National Review’s Jason Steorts: “Even if warming is predominately the result of human activity, and even if its harms will outweigh its benefits, the question is whether it will be bad enough to justify the economic castration that significant greenhouse-gas reductions would require.”

Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK): “The Kyoto Protocol is a lot of economic pain for no climate gain.”

Rush Limbaugh: “‘Would you get off the global warming stuff,’ some people are saying. No, I’m not going to get off of it because what’s at stake is the US economy, folks, what’s at stake is our lifestyle. The people that are trying to force this on everybody and take the natural fluctuations of our climate.”

The right wing is right, but for all the wrong reasons. The U.S. economy and our lifestyles are indeed at stake if we continue to listen to the deniers. According to a new groundbreaking report commissioned by the British government — “the most comprehensive review ever carried out on the economics of climate change” — the economic costs of doing nothing far outweigh the costs of mitigating global warming’s effects. Here are a few of the report’s key conclusions:

Using the results from formal economic models, the Review estimates that if we don’t act, the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year, now and forever. If a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account, the estimates of damage could rise to 20% of GDP or more.

In contrast, the costs of action — reducing greenhouse gas emissions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change — can be limited to around 1% of global GDP each year.

[...]

The transition to a low-carbon economy will bring challenges for competitiveness but also opportunities for growth. … Markets for low-carbon energy products are likely to be worth at least $500bn per year by 2050, and perhaps much more. … [F]rom implementing strong mitigation policies this year, shifting the world onto the better path: the net benefits would be of the order of $2.5 trillion. This figure will increase over time. This is not an estimate of net benefits occurring in this year, but a measure of the benefits that could flow from actions taken this year; many of the costs and benefits would be in the medium to long term.

The message for those willing to heed reality is that if you’re concerned about global warming’s impact on the economy, now is the time to act.

A new study by the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University reveals the severe economic consequences of doing nothing. From the report:

[I]f nothing is done to restrain greenhouse gas emissions, annual economic damages could reach US$20 trillion by 2100 (expressed in U.S. dollars at 2002 prices), or 6 to 8 percent of global economic output at that time (Kemfert 2005). The same study found that immediate adoption of active climate protection policies could limit the temperature increase to 2° and eliminate more than half of the damages…If, however, climate protection efforts do not begin until 2025, the same model estimates that it will be impossible to limit warming to 2° by 2100 — and climate protection in general will be more expensive, the later it starts.

Even that estimate “necessarily omit[s] some of the most troubling potential consequences of climate change.” Importantly, the study found that the cost of mitigation is about one quarter the cost of doing nothing.

Even if warming is predominately the result of human activity, and even if its harms will outweigh its benefits, the question is whether it will be bad enough to justify the economic castration that significant greenhouse-gas reductions would require.

In today’s Washington Post, columnist Sebastian Mallaby efficiently dispenses with this argument:

In 2004, for example, the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration analyzed a carbon-cutting plan advanced by Sens. John McCain and Joe Lieberman, which aimed to stabilize greenhouse emissions. The energy administration estimated that reaching this target would cause U.S. GDP to be 0.4 percent less than it would otherwise have been in 2028. Since GDP was projected to grow by 90 percent between the time of the study and that year, this meant that the nation could address climate change and still experience growth of 89.6 percent over the period.

In 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the most prestigious authority in the field, carried out a similar exercise . It calculated that stabilizing carbon emissions at an acceptable level — defined as slightly higher than today’s — would cause world GDP to be 4 percent lower than it would otherwise have been in 2050. Again, that is a modest cost — roughly one year of decent growth for the world economy.

Even on a global level, combating global warming is relatively affordable. Of course, what’s always missing from the analysis of those who insist that our climate policy should be determined by cost-benefit analysis is the cost of doing nothing. I wonder why?

