We are at the “precipice of what might turn out to be a catastrophe for the world’s poorest,” according to a recent op-ed in Bloomberg News.
Warning of “severe malnutrition, illness and starvation,” Michael J. Roberts, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University, asserts that “the negative effects of warmer temperatures could be worse than scientists have assumed.”
Having just conducted extensive research on the issue of global warming, I’ve seen enough evidence on both sides of this debate to be thoroughly convinced that no one truly knows what will happen in the future. There are just too many significant variables that affect the Earth’s climate, and scientists have yet to reliably isolate them.
However, it bears noting that claims of doomsday climate scenarios involving famines, flooding and extreme weather have not borne out, and average global temperature increases have thus far been associated with increasing worldwide food resources and vegetation productivity.
For example, between the mid-1970s and late 1990s, the average global surface temperature (as calculated by NASA) increased by 0.9ºF, and the world’s population increased by 45%. Yet, during this same period, apparent food consumption per person increased by 15% worldwide and by 25% in developing countries. In other words, actual experience has been the exact opposite of what global warming (and overpopulation) campaigners are predicting.
Likewise, a 2003 paper in the journal Science found that worldwide vegetation productivity increased by 6.2% between 1982 and 1999. This “somewhat surprising result,” as it was described in the journal BioScience, is credited to “higher temperatures, longer temperate growing seasons, more rainfall in some previously water-limited areas,” and more sunlight. This map shows these productivity increases, which are nearly global in scope.
Professor Roberts suggests more “public research money” for agronomics as a way to deal with this alleged problem, claiming that the annual return on investment is “45 percent to 50 percent, numbers any hedge-fund manager could envy.” If this were truly the case, hedge-fund managers, who are known for making high-profit investments, would be tripping over one another to fund such research, and there would be no need for governments to subsidize it.
Should global warming prove to be a non-problem, governments will lose a major justification for prying more tax money from the people. Obama administration documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealingly describe “emissions allowances under a cap and trade system” as “valuable assets” that are “analogous to revenue under an equivalent tax policy.” As these documents optimistically note, this “could generate federal receipts” ranging from $100 to $300 billion every year.
Perhaps this potentially perpetual source of taxpayer money explains why the same politicians who have always called for more taxes, more wealth redistribution and more pork-barrel spending are also insistent that global warming is a crisis.
James D. Agresti is the president of Just Facts, a nonprofit institute dedicated to researching and publishing verifiable facts about public policy issues.