Global Change

Foreword: The following exchange of emails between Clinton and I took place last week. Hopefully, the matters raised need no further introduction, though I fear they may do. I leave it bare for you to absorb.

Hi Rob,

During my periods of indolence, due to the poor property market, I have been trying to do some research on climate change in an attempt to look behind the hype and hysteria to try and gauge what is actually happening. Very interesting to see how government and the media and science are all reacting and inter- acting on this.

There are some good videos on YouTube by a Professor Bob Carter in Australia which seem to give a measured and balanced view on climate change. In one of his lectures he looks at the collection of raw data on temperature change. He cites research in the USA on the state and condition of the ground weather stations which America is supposed to lead the world in. He shows the weather station at UofA, which is wrongly sited on tarmac, and the thermometer is wrongly positioned! As he points out, this is an academic institution that should be on the ball. Many sites are not run by people who should know better.

Upshot of research as follows:

1. The world’s climate is in a constant state of change. In the latest 2000 years we have seen the warm medieval period and the mini ice-age from 1500 to 1850. Both involved temperatures and temperature changes exceeding those of the last ten years.

2. Man constantly affects the climate with all our activities. Some activities produce warming some produce cooling.

3. Is the earth warming? It depends on the data and the timescale looked at. We are in a warmer period but this has been the case since 1850.

4. Is man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 the cause of the present warming? No one knows. A heap of money has been spent on research and no link has been found.

5. Is CO2 a greenhouse gas? Yes, but the most significant is water vapor. The interaction between all the greenhouse gasses and the effects of the sea, the Iris effect and global dimming and the relationship between the hundreds of factors that affect the climate are not fully known or understood.

6. Man has a very poor record on understanding and making predictions when it comes to complex man-made systems, let alone complex natural systems. For example we cannot predict with accuracy the effects of certain stimuli on the world economy, as shown in the current crises and the lack of agreement on the steps needed to get us out of recession.

7. Are we heading for a crisis? No. If we are, then the steps being taken are unlikely to change anything. It is an expensive act of utter futility. These resources should be deployed to combat problems we can deal with. Pollution, supply of power to all worlds’ population, supply of clean water to all of world’s population.

I also watched some video of the late Michael Crichton (author of Jurassic Park). He makes some very interesting points. Firstly he looks at environmentalism and equates it to a religion. On an anthropological view, a religion is a collective set of beliefs which has a leader/s promoting the belief with followers who contribute to the belief system and change their lifestyle to match the beliefs. The belief provides a total view of what should be considered bad and what should be considered good. The environmental creed particularly follows the Judao/Christian belief system. I.e. There was once an Eden, which man has ruined and, thereby, became original sinners. Salvation lies through “sustainability”. You are measured as a person by being either good or bad by this creed.

Issues such as climate change need a very strict scientific approach. The environment constantly changes and our understanding of this complex system constantly changes. We must constantly re-evaluate, admit mistakes, be flexible, adapt and look at research with clear unbiased eyes. “Religion” cannot respond to this challenge.

Consensus is also a dead end to understanding. “90% of scientists believe that global warming is man-made and will lead to catastrophes”. History is littered with examples of when the scientific consensus was wrong. Scientists should never rely on consensus. (See debate on tectonic plate theory.)

The Nazis tried to discredit Jewish scientists including Einstein They got a couple of hundred scientists to say they believed his theories were wrong. When Einstein was quizzed on this he said that all that was needed was for one scientist to PROVE he was wrong.

Another factor in the debate is the fear element. Politicians and media use fear to push home their political points, particularly to justify taxation. Fear paralyses true debate and reasoning. Look at old newspapers and the language used to discuss historic issues like Y2K, global cooling, DDT. The science got lost in the hype. Look at how a complex natural balance can be misunderstood and mismanaged such as with Yellowstone National Park .

As to the end of the world - every three minutes there is an earthquake somewhere in the world, at least one of magnitude of 5 on the Richter scale every 3 hours, lighting strikes somewhere every eleven seconds, at any one time there are 1500 electric storms around the globe, a tornado every 6 hours, a Tsunami across the Pacific every 3 months and 90 hurricanes a year. The biggest threat to mankind is a virus.

