[Editor note” Part I presented the key questions regarding the climate-change issue from William Niskanen’s Fall 1997 symposium essay, “Too Much, Too Soon: Is a Global Warming Treaty a Rush to Judgment?.” Part II was Niskanen’s views on How Good is the Science of Global Warming? Part III today is his views on Should We Fear Some Moderate Warming?]
“On the whole, it is not yet clear whether some moderate warming should be a cause for concern. The balance of conditions suggests that moderate warming may generate net benefits to people in temperate regions and net costs to people in the tropics.”
“As now envisioned, however, the major costs of the measures presumed necessary to avoid global warming would be borne by people in the rich countries of temperate regions.…
https://niskanencenter.org/blog/last-week-trump-kneecapped-conservative-climate-policy/
“Republicans have gone from measured resistance to climate action into total, unreasoning incoherence.”
“There are Republicans who know better, but they’ve been cowed into silence while their party drifts ever further into madness.”
Jerry Taylor, “Last Week, Trump Kneecapped Conservative Climate Policy.”
Lost in the firestorm that followed last week’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement is the arresting display of intellectual meltdown within the GOP. Republicans—with Trump at the helm—are gleefully blowing up an agreement that was everything they have long said they wanted out of international climate talks. They are likewise shredding Obama-era compliance plans that are anchored in everything conservatives still say they want out of domestic environmental policy. Republicans have gone from measured resistance to climate action into total, unreasoning incoherence.
The Republican battle cry in the 1990s and 2000s was that no U.S.…
“With my characteristic optimism, my 1997 paper on global warming remarked that ‘We should know a lot more about this issue in the next 10 to 20 years.’ Unfortunately, there has been a rush to judgement on this issue without a significant increase in the information on which to base this judgement.”
– William Niskanen, 2008
Part I yesterday presented the key questions regarding the climate-change issue from William Niskanen’s Fall 1997 symposium essay, “Too Much, Too Soon: Is a Global Warming Treaty a Rush to Judgment?” Part II today reprints a lead section from that essay, How Good is the Science of Global Warming? followed by Niskanen’s eleven-year retrospective. I conclude with a brief comment as a twenty-one year retrospective.
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The current debate in the scientific community about global warming is based on only a few hard facts: The current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is nearly 30 percent higher than in pre-industrial times; the average (measured) global temperature has increased about 0.5°C since the 1880s; and the increased concentration of carbon dioxide may have contributed to the increase in temperature. …