[geocentrism] Global warming needs cooler heads
- From: "Robert Bennett" <robert.bennett@xxxxxxx>
- To: "Geocentrism" <geocentrism@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2007 10:15:10 -0400
The Politics of Global Warming
Thomas Sieger Derr
With the virtual apotheosis of Al Gore, talk of global warming has become
pervasive-and pervasively one-sided. Churches of all varieties have signed
on as a moral cause. Corporations, including former doubters, have adopted
anti-warming language, either from new conviction or convenient public
image. Politicians, with few exceptions, dare not openly deny that there is
a problem, though their responses may vary.
Through it all, one would never know there are dissenters of
distinguished credentials in the scientific community. Even where their
existence is admitted, they are thoroughly marginalized, accused of being in
the pay of the oil companies (Gore slyly and meanly implies this in his
movie, An Inconvenient Truth), or dismissed as over-the-hill retirees out of
touch and perhaps a bit senile. Their articles are denied publication in
Science and Nature, those two so-called flagship science journals of high
reputation despite some embarrassing lapses.
When dissenters do speak and publish, the majority who embrace the
prevailing theory that humans are causing global warming try to silence them
on the grounds that, because they are in error, they must not be allowed to
be heard. Newspapers who seek balance in their reporting are told that they
are doing a disservice to the public, to truth, and to the survival of the
human race. The Weather Channel, a full-bore promoter of global-warming
alarm (which feeds its appetite for newsworthy disaster), has, through its
chief climate expert Heidi Cullen, even said that weather reporters who
don't accept the reigning thesis should be decertified by the American
Meteorological Society-in other words, believe our way or lose your job.
When British television producer Martin Durkin made a counter-movie to
Gore's, the head of the Royal Society declared that he should not be allowed
to show it.
The result is that anyone who finds the dissenters persuasive-including
me-is suspected of being a right-wing extremist, making politics determine
science. In vain do we point out that dissenters from established scientific
consensus have often been dramatically vindicated. Undeterred, some of our
critics have even compared us to Holocaust deniers or urged that dissenters
be tried as war criminals. Or maybe burned at the stake for heresy-for our
religious critics do think of us as heretics and sinners.
This dismal state of affairs is made possible by an astonishing
historical amnesia. It is indisputable that climate swings are a regular
feature of our planet's life. Short-term changes lie within our personal
memories: The current warming trend dates from only about 1975. Before that,
a pronounced cooling period starting about 1940 led the scientific consensus
of the 1970s to proclaim global cooling and perhaps the first signs of an
ice age. Note that these swings do not correspond to the amount of CO2
released into the atmosphere; 60 percent of global warming since 1850
occurred before 1940, while 80 percent of CO2 was emitted after that
date-and temperatures fell from 1940 until the turnaround in the late 1970s.
Going further back, we find the "little ice age" of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, when the Hudson and the Thames froze, crops failed,
and disease was rampant, so that millions died. Before that, we come upon
the "medieval climate optimum," when a prevailing warmth made life pleasant,
grape vines grew in England, and the Vikings established settlements in
Greenland and Newfoundland (which they called Vmland; the names are
revealing)-settlements that lasted until the little ice age froze them out.
That period was, in turn, preceded by an unfavorable climate in the Dark
Ages, and that by another warm stretch in Roman times. Using proxy records
(tree rings, ice-core samples, ocean-bottom sediment), geologists have
determined that such climate swings stretch back into prehistory. Fred
Singer (who has impeccable credentials and experience as a climate
scientist) and Dennis Avery have calculated that this swing-and-return
pattern occurs roughly but regularly every 1,500 years. Obviously, the
pattern has nothing to do with human activity. Nor does it correspond to the
levels of CO2 in the
atmosphere. If anything, climate change appears to precede, not follow,
increases in CO2.
