It is clear that Democrats plan to make “climate change” a front-line issue in the 2016 campaign. They tried to do that in 2014 and got nowhere , but President Obama still brings it up at every opportunity. His science czar John Holdren calls it “urgent.”
“Look around you,” the Democrats say. “Droughts in California. Bitter cold in Boston. Tornadoes in strange places. This is the new normal and will only get worse unless drastic steps are taken immediately. Those who deny this put the planet in peril.” By framing the issue in these terms — a bipolar fight between those who accept science and those who don’t — and then wrapping themselves in the scientists’ flag, they hope to gain the moral high ground.
That’s why they are reacting so strongly against scientists who accept the global warming/climate change theory as correct but question the scientific validity of the projections about what it means in real world terms. Such scientific inquiry upsets the neatness of their bipolar construct.
A recent target of their ire is Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado, Boulder, an expert on extreme weather. He believes that climate is being affected by human emissions. He further believes that the consequences of doing nothing about it could be harmful. He favors a tax on carbon. So far, for Democrats, so good. However, Pielke has also highlighted data that shows that recent extreme weather events do not appear to have been caused by human emissions. That brought the full weight of Jon Holdren down on him.
Holdren should have realized that Pielke’s statement — that there has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, nor droughts since the mid-20th century— echos the position of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the ultimate keeper of the climate change flame: “[T]here is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century.”
This is devastating to those who want to keep the issue framed as a pro-science/anti-science debate. It changes the core question from “Is it real?” to “How bad is it?” — creating a whole different set of scientific issues to be addressed.
The track record of those who have used doomsday scenarios to answer that question is not good. Some 1990 forecasters predicted a billion climate change deaths by 2020. Al Gore said that British schoolchildren born after 2000 would never see snow. Gov. Jerry Brown, in California, said that rising sea levels were threatening to flood Los Angeles Airport (LAX). He stopped when someone told him that predicted annual increases in sea level were measured in fractions of inches. LAX is 119 feet above sea level, so it’s safe for centuries.
Perhaps in response to this history, predictions are now offered in terms of a range. For example, a current projection about the sea level at a future date says the increase between now and then will be somewhere between 1 and 8 feet.
That gap is so wide that it’s meaningless. It comes from a computer model that has not been able to accurately project sea level increases in the past. Instead of attacking scientists like Roger Pielke because they do not automatically endorse a doomsday view, we should ask them to help us build better models. We should not begin to dismantle our current energy economy in an effort to solve climate change until we have a much better answer to the question, “How bad is it?”
Robert Bennett, former U.S. senator from Utah, is a part-time teacher, researcher and lecturer at the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics.