Hot tempers and global warming

FRANK MIELE

It used to be said that there were two things you should not talk about at the dinner table - religion and politics - in order to avoid unpleasant disagreements.

To that we may now add global warming, a topic which certainly leads to hotter tempers if not always rising temperatures.

Last week, I wrote about Newsweek's recent cover story about global warming, and noted that it was more of an effort to belittle and besmirch critics of global warming dogma than a serious news story. Well, to be accurate, it was not even an unserious news story; it was commentary without an appropriate label.

Nonetheless, Newsweek speaks for a sizable population that is convinced we are going to roast like shrimp on a barbie unless we take drastic measures to change our way of life. I suppose their fear may explain why they are also so hostile, as terror often leads to hatred. As expected I heard from a couple of readers last week who told me I was either stupid or a corporate media lackey (and I thought all the corporate media lackeys worked for Newsweek!) because I had challenged the common wisdom on climate change.

Of course, you will never hear me say that the earth is not getting hotter. I have no idea if it is getting hotter or not, and neither does anyone else, in the sense of scientific certitude about a long-range trend. We have been keeping track of temperatures for a few hundred years, and sure enough it seems to be getting hotter some of those years (and cooler others). But there is absolutely no evidence that the increase in temperatures for the past couple hundred years (since the Industrial Revolution started) is in any way comparable to the much bigger swings in temperature that have been recorded at various other period's in the earth's pre-industrial history.

We are currently in what is called an interglacial period known as the Holocene era, which began about 12,000 years ago. An interglacial means that we are between two ice ages. This, in my opinion, is a good thing. The bad news is that we do not know when the next ice age will begin, but it could be as soon as "the day after tomorrow" (to quote a recent movie title) or as far in the future as 50,000 years. Perhaps we should consult the 1975 Newsweek article on "The Cooling World" for a more definitive explanation of when the next ice age will start. According to them, it is already here!

In the meantime, we should be glad for the global warming that began 12,000 years ago and allowed mankind to populate much of the earth for the first time, eventually develop agriculture and civilization, and then invent both air conditioners and tanning booths.

We should also put our heads together and figure out whether or not mankind really does control the destiny of planet earth, or whether we are its innocent victims just like the dinosaurs were. That means looking at all the evidence of climate trends, not just data from the past 200 years. Even if it is conclusively proved that there has been a temperature increase during the last two centuries, there is no way to conclusively prove that the change was caused by humans. It could just be coincidence. That is why there is a logical fallacy known as "post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of it)." That means humans have a tendency to think incorrectly that whenever one event follows an earlier event, there is a causal relationship. In movies, this is famously put to use when poor primitive saps see a total eclipse of the sun and decide not to kill the heretic, foreigner or great white hunter because they are afraid of his/her powerful magic. Most recently, Mel Gibson relied on this silliness in the otherwise flawless "Apocalypto."

Global warming hysteria roughly translates as medicine men pointing at the blackened sun and screaming about how the gods are angry.

Too bad the evidence indicates the gods are not so much angry as whimsical. Things happen, but they don't always happen because the gods are trying to make a point. A couple of examples will suffice of evidence that climate changes regardless of what man has wrought with his infernal combustion engine.

. Around the year 1,000 there was a prolonged heat wave in the northern hemisphere that was followed 500 years later by a big chill. The overall temperature swing between those two events was about 1 degree, a little more than the oh so scary increase thought to have occurred since 1900. Scientists say the variations were probably due to "tiny fluctuations in the planet's orbit, as well as 'wobbles' in the spin of its axis," according to an Associated Press story from 2005. I wonder if those wobbles and fluctuations still exist?

. It is well known that sudden glaciation occurred about 5,200 years ago, about the same time that the Sahara shifted from being an inhabitable region to an inhospitable desert. According to an article about Ohio State glaciologist Lonnie Thompson in the university's Research newsletter, "Thompson believes that the 5,200-year-old event may have been caused by a dramatic fluctuation in solar energy reaching the earth… Evidence shows that around 5,200 years ago, solar output first dropped precipitously and then surged over a short period. It is this huge solar energy oscillation that Thompson believes may have triggered the climate changes he sees."