A common right-wing argument about why global warming isn’t a problem is that it may have positive benefits for the earth:

“When it’s not even clear that the warming we’ve seen is hurting us — many argue that it’s a boon, citing its benefits to agriculture and its potential to make severe climates more hospitable.” [Jason Lee Steorts, National Review, 6/6/06]

A new study to be published today in the journal Science, however, concludes that recent increases in Western wildfires may be a result of global warming. While “part of the increase may be attributed to natural fluctuations, evidence also links it to the effects of human-induced climate warming,” according to Dan Cayan, a co-author of the paper and director of the climate research division at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The AP reports on the study:

An analysis of data going back to 1970 indicates the fires increased “suddenly and dramatically” in the 1980s and the wildfire season grew longer, according to scientists in Arizona and California. … Beginning about 1987, there was a change from infrequent fires averaging about one week in duration to more frequent ones that often burned five weeks or more, they reported. The length of the wildfire season was extended by 78 days.

“So far in 2006, more than 3.8 million acres have burned in the United States — double the 10-year average for this time of year,” according to the Interagency Fire Center. In 2000, fires burned 7.4 million acres across the West and more than 20 people died.

In his letter, Michaels backs away from that claim, but offers a new argument:

Every modern climate model predicts that Antarctica will gain ice in the 21st century, resulting in a slight lowering of sea levels (which will, nonetheless, be largely compensated for as slightly warmer surface temperatures cause ocean waters to expand).

This argument is technically correct, but highly misleading.

Most of the ice loss in Antarctica is occurring in the coast. It’s not happening in a regular, linear fashion that can be captured by existing models. As a result, most of this ice loss is getting missed by the models. Richard Alley, who is writing the upcoming IPCC report on these issues, explains in a 2005 paper published in Science magazine:

[T]he models used in these projections lack some of the physical processes that might explain the rapid rates of ongoing coastal changes and lack the oceanic forcing responsible for inducing these changes…

Michaels’ shift is a good example of how climate skeptics operate. Throw out an argument and see what happens. If that doesn’t work, try something else. The goal here is not to win the argument, but just to keep things in doubt.

Fight back with the facts. Pledge to see An Inconvenient Truth:

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(Note: Even if you’ve already seen the film, make sure to pledge and be counted.)

In the new issue of National Review, Steorts owns up to one of his errors in a “clarification” letter to the editor. Here’s an excerpt:

CLARIFICATION

My article “Scare of the Century” (June 5) quoted University of Virginia climate scientist Patrick J. Michaels as saying that “Antarctica has been gaining ice,” and, based on Michaels’s view, called 2002 a “high-water mark for Antarctic ice.” Michaels cited a study by Curt Davis to support his position. Davis subsequently noted that his study did not measure ice changes over all of Antarctica. It showed that a large part of the East Antarctic ice sheet was growing while much of the West Antarctic ice sheet was shrinking. Davis wrote in his study that, if the observed growth pattern held for all of East Antarctica, it would outweigh estimated ice loss in West Antarctica; but he did not conclusively prove this to be the case.

Steorts’ “clarification” also contains an error. Davis’ study is for the interior of Antartica only. The fact that Davis wrote that growth in the Eastern interior may outweigh losses in the Western interior can’t be used to suggest that Antartica is gaining ice overall. The study doesn’t cover losses on the costal areas, where loses are known to be substantial.

Steorts tries to argue his error was irrelevant:

The argument in “Scare of the Century,” however, did not depend on Davis’s study; in fact, it noted that research subsequent to Davis’s shows a current net ice loss for Antarctica.

Steorts, however, dismissed that subsequent research out of hand, relying on the same false claim 2002 was “a high water mark for ice.” Steorts wrote that “Alarmism over [that] study is on the order of going to the beach at high tide, drawing a line at the water’s edge, and fretting a few hours later that the oceans are drying up.”

The lesson here is simple. On global warming issues, the National Review can’t be trusted.

Steorts identifies four. At ThinkProgress, we take accuracy seriously. Let’s take Steorts claims in order:

1. The “assertion that I wrote that when you factor coastal ice loss into Davis’s study, it still shows that the Antarctic ice sheet is growing.”

