Walter Russel Mead
The global warming movement as we have known it is
dead. Its health had been in steady decline during the last
year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty
to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the
time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced to hoping for a
‘politically binding’ agreement to be agreed that
would set the stage for the rapid adoption of the legally binding
treaty. After the failure of the summit to agree to even that
much, the movement went into a rapid decline.
The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad
politics.
After years in which global warming activists had
lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific
evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the
global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making
inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis
at all. This latest story in the London
Times is yet another shocker; the IPCC’s claims
that the rainforests were going to disappear as a result of global
warming are as bogus and fraudulent as its claims that the Himalayan
glaciers would melt by 2035. It seems as if a scare
story could grab a headline, the IPCC simply didn’t care
about whether it was reality-based.
With this in mind, ‘climategate’
— the scandal over hacked emails by prominent climate
scientists — looks sinister rather than just
unsavory. The British government has concluded that
University of East Anglia, home of the research institute that provides
the global warming with much of its key data, had violated
Britain’s Freedom of Information Act when scientists refused
to hand over data so that critics could check their calculations and
methods. Breaking the law to hide key pieces of data
isn’t just ’science as usual,’ as the
global warming movement’s embattled defenders gamely tried to
argue. A cover-up like that suggests that you indeed have
something to conceal.
The urge to make the data better than it was
didn’t just come out of nowhere. The global
warmists were trapped into the necessity of hyping the threat by their
realization that the actual evidence they had — which, let me
emphasize, all hype aside, is serious, troubling and establishes in my
mind the need for intensive additional research and investigation, as
well as some prudential steps that would reduce CO2 emissions by
enhancing fuel use efficiency and promoting alternative energy sources
— was not sufficient to get the world’s governments
to do what they thought needed to be done. Hyping the threat
increasingly doesn’t look like an accident: it looks like it
was a conscious political strategy.
Now it has failed. Not everything that has
come out of the IPCC and the East Anglia Climate Unit is false, but
enough of their product is sufficiently tainted that these institutions
can best serve the cause of fighting climate change by stepping out of
the picture. New leadership might help, but everything these
two agencies have done will now have to be re-checked by independent
and objective sources.
The global warming campaigners got into this mess
because they had a deeply flawed political strategy. They
were never able to develop a pragmatic approach that could reach its
goals in the context of the existing international system.
The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international
agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in
national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political
economies of most countries on the planet. As it happened,
the movement never got to the first step — it never got the
world’s countries to agree to the necessary set of treaties,
transfers and policies that would constitute, at least on paper, a
program for achieving its key goals.
Even if that first step had been reached, the second and
third would almost surely not have been. The United States
Congress is unlikely to pass the kind of legislation these agreements
would require before the midterm elections, much less ratify a
treaty. (It takes 67 senate votes to ratify a treaty and only
60 to overcome a filibuster.) After the midterms, with the
Democrats expected to lose seats in both houses, the chance of passage
would be even more remote — especially as polls show that
global warming ranks at or near the bottom of most voters’
priorities. American public opinion
supports ‘doing something’ about global warming,
but not very much; support for specific measures and sacrifices will
erode rapidly as commentators from Fox News and other conservative
outlets endlessly hammer away. Without a
commitment from the United States to pay its share of the $100 billion
plus per year that poor countries wanted as their price for compliance,
and without US participation in other aspects of the proposed global
approach, the intricate global deals fall apart.
Since the United States was never very likely to accept
these agreements and ratify these treaties, and is even
less prepared to do so in a recession with the Democrats in
retreat, even “success” in Copenhagen would not
have brought the global warming movement the kind of victory it sought
— although it would have created a very sticky and painful
political problem for the United States.
But even if somehow, miraculously, the United States and
all the other countries involved not only accepted the agreements but
ratified them and wrote domestic legislation to incorporate them into
law, it is extremely unlikely that all this activity would achieve the
desired result. Countries would cheat, either because they
chose to do so or because their domestic systems are so weak,
so corrupt or so both
that they simply wouldn’t
be able to comply. Governments
in countries like China and India aren’t going to stop
pushing for all the economic growth they can get by any means that will
work — and even if central governments decided to move on
global warming, state and local authorities have agendas of their
own. The examples of blatant cheating would inevitably affect
compliance in other countries; it would also very likely erode what
would in any case be an extremely fragile consensus in rich countries
to keep forking over hundreds of billions of dollars to poor countries
— many of whom would not be in anything like full compliance
with their commitments.
For better or worse, the global political system
isn’t capable of producing the kind of result the global
warming activists want. It’s like asking a
jellyfish to climb a flight of stairs; you can poke and prod all you
want, you can cajole and you can threaten. But you are asking
for something that you just can’t get — and at the
end of the day, you won’t get it.
The grieving friends and relatives aren’t
ready to pull the plug; in a typical, whistling-past-the-graveyard
comment, the BBC first acknowledges that even if the current promises
are kept, temperatures will rise above the target level of two degrees
Celsius — but let’s not despair! The BBC
quotes one of its own reporters: “BBC environment
reporter Matt McGrath says the accord lacks teeth and does not include
any clear targets on cutting emissions. But if most countries at least
signal what they intend to do to cut their emissions, it will mark the
first time that the UN has a comprehensive written collection of
promised actions, he says.”
Gosh! A comprehensive written collection of promised actions!
And it’s a first!! Any day now that jellyfish is
going to start climbing stairs. Sure, it will be slow at
first — but the momentum will build!
The death of global warming (the movement, not the
phenomenon) has some important political and cultural consequences in
the United States that I’ll be blogging on down the
road. Basically, Sarah Palin 1, Al Gore zip. The
global warming meltdown confirms all the populist suspicions out there
about an arrogantly clueless establishment invoking faked
’science’ to impose cockamamie social mandates on
the long-suffering American people, backed by a mainstream media that
is totally in the tank. Don’t think this won’t have
consequences; we’ll be exploring them together as the days go
by.