I saw this a week ago, and totally forgot to post it on gimme-five.  According to a new study, solar activity is not responsible for climate change.  Solar activity driving global climate was one of the central claims of many anthropogenic climate change skeptics, so this is big news.

A new scientific study concludes that changes in the Sun’s output cannot be causing modern-day climate change.

It shows that for the last 20 years, the Sun’s output has declined, yet temperatures on Earth have risen.

It also shows that modern temperatures are not determined by the Sun’s effect on cosmic rays, as has been claimed.

Writing in the Royal Society’s journal Proceedings A, the researchers say cosmic rays may have affected climate in the past, but not the present.

Basically, it looks like the scientists measured solar output compared to Earth temperatures, in the same way that the authors of the film: ”The Great Global Warming Swindle” did.  I haven’t seen TGGWS, but the authors of this study allege they show solar output and temperature on a graph all the way through 1980, where they are highly correlated.  However, this study shows after 1980, solar activity and global temperatures diverge.  The implication is beyond 1980, humans are having such a large effect on global climate that it overshadows (pun intended) the sun’s effect.

My cousin once told me that heavy societal debate on climate change could actually be somewhat harmful, because it diverts attention from other important environmental problems.  Popular Science Magazine addressed five important environmental problems that can cause serious harm that are not related to climate change.  They are:

1. Desertification of Land.  More and more land is turning to desert because topsoil anchoring plants are being destroyed, costing the world $42 billion per year in lost food, livable land, etcetera.  Popsci projects it would cost $2.4 billion per year to combat desertification.
2. Excessive Nitrogen.  Nitrogen accelerates algae growth, which can dramatically harm ecosystems and poisons humans when it gets into our food and water supply.  60% of “fixed nitrogen” comes from fertilizers.  [Note that corn production uses nitrogen fertilizer.  Yet another reason corn-based ethanol is a poor solution to the transportation problem.]
3. Water Problems.  1 billion people on earth do not have adequate drinking water, and that number is increasing steadily as old water infrastructure falls apart in developed countries and pollution makes water undrinkable in developed and developing countries.
4. Arctic Haze.  Pollution around the arctic is accelerating its warming and melting the arctic ice.

Question of the day, week, month, and year: why do liberals tend to be more convinced than conservatives about the threat of climate change, even though both sides have the same evidence available to them?

According to a January 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center, 77% of those polled believed that the earth was getting warmer.  However, only 54% of conservative Republicans believed this, compared to 92% of liberal Democrats.  More importantly, only 20% of conservative Republicans believed climate change is primarily caused by human activity, compared to 71% of liberal Democrats.

Does it just so happen that people on a certain side of the political spectrum evaluate facts in the same manner as those with similar political beliefs?  I don’t buy this.  If both sides have access to identical facts, yet there is statistically significant evidence that being on a certain side of the political spectrum causes one to believe a particular thing, something else has to be going on.

I believe that many people assume the answer to the climate change question before they even look at the evidence.  The average liberal looks at the evidence after affirming in his own mind that climate change is a real threat.  At the same time, the average conservative has already cemented in her mind that climate change is a falsehood when she first begins to examine climate change evidence.

Al Gore wrote an Op-Ed yesterday in the New York Times that is worth reading.  In it he acknowledges that Kyoto will never be ratified in the US, so a new international treaty must be ratified.

To this end, we should demand that the United States join an international treaty within the next two years that cuts global warming pollution by 90 percent in developed countries and by more than half worldwide in time for the next generation to inherit a healthy Earth.

This treaty would mark a new effort. I am proud of my role during the Clinton administration in negotiating the Kyoto protocol. But I believe that the protocol has been so demonized in the United States that it probably cannot be ratified here…

What might the treaty entail?  It’s not a big surprise:

A new treaty will still have differentiated commitments, of course; countries will be asked to meet different requirements based upon their historical share or contribution to the problem and their relative ability to carry the burden of change. This precedent is well established in international law, and there is no other way to do it.

The Senate just voted to increase CAFE standards in a new energy bill. I guess doing this is better than nothing for reducing oil use, but there is a much better option available: a tax on gasoline.

Raising the CAFE standards creates some problems. Raising the standards is expensive, the standards are full of loopholes, and the penalty for violating the standards is virtually nothing for big automakers (Andrew Kleit, “CAFE Changes, by the Numbers,” Regulation 2002: 32-5.). On the plus side, the new CAFE standards would no longer create differing standards for cars and “light trucks” (i.e. SUVS).

A better “free market” solution would be to simply estimate the external cost of consuming a gallon of gasoline and tax gasoline by that amount so that gasoline can be purchased and sold efficiently. For example, gasoline should not be priced at merely the total cost of production plus a small tax. It should be priced at the entire cost of production, plus the cost of pollution, congestion, geopolitical instability, and any other costs that its consumption creates.