Newley Purnell

The only saving feature in all my experience since the 1970’s is my habit of separating garbage and selling my glass and paper to a local processor. However, this was a habit acquired from my grandmother in Cali, Colombia much before the environmental awareness movement had officially started (I guess she could have been disqualified in the enviro-olympics for a false start). I put the money from my basic recycling efforts to the cause of supporting my library or my wants.

Now, if you really want to explore the other side of the global warming coin (or Victoria regia leaf) there is a lot of stuff to sort out. The following is a sampling of items of interest that can generate linkages to other items (ad nauseum and ad infinitum). The listing is not prioritized and only reflects the way the names and titles came to mind:

Richard S. Lindzen, Global Warming: The Origin and Nature of the Alleged
Scientific Consensus (www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg15nZg,html) This is fine article by a bona fide scientist who holds the Alfred P. Sloan Chair of Metereology ay MIT.

Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cambridge University Press,
2001; M. Mihkel Mathiesen, Global Warming in a Politically Correct Climate, 2000; Ronald Bailey, Ecoscam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse, 1994; Patrick J. Michaels, The Satanic Gases, 2000; Wilfred Beckerman, Through Green-Colored Glasses: Environmentalism Reconsidered, 1996; Thomas Gale Moore, Climate of Fear, 1998.

There are plenty more. However, it is good to visit the other side of the force. Two items can offer good statements of position somewhat above the mess of EPA and NOAA sub-sites and university web pages:

Robert Hunter, 2030: Confronting Thermageddon in our Lifetime, 2002

I’m not a scientist, so I can’t really comment on the whether or not global warming really exists and what its cause(s) would be, only to say that CO2 is most definitely not a pollutant, regardless of where it comes from, and any caps that regulators want to put on emissions, should be voluntary and technologically driven. Reduction efforts must also not get in the way of economic progress (i.e. fuel switching to cleaner, but less efficient fuels). If anything all of the arguments for reduced carbon content fuel sources advances the agenda of the one thing enviros hate to think about: nuclear power, the only truly clean fuel that is capable of handling the power needs of developing and industrialized countries. Steve Milloy has more to say at his website: www.junkscience.com. Scroll down past the Dec. 1 entry to hear more dissenting opinion on the myth that is “climate change.”

You may want to check out this book review also:

Climate skeptics succeed in raising doubt on theories of climate change because a) the average individual, policy-maker, and CEO is ignorant of the science (not an insult just a fact); b) there is lots of incentive among
certain interest groups to avoid policies that would seek to address climate change; and c) there are some who simply see any environmental issue as a leftist issue and thus something to oppose. As long as the public remains ignorant (and some people unfortunately really do think they know more than those pesky PhD scientists), then any and all positive affirmation on climate change can be countered by a negative, provided that negative is offered by someone with seemingly credible scientific credentials. The public is in no way capable of determining a scientist’s credibility - they don’t understand the science, the nature of science, what it means to be successful in science, and how the quality of science is assessed.

So despite the fact that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (as well as the National Academies of just about every country that has one), and stacks of individual scientific studies have concluded that humans are, in fact, having a discernable influence on the global climate, there is still a tough resistance being fought on the frontlines. However, this resistance is quite honestly a handful of individuals, essentially all of which are spurred on through corporate funding via “think tanks”, policy institutes, lobbying groups, etc. Hence, these skeptics are prospecting for evidence in support of an a priori agenda.

Those who attempt to argue that humans are not influencing the climate resort to the natural variability argument - the climate system is inherently variable, and thus we shouldn’t be surprised by change. Sounds quite reasonable (and sure, climate varies), but natural variability alone cannot explain the climate of the past 50 years (many have tried and failed using the good old scientific method), and though it is perfectly legitimate to hypothesize that it can, sooner or later one has to pony up the data.

The bottom line is that if climate change is a big scientific conspiracy perpetrated by the scientific community, then where are all the honest scientists? How come we never hear their names, where do they work, how come they never seem to publish anything? Thus, when I encounter someone who attempts to play the natural variability card, my first reaction is that he/she is wasting time by not contributing anything constructive to the debate, or worse, simply misleading the public with misinterpretations of science.

So what is constructive debate? Well, in fact, there are two issues in particular which I think are meaningful questions to ask about climate change. First, how bad is it going to be (i.e., how much warming are we really likely to see). There’s a lot of legitimate uncertainty on this issue, and thus I find it to be an important topic of debate, and in fact, there are a number of credible
scientists out there who produce credible analyses suggesting the warming we’re in for is of a relatively low magnitude (<1oC). This, however, is not the mainstream scientific view. The most interesting work on this subject is from
investigators out of MIT and UNC-Chapel Hill who are using quantitative probabilistic uncertainty analysis to estimate the likelihood of future magnitudes of global warming while accounting for both uncertainty in greenhouse gas emissions and uncertainty in the sensitivity of the climate to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations.

Such studies tend to estimate the most likely magnitude of warming for the 21st century is on the order of 2-3oC, but they cannot eliminate the probability of greater warming (~5oC) altogether. Incidentally, warming of 2-3oC is quite sufficient to yield a diversity of both benefits and damages to global societal sectors and ecosystems (although damage thresholds are poorly defined in general). Thus when one hears arguments that warming will be only 1oC or less over the 21st century, those estimates are typically based upon unproven assumptions about the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases or the future rate of greenhouse gas emissions.

