George Will Whiffs Again on Warming

Having diagnosed Newsweek's redesign as a dud, I now offer a simple prescription to make the magazine much better: Fire George Will.

In his back-page column this week, the baseball-loving righty once again pours cold water on global warming, arguing that the measures needed to have even a "negligible effect" on the climate would suffocate the world's economy and hurt the poor.

This is not a new claim, but Will does introduce a couple semi-novel -- and easily refuted -- lines of reasoning.

One is a faulty analogy: Will likens curbing carbon emissions to introducing a global 5 mile-per-hour speed limit.

"In 2003 along, that would save 1.2 million lives and $500 billion in damages, disproportionately in the Third World. But a world moving at 5 mph would be, over the years, uncountable trillions of dollars poorer, which would cost some huge multiple of 1.2 million lives through forgone nutrition, education, infrastructure -- e.g., clean water -- medicine, research, etc."

At the risk of edging onto Felix Salmon's turf -- oh, who am I kidding? It's all Felix's turf -- this is a bogus parallel. There's a relatively linear relationship between speed limits and traffic deaths; you can plot how many deaths would be prevented by lowering the speed limit 10 mph, or caused by raising it 10 mph.

But climate is different. There are all kinds of hinky feedback mechanisms, from methane trapped in bogs to the differing reflectivity of water and ice to the effect of meltwater on glacier flow rates, that can amplify small changes into big ones in a way scientists are still struggling to understand. The model they use to predict future temperatures is changing all the time. Hence the so-called "precautionary principle" of not ruling out the worst-case scenario.

There is no equivalent to the precautionary principle in the field of traffic-death prevention. We know exactly what the trade-offs involved are, and can thus make informed decisions about how many deaths we're willing to accept in exchange for rapid transportation. If we knew exactly how much heating would be caused by different levels of emission, and how much the seas would rise, etc., we could make a similar calculation. But we don't.

Then there's this little bit of assertion:

Global warming was blamed for 35,000 deaths in Europe's August 2003 heat wave. Cold, however, has caused 25,000 deaths a year recently in England and Wales -- 47,000 in each winter from 1998 to 2000. In Europe, cold kills more than seven times as many as heat does. Worldwide, moderate warming will, on balance, save more lives than it will cost -- by a 9-to-1 ratio in China and India. So, if substantially cutting carbon dioxide reverses warming, that will mean a large net loss of life globally.

Assuming his stats are legit, this still ignores the reality of the way people conceptualize moral tradeoffs. As psychologist Marc Hauser's experiments show, the human mind innately recognizes a moral difference between deaths caused through action and those caused through inaction. People in northern latitudes have always died of cold, but when people in Paris are dying of heatstroke, it's perceived, rightly or wrongly, as the product of human activity.

Will wants us to cast an actuarial eye on the numbers and balance deaths caused by nature against those caused by man-made warming, but intuitively we know they're not the same. Anyone with an intact moral sense can see that, even a child. But not, apparently, George Will.

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