing pieces before they failed would be enormously costly. Further, trying to have backup systems on all 8,000 pieces would be technologically difficult and probably not financially feasible. Instead, a strategy of resilience, such as implementing a sophisticated fire-response system, is more likely to be a feasible and efficient way of dealing with this risk.

In the case of climate change, our knowledge of the nature and scope of risks and future conditions is low, and our knowledge about how to intervene to head off specific risks is small. This suggests that current policy approaches that focus on mitigating GHG emissions largely to the exclusion of everything else are simply a waste of attention and resources, and resilience should be considered the default climate strategy. And to a large extent, the resilience option is the complete opposite of the climate-stasis approach; it focuses on decentralization, deregulation, and freeing markets to maximize resilience.

Managing Risks with Resilience-building Policies

A vast range of risks has been discussed in the context of climate change, from flood to drought, threatened food supplies, more deadly insect-borne diseases; higher heat-related deaths; rising sea levels, and so forth. Several approaches economists and policy analysts have identified could help increase social resilience to such risks.

Eliminate risk subsidies. Predicted damages associated with sea levels and storms are high because of the popularity of such locales for high-density business and upscale residential development. As a result, damages from extreme coastal weather events have been hugely expensive. The damages from Hurricane Katrina, for example, reached over $150 billion.  The question, however, is why there was so much value that was so badly protected against completely predictable events? Levees and sea-walls were under-designed. Many houses and businesses were not insured against flood damage. As Charles Perrow observes in Our Next Catastrophe, “Even in areas known to be hazardous, only about 20 percent of homeowners purchase flood insurance, and less than 50 percent of businesses purchase flood and earthquake insurance in risky areas.”

The reason for much of that risk-taking is the role of state and federal governments as the insurer of last resort. People know that in the event of a disaster, even if uninsured, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will give grants to let people recover from natural disasters such as hurricanes, floods, and storm surges. Without such assurances, we can assume that many people would be unwilling to face the risk of living in coastal areas that could be flooded by rising sea levels, and would relocate to higher ground. Capital needed for businesses would also avoid areas of high-risk due to sea-level rise, preventing further siting of high-value structures in vulnerable areas. If risk subsidies cannot be abolished entirely, at the very least, they should charge risk-based premiums.

Privatize Infrastructure. Climate change could also pose a challenge for coastal or low-lying roadways, water-treatment facilities facing increased rainfall intensity, energy utilities facing increased summertime electricity demand, and so on. Governments are quite good at building infrastructure. After all, what politician does not enjoy a ribbon cutting ceremony for some new element of name-bearing infrastructure? But governments are dismal at maintaining infrastructure, as they generally fail to establish a revenue stream to maintain a system that provides feedback about whether a particular road should be raised or a water-treatment facility expanded or a power-capability increased. A solution to these problems, as well as a potential source of revenue for cash-strapped state and municipal governments is the privatization of infrastructure. While a few poorly executed privatization efforts have tarnished the name, the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater; privatization offers a host of benefits. A great deal of research on privatization in developing and developed countries demonstrates that, on the whole, privatization shows considerably more benefit than risk. One reason is that private owners of infrastructure have a lot of investment tied up in getting a long-run stream of revenue from the infrastructure. Ensuring that future changes in climate do not disrupt that long- run cash flow is critical to their current financial performance.

• Roadways. If roads are privately owned and tolled, road operators have a revenue stream to tap in order to raise, resurface, or re-contour roadways to adapt to climate changes. If costs of such adaptation are high, tolls will rise, and at some point, an economic decision will occur about whether a road should be maintained, or whether some alternate route should be developed. In some cases people may indeed find their transportation options so limited that they must move away to a place with a less fragile climate. One can imagine something like this for some coastal roadways where there are no easy alternate routes, but it would probably be a fairly rare outcome. Still, if such situations did develop, this is a desirable outcome, as it is both economically efficient and reduces the likely cost of climate-related damages to structures.

• Electricity Supply. As long as governments distort the prices consumers pay for energy with subsidies, fuel mandates, renewable power mandates and the like, electricity markets cannot effectively adapt to changing climatic conditions. If electricity markets were fully deregulated, and if full costs were passed onto consumers, price signals would be created for the electricity provider in terms of expanding or decreasing capacity and for the consumer in terms of the real cost of living in an environment subject to energy-consuming heat waves (or cold snaps). Privatization would create incentives for electricity conservation and for the acquisition of energy-efficient appliances and devices without any need for specific governmental efficiency standards. Further, electric companies would be driven to connect with one another to ensure reliability to their customers rather than doing the minimum possible to satisfy regulators.

