Over the last year the Gulf Coast has been devastated by hurricanes, most recently Hurricane Katrina.  In the wake of all the destruction the debate over whether global warming causes hurricanes to be stronger has reignited.  Environmentalists and analysts around the world have debated this connection for many years and the debate is only intensifying.

Recently Iain Murray, a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, joined the Center’s Corporate Counsel, Renee Giachino, to discuss global warming, hurricanes and fuel shortages on the radio show “Your Turn — Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense,” which airs on WEBY 1330 AM Northwest Florida’s Talk Radio.  What follows are excerpts from the interview.

GIACHINO:  My next guest is Iain Murray, who is a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.  At CEI he specializes in global climate change and environmental science.  Mr. Murray edits “Cooler Heads,” a bi-weekly newsletter of the Cooler Heads Coalition.  He writes regularly on scientific and statistical issues in public policy.

Thank you very much for joining us on the program.

MURRAY:  Hi Renee, I am glad to be with you.

GIACHINO:  I would like to start first, please, by asking you to tell us more about the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

MURRAY:  The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a free-market advocacy institute that is based in Washington, D.C.  We believe that the problems in the world are best solved by utilizing the vast resources and skills of the free-market rather than trying to impose solutions from the government.  We think that wherever these solutions have been tried, they have worked; whereas whenever the government’s solutions have been tried, they have tended to fail.

GIACHINO:  Let’s talk a little about the Cooler Heads Coalition.  What is it?

MURRAY:  Cooler Heads Coalition is a group of think tanks and public policy organizations that believe that we are very much running ahead of ourselves when it comes to alarm over global warming and climate change.  We think that if people just calm down and look at what the science and economics of the issue actually say, then we would not be rushing into trying to impose policies on the world which we think could be possibly disastrous and very likely cause more damage to the world than global warming itself.

GIACHINO:  Let’s back up, please.  Let’s start with some basics.  What is meant by global warming?

MURRAY:  Global warming is the theory that mankind’s industrialization — in the course of powering our industry and our transportation and burning fossil fuels to provide that power — that we have released into the atmosphere what is known as greenhouse gases.  The most prominent of these is carbon dioxide, but there are others of these such as nitrogen oxide and various other methane gases and other gases which together when they enter the atmosphere have the property of trapping heat from the sun.  When they trap the heat from the sun they warm up the atmosphere with the result being that the global temperature as a whole rises.

GIACHINO:  Am I correct that I read that it has risen one degree Fahrenheit over X number of years?

MURRAY:  The temperature has risen about one degree Fahrenheit or about six tenths of a degree Celsius over the last 100 years.

GIACHINO:  So the sky is falling, the sky is falling?

MURRAY:  That is what the alarmists say.  They take these numbers and then they feed them into what they call global climate models, which have all sorts of theories that as the temperature rises it won’t just rise linearly or that it won’t just tail off as basic science says.  The science of the atmosphere suggests that each atom or molecule of carbon dioxide that you add to the atmosphere will have less heat trapping properties than the previous one.  So there won’t even be a linear rise in temperature.

But unfortunately these global climate models suggest that there are all sorts of feedback effects and hidden processes that would raise the temperature of the earth by five or six degrees.  This is about the temperature rise we have seen since the last Ice Age.  And if that happens then there probably will be negative effects.

GIACHINO:  Let’s get a little more of a basic understanding.  When people talk about global warming we very often hear the phrase “Kyoto Protocol.”  Mr. Murray, what is the Kyoto Protocol?

MURRAY:  Because the science at a very early stage suggested that the main thing causing the rise in temperature was the emission of these greenhouse gases that I mentioned earlier, and that because most of these greenhouse gases are emitted because of our burning of fossil fuels — whether it’s coal to power our energy stations or the gas that we put in our cars — then the burning of these fuels releases these greenhouse gases.  So the Kyoto Protocol is an attempt to cap the amount of greenhouse gases each nation emits into the atmosphere and try to reduce them to a certain percentage below the level that they were at in 1990.

