The Wall Street Journal ’s editors — longtime climate-consensus skeptics and veteran opponents of measures to limit greenhouse gases — have predicted that the United Nations’ 17th annual climate-change conference next month in Durban, South Africa, will “be a historic event, if not in the way the organizers might hope.” The editors perceive a worldwide turn away from “a global deal on carbon” and toward what they see as a practical, sensible awareness of prohibitive costs — at a time when, they assert, the “science on climate change and man's influence on it is far from settled.”
The editorial summarizes the geopolitical dynamics underlying what the editors call “the collapse of the comic 2009 Copenhagen summit” and analyzes the prospective costs of climate countermeasures. “By the EU's own estimate,” the editors report, “the cost of meeting its current carbon emissions targets — a cut of at least 20% of 1990 emissions levels by 2020 — comes to at least €48 billion ($67 billion) per year.” They continue:
And so it goes with every technology that claims to promise greenhouse-gas salvation. Wind power may emit zero carbon, but windmills need up to 90% of their capacity backed up to prevent blackouts — usually with coal and gas plants. Windmills also kill a lot of birds. As for solar power, a new study from the University of Tennessee and Occupational Knowledge International finds that manufacturing the necessary lead batteries threatens to release more than 2.4 million tons of lead pollution by 2022, or one-third of today's total global lead production.
The editors close by identifying what they see as the central question: “whether it makes sense to combat a potential climate threat by imposing economically destructive regulations and sinking billions into failure-prone technologies that have their own environmental costs.” They grant that the “earnest people going to Durban next month may think so,” but they end by asserting that the “rest of the world is wearier and wiser.”
It seems worth noting anecdotally, however, that in fact some of the world is not only considering global-warming countermeasures, but active geoengineering countermeasures. A BBC News article carries the headline “Public supports geo-engineering ideas, study suggests” and reports “strong support among the public in the US, UK and Canada for more research on geo-engineering technology.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