So what's going on? There is a significant body of scientific opinion
that finds the sun to be the principal climate driver. The sun's output is
variable and complex, more and less intense at different periods. A German
team has shown an almost perfect correlation between air temperatures and
solar cycles for the past 150 years. A Danish team likewise has constructed
a multi-era match of solar activity (measured by sunspots) to global
temperatures. Nigel Weiss of Cambridge University, a mathematical
astrophysicist and past president of the Royal Astronomical Society, also
correlates sunspot activity with changes in the earth's climate. Because
solar activity is cyclical, he expects that a downturn is coming and will
usher in a cooling climate for earth in, maybe, three decades. Actually,
global average temperature seems to have plateaued since 2000, though it is
probably too soon to expect the downturn to have begun. Still, Richard
Lindzen, a distinguished atmospheric physicist at MIT and a leading doubter
that human activity is driving warming, thinks the odds are about 50 percent
that the earth will be cooler in twenty years-due to natural cycles.
It may or may not be significant, but it is suggestive, that NASA's
instruments calculate that Mars, Jupiter, Pluto, and the Titan moon of
Neptune are warming, suggesting a solar-system-wide phenomenon. To be sure,
this is not hard evidence; other factors (axis tilt and wobble on Mars, for
instance) may be a cause. Still, it may be a clue to what is happening here
on our planet.
Some caveats are in order. Human activity may add something to the
natural cycle, though how much is hard to tell. I have seen a paper that
estimates the human contribution at 3 percent and another that gives it at
0.28 percent, for an almost undetectable effect on climate. The principal
greenhouse gas, some 97 percent of the total, is water vapor, which leaves
little for CO2 and other trace gasses. Scott McIntosh, of the Southwest
Research Institute in Boulder, says that warming caused by CO2 compared to
the effect of solar magnetic fields is like a flea's contribution to the
weight of an elephant.
We do know, however, that atmospheric emissions can affect climate-for
example, the serious consequences of the ash cloud thrown up by volcanic
eruptions; so perhaps there is something to the greenhouse gas theory.
People can also argue about the historical record and try to modify the data
that shows natural climate cycles. There may be problems with the sun
theory; climate is also affected by ocean currents, meteor impact, the tilt
of the earth's axis, cosmic rays, precipitation systems, and other factors.
And so on. Those of us who are doubters will not complain when we in turn
are doubted. Debate is healthy and must not be choked off.
Nevertheless, the large, rough historical record should be enough to
awaken the critical instincts and make anyone take a long second look at the
claims of the global-warming alarmists-and alarmists they certainly are,
deliberately and unabashedly so.
They've claimed, for example, that the glaciers will melt in Greenland
and Antarctica and raise the oceans so much that low-lying cities and
countries will be submerged and the Gulf Stream will shut down and plunge
Europe into an ice age.
As it happens, while there is edge-melting in Greenland and along the
peninsula of Antarctica that stretches toward South America, snow is
accumulating in the interior of Greenland and in most of Antarctica. The
warming peninsula there is just 2 percent of the continent; the other 98
percent is cooling. The Larson B ice shelf, which collapsed, was 1/246 the
size of the West Antarctic ice shelf, which has been retreating slowly
anyway for thousands of years. As for the Gulf Stream threat, oceanographers
debunk it. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the
U.N body that puts out huge periodic reports warning of climate disaster,
has backed down from its earlir estimates of sea rise, from three feet for
the next century to seventeen inches-and many scientists think even that is
too high.
Speaking of glaciers, the alarmists point out they are melting
everywhere. Kilimanjaro will be bare in a few years, and the Alpine glaciers
will be but pale shadows of themselves, and so on around the globe. But
Claude Allegre, a distinguished French climate scientist has recanted his
earlier support for the IPCC's conclusions, and says of Kilimanjaro
specifically that its snow cap is retreating from natural causes having to
do with moisture from the Indian Ocean. Alpine glaciers, most everywhere,
grow and retreat often through their lives. In 2003, as the Schnidenjoch
glacier in Switzerland was retreating, a 4,700-year-old archer's quiver was
exposed; that pass has been open to human travel many times since the last
ice age.
On and on, the alarms go. Perhaps you've seen the claim that the Arctic
sea ice is disappearing and that polar bears are threatened with extinction
because they can't hunt from ice floes any more. But Arctic sea ice, like
the glaciers, grows and retreats in natural cycles. Gore's computer
simulation of the drowning polar bear may look sad, but, of course, it's
fake. Canadian wildlife biologists say most populations of the bears are
actually increasing. Or perhaps you've heard that storms on land and sea
will increase in number and intensity, and we can expect more Katrinas. In
fact, there has actually been a downward trend in the number of the bigger,
detectable tornadoes since 1950; we detect more because better reporting
picks up more small ones. New evidence shows that hurricane intensity does
not correlate with ocean temperature.
