Discussing Global Warming in the Security Council: Premature and a Distraction from More Pressing Crises...part 3

The Current Evidence

The state of current scientific understanding undermines the case for consideration of global warming in the U.N. Security Council.

A review of the evidence reveals fundamental uncertainties and projected harms that, even under worst-case scenarios, are not pressing threats requiring immediate attention by the Security Council.

To what extent is warming caused by human activity? The earth's average temperature has increased over the last 30 years, and many point to this as evidence of harmful, human-induced warming. But temperatures have risen and fallen many times in the past. For example, the Medieval Warm Period was likely as warm as the present.

While it is likely that mankind's activities have made a contribution to warming, current temperatures are within the historical range of natural variability.

How much of an immediate and dire threat is posed by warming? Given that the current upward trend in temperatures is not unprecedented, it stands to reason that such minor warming will not lead to unprecedented catastrophes, and scientific evidence is independently confirming this.

The planet and its inhabitants are much more resilient to temperature variability than had been previously assumed, and the warming over the last few decades has not been particularly harmful to humans or the environment.[5] Indeed, the rise in greenhouse gas emissions and temperatures over this period has been accompanied by declining damages from natural disasters, not the opposite.[

In sum, the more alarming predictions

—dramatic sea level rises, increased storms, wider spread of malaria, etc.

—are not extrapolations of current trends, but radical departures from them. At the very least, they are highly implausible in the near term and so not an imminent threat to international peace and stability, which is the claim made to justify consideration before the U.N. Security Council.


Is reducing CO2 emissions worth the costs? China, which will soon overtake the U.S. as the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, and other developing nations are exempt under Kyoto, and most of the European signatories to the Protocol are not on track to meet its requirements, with several actually seeing their emissions since 2000 rising faster than in the U.S. Britain's emissions are at a ten-year high.

Even if the U.S. had ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and even if Europe and others were in full compliance with it, the treaty would avert an inconsequential 0.07 degree Celsius temperature increase by 2050[, at a cost to the U.S. of $100 billion to $400 billion annually.[

This would directly impact the public with higher gasoline and electricity prices as well as fewer jobs and other consequences. In other words, the Kyoto approach leads to great economic pain and almost no environmental gain.
Even if global warming occurs as envisioned, it is far from clear that acting now to address the threat is the most efficient use of resources.

Many of the disasters predicted by alarmists (e.g., floods, droughts, crop-failures, storms, and vector-borne diseases) will occur from time to time whether or not global warming makes them more frequent or severe. These threats should be faced directly, irrespective of global warming. Costly measures like Kyoto, however, will do almost nothing to cool the planet but would damage economies and sap resources away from more useful and direct efforts to fight these problems.

For example, the Copenhagen Consensus Conference brought together leading economists, scientists, and specialists in May 2004 to prioritize how to best allocate limited resources to address the most pressing global problems. In June 2006, the Copenhagen Consensus Conference brought together U.N. ambassadors, including the U.S., Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani ambassadors, for the same purpose.

In both cases, "[Participants] agreed that the world's top spending priorities should be around the areas of health, water, education and hunger. And, perhaps more courageously, they also said what should not come at the top—financial instability and climate change ranked at the bottom of the list."