Review by Martin Hutchinson from Good Reads
Errors have been key to global warming’s
trajectory. Rupert Darwall’s book “The Age of Global Warming” shows how
politicians locked us into global warming belief before scientists had credible
evidence for it. Then a self-perpetuating U.N. bureaucracy and conflicted
scientists manufactured evidence to order. The result has been toxic both for
the modestly warming globe and for its economy.
The first study explaining how carbon dioxide
emissions might produce global warming was published by the British meteorologist
Guy Callendar in 1938, following a temperature upswing in the first third of
the century. The unfortunate Callendar spent the rest of his life losing
confidence in his theory as global temperatures declined, his last years
coinciding with the sharp British winters of 1961-63.
Warming temperatures in the 1970s and 1980s gave
new credibility to the Callendar Effect, but the breakthrough for atmospheric
environmentalism was the three treaties on chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) agreed
between 1987 and 1990. All production was eliminated by 2000 at a moderate cost
on the global economy.
The political success of this effort helped launch
global warming as a political issue. The United Nations established the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, after the topic been
discussed earlier in the year at a G7 meeting, presented to the U.S. Senate by
James Hansen, a leading scientist, and promoted by Margaret Thatcher, the
British prime minister. The 1992 Rio Declaration included a commitment by governments
to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions, although no legally binding targets were
set.
Once governments were committed and a U.N.
bureaucracy was bent on self-perpetuation, production of the necessary evidence
by the scientific community was all but inevitable. Although Darwall does not
draw the analogy, financially aware readers will think of banks’ Value at Risk
models, which were designed to minimize apparent risk to top management and
regulators. Global warming computer models were likewise custom-built for their
purpose. Most notorious was Michael Mann’s 1998 Hockey Stick graph, purporting
to show that the 20th century’s rise in global temperature was far in excess of
fluctuations of the preceding millennium.
Darwall goes painstakingly through the conceptual
errors of this paper, notably the use of an algorithm that would produce a
hockey-stick shape from almost anything. He tells of its rapturous acceptance
by the Third IPCC Report in 2001 and its gradual debunking, against fierce
opposition from the scientific establishment, in subsequent years. Even the
IPCC was compelled to largely disown it in its 2007 Fourth Report.
Darwall shows how the traditional scientific
method was abandoned by scientists who were rewarded for the promotion of the
anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. He criticizes the confident promotion
as undoubted fact a thesis which cannot be falsified for a century. He also
makes good points about the failings of a peer-review system in which the
peers’ livelihood depends on the scientific points being asserted.
His description of the politics of climate change
is compelling, from the 1998 Kyoto conference to the abject failure at
Copenhagen in 2009. The lesson is that after Copenhagen, both a global
agreement on hard targets for emissions’ reduction and a watertight permit
trading system to achieve such a reduction were chimeras.
Darwall rejects the more extreme claims of the
global warming scientists, but appears agnostic as to whether human activity is
actually warming the atmosphere. That is probably enough doubt to cause climate
change believers to reject the book out of hand. To a less biased reader, it
appears well-written, fair and even-toned.
After reading “The Age of Global Warming”, this
reviewer would favor a modest carbon tax, adopted country by country, to
encourage research and investment in lower-carbon technologies. The more urgent
lesson, however, is the need to dismantle the birds’ nest of trading schemes,
subsidies, crony capitalist contracts and regulations which have slowed global
economic growth without doing much to slow whatever global warming actually
exists.
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