¡Es verdad, lo dicen los expertos!

Ayer se conoció un informe sobre el “cambio climático” de la “Comisión Internacional sobre Cambio Climático” después de una semana de debates en Paris. Por acá no se habla de otra cosa y las noticias no hacen otra cosa que repetir tal cual las conclusiones del documento. Hasta ahora no escuché la más tímida voz que pueda llegar a sugerir alguna objeción. Después de todo, si unos 500 expertos están de acuerdo en algo, debe ser cierto.

No soy un experto en el tema ni mucho menos pero honestamente creo que nadie se puede sorprender por las conclusiones. Son básicamente los mismos expertos de siempre, reciclando la misma información de siempre, para repetir las mismas conclusiones de siempre. Lo verdaderamente sorprendente hubiera sido que estos centenares de expertos, que reciben fondos públicos para estudiar el fenómeno del “calentamiento global”, reunidos en un evento sobre el "calentamiento global" no hayan publicado un informe asegurando que el “calentamiento global” existe, se agrava año a año y que es causado por la actividad humana.

El gran problema creo yo es que la ciencia no es una cuestión de consensos. Una teoría es más o menos válida no porque haya mucha gente que esté de acuerdo en su validez sino porque sus postulados, las predicciones que hace, se cumplen una y otra vez independientemente de quién los estudie.

En fin, este es el punto de vista de Patrick Michaels de Cato. El muchacho va directo a la hoguera de la inquisición del “cambio climático”:

It's hardly news that human beings have had a hand in the planetary warming that began more than 30 years ago. For nearly a century, scientists have known that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide would eventually result in warming that was most pronounced in winter, especially on winter's coldest days, and a cooling of the stratosphere. All of these have been observed.

However, actually "doing something" about warming is a daunting endeavor. The journal Geophysical Research Letters estimated in 1997 that if every nation on Earth lived up to the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol on global warming, it would prevent no more than 0.126 degrees F of warming every 50 years. Global temperature varies by more than that from year to year, so that's not even enough to measure. Climatically, Kyoto would do nothing.

In the past four years, the Senate has voted twice against "cap-and-trade" legislation — sponsored by New Mexico senators Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat, and Pete Domenici, a Republican — that would set quotas on carbon emissions and let companies buy and sell them. If adopted, their cap-and-trade law would reduce emissions by less than the Kyoto Protocol specifies. In other words, the Senate has been loath to even adopt something that does less than nothing.

The stark reality is that if we really want to alter the warming trajectory of the planet significantly, we have to cut emissions by an extremely large amount, and — a truth that everyone must know — we simply do not have the technology to do so. We would fritter away billions in precious investment capital in a futile attempt to curtail warming.

Consequently, the best policy is to live with some modest climate change now and encourage economic development, which will generate the capital necessary for investment in the more efficient technologies of the future.

Fortunately, we have more time than the alarmists suggest. The warming path of the planet falls at the lowest end of today's U.N. projections. In aggregate, our computer models tell us that once warming is established, it tends to take place at a constant, not an increasing, rate. Reassuringly, the rate has been remarkably constant, at 0.324 degrees F per decade, since warming began around 1975. The notion that we must do "something in 10 years," repeated by a small but vocal band of extremists, enjoys virtually no support in the truly peer reviewed scientific literature.

Rather than burning our capital now for no environmental gain (did someone say "ethanol?"), let's encourage economic development so people can invest and profit in our more efficient future.

People who invested in automobile companies that developed hybrid technology have been rewarded handsomely in the past few years, and there's no reason to think environmental speculators won't be rewarded in the future, too.