A GREAT DAY FOR IRRATIONALISM
Today the Kyoto protocol for decreasing the amount of greenhouse gases spewed out in the atmosphere comes
into effect, and thus marks one of the great victories for irrationalism. Why? For several reasons.
To start with the scientific basis for the greenhouse gas global warming theory is shaky at best. Surely, you
may think, I'm not claiming that the greenhouse effect is imaginary? No, I'm not. The greenhouse effect is certainly
real - if it weren't we'd live on a snowball twelve months a year. The attributes of the greenhouse gases that disallowes
heat to escape out in space are well documented and their effects can be studied in the extremes on Venus.
Neither am I denying that it's getting warmer. All data we have is saying it is, and there's no reason to assume that
the data is bad. It has been getting warmin over the last century and the trend does not appear to be turning anytime
soon.
And although it is a reasonable conclusion that the greenhouse gases our industries and cars and what not produces
are the reason for this increased average temperature, there simply isn't enough evidence to draw that conclusion.
Without being an expert in the area, the theory may well be able to explain the changes we've seen so far (though
I'm not confident that that's the case either). However, a good scientific theory needs to be able to make correct
predictions about the future too, and these predictions needs to be better than those made by every other competing
theory. We're still waiting for results in this respect.
Against this argument one may point out that we can't afford to wait and see, because if the theory is right we'd be
in the middle of disaster when the data finally arrives. Therefore we have to act now, regardless of whether the theory
is correct or not, just to be on the safe side. I don't think this is a good argument. It should be possible to put
in the data from, say, 30 years ago into the computer models used and see what result they get for today. There's a second
reason for rejecting this argument too. If acting now to stay safe was free or cheap it would probably make sense to
sign something like the Kyoto protocol. It isn't.
In this excellent
article published in The Telegraph last December, Björn Lomborg shows that the cost for implementing the Kyoto protocol
is $150 billion for every year in which the protocol is in effect. This is an astonishing number, especially considering
that the effect of the protocol - even according to the environmentalists - is barely noticeable. We'd need something vastly
stronger to make an impact on global warming, and the cost for that would hardly be lower.
This shows the second, and largest, reason for why signing the protocol is highly irrational. As Mr Lomborg shows, even
if the theories are correct and the computer simulations give us accurate numbers, the cost for implementing the pretty
unsharp Kyoto protocol is vastly higher than the cost for dealing with the consequences. If the money is instead spent
on other things - preferably things that help people out of poverty - what we'll do is - in Mr Lomborg's
words - "a very costly way of doing very little for much richer people far into the future." Instead of doing a lot
for very poor people today.
I think, in a few decades, people will have realised this and the Kyoto protocol will be seen as one of the biggest wastes
of money the world has ever seen.
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