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By Root 584 0

looks suspiciously like a back-up plan by the environmental pressure groups in case the climate fails to warm: another try at condemning fossil fuels. The oceans are alkaline, with an average pH of about 8.1, well above neutral (7). They are also extremely well buffered. Very high carbon dioxide levels could push that number down, perhaps to about 7.95 by 2050 – still highly alkaline and still much higher than it was for most of the last 100 million years. Some argue that this tiny downward shift in average alkalinity could make it harder for animals and plants that deposit calcium carbonate in their skeletons to do so. But this flies in the face of chemistry: the reason the acidity is increasing is that the dissolved bicarbonate is increasing too – and increasing the bicarbonate concentration increases the ease with which carbonate can be precipitated out with calcium by creatures that seek to do so. Even with tripled bicarbonate concentrations, corals show a continuing increase in both photosynthesis and calcification. This is confirmed by a rash of empirical studies showing that increased carbonic acid either has no effect or actually increases the growth of calcareous plankton, cuttlefish larvae and coccolithophores.

My general optimism is therefore not dented by the undoubted challenge of global warming by carbon dioxide. Even if the world warms as much as the consensus expects, the net harm still looks small alongside the real harm now being done by preventable causes; and if it does warm this much, it will be because more people are rich enough to afford to do something about it. As usual, optimism gets a bad press in this debate. Optimists are dismissed as fools, pessimists as sages, by a media that likes to be spoon-fed on scary press releases. That does not make the optimists right, but the poor track record of pessimists should at least give one pause. After all, we have been here before. ‘I want to stress the urgency of the challenge,’ said Bill Clinton once: ‘This is not one of the summer movies where you can close your eyes during the scary parts.’ He was talking not about climate change but about Y2K: the possibility that all computers would crash at midnight on 31 December 1999.

Decarbonising the economy

In short, a warmer and richer world will be more likely to improve the well-being of both human beings and ecosystems than a cooler but poorer one. As Indur Goklany puts it, ‘neither on grounds of public health nor on ecological factors is climate change likely to be the most important problem facing the globe this century.’ The results of thirteen economic analyses of climate change, assuming consensus amounts of warming, conclude that it will either add or subtract about one year of global economic growth in the second half of the twenty-first century. Critics of this view often argue that development and carbon reduction need not be alternatives, and that it is the poor who are hit hardest by climate change. True, but it is a point that cuts both ways – it is the poor who are hit hardest by high energy costs, too. If mismanaged, climate mitigation could prove just as damaging to human welfare as climate change. A child that dies from indoor smoke in a village denied fossil-fuel electricity is just as great a tragedy as a child that dies in a flood caused by climate change. A forest that is cut down by people deprived of fossil fuels is just as felled as one lost to climate change. If climate change proves to be mild but cutting carbon causes real pain, we may find we have stopped a nose bleed by putting a tourniquet round our neck.

And cutting carbon will mean costly energy: so says the IPCC. If I am to accept the IPCC’s estimate of temperature rise for the sake of this argument, then I should also accept its estimate of the cost of carbon rationing – which it puts at 5.5 per cent of GDP after about 2050, and that is after making highly unlikely assumptions of (quoting from the IPCC’s 2007 report) ‘transparent markets, no transaction costs, and thus perfect implementation of policy measures throughout