July 5, 2005

RALEIGH – The mission of the General Assembly’s proposed commission on global climate change can best be accomplished by soliciting a wide variety of expert opinions on the science and economics behind the global-warming debate, according to a vice president of the John Locke Foundation.

Dr. Roy Cordato, an economist and vice president for research, has written or commissioned several studies for the Raleigh-based think tank on air quality and climate change. He said Wednesday that if the commission is to “determine whether it is appropriate and desirable for the state to establish a global warming pollutant reduction goal,” as the text of the bill specifies, then members need to hear the full spectrum of views on the subject.

“Contrary to what legislators are being told, climate scientists disagree on the extent and causes of global warming,” Cordato said. “Scientists who construct computer models of the Earth’s climate tend to believe that human action is causing a harmful warming trend, but scientists who compare these predictions to actual temperature records tend to find them exaggerated or mistaken.”

For example, Cordato said, while some measurements of average global temperatures do show a warming trend over the past century, most of the apparent warming occurs before 1940 – after which greenhouse-gas emissions rise but temperatures stay level or even decline.

Furthermore, he pointed out that over the past 25 years there are also significant differences in temperature measurements between ground stations, which can be influenced by radiated heat from urban development, and weather balloon and satellite data, which show rates of warming that are consistent with natural variation.

One scientist cited by Cordato is Dr. Fred Singer, a physicist affiliated with George Mason University and the University of Virginia. He is one of the nation’s foremost experts on climate trends and devised the basic instrument used by scientists to measure stratospheric ozone. Now head of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, Singer will speak in Raleigh next Tuesday, July 12, at a press conference at the General Assembly and later at a John Locke Foundation luncheon.

Cordato’s own work on the issue has focused on the potential economic effects of proposed policy responses to global warming. In North Carolina, studies show that regulatory efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions would result in a loss of nearly 70,000 jobs within 10 years of implementation. The economic consequences would be more severe if North Carolina chose to implement regulations on its own, given the likely response of many businesses to move their operations to other states.

“The commission needs to weigh carefully the costs and benefits of the state going out on a limb here,” Cordato said. “Making the wrong choice will cause significant harm to many people in North Carolina.”

Cordato suggested that as a guide for future recommendations, the proposed commission should study the language contained in a recent statement from the American Association of State Climatologists:

Policy responses to climate variability and change should be flexible and sensible – The difficulty of prediction and the impossibility of verification of predictions decades into the future are important factors that allow for competing views of the long-term climate future. Therefore, the AASC recommends that policies related to long-term climate not be based on particular predictions, but instead should focus on policy alternatives that make sense for a wide range of plausible climatic conditions regardless of future climate. Climate is always changing on a variety of time scales and being prepared for the consequences of this variability is a wise policy.

“There is no need to panic, or to rush to judgment about policies that will have significant long-term effects on the economy and quality of life in North Carolina,” Cordato said.

For more information on climate change and Dr. Fred Singer’s appearance in Raleigh next Tuesday, call Cordato at 919-828-3876 or visit the John Locke Foundation’s main website.