• Water Supply. Full pricing of water and full privatization of the water supply, drinking water plants, and wastewater treatment plants would ameliorate many climatic risks incrementally over time, including flooding, seawater intrusion, and coastal and river pollution from storm runoff. Charging the full price for water, from supply to disposal, would create a price signal for consumers regarding the real risks they face living in hydrologically sensitive areas and create incentives for conservation while producing a revenue stream to allow for expanded capability or the securing of alternative supplies. At some point, again, high prices could simply lead people to move away from areas that are hydrologically costly, such as cities dependent on a single winter snow pack that shrinks or a single major river that suffers reduced flow.

• Flooding. What is not achieved by removing insurance subsidies in flood-prone areas can be managed through the creation of privately administered hydrologic utilities, which would be financed by flood-protection fees charged to residents of flood prone areas. Again, such a system creates a price signal that can show when it is and when it is not efficient to raise the height of a levee, for example, or to expand permeable surfacing requirements in development. The cost of paying for such activities would send the consumer a signal about the true cost of living in flood-prone areas, and would ultimately lead those who could not afford to fully finance their level of risk to relocate to safer areas.

Trust in Resilience, but Tie up Your Camel

In the event that climate change does tend toward higher estimates put forward by the United Nations and other groups, it is reasonable to consider insurance options that might help deal with such climate changes. Such options might include government investment in geoengineering research, investment in research and development to advance technologies allowing the removal of GHGs from the atmosphere, and possibly the creation of a climate adaptation fund to be used where state and local governments find themselves unable to cope with a given climate change, or even to compensate others should it ultimately be shown that U.S. emissions of GHGs have caused harm to other countries or the property of other individuals.

It has long been known that certain types of risk are not suited to attempted prevention, but instead must be met with the resilience needed to live with the risk. Climate change is one such risk that is, as the world is increasingly observing, virtually impossible to prevent, whether it is manmade or natural.

As efforts to mitigate GHGs fail around the world, it is long past time to broaden the tools available to us in order to make our society resilient to climate risk. Rather than remain largely focused on the quixotic effort to reduce GHG emissions or to stand athwart the stream of climate and shout “stop, enough!” we should shift the majority of our policymaking attention to an agenda of resilience building and adaptation, two areas  with which governments particularly struggle. Plan B for climate resilience should consist of an aggressive program of resilience building through the elimination of risk subsidies, and the privatization of infrastructure. Other subsidies and regulations that make the overall economy more brittle in the face of climate change would also be ripe targets for removal, such as those which permeate energy and water markets.

NOTES

1. Steven F. Hayward and Kenneth P. Green, “Waxman-Markey: An Exercise in Unreality,” AEI Energy and Environment Outlook, no. 3 (July 2009), available at www.aei.org/outlook/100057.

2. It is possible that per-capita CO2 emissions were never this low even before the advent of widespread use of fossil fuels: wood burning by Americans in the nineteenth century may have produced more than 2.4 tons of CO2 per capita. Much depends on the emissions coefficient for wood burning and how, since wood is biomass rather than a fossil fuel, reforestation is credited in carbon accounting. In 1875, burning wood generated twice as much energy as fossil fuels.

3. Kenneth P. Green, Steven F. Hayward, and Kevin A. Hassett, “Climate Change: Caps vs. Taxes,” AEI Environment and Energy Outlook, no. 2 (June 2007), available at www.aei.org/outlook/26286.

4. Aaron Wildavsky, Searching for Safety (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1988). Wildavsky used the terms “resilience” and “anticipation” rather than “resilience” and “interception.” In adapting Wildavsky’s framework to more recent risk-related issues, I have chosen to use “interception” because it corresponds better to common perceptions of how risk regulations work.

5. Ibid.

6. Mark L. Burton and Michael J. Hicks, “Hurricane Katrina, Preliminary Estimates of Commercial and Public Sector Damages” (Huntington, WV: Marshall University Center for Business and Economic Research, September 2005), available at www.marshall.edu/cber/research/katrina/Katrina-Estimates.pdf (accessed September 24, 2009).

7. Charles Perrow, The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natrual, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007): 37–38.

This post is an excerpt from a longer Environment and Energy Outlook, published by the American Enterprise Institute. The full study can be found here.