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Global Warming
Q: Is global warming true? Lanney, Sandia Park, New Mexico
Photo courtesy of Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt and Earth Sciences
and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center.
A: Global warming is often defined as "the observed increase in the mean
(average) temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans in recent decades,"
which, unfortunately, leads to difficulties.
I am indebted to physicist and meteorologist
Craig
Bohren, distinguished professor emeritus at the Pennsylvania State
University for sorting out problems, biases, and what objective answers that
exist.
This is his answer:
| Discussion: First off, let me say I
consider the concept of a global mean temperature to be somewhat dubious,
and I say so in my recent book (with Eugene Clothiaux) Fundamentals of
Atmospheric Radiation. A single number cannot adequately capture climate
change. This number, as I see it, is aimed mostly at politicians and
journalists. The issue of global warming is extremely complicated, and it
transcends science. Views on global warming are as much determined by
political and religious biases as by science. No one comes to the table
about this issue without biases. So I'll state some of mine.
My biases: The pronouncements of climate modelers, who don't do
experiments, don't make observations, don't even confect theories, but
rather play computer games using huge programs containing dozens of separate
components the details of which they may be largely ignorant, don't move me.
I am much more impressed by direct evidence: retreating glaciers, longer
growing seasons, the migration of species, rising sea level, etc.
 Perito
Moreno Glacier, Argentina. Photo courtesy of Akshat and Wikipedia
I have lived long enough to have seen many doomsday scenarios painted by
people who profited by doing so, but which never came to pass. This has made
me a skeptic. Perhaps global warming is an example of the old fable about
the boy who cried wolf, but this time the doomsayers are, alas, right.
Maybe, but I can't help noting that some of the prominent global warmers
of today were global coolers of not so long ago.
In particular, Steven Schneider, now at Stanford, previously at NCAR,
about 30 years ago was sounding the alarm about an imminent ice age. The
culprit then was particles belched into the atmosphere by human activities.
No matter how the climate changes he can correctly say that he predicted it.
No one in the atmospheric science community has been more successful at
getting publicity. NCAR used to send my department clippings from newspaper
and magazine articles in which NCAR researchers were named. We'd get thick
wads of clippings, almost all of which were devoted to Schneider. Perhaps
global warming is bad for the rest of us, but for Schneider and others it
has been a godsend.
Within the past 10 years or so at least four, possibly more, alarming
books on the possibility of asteroid collisions with Earth were published.
Such collisions, if they were to occur, would be incomparably more
disastrous than global warming. I also started to read, again within about
the past 10 years, The Coming Plague. It painted a picture of future plagues
so ghastly and sickening that I couldn't continue reading it. The shelves of
bookstores groan under the weight of books proclaiming disasters of all
sorts. Take your pick of how we all are going to die horrible deaths.
Repent!
People who write alarmist books are either trying to make a buck or they
have an axe to grind. For example, it is in the best interests of
astronomers to scare us so that we'll pressure the government to support
astronomy research more generously. The same is true for biology, medicine,
atmospheric science, and so on. This does not mean that the alarmists are
wrong or even dishonest, merely that in assessing their claims we must
always ask about the extent to which they will profit from our believing and
acting on them.
When I was a young man I read Famine 1975! by the Paddock
brothers, one a foreign service officer, the other a tropical agriculture
specialist. This book profoundly affected me. The Paddocks confidently
predicted massive famines in 1975, and I believed them. But the famines did
not turn out as predicted. And this is just one example among many.
Skeptics about global warming are often painted as hirelings of the oil
and automotive industries. Such claims irritate me. I have never earned a
nickel as a consequence of my skepticism. Indeed, I have lost hundreds of
thousands of dollars by it. First, you have to understand how a large
research university operates. The professors are expected to obtain research
grants, and in the atmospheric sciences these grants come mostly from
government agencies. Every year at Penn State I would get a letter from the
dean telling me what the range of my salary would be. In essence, my 9-month
salary was spread over 12 months, and I could "supplement" my salary (up to
a limit) with grant money (summer salary). |
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This is about all Bohren
thinks can be said rationally about global warming: 
Rise in concentration of carbon dioxide during the Industrial Revolution,
from about 1800 on. Drawing courtesy of Robert A. Rohde (for the Global
Warming Art project) and Wikipedia, modified by the author.
- The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been
steadily increasing since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This
increase is most likely a consequence of increased burning of fossil
fuels.
