The Taxing Carbon Fallacy - Part One

Over the next few days we will take a look at the next political class disaster in waiting after health care reform, namely taxing carbon usage, otherwise known as fixing global warming. As with the health care issue, the political class is running to a solution without identifying and quantifying the problem. They propose a massive new bureaucracy without identifying all of the underlying interdependencies and root causes.

Today's discussion will focus on a very core issue, is global warming a myth or a reality? Consider the following historical publications:

• "The world's climatologists are agreed" about the need to "prepare for the next ice age." - Published in Science Digest, February, 1973
• "The earth's climate seems to be cooling down...the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century" - Published in the Newsweek cover story, "The Cooling World" on April 28, 1975
• "Continued rapid cooling of the earth means that a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery." - Published in International Wildlife, July, 1975
• "A major cooling of the planet...is widely considered inevitable." Published in the New York Times, May 21, 1975

The same type experts that are today telling us that global warming is inevitable were telling us that a new ice age was imminent just thirty four years ago. Seems like they missed that prediction by a mile. Who is to say they got this prediction right? And do we really want to implement a massive government effort that will significantly increase energy costs to both American consumers and American businesses based on experts that were so wrong so recently?

Furthermore, consider the plight of Alan Carlin, a veteran and senior analyst at the EPA. According to an article for the Wall Street Journal by Kimberley Strassel, summarized in The Week magazine on July 17, 2009, Mr. Carlin co-authored a 98 page study that raised "serious doubts about commonly used climate models, punches holes in apocalyptic scenarios, and notes that, in recent years, global temperatures actually have been on a downward trend." Unfortunately, rather than openingly debating his position in the effort to find truth, Mr. Carlin's boss at the EPA, Al McGarland, has forbidden Carlin from communicating his findings outside of the EPA, according to Ms. Strassel. If the Carlin analysis is not good science or not well done, why suppress his findings and conclusions? Let the scientific community refute it if it needs to be refuted. Combine this suppression with the ice age myth and miscalculations listed above, it really does throw a shadow of a doubt about the validity of global warming.

(Side note: remember how the mainstream press and the Democrats went crazy a few years ago when the Bush administration was accused of suppressing analyses supporting global warming? Why not the same outrage of when the Obama administration does the same thing? A little hypocrisy going on here.)

Finally, from a statistical perspective, people often mistake statistical correlation with causation. Just because two events seem related does not mean that one causes the other. Some global warming advocates would argue that rising planet temperatures are caused by increasing discharge of carbons into the atmosphere (although Mr. Carlin and others would disagree with even this basic assumption) since both are increasing at the same time. Although they are correlated, no one has proven that one causes another, they are just assuming that there is a causation. Assumptions like this can be very dangerous particularly when so much is at stake. A new Federal carbon tax bureaucracy, increased costs on American households and businesses, and a continued reduction of freedom as the political class expands how they dictate more and more how we are to live and spend out wealth, this time in the energy area.

Imagine what would have happened if in the late 1970s we believed the climatologists of the time and had begun to fight against the onset of the next ice age. It would have been a tremendous waste of time, energy, and dollars since they were totally wrong.

Still think that global warming is a reality? Come back tomorrow and see how even if you are right, what the political class is planning will make absolutely no difference.