59abd191_Quark_Soup_by_David_Appell__ode_Highlights_HIDE_HIGHLIGHTS
[Time] 0:33
Intro. [Recording date: June 18, 2015.] Russ: We are going to talk about climate change, your view of the state of our scientific knowledge and some controversies you've been in. How has your thinking on this evolved over time? Give us some background. Guest: Well, I've covered climate change as a journalist for more than 25 years. I first wrote about it in the late 1980s, for The Economist. At the time I took everything that alarmed scientists were saying at face value. I gradually became more skeptical, in the 1990s. I then returned to alarmism, for a while, because of seeing the hockey-stick graph, which seemed to me to demonstrate unambiguously that what was happening today was much more drastic, was unprecedented and much more drastic, than what we'd seen. So, when I discovered that that graph was actually very misleading, once you understood the statistics behind it, I began to look at all the rest of the evidence. And the more I looked, the more skeptical I got. Not about the idea that climate change is--not about the idea that mankind can influence the climate. Not about the idea that carbon dioxide, greenhouse gas, but about the idea that we are totally likely to see dangerous climate change within the next hundred years or so. Russ: So, we are going to come back maybe and talk about the hockey stick. But one issue that hangs over this conversation and that hangs over our conversations here at EconTalk on economics many times is this issue of 'the facts.' And I find it remarkable, the deeper you dig into something, the more often you realize that the facts are a little bit ambiguous. Uncertain. They are created. They are not just coming down from Sinai. And when people tell me, 'Well, the facts speak for themselves,' I always get suspicious. Because they never do. They have to be prepared and measured and packaged, and that often makes a difference. Now, as you said, you are not skeptical about a lot of things; in fact you describe yourself as--and I love this phrase--a 'lukewarmer.' That's one word. That's not a name. That's not Luke Spacewarmer--although that would be an interesting character, I think, if we had a graphic novel about a project. But, what do you mean by a 'lukewarmer'? Guest: What I mean by a lukewarmer is somebody who is not challenging the idea that carbon dioxide levels are increasing or that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas or that we have seen warming in recent years or are likely to see warming to continue. But is challenging the idea that there is a strong likelihood that this will turn dangerous at some point in the future. In fact, I would often go further and say, actually, there's pretty good evidence that the carbon dioxide emissions we are putting into the atmosphere as fossil fuels are in many ways improving the environment. By that I mean we've seen a 14% increase in the amount of green vegetation in the planet in the last 30 years. Almost certainly largely because of the extra CO2, which is enabling plants in all ecosystems to grow more vigorously. And that has slightly improved the greenery of the planet, particularly in arid areas like the Sahel and Western Australia. So there are really quite--and I haven't even begun to mention the effect of slightly more rainfall on crops, and so on. Drought on the whole has been decreasing over the last 30 years. So, there are all sorts of reasons for thinking that for the planet as well as for mankind, carbon dioxide emissions are a good thing. A far bigger example of course is that if we burn coal oil and gas, we don't burn wood. And so we don't chop down forests. There is no doubt that switching to fossil fuels enabled us to stop destroying forests on a massive scale. Particularly in the Western World, where forests are recovering a lot of land very rapidly. So, I think the conversation about climate change is often terribly one-sided: Talks only about the damaging impacts and never about the positive impacts of fossil fuels and their emissions. And a 'lukewarmer,' like me, is someone who thinks that we are unlikely to see dangerous climate change; we are quite likely to see benefits. Meanwhile, this doesn't make me someone who is not concerned about the environment. I think there are some very serious environment challenges. Top on my list is invasive species, which are helping to decimate native species on particular islands all over the world, still. This has been a big problem for hundreds of years; it's getting worse at the moment. And I think those issues have been neglected. Because we are spending all our time talking about climate change.
Quark Soup by David Appell
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