Steorts did assert that when you factor in coastal loss Antarctica is still growing. Here’s the quote “Since this unstudied area lies in the ice sheet’s interior, it almost certainly gained ice over the course of the study, and would accordingly have offset the (also unmeasured) coastal loss.”

2. The “claim that my discussion of Ola Johannessen’s study of ice buildup in interior Greenland failed to acknowledge coastal loss.”

We never claimed Steorts failed to acknowledge costal losses in Greenland. In fact we quoted Steorts saying “Various studies show that warmer temperatures are causing the ice sheet [in Greenland] to lose mass at the margins.”

3. The “claim that my discussion of Greenland’s temperature history is contradicted by average global temperature records.”

Greenland’s temperature history is contradicted by average global temperature records. Steorts claims a forthcoming study in Geophysical Research Letters found it was warm in Greenland in the early 20th century. If true, that’s more relevant than the global average.

4. The “implication that I’d denied that human activity causes warming, when what I’d said was that there is disagreement about how much warming it causes.”

We never claimed Steorts denied human activity causes global warming. We illustrated that Steorts overstated the disagreement about how much human activity is responsible for global warming.

The real test for the National Review is if they buy Steorts argument factual errors are “irrelevant.” The magazine should take accuracy seriously and print a correction in their print edition.

In his cover story, Steorts then references a study by Isabella Velicogna that examined the whole continent from 2002 to 2005 and found is was losing substantial amounts of ice. But Steorts provides this rebuttal:

2002 — the year in which the study began — was a high-water mark for Antarctic ice, so it’s not too surprising to see some decline since then. Alarmism over Velicogna’s study is on the order of going to the beach at high tide, drawing a line at the water’s edge, and fretting a few hours later that the oceans are drying up.

The original article does not provide a source for the claim that 2002 “was a high-water mark for Antarctic ice” but in an online piece today Steorts said that he was told that information from the CATO Institute’s Patrick Michaels.

ThinkProgress talked to Patrick Michaels this afternoon. Michaels said he was referring to a graph in the study by Curt Davis. ThinkProgress then called Curt Davis. Here is what he had to say:

If Michaels is using my study to claim that 2002 was a high water mark in terms of ice for all Antartica, that is completely wrong. My study result only demonstrated this for the interior of East Antarctica. You can’t use that for Antartica as a whole because the coastal areas of the ice sheet were not included in my analysis. My study clearly stated that the overall mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet depends on the sum of the contributions from the interior and coastal areas.

So it’s the same shell game again. Take a finding for the interior of the eastern part of the continent and pretend the whole continent is gaining ice, even though studies show the western and coastal areas are losing ice at a rapid pace.

Steorts now claims these serious factual errors are immaterial. In his most recent online commentary, Steorts says his article “hinges neither on the question whether Antarctica is presently gaining or losing ice.” That’s odd considering it was promoted on the cover of the National Review with the title “Snow Job: The Truth About the Great Overhyped Glacier Melt.” Seems like what’s happening to the ice is a pretty central point.

The author of the study, Curt Davis, issued a press release in response calling CEI’s ad a “deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public about the global warming debate.” Davis noted that his finding were limited to the interior of the eastern portion of Antarctica and more snow was “a predicted consequence of global warming” as the ocean temperature warms.

In a National Review cover story, Steorts used a similar tact with Davis’s study. He used it to suggest all of Antarctica was gaining ice and cast doubt on global warming science. Nevertheless, he has repeatedly insisted that Davis’s criticism of CEI do not apply to him:

Rehashing its objection to the way I used a study by Curt Davis, Think Progress offers, for the second time, a link to a document detailing Davis’s concerns with the way the Competitive Enterprise Institute cited that study…those criticisms aren’t applicable to my article.

ThinkProgress talked to Curt Davis this morning. This is what he had to say:

When [Steorts] quoted my study he misrepresented it just like CEI did because he reported this as representative of the entire Antarctic ice sheet. I did not report a result for the entire Antarctic ice sheet. We know from other studies the coastal areas are losing lots of ice.