What this means, of course, is that, in order to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases, we are going to have to reduce the amount of electricity we produce and the amount of gas we burn in our cars.  In other words, we have to reduce the use of the fuels that power our economy.  So this will almost certainly result in a slowing of economic growth and a loss of jobs.

GIACHINO:  So is the Kyoto Protocol a voluntary protocol or is it a pact that was entered into by a number of nations?

MURRAY:  Back in the early ’90s the United Nations — our favorite organization in New York — got together something called the Framework Convention on Climate Change.  This is only a couple of years after the potential problem of global warming had first been introduced.  So the United Nations immediately came up with the solution to cap greenhouse gases.  And a few years later the various parties finally got together in Kyoto, Japan, and produced a treaty which said that certain nations — basically America, Australia, Europe, Japan and Canada — would have to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that they emit while other nations would think about doing this in the future.

As a result, this was negotiated by the Clinton-Gore team in 1997, and, when the current president came into office, he realized that this treaty would have severe negative effects on the U.S. economy so that he was not going to take part in it any more.  Similarly, the Australian government under John Howard came to a very similar conclusion so they are not part of it either.

GIACHINO:  Can you give us some examples of the severe negative effects that are put out there for people to consider?

MURRAY:  The claim that global warming will lead to economic damage based on certain things like sea-level rise because both glaciers are melting and adding more water to the oceans, ice caps in the northern hemisphere are melting — not yet in the southern hemisphere — but they are in the northern hemisphere, so that is adding more water to the ocean.  And at the same time as the ocean gets warmer, water expands.  It really is not anything to worry about, those of us in Cooler Heads Coalition think, because the sea-level has been rising ever since the last Ice Age.  In fact, it has risen about 20 centimeters in the last 100 years and nobody has really noticed.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists who get together to work out what global warming’s effects are going to be, suggests that it will rise between 10 centimeters and 90 centimeters in the next 100 years.  That could be a problem for low-lying countries like Bangladesh and some island states in the Pacific, but as we know from the example of the Netherlands, humans have been able to cope with rising sea-levels in the past, and I see no reason why they should not be able to do so in the future.

GIACHINO:  So some of the severe negative effects would be re-looking at how people may be building along the coastal lines or maybe erosion and things like that.  Would that be right?

MURRAY:  Yes, that is the sort of thing.  One of the reasons why people are particularly worried about sea-level rising and the effects of storm damage on the coasts is that in the past we did not build in areas where there was likely to be storm surges.  Today, we do and insurance companies are very worried about the very expensive buildings being built along, say, the Miami seafront and places like that.

GIACHINO:  Well, you are talking to people who are currently living in Hurricane Alley — a name we do not fondly take to.  Ivan slammed ashore right here in Santa Rosa and Escambia Counties just shy of a year ago.  And then we were hit again by Dennis just over a month ago.

What is the purported relationship between global warming and hurricanes, and can you tell us the truths and the myths related to that?

MURRAY:  There are a lot of myths involved when it comes to hurricanes and climate changes.  The basic science of a warming planet, especially in the places where the warming is likely to take place, which is in the northern latitudes — so we are seeing most of the warming that is taking place in places like Alaska and Siberia, that means that as the atmosphere up there gets warmer there is less of a clash between the warm tropics and the cold northern latitudes.  This means there is likely to be less frantic activity in the atmosphere along those borderlines which is part of the atmospheric science that causes hurricanes.

Some people are now suggesting that there is a possibility that a warmer world will lead to more intense hurricanes.  This does not seem to have happened yet.  All of the major hurricane experts like William Gray of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Colorado or folks from the National Institute for Atmospheric Research all say that there is no detectible effect of the warming that we have seen so far on hurricanes, and they don’t see how there can be any affect on hurricanes in the future.

So when people are saying that the science is telling us that there are going to be more hurricanes, they are going beyond what the science really does tell us.  The real hurricane experts believe that they are really misinterpreting the science and are being alarmists about this.

GIACHINO:  Mr. Murray, how can people learn more about CEI and its efforts?

MURRAY:  By a very simple web address which is www.cei.org, and there you can read all our writings about free-market environmentalism and technology policy and specifically on this subject of climate change.

