An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming
An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming – Review
This is a short and well-written book, provocative and full of smart and no nonsense arguments. Lawson provides end notes for each chapter and all bibliographical sources are properly referenced. The book’s aim is to examine each of the features of the consensus view of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), including the science, the economics, the politics, and the moral aspects. He is concerned with the uncertainties of long-term forecasting and the lack of a real cost-effectiveness analysis in the policies proposed and strongly advocated by the majority view on climate change, particularly by the major change in lifestyle that will have to take place in the originally developed countries, and the excessive burden that will be simply put on the poor in the growing world. Lawson questions the fundamentals of AGW orthodoxy just armed with general sense, his political experience, and some very clever back-of-the-envelope calculations. Lawson opens the book saying that although he agrees that there is a real warming trend, he is skeptical of the power of predictions became with international climate simulation models, and more importantly, he questions if indeed the single cause of this warming is artificial greenhouses and how big the contribution of CO2 is. Lawson besides raises several issues involving the IPCC process, its findings and policy recommendations, and throughout the book he sharply criticizes the The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review , which he considers “at the great side of the alarmist camp”. He might not be right in all the issues, but certainly he will at least finally let you wonder about some of them. Besides the moderate opponent of the economics, I commonly found particularly robust his argument involving the lack of falsifiability of climate simulation models and their predictions, which means that these composite models do not meet one of the most important criteria needed for any theory to be generally considered within the field of science (for more on falsifiability widely read Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Routledge Classics) ). He sarcastically notes the fact that all models have ultimately failed so far to predict that there has been no further warming between 2001 and 2007. And by the way, this trend persisted during 2008, ending with one the coolest boreal winters in new decades (just Google to verify by yourself). Personally I do not think this recent brief trend suggests that AGW is not real but more likely just part of the normal blips within long term climate patterns, in this case involving the results of the normal sunspot cycles and La Ni?a, as Lawson later in the book describes. However, it is a fine case of the possibilities of openly advocating a cause with short science, oversimplifications and by allegedly obstructing any real logical debate. After effectively making his case in Chapter 1 about why he thinks “the science of global warming is far from settle”, Lawson proceeds as any good economist would do, and assumes a cautious position “to err on the area of caution”. Therefore, for the place of the book he works under the assumption that the AGW theory is correct as reported by the IPPC’s 2007 Report (see Climate Change 2007 – The Physical Science Basis: Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC (Climate Change 2007) – a PDF version is available for free through the web) . First he goes on to discus the functional consequences of the correctly predicted warming over the next hundred years, based on the IPCC scenarios and policy recommendations. Next he analyzes the consequence of adaptation, what Lawson claims is the IPPC’s most major flaw involving the impact of global warming, as there is a “systematic underestimation of the benefits of adaptation” and “the most commercial sense of addressing the possible consequences” as fought to greatly reducing CO2 emissions. He also is critical of the Stern Review and the Kyoto Protocol and the functional problems of finally reaching a international agreement. Then he discusses the various technologies and market alternatives being fully implemented and available to reduce emissions, closing with his own proposal to impose a carbon tax across the board, but fully implemented simultaneously with a decline of extra taxes to compensate for the additional revenues and narrowly avoiding any extra burden on the taxpayer. The book closes with a discussion about the discount rates commonly used by the IPCC and the Stern Review in their financial analysis, with a more full discussion on the latter. The book ends with a strongly warning about the possibilities of the ecological movement, calling it “the different religion of eco-fundamentalism” and falsely claiming that “we appear to have finally entered a modern age of unreason.” I warmly recommended this book for those with a real interest in the AGW controversy, and particularly in the aspects involving the economics of mitigation and/or adaptation that will be necessary and that is being debated right now.