Surely, not even the most avid environmental activist has the audacity to complain that human behavior is to blame for changes in solar activity. And yet solar activity - little understood and hardly ever mentioned - is one of the major factors in the earth's climate.

In fact, the sun is undeniably the most important factor in climate on all the planets in the solar system. Without the sun, as we know, life itself would be impossible. It is the source of all that warming which we churlishly complain about. You would think it would be of more concern to people, therefore, that changes in solar activity have been blamed for global warming or climate change currently under way on Mars, Jupiter, Neptune's largest moon, and even distant Pluto. One study by physics professors Scafetta and West of Duke University (published in Geophysical Research Letters, Sept. 15, 2006) concluded that based on a study of the past 400 years, "The sun might have contributed approximately 50 percent of the observed global warming since 1900."

Another cause of global warming, of course, is what is called greenhouse gases - the emissions from power plants and other components of modern technology which, according to computer models, reflect heat from the surface of the earth back toward the planet instead of letting it escape into the ether.

There is no reason to doubt these computer models, as a general reflection of a simple scientific principle, but there is no reason to panic as a result of them either. Let's suppose that the technology which has allowed us to advance from the horse and buggy in 1907 to Boeing 747s in 2007 has also resulted in a small increase in surface temperatures. Let us further suppose that this increase in temperatures might result in some changes in weather patterns that could increase storm activity in some areas or flooding in other areas. We can all agree that those are unfortunate results, but we cannot all agree about what is the best response.

Consider this: The electrification of the globe which has been occurring since about 1900 has not just caused global warming; it has also caused the greatest leap in technology since the beginning of mankind. It has caused us to be able to talk about a 40-hour work week, the eradication of polio, and what to do in our retirement years. What people used to do in their retirement years was sleep in a pine box six feet underground.

Lest we forget, the average life span in the United States in 1900 was 47 years. By the year 2000, it was 77. That's an increase of 64 percent. The change has been even more dramatic in Third World nations such as India and China, where life expectancy actually doubled from the year 1950 to the year 2000. Those are astounding, invaluable, incalculable additions to the sum total of human experience made possible by the very science and technology which have been made out to be demons in the war against global warming.

The question of what technology has bought us is an important one, because a lot of the environmental activists think we should give back a lot of the benefits we have accrued in the past 100 years as a way to fight global warming. The question of how many years of your life span you are willing to give back in order to cool global temperatures by one-tenth of a degree has not yet been asked, but you should be aware that it is on the table. So too is everything from banning barbecues (proposed in Europe), jacking up gasoline taxes and eliminating the mortgage deduction for homes over 3,000 square feet (proposed by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., earlier this month), and wiping out the rainforests so that businesses will have biomass available to turn into biofuel so that we can run our cars more expensively (and at great expense to orangutans, which are being wiped out as a result of the destruction of their Indonesian habitat).

Or you could just mindlessly sign on to something like the Kyoto Protocol, which established arbitrary goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and if followed religiously would have the effect of making mankind give up many of the luxuries we have earned in the last 200 years or making us pay much more for them. Yale University economist William Nordhaus released a new study last week which estimates the costs of various scenarios for limiting carbon dioxide over the next 200 years versus the economic benefits achieved, and the outlook is glum indeed.

According to Nordhaus, if the world were to follow the proposals by former Vice President Al Gore for rapid deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, future damage to the environment from global warming would be reduced in cost by $12 trillion. The bad news is that accomplishing the reduction would cost $34 trillion. There is a slightly better scenario if you follow the proposals of British economist Nicholas Stern, but even in that case you spend $27 trillion to prevent $13 trillion in damage. Not exactly a smart way to spend money. You might be better off just investing that extra $14 trillion or $22 trillion in developing alternative energy technologies. That's what the free-market would be doing anyway if it weren't being taxed into submission.

But too many people don't want to hear too many facts. They are too darn confusing.