Because if they were as right as climatologists pretend, we would be doomed:
“[Garrett discovered that] Throughout history, a simple physical constant… links global energy use to the world’s accumulated economic productivity, adjusted for inflation. So it isn’t necessary to consider population growth and standard of living in predicting society’s future energy consumption and resulting carbon dioxide emissions. … ‘I’m not an economist, and I am approaching the economy as a physics problem,’ Garrett says. ‘I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have.’ Garrett treats civilization like a ‘heat engine’ that ‘consumes energy and does “work” in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy,’ he says. That constant is 9.7 (plus or minus 0.3) milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar. So if you look at economic and energy production at any specific time in history, ‘each inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar would be supported by 9.7 milliwatts of primary energy consumption,’ Garrett says. … Perhaps the most provocative implication of Garrett’s theory is that conserving energy doesn’t reduce energy use, but spurs economic growth and more energy use.”
I trust estimates like this far better. If you can estimate how much energy, i.e. electricity, is used by humanity as a whole and enter some assumptions about how much of it is generated from fossil fuels, then you can get a lower limit on carbon emissions from that alone fairly quickly (if you want to cut the work, you can assume Carnot efficiency for some ballpark estimates of heat reservoir temperatures; it won’t be off by more than a factor of 2). And until that assumption about what fraction of energy comes from burning off carbon breaks down (perhaps by acceptance of nuclear power, or what some people are trying to call “terrestrial power”), this is one calculation that will not depend on models and will stay true within (rather large) margin of error.
Oh, boy. How glad I am that our climate is a nonlinear, chaotic system. Thankfully, doubling CO2 content of atmosphere does not lead to doubling global temperature. There isn’t even a linear relationship, as last 10 years might demonstrate. There definitely isn’t an exponential relationship—Thank God!
If one is a really serious advocate of these “climate change” theories, there is only one way he can be consistent (and not be a hypocritical political hack like Gore): (1) stop eating meat, as methane from cows is another greenhouse gas; and (2) start really pushing for more nuclear power plants everywhere—nuclear waste isn’t that big of an issue; we can recycle fuels until they run out of radioactive isotopes (… if we weren’t so hung up on non-proliferation, since recycling fuel is one way to build one type of atomic bomb). “Renewable energy” like solar and wind are all good, but they can only provide so much fraction of our grid power (let’s say, 50%) because they are not very reliable, and the rest have to come from somewhere: and the only viable long term option (at least until space travel and colonization becomes a reality) is nuclear power.
This is one problem (in fact, one among many, excluding Gore’s finances) that buying carbon offsets will not solve.
Update: Oh, and there’s always the Unabomber route, too. Although I have to say that as much as his anarchist manifesto appeals to me as far as it extols the virtues of a free man, I am not sure if I want to live in Mr. Kaczynski’s paradise: in his ideal society, if you could call it that, we are still trapped on this world—with no future for humanity beyond this little planet.
Update: This is exactly what I mean. Even if the hydrodynamics of climate were perfectly understood, numerical models can get us only so far—especially when the underlying system is nonlinear and chaotic. Blind faith in climatologists’ models is just as bad as blind faith in numerology or some sort of Bible code.