In his first response to our criticism, Steorts acknowledged that he falsely claimed Davis’s study applied to all of Antarctica but said it was inconsequential. Doing some calculations, Steorts asserted that even if you factor in Western Antarctica and costal regions, the continent is gaining mass.

Davis told me that Steorts “did his own math. But his math his wrong.” He assumes that ice lost on the coast has the same density as snow gained in the interior of Eastern Antarctica. Actually, ice is about three times more dense. (Even if Steorts got his math right, the data he is using for the coasts isn’t reliable enough to make such a comparison. That’s why it wasn’t included in Davis’s study.)

How much deeper a hole is Steorts going to dig himself? Only time will tell.

UPDATE: Davis writes in to more precisely describe how Steorts got his math wrong:

My study only reported the mass gain due to changes in the interior of the East Antarctic ice sheet. Steorts used the average elevation change of the entire area of study, which included large portions of East and West Antarctica, and used the density of snow to convert to mass gain for both areas. In fact, the elevation change in the West interior is, in general, due to ice loss on the coasts while elevation change in the East interior is due to snow gain. Ice is about three times more dense than snow and the appropriate way to calculate the combined effect is to use an ice density for the West losses and a snow density for the East gains.

More importantly, even if Steorts got his math right, this type of calculation cannot be used to represent the entire Antarctic ice sheet. The altimeter data used does not cover coastal regions very well, and we know from other studies there is significant ice loss on the coasts that must be considered in developing a realistic estimate for the overall contribution of the Antarctic ice sheet to sea level rise.

In his latest response to our critique, Steorts enlists James Hansen – the NASA climate scientist who was famously muzzled by the Bush administration for his outspoken views about the dangers of global warming – to bolster his point. Steorts quotes Hansen as saying “the IPCC scenarios are unduly pessimistic.”

Steorts never links to Hansen’s actual writing, but to a blog written by fellow climate skeptics characterizing Hansen’s work. Here’s what James Hansen actually said:

There are reasons to believe that the IPCC scenarios are unduly pessimistic. First, they ignore changes in emissions, some already underway, due to concerns about global warming. Second, they assume that true air pollution will continue to get worse, with O3, CH4 and BC all greater in 2050 than in 2000. Third, they give short shrift to technology advances that can reduce emissions in the next 50 years.

In other words, Hansen’s article is a call to action. He argues that we can reduce the impact of global warming if we limit carbon dioxide emissions, control air pollution and adopt new technologies. Here’s how the same article begins:

Global warming is real, and the melting ice is an apt portent of potentially disastrous consequences… Study of these forcing agents shows that global warming can be slowed, and stopped, with practical actions that yield a cleaner, healthier atmosphere.

Steorts uses the same tactic when he notes that Hansen “looked at the instrumental record and predicted 0.75 degrees of warming by 2050.” Actually Hansen predicts that amount of warming if the growth in air pollutants and carbon dioxide emissions can be stopped.

Steorts takes a couple of words from Hansen’s call to action totally out of context to argue that action is unnecessary. This isn’t a real argument, it’s a shell game.

1. Discount the consensus of thousands of scientific experts in favor of a handful of skeptics backed by the fossil fuel industry. Steorts objects to two of our points because they are “based on the International Panel on Climate Change’s models” which he claims “make unrealistic assumptions.” The IPCC process involves thousands of scientists from over 120 countries who, over a period of years, develop detailed reports on climate change. The peer-review process is far more extensive than even the most prestigious scientific journals – the most recent report was reviewed by more than 1,000 top experts. The process includes “climate skeptics” and representatives from industry. In response, Steorts cites one individual, Patrick Michaels who disputes the IPCC’s science. Michaels, whose work is backed by the fossil fuel industry, once famously “proved” global warming wasn’t happening at all by mixing up degrees with radians.

2. Distort scientific research, much of which confirms the severity of global warming, to confuse the issue. First, Steorts quotes Patrick Michaels asserting that “Antarctica has been gaining ice.” Michaels doesn’t have any research to back up that claim, so Steorts is forced to rely on the scientific research of others, including Curt Davis. Steorts is unconcerned that Davis has said that the use of his research by climate skeptics is a “deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public.” Pieter Tans, who runs a lab at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, explains that this is a typical tactic “They argue not as scientists but as lawyers. When they argue, they pick one piece of the fabric of evidence and blow it up all out of proportion…Their purpose is to confuse.”

