Global Warming

It's interesting how when something gets a price tag associated with it, suddenly there's interest.

I refer to this morning's screaming headlines that global warming will cost the global economy on the order of $7 trillion dollars.

Global warming is an interesting phenomenon in itself. If you listen to the vast majority of climate scientists, it's real and it's happening and it's going to have enormous impacts on all life on the planet.

On the flip side, governments and business leaders have been doing their level best to pay lip service to the problem, and often spend more time pooh-poohing the whole notion of global warming.

Leaving aside the dire "the sky is falling" predictions aside, last June an article appeared in Nature discussing climate change. Some scientists from ten European nations took a very deep core sample of the Antarctic ice allowing them to look at the earth's climate over the past 740,000 years.

The findings are quite telling. There have been several cold periods (ice ages) interspersed with warmer periods. A natural ebb and flow.

To wit:

The analysis has shown that the earth has undergone eight ice ages in the last 740,000 years – periods when the climate was much colder than it is today. These ice ages were interrupted by eight warmer “interglacial” periods. During the last 400,000 years, these warm periods have had a climate similar to that of today. Before that, the warm periods were cooler but lasted longer.

Scientists can now draw parallels with earlier episodes of climate change. Without the interference of humans, the warm period we are now experiencing, which began 12,000 years ago, should continue for at least another 15,000 years.

Now, one could argue that we're merely in part of one of those warmer trends. But, and here's the rub, it seems that human activity is having some effect:

Analysis of the air bubbles in the ice reveals variations in the mixture of various gases in the atmosphere over time. Preliminary research indicates that today’s carbon dioxide levels are higher than at any other time in the past 440,000 years.

So based on this snippet of information, it seems that we are contributing to global warming, but also that we're about mid-point of a natural warm/cool cycle of global climate.

The question then becomes what we should do about it. On the one hand, it seems that the climate will continue to warm up regardless of what we do.

However, it seems unreasonable that we do nothing. Pollution of our environment affects us all, and will also affect our descendants.

So, while Kyoto as written is probably a bad idea (conceptually good, but the notion of "buying" emission credits from poor countries is asinine), continued research and development of cleaner energy and alternatives to oil and other carbon emitting resources, combined with increasingly stringent regulation of allowable emissions, is a very good one.