The other worthy topic for debate is the best way to manage the consequences of climate change - namely to mitigate greenhouse gases, adapt to the impacts, or just keep on trucking as is. I personally recommend both mitigation and adaptation, but this is basically a policy issue that democratic societies have to sort out for themselves (provided the debate is bounded to focus on such issues, and doesn’t get lost in irrelevancies). Mitigation is basically bet hedging - making small investments now in order to reduce the magnitude of climate change and reduce the likelihood of its more unpleasant potentialities.

Mitigation costs money (although there’s a lot of sketchy economic analyses out there), but from my standpoint, one is basically paying to accelerate a transformation of the global energy infrastructure that we all know is going to eventually occur anyway, and in the process reap some ancillary benefits in the form of improvements in air quality and technological innovation. However, additional future climate change is unavoidable (mitigation would basically influence warming beyond 2050, but do nothing over the interim), thus some adaptation is also in order.

From my perspective, adaptation just represents anticipatory decision-making. If a decision is to be made, does accounting for climate change have any influence on that decision? Furthermore, adaptation is basically a win-win all around. Developing countries are particularly interested in adaptation, because they tend to be highly vulnerable to climate as it is (e.g., agrarian economies, limited infrastructure, etc.), so a country that can reduce its vulnerability to current climate variability will also likely reduce its vulnerability to future climate change. And adaptation alleviates the dependence on scientific certainty for decision-making. If the foundation of your beach house is being eaten away by rising sea-level, you’re not likely to simply say “Oh, that’s OK - it’s natural”. You’re going to act to protect your investment. So there’s plenty of justification for taking climate and/or climate change seriously regardless of what one feels about the “scientific community.”

A little basic background: greenhouse gases are those which are transparent to visible light (which the sun produces the most of) but opaque to infrared
light. This is important because the earth receives a lot of radiant energy from the sun, which warms the earth. In general, things that are around the temperature of the warm earth (or people; this is how IR night vision works)emit light which peaks at infrared wavelengths (just as incandescent bulbs and the sun emit light which peaks at visible wavelengths). Greenhouse gases
allow sunlight to reach and warm the surface of the earth, but inhibit infrared light emitted by the earth to leak into space. There are always greenhouse
gases in the atmosphere, there are many different types, and they are very important (in fact crucial) to almost all life on earth, as this would be a seriously cold place without them.

It is indisputable that humanity (post-industrial revolution) has added a large amount of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. More greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than before means that less energy can leave the earth and that, on average, global temperatures will accordingly rise to a new level. It
is certainly true that the climate will always be variable, just as it was before human enterprise started changing the amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a natural compound which has existed in copious amounts for nearly all ofthe earth’s history. There are also many
processes by which carbon dioxide transfers from the atmosphere to the solid parts of the earth and back. It is notable that one of these mechanisms is plant life’s consumption carbon dioxide in the process of photosynthesis (the total effect of which is reduced when we cut down our forests). Actually, there may ery well have been periods in earth’s history duringwhich carbon dioxide levels were higher than they are ow, but to cite this as a reason why increased CO2 missions are not important is a bit shortsighted; the extra carbon dioxide will eventually catch up with us.

I tend to agree with Ben’s assessment that, while skepticism is a truly important aspect of the scientific enterprise, many “skeptical environmentalists” hold very much the minority opinion and often have a hard time with their facts. For example, your email contributor’s suggested book,
“The Skeptical Environmentalist,” received a thorough and insightful lambasting by Scientific American:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000F3D47-C6D2-1CEB-93F6809EC5880000

I would have to voice my dissention to Jack’s opinion that carbon dioxide emission regulations should be wholly voluntary. While not a “pollutant” in the
sense that it directly causes environmental degradation (it is, in fact, good for plant life), it very well may be that long-term augmentation of atmospheric carbon dioxide could cause climactic change that we wouldn’t be able to decisively quantify until its effects on the planet are very serious and much less avoidable than they may be. Also,industrial emission of carbon dioxide nearly always comes hand-in-hand with emission of “real” pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which definitely should be regulated. It is an
interesting fact that industrial emitters usually have the built-in capacity to reduce emissions of harmful substances more than they are required by law to do. The effect of this is that they could merely turn their dials and keep more pollutants from leaving their smokestacks, but don’t because they will always emit the maximum allowed by law.

But, let’s think about human nature and the reality of energy production. Our world now is driven by economics, and until fossil fuels get more scarce and the prices of them get higher, moves toward alternate energy sources will be made only by people with environmental consciences (who are very few
indeed). So buy a new SUV while there is still gas to run it! My view is that most people will never change their habits until it affects their bank accounts. And as of now, the most viable alternate energy sources, even if implemented much more thoroughly, could only provide a small part of our (exponentially
increasing!) energy consumption. Barring tremendous advances in controlled nuclear fusion technology, I agree with Jack that we are really only left with one
viable alternative: nuclear fission reactors.