In the last line of his column, Steorts claims we don’t have the “slightest idea what [we] are talking about.”

But the issue here is not that we know what we are talking about and Steorts doesn’t. The point is that thousands of scientific experts do know what they are talking about. The few people paid by the fossil fuel industry to cast doubt on the consensus, and writers like Steorts who act as their megaphone, are not a credible or reliable rebuttal.

CLAIM: “[T]here is wide disagreement about the extent to which carbon-dioxide emissions are responsible for the warming we’ve seen so far.”

FACT: In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency concluded that the recent warming trend “is real and has been particularly strong within the past 20 years…due mostly to human activities.”

FACT: The U.S. Climate Change Science Program concluded that humans are driving the warming trend through greenhouse gas emissions, noting that “the observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone, nor by the effects of short-lived atmospheric constituents such as aerosols and tropospheric ozone alone.”

FACT: Science Magazine analyzed 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003. Not a single one challenged the scientific consensus the earth’s temperature is rising due to human activity.

CLAIM: “When it’s not even clear that the warming we’ve seen is hurting us — many argue that it’s a boon, citing its benefits to agriculture and its potential to make severe climates more hospitable — such draconian solutions should be unthinkable.”

FACT: The 2001 report by the IPCC finds that global climate change’s “negative health impacts are anticipated to outweigh positive health impacts.” Assuming that current emission levels continue, an increase in heat waves and a deterioration in air quality “will increase the risk of mortality and morbidity, principally in older age groups and the urban poor.” Additionally, any “regional increases in climate extremes (storms, floods, cyclones, etc.) associated with climate change would cause physical damage, population displacement, and adverse effects on food production, freshwater availability and quality, and would increase the risks of infectious disease epidemics, particularly in developing countries.”

CLAIM: “Various studies show that warmer temperatures are causing the ice sheet there to lose mass at the margins. But, as in Antarctica, higher sea temperatures are also causing greater snowfall and building up ice in the interior…In fact, Science had earlier published a study by Ola Johannessen that used satellite measurements to determine how much the ice sheet was growing. Johannessen found that, between 1992 and 2003, it was gaining on average 5.4 centimeters of elevation per year.”

FACT: The study (by Johanessen et al.) did find there was an increase in snow accumulation on Greenland’s interior. This is exactly what you’d expect as the earth gets warmer. The climate scientists at realclimate.org explain: “However, Johanessen et al. were not able to measure all of the coastal ranges. Indeed, the thinning of the margins and growth in the interior Greenland is an expected response to increased temperatures and more precipitation in a warmer climate. These results present no contradiction to the accelerated sliding near the coasts.”

CLAIM: “If today’s temperatures are causing Greenland’s coastal ice to slide into the sea, it must have been positively galloping there 80 years ago. That’s significant, because the warming period in the early 20th century took place well before fossil-fuel burning could have triggered global warming.”

FACT: According Climatic Research Unit data, the last three decades (1976-2005) have seen a sharper rise in global air temperature than any other period since at least 1860.

CLAIM: How much ice has Antarctica gained? In a 2005 study published in Science, Curt Davis used satellite measurements to calculate changes in the ice sheet’s elevation, and found that it gained 45 billion tons of ice per year between 1992 and 2003. Far from flooding the coasts, that’s enough to lower sea levels by roughly 0.12 millimeters annually.

FACT: Davis has criticized the global warming skeptics’ misuse of his data. The whole story, according to Davis, is that increased precipitation in the interior of Antarctica is “predicted consequence of global climate warming.” Warmer temperatures mean more participation and more snow on the interior of the continent. Meanwhile, “Growth of the ice sheet was only noted on the interior of the ice sheet and did not include coastal areas. Coastal areas are known to be losing mass.”