QOTD

Gary Rosen, the managing editor of Commentary, in Sunday's NY Times Magazine at 20, in a piece titled "More Heat Than Light":

I have to confess to a serious case of global-warming fatigue. I know that the planet is heating up and that fossil fuels are the likely culprit. But I'm tired of the sanctimony and the alarmism that surround the subject. Every temperature spike is not a portent of the apocalypse, and the need to see it that way keeps us from dealing rationally with the problem itself. The issue is climate change, after all, not weather change. What scientists worry about isn't the occasional winter scorcher but the long-term shift in average temperatures.

Actual global warming over the past century amounts to just over 1 degree Fahrenheit. The United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the continued buildup of atmospheric CO₂ could make the Earth 3.5 to 8 degrees warmer by 2100, with potentially severe consequences for agriculture, water supplies and sea levels. The trouble is, there is virtually no chance that we'll reverse that trajectory. Even the most ambitious proposals for carbon taxes and "cap and trade" emission limits would only slow the rate of increase. And they won't alter the basic fact that, for the foreseeable future, modern economies will still depend overwhelmingly on fossil fuels. . .

If your starting point is what environmentalists call the "precautionary principle" -- the idea that we must act to avert ecological disaster even when we lack scientific certainty about the extent of the threat -- then our prospects are dim. A radical shift to clean energy, with the aim of ending greenhouse gas emissions, isn't on any government's agenda. . .

If "precaution" is to make sense, it must be tempered by the logic of cost-benefit analysis, with its trade-offs and estimates of relative risk. Taxing carbon consumption is a fine idea -- it would create incentives for new energy technologies -- but if pushed too far it could depress economic growth. Resources might be better invested in adaptation -- that is, in developing new crops and water supplies for a hotter world. Nor can we let climate change divert attention from more pressing human needs. The social scientist Bjorn Lomborg persuasively argues that the Third World suffers more from malnutrition and H.I.V./AIDS than it is likely to suffer from global warming.

Such a balance sheet will not satisfy those who see the campaign against global warming as an evangelical cause, a way to atone for central air conditioning, S.U.V.'s and other sins against nature. But the current debate would benefit from less emotion and more calculation.