Maybe you've read that tropical diseases such as malaria will spread into
now-temperate zones, higher latitudes, and higher altitudes -Nairobi, for
example. But Nairobi was built when malaria was already endemic there. It
was repelled with better insecticide, especially, in Africa, DDT The current
resurgence of malaria comes not from global warming but from the ban on DDT
spraying, growing resistance to drugs, and poverty.
You've also been told that failing to curb our greenhouse-gas emissions
will cause irreparable economic damage to the poorer nations, as the Stern
Report insisted. But the report was savaged by economists. William Nordhaus
of Yale is among those who fault Stern for using a near-zero social-discount
rate, which would charge current generations for problems not likely to
occur for two or three centuries hence.
In fact, one can make the opposite case from Stern's with greater
plausibility: Economies would be wrecked by adoption of the Kyoto targets.
Even a moderate stabilization of greenhouse-gas emissions would require
something like a 60 to 80 percent reduction in fossil-fuel use, and
standards of living would drop through the floor. Poor countries would have
a nearly impossible time rising out of their poverty. Is it any wonder that
China and India and other developing nations will have none of Kyoto-style
proposals, and are loudly and clearly telling the developed nations to
proceed without their participation? Naturally, they are much more
interested in Bush's proposal to bypass the useless Kyoto framework and
substitute technological changes and voluntary goals for the binding targets
championed by the Europeans.
One of the goofiest ways of raising consciousness about global warming
has been the lectures we've received about purchasing carbon offsets. As it
happens, the purchase of carbon offsets allows the buyer to continue his
merry energy-guzzling ways, his sins having been forgiven for a cash
payment. The process has the ring of a medieval indulgence sale, as many
critics have gleefully noted. Gore buys carbon offsets so he can justify
living in a mansion with huge electricity use. And he can certainly afford
that, as his $100,000 lecture fees and his relations with Internet companies
and environmental businesses have made him extraordinarily wealthy.
Everywhere you go, you hear the news that we have only a few years to
save the planet before we reach the point of no return, the tipping point,
irreversible catastrophic climate change, and the end of civilization.
Hyperbolic statements like these are meant mainly to scare people into
acting and accepting the enormous sums required for the proposed reduction
program. Sir John Houghton, the first chair of the IPCC, wrote in a 1994
book, "Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen."
A backlash against such exaggeration is growing, not least among
scientists concerned for their own professional integrity. In any case, we
need cooler heads to go with a warmer climate. Lindzen and Israeli
astrophysicist Nir Shaviv calculate that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere
by 2100 would cause a temperature rise of 1 degree Celsius, which is only a
little more than the rise from the late nineteenth century to the present
has been. A 50 percent rise would yield a 0.5-degree C.increase. There are,
of course, good reasons for controlling many emissions and finding
alternative sources to fossil fuels: pollution control, for instance, and
freedom from economic fealty to some rather nasty oil-producing regimes. But
stopping global warming is not one of them.
It almost seems as if the issue is not in science but in ideology and
social psychology. Environmental alarmism is part of a systematic rejection
of industrial civilization, of technology, consumerism, globalization, and
what most of us think of as growth and progress, in favor of a return to
local, simpler, largely agricultural societies -and, of course, fewer
children, since humans are the ultimate pollution. Climate reversal has
grown to become the latest focus of this way of thinking.
It is an issue that has acquired popular traction, even among people
who do not share the radical goals of the larger movement, thanks to
deliberate alarmism; and it is now firmly entrenched in our public
discourse, especially in our politics. I suspect that it will stay there
until the temperature starts to decline again, at which point, as in the
1970s, we'll hear more about the inevitable return of an ice age.
Thomas Sieger Derr is professor emeritus of religion and ethics at Smith
College and the author of Environmental Ethics and Christian Humanism.
First Things Aug/Sept 2007
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