- Carbon dioxide is an
infrared-active gas (I hate the term "greenhouse gas"), and hence all
else being equal (an important qualification) we expect more downward
infrared radiation (and a heating effect) from the atmosphere with an
increase in carbon dioxide. The detailed consequences of this, however,
are unknown and possibly unknowable. By consequences I mean length of
growing season, distribution and amount of rain, distribution and amount
of sunshine, etc. And the economic and social consequences are even more
uncertain. However the climate changes, it is likely that some regions of
the planet will gain, others will lose.
- Climate has changed in the past, and there is no reason to believe
that it will not change in the future. After all, the last Ice Age ended
only about 10,000 years ago, and it is fair to say that another Ice Age
would be equally or more catastrophic for Earth than global warming.
- How much of the present climate change is a direct consequence of
human activity is difficult to say with certainty.
- A prudent society would reduce its dependence on fossil fuels,
especially oil, as quickly as possible for many reasons, not just the
possibility of global warming. A prudent society would also develop
drought-resistant crops and make other long-term plans for inevitable
climate change of any kind.
- At the present, there seems to be no alternative to central power
generation than nuclear power. Fusion is pie-in-the-sky. We are not even
close to fusion. Solar and wind and tidal power can help but are not
panaceas. Conservation is desirable but probably not acceptable to many
people. The advantages and disadvantages, costs and benefits of all
schemes for power generation should be carefully assessed. A full and
honest balance sheet is needed. No matter how power is generated, some
people will die or be injured as a consequence. This is a fact of life. I
worked on the construction of a large power plant (not nuclear) about 46
years ago in Pittsburg, California. It was taken as axiomatic that several
workers would die in the construction of any power plant.
- Whatever the US and Europe do to mitigate consumption is likely to be
negated by increased consumption in countries such as China, India, and
Brazil.
- Those who advocate less consumption (in the US) should show the way by
consuming less themselves.
- Because of the present large population of Earth and the existence of
nation-states, mass migration of people is no longer a feasible response
to climate change without wars on all scales.
- There is no simple solution to global warming given the disparate
views of people of different religions, political views, and
nationalities, as well of competition between different countries for
resources.
- The concept of tradeoffs has to be firmly grasped by everyone,
especially environmentalists, who whine about global warming and then hop
in jet planes and fly 2000 miles to go skiing in the Rockies. The notion
of "green" power generation is absurd. A network of wind turbines adequate
to provide appreciable power would require staggering amounts of
construction materials: steel, aluminum, concrete. The same is true for
solar power and tidal power—and anything else.
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In the atmospheric sciences it is difficult to get grants unless you can
somehow tie your work to global warming, that is to say, to scare science.
Because of my reputation, I immodestly believe that I could have jumped onto the
global warming bandwagon. But I refused to do so because I would have found this
repugnant.
At some universities, professors get only a fraction of their salary from the
university, the rest coming from contracts and grants. Research associates and
research professors often must scrounge for 100% of their salaries.
Professors not only directly profit from their research grants (summer
salaries), they also indirectly profit. If Professor X has grants amounting to
millions of dollars, this gives him leverage. He wants more money so he
threatens to leave and take his bags of money with him if he doesn't get a
whopping raise. Or he plays one university off against another. He gets an offer
from another university in order to pressure his present university to increase
his salary. I have seen this done many times. The system of federal grants,
which hardly existed before WWII, has created a professoriate with greater
allegiance to government agencies than to their universities.
Professors who get research money to work on aspects of global warming are
not doing anything dishonest or illegal. This is not graft. But when it is in
the best financial and career interests of professors to raise the alarm about
global warming (or anything), we should be skeptical.
Perhaps some critics of global warming are in the pay of the oil and
automotive companies. If so, they should be forthright about this. But so should
folks on the other side of the debate. What fraction of their salaries comes
from research on global warming?
 Coal
cars in Ashtabula, Ohio. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.
Now to more of my biases. I have an MS in nuclear engineering. About 40 years
ago I was designing nuclear reactors. I got out of the business mostly because
of boredom, not because I felt guilty about killing babies or some such
nonsense. I have long felt that burning fossil fuels is madness in the long run
regardless of what this will do to climate. Burning fossil fuels creates air
pollution, which is not good for anyone's health. Also, fossil fuels are the
feedstock for all kinds of industries, and so burning them is like burning fine
furniture to heat your house. And finally, most important of all, basing an
economy on a commodity that is controlled by the most backward, unstable, and
violent countries in the world is madness.
Nuclear power is dangerous but so is non-nuclear power. Several years ago
Petr Beckmann published The Health Hazards of not Going Nuclear in which he did
what is rarely done by the anti-nuclear folks: he tried to account for how many
people die because of fossil fuels (not including automobile accidents). And
this was before Gulf War I, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on. These
recent wars are mostly a consequence of oil. All the countries in the Middle
East could dry up and blow away without the US and Europe noticing or caring
were it not for oil. Hundreds of thousands of people have died because of oil
wars, and we've seen only the beginnings of the carnage.