GIACHINO:  On the subject of climate change, they can visit the site at Cooler Heads to learn more about that.

We talked about global warming and the Kyoto Protocol.  If you would, please educate us on what is the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate?

MURRAY:  That is the new approach that America and Australia have adopted and hope to do something about global warming without crippling the economies of those countries.  One of the main problems with the Kyoto Protocol — and this is why the Senate voted 95-0 in 1997 that it would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol — was that China is rapidly approaching America in terms of being the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.  Well, the Kyoto Protocol does not require China to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions yet.  So the Senate thought that was unfair.  China said its economy is growing, and it wants its economy to continue to grow and so it will not accept any limits on greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Kyoto Protocol or any other treaty.

So in order to get around this problem, U.S.A., Australia, Japan, China and South Korea have come together with a newer approach, which is aimed at utilizing the benefits of using technology to reduce the emissions rather than just imposing a target with fines and penalties for not meeting that target.  We happen to think this is a much better approach as it utilizes the ingenuity of mankind to come up with the solution rather than just imposing some kind of a penalty.

GIACHINO:  Speaking of imposing penalties, does CEI take a position on the higher mileage standards for SUVs that a lot of people are proposing?

MURRAY:  Yes, we are dead set against it.  And the main reason we are dead set against it is that the National Academy of Sciences, when it looked at the effect of imposing higher mileage standards on the American automobile fleet, it discovered that, since these new standards were first introduced, they have contributed to about 2,000 deaths per year on the roads because the cars that people started driving were much smaller and as a result were much less safe.  One of the main reasons that people choose to drive an SUV is because it is that much bigger and that much safer.  If you are concerned about people losing their lives in road accidents, then one of the last things you should do is support better fuel economy standards.

GIACHINO:  I drive the “big white bus” — it is an enormous Suburban and I feel very, very safe driving it, although lately I have not liked having to fill up the gas tank.  In fact, gas prices have shot up quite a bit in the last several weeks. 

Iain, is this shortage real or is this a contrived way to try to encourage the U.S. to adopt policies that will allow for further drilling in the Gulf or Arctic?

MURRAY:  It seems pretty sure that this is a real problem.  It is a problem with supply.  At the moment the world’s oil industry is operating pretty close to capacity trying to meet the demand which has increased in places like China — as I mentioned earlier it has increased tremendously in China.  India is going to start needing more oil, as well, in the years to come, and they have a population just the same size as China if not bigger now.  Unfortunately the world is operating on an oil supply which is not quite engineered enough to meet the demand that is currently there.  That means that whenever there is any sort of a suggestion that the supply might be interrupted or limited further, the price of oil goes up. 

If we can work with our friends in Alberta — where there is about as much oil as there is in Saudi Arabia — to get that oil flowing; if we can get oil coming down from Alaska from the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, that should help.  But at the moment the trouble is that the gas supply industry is operating close to, if not at, capacity.

GIACHINO:  I had a conversation with someone recently who is of the opinion that, and I would like you to comment on this, the problem is less a shortage of supply of crude oil than it is a shortage of refinery capacity — that is the ability to turn that crude oil into petroleum or jet fuel.  He said a lot of the problem could actually be solved if we were to build new refineries.  Can you comment on that?

MURRAY:  That is very much the case.  That is why I was talking about how the industry is engineered.  If there were more refineries and if the existing refineries could be modernized — we saw a dreadful explosion at a refinery in Texas recently which was probably caused by the various regulations that are imposed on these refineries that are stopping them from being modernized — if we can get the existing refineries modernized and new refineries built, then that would certainly cause some of the bottlenecks in the system to open up and that would certainly help.

GIACHINO:  Thank you very much for joining us today.  That is all the time that we have.  I want to make sure that people know they can visit your website at www.cei.org to learn more about the issues that we have been talking about — that is global warming and the different ways that our government or others are trying to impose restrictions on us in a “sky is falling” alarmist way. 

Thank you, Iain Murray, Senior Fellow for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

MURRAY:  It has been a pleasure.  Thank you for having me.