30 July 2010
Climate Alarmism Reconsidered
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The energy challenges of resource depletion, security of supply and pollution have been effectively addressed by market entrepreneurship, technology, and measured regulation. The remaining sustainability issue for carbon-based energy reliance is anthropogenic or man-made climate change. Climate Alarmism Reconsidered demonstrates how the balance of evidence supports a benign enhanced greenhouse effect, and how the case for mandatory greenhouse gas reductions depends on unrealistic assumptions.
Government intervention in the name of energy sustainability is the major threat to real energy sustainability and the provision of affordable, reliable energy to growing economies worldwide. Free-market structures and the wealth generated by markets help communities to best adapt to climate change.
This multi-disciplinary study concludes that climate alarmism and its corollary, policy activism, are unwarranted and counterproductive for the developed world and particularly for the world's energy poor.
'Every few decades the intellectual community becomes obsessed with some energy "problem" to which it can see no solution and calls for intervention by governments and international bodies to save the world. In the 1970s the perceived problem was an imminent energy shortage; today the issue is climate change. In 'Climate Alarmism Reconsidered', Rob Bradley carefully dissects the evidence about climate change; points out the difficulties of drawing conclusions given that the climate is always in flux; emphasises the positive aspects of increased carbon dioxide concentrations; and argues powerfully that any incipient problems will be better solved by entrepreneurs in competitive markets than by imperfect governments under the influence of interest groups.'
Professor Colin Robinson, University of Surrey
'An important addition to the discussion of global climate change and the policy response to it . . . . Bradley's approach is compatible with a wealthier, healthier and cleaner world.'
Professor Richard S. Lindzen, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT
See also:
Climate Change Policy: Challenging the Activists by Colin Robinson et al.
Global Warming False Alarms by Russell Lewis.
Climate Change: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom, edited by Julian Morris and with contributions from Robert Balling, Roger Bate, Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, Deepak Lal and Thomas Gale Moore.
Climate change articles on the IEA blog.
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