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Hi Dad,

It is tragic, as you point out, that science, and the media uptake of scientific research, can be skewed and distorted by financial opportunism.

On the matter of global warming, all of what you say can be argued convincingly. No matter how many cars we replace with Toyota Priuses there will always be 180 million Americans who herald the four-wheel drive, Ford pick-up truck as their ideal vehicle. And so long as budding industries in China and India continue to build coal-powered energy plants at the rate of about one per week, the public frenzy we see surrounding global warming is largely superfluous.

Here, it’s worth clarifying a commonly held untruth, which asserts that global warming, and particularly CO2, damages the Ozone layer. This is wholly, categorically, singularly, veritably untrue. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) chemically react with the outer layer of the stratosphere, which is made up of oxygen in the form of O3 (Ozone). In doing so, they break down the molecular structure of ozone into its component parts – O2, and of course, another single oxygen molecule. Needless to say, as this process takes place, the useful qualities of O3 in reflecting UVB and UVC light are lost and this additional radiation from the sun breaks down H2O molecules that have recently formed in the outer troposphere. Overall, this leads to a wealth of O2 in the atmosphere that has the unfortunate tendency of bonding with extra carbon molecules and form additional CO2. Hence the frequently wavered attack that CO2 is intrinsically linked to the destruction of the ozone layer.

It's true that carbon-dioxide retains heat, but it is far from the best conductor; methane gas, Freonic CFCs, and nitrous oxides are far more effective at storing heat in the atmosphere and, collectively, they outweigh the effects of carbon-dioxide. Carbon levels fluctuate anyway, as we know, through the carbon cycle, so it is important to analyse any information or recommendations we receive about carbon-dioxide with a sceptical eye. The carbon cycle is responsible for circulating roughly 200 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year and a mere 7 gigatons is anthropogenic. Even so, carbon-dioxide is not, strictly speaking, a greenhouse gas.

However, as the global population continues to rise, with birth rates in America tipping beyond 2.1 (the worst offender per capita in the world), and people living longer, there is going to be an inevitable squeeze on global resources, most evidently within the next fifty years. This, of course, is a speculative projection, but a necessary one. As we've said before, the Earth warms and cools naturally anyway over long periods of time. What we need to address is our effect on the natural warming the planet is undergoing.

As you say, human activity has a cooling effect alongside a warming effect, and it remains under-acknowledged that a lot of our carbon-dioxide output comes simply from the construction and maintenance of buildings (roughly 50%, in fact). This demonstrates again how talk of global warming is frequently marred by a select few with vested interests.

If we were in any way perturbed by being outside consensus we would not be having this discussion. Achieving scientific consensus is extremely rare, and so it should be. This reminds us of the unfortunate state of much of American and European scientific research - scientific endeavor is limited to its financial restraints. Unless someone (usually the government) is willing to fund a project, having seen the thesis, scientific research can barely get off the ground. You can see, in that case, how certain lines of thinking become more popular than others if researchers can broach their theories to conform to the Zeitgeist. Consensus, therefore, becomes reciprocal, leading to more and more extreme results (see Swine Flu, Avian Flu, SARS, etc.)

Obviously, to coincide with increasing population, we face the threat of limited resources (most pertinently - oil), the depleting rainforests, and the pollution of large water basins in North and South America. These matters, it's worth saying, are fairly trivial and non-urgent in relation to the current political landscape. I would argue that a nuclear exchange is a more pressing threat to mankind than a virus. However, some argue that these effects combined; even if they raise the global temperature a mere two degree could cause severe and irreparable melting of the ice sheets in Greenland. If enough cool water were to infiltrate the ocean system in a short span of time off the East coast of North America then we really would notice a change in the global climate. The ocean conveyor would grind to a halt and the conduction of heat from the equator to the tropics, for example, would stop. This is the most salient point, but it still seems extreme and unlikely.

Again, demands placed upon human activity, in the superficial form it takes today (drive economically; invest in wind turbines; buy a solar-panel for your home; etc.), are unlikely to change the course of global warming. We would do well to invest in broader scientific research that addresses the effect rather than the cause in order to prepare ourselves for the possible eventualities.