How Climate Policy Went Wrong

A scientist’s aerosol research hints at why America’s energy suicide isn’t helping

By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Excerpts:

"the direct effect of increased CO2 is easily calculated to be only about 1 degree Celsius of warming from an expected atmospheric doubling later this century.

To make CO2 responsible for the warming already observed—1.2 degrees—scientists have to posit “positive” or warming feedbacks. In a new paper, veteran NASA scientist James Hansen offers a larger estimate of the (ironically) negative feedback from particulate emissions. This negative feedback (cooling) becomes, in effect, a positive feedback (warming) only because our efforts to curb air pollution allow more sunlight to reach Earth’s surface.

In his overall model, 70% of warming comes from positive feedbacks rather than from CO2 directly, slightly more than in some standard models. These feedbacks start life as exercises in scientific imagination, since they don’t necessarily announce themselves or their magnitude or even direction (warming or cooling). Important feedbacks are believed to include changes in water vapor, darker or lighter clouds, increases in light-absorbing ground cover, decreases in light-reflecting ice, etc."

"Because human appetite for energy is unbounded except by price, subsidizing green energy doesn’t mean less consumption of carbon energy and may even increase it in the absence of a carbon tax."

One line the press won’t quote, though, is his [James Hansen] group’s explanation of how they reach their particulates estimate. “Aerosol impact,” they write, “is suggested by the gap between observed global warming and expected warming due to GHGs based on ECS inferred from paleoclimate” (emphasis added).

If that sounds like a lot of spitballing based on a missing variable extrapolated from two different kinds of estimates that are already fuzzy to begin with, it is."

"A recent report by Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electric Reliability Corp. indicates that last year New York City came dangerously close to running out of gas to maintain apartment-building heat. Had the gas failed, restoring heat to thousands of buildings would have been a job of months, not hours, as technicians went door-to-door relighting boiler pilot lights."