Many years ago I was involved in a campus debate about nuclear power. I was
willing only to take the middle ground, being flanked by a professor of nuclear
engineering and an "environmental activist." I considered the latter to be
nearly insane. His stated position was that "the loss of a single life" was not
a price he would willingly pay for nuclear power. This is madness. We are
willing to accept the loss of tens of thousands of lives every year in
automobile accidents with hardly a peep. Coal miners die all the time, quickly
in explosions or slowly by lung disease, with hardly a word of protest.
Refineries go up in flames killing lots of people, and again where are the
"environmental activists" to protest this? Several years ago I began reading a
book on risk assessment. In one of the first chapters (which stopped me in my
tracks) the author described Three-Mile Island as the "worst industrial
accident" in U.S. history. And yet this was an accident in which no one died or
was injured, in contrast with the thousands of people who have died in mining,
refinery, and chemical plant accidents.
So it rankles me that many of the same folks who did their best to undermine
nuclear power are also now screaming their guts out over global warming. Mind
you, I have no more to gain from nuclear power than any other citizen. I have
been out of this field for 40 years and at my age am not planning a comeback.
Another bias is many years ago I came to the conclusion that austerity was a
desirable way of life in order to mitigate possible environmental degradation.
Mind you, I am not complaining. I consider myself to be extraordinarily
fortunate, rich in fact. But this richness is not highly dependent on continuous
spending on consumer goods.
Given my way of life, it rankles me that global warmers are not similarly
frugal. In fact, many of them are profligate by my standards, and yet they
enjoin the rest of us to cut back. They, however, as world savers, are exempt
from austerity.
Now to the biases of others. It hardly comes as a surprise that the Wall
Street Journal takes shots at global warming. Conservatives believe in unlimited
growth, a consumer society that consumes more and more. Good for business. The
Bush White House is in the hands of oilmen who will never accept that burning
oil could have any deleterious consequences. They believe what they want to
believe.
About 30 years ago I applied for a job at SERI (Solar Energy Research
Institute) in Colorado. At that time SERI was growing by leaps and bounds. When
the Reaganites took over, SERI was gutted. But both political parties, liberals
and conservatives, are to blame for the US not having a rational energy policy.
Conservatives are correct in that a sudden decrease in the consumption of oil
would have grave economic consequences. Like it or not, the US economy (indeed
the world economy) is based on readily available cheap oil. We as a nation made
lots of bad decisions: cars instead of mass transport in cities, trucks instead
of railroads, suburbs and so on. The food that almost everyone eats is
transported long distances by trucks. We are no longer a nation of
self-sufficient farmers. We depend on all kinds of networks of food, water, and
power kept in operation mostly by burning fossil fuels.
Liberals have a curiously puritanical view of global warming. Our
contribution to it is evidence of our wickedness.
Stated simply (and probably unfairly), conservatives do not believe that
global warming exists (because they don't want it to exist) whereas liberals
believe in global warming (because they want it to exist).
And then there are religious biases. Certainly one means of mitigating the
undesirable consequences of climate change, whatever its causes, would be
population control. But this is not acceptable to many religions.
Some Christians seem to take the view that God cannot possibly let us destroy
our planet, whereas others want us to perish because of our sinful ways. Some
evangelical Christians seem to be eager for the end of the Earth.
Economists take a quite different view of global warming than do atmospheric
scientists. Not long ago a group of prominent economists compiled a list of
pressing problems for humanity. Global warming was near the bottom of the list,
which outraged the global warmers. But in the short run global warming surely
must be of little concern to someone in Africa dying of AIDS or malaria or
malnutrition. Or who doesn't have clean water, education, a job.
People in China, India, and Brazil, where the bulk of humanity lives, aspire
to the same standard of living as those of us in the US and Europe. No matter
what we do, these other countries are going to consume more fossil fuels, and
there isn't much we can do about it.
Fortunately, I'll be dead before the consequences of global warming become
dire, if indeed they do. But I would like to stick around long enough to see
this drama played out. I have done my small part: no children, austerity and
nuclear power development (failed).
Further Reading:
Famine 1975! by William Paddock
Rise in Gases caused by human activities by Andrew C. Revkin, New York
Times, November 25, 2005
Carbon dioxide continues its rise by David Shukman, BBC News
(Answered Aug. 08, 2006)
Click for printer version.
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