haramoto@zodiac.rutgers.edu (01/05/90)
[reposted from "sci.environment"] On Nov. 7 the U.S. and Japan shocked environmentalists around the world by refusing to sign a draft resolution at a Netherlands international conference on global climate change calling for the "stabilization" of emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other "greenhouse gases" by the yaer 2000. Instead, they made the conference drop all reference to a specific year, and to a specific CO2 reduction target. The Bush Administration view was set forth by D. Allan Bromley, the presidential science adviser, in testimony to Senator Gore's subcommittee on Science, Technology & Space: "My belief is that we should not move forward on major programs until we have a reasonable understanding of the scientific and economic consequences of those programs." President Bush was immediately savaged by environmentalists, and by politicians like Senator Gore (D-Tenn.). The Bush viewpoint does not sit too well with most of the media, either. Last January Time published a cover story on environmental catastrophes, declaring that greenhouse gases could create a climatic calamity. The New York Times weighed in a month ago with a story about how melting polar ice would flood the nations that can least afford to defend themselves, Third World countries like Bangladesh and India. Or perhaps you have seen the ads for Stephen Schneider's Global Warming, accompanied by a blurb from Senator Tim Wirth (D-Colo.). In his book this well-known climatologist paints a future of seas surging across the land, famine on an epidemic scale and eco-system collapse. Is the earth really on the verge of environmental collapse? Should wrenching changes be made in the world's industry to contain CO2 buildup? Or could we be witnessing the 1990s version of earlier scares: nuclear winter, cancer-causing cranberries and $100 oil? The calamitarians always have something to worry about. Consider this: In his 1976 book, The Genesis Strategy, Schneider lent support to the then popular view that we could be in for another ice age, "perhaps one akin to the Little Ice Age of 1500-1850. Climate variability, which is the bane of reliable food production, can be expected to increase along with the cooling." At the very moment Bromley was testifying to Gore's subcommittee, MIT's prestigious Technology Review was reporting on the publication of an exhaustive new study of worldwide ocean temperatures since 1850 by MIT climatologists Reginald Newell, Jane Hsiung and Wu Zhongxiang. Its most striking conclusion: "There appears to have been little or no global warming over the past century." In fact, the average ocean temperature in the torrid 1980s was only an eighth of a centigrade degree (a quarter of a Fahrenheit degree) higher than the average of the 1860s. Ocean temperature is now virtually the same as it was in the 1940s. Since two- thirds of the buildup of CO2 has taken place since 1940, the MIT data blow all of the global warming forecasts into a cocked hat. President Bush wisely told reporters: "You can't take a policy and drive it to the extreme and say to every country in the world, 'You aren't going to grow at all.'" That is the central issue of the global warming debate, and it explains why the U.S. and Japanese position was supported by some 30 other developing nations which see that just as Marxism is giving way to markets, the political "greens" seem determined to put the world economy back into the red, using the greenhouse effect to stop unfettered market-based economic expansion. In simplest terms, the earth's atmosphere does operate as a greenhouse. In addition to oxygen, nitrogen and water vapor, the atmosphere contains several gases that trap radiated heat, including methane and CO2. Carbon dioxide is essential not only to warmth but to vegetation. It is also essential to life in another way: Without its heat-containing effect the planet would freeze, like the atmospherically naked moon. Throughout most of human history that atmospheric blanket has held global temperatures at an average of about 60 degrees F., plus or minus 5 degrees F. During most of human history, the CO2 concentration in that blanket has, until this century, hovered around 270 parts per million, although in earlier geologic epochs it reached as high as 20,000. Over the last 100 years the CO2 concentration has risen from 270 to today's level of 350. The culprit: man. Most of the greenhouse gas increase is the result of fossil fuel consumption. Add to that the rise in other man-generated trace gases - methane, nitrogen oxides and chlorofluorocarbons - and total greenhouse gases are now at 410 ppm. In other words, because of the combined effect of these gases, we have already gone over halfway to a doubling of CO2. Even so, there has been less than a half a degree of warming in the last 100 years. What do the environmental pessimists make of all this? The earliest versions of their computer "general circulation models" predicted that the earth would warm up by anywhere from 3 to 5 degrees centrigrade, or 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit, by the year 2050. The most extreme scenarios warn of coastal flooding (from melting ice caps) and rising inland droughts. However, as the level of sophistication of the models has risen, these forecast effects have been steadily reduced to a new range of 1.5 to 2.5 degrees centigrade. One major exception to this declining rate of doom is the model run by James Hansen of the National Aeronautics & Space Administration, who shocked a congressional hearing in June 1988 during the middle of a scorching near- nationwide drought, by saying he was "99% confident" the greenhouse effect is now here. Even though the vast majority of the climatological community was outraged by Hansen's unproven assertions, environmental advocate Stephen Schneider notes in Global Warming, "Journalists loved it. Environmentalist were estatic. Jim appeared on a dozen or more national television news programs..." By the end of 1988, with Hansen and Schneider's enthusiastic support, global warming was deeply embedded in the public consciousness. Now over 60% of the public is convinced it will worsen, even as the evidence of that alleged trend is under increasingly sharp and solid scientific attack. On the contrary, that attack has been used as a premise for even more immediate action. As one TV anchorman argued, "Even if we aren't sure it's true, shouldn't we take precautions and act now as if it were?" Unfortunately, "taking such precautions" could well spell the end of the American dream for us and the world. Once CO2 is in the atmosphere, we can't easily remove it. Since most of the forecast rise in the gas is a function of simple economic and population growth in the Third World, there is no realistic economic way to prevent a CO2 doubling without slashing growth and risking a revolt of the have-not nations against the haves. The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic & International Studies points out that, even though the U.S. is now the largest carbon fuel user, it's the developing countries that will quadruple their energy consumption by 2025. "By the middle of the next century, they will account for the bulk of the greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere, even if they succeed in doubling energy efficiency." The Environmental Protection Agency finds that just to stabilize U.S. CO2 emissions at present levels would force 30% taxes on oil and coal, while to meet environmentalists' demands for a 20% reduction in U.S. CO2 emmissions would require a tax of $25 per barrel on oil, and $200 a ton on coal, effectively doubling U.S. energy costs. Unfortunately, the popular media don't seem to care. In May the national press erupted in a two-day firestorm when Hansen told Senator Gore's sub- committee that the Office of Management & Budget had censored his florid global warming testimony by adding the modest caveat, "These changes should be viewed as estimates from evolving computer models and not as reliable predictions." Yet, at the moment of that testimony, 61 of the world's top climatologists, gathered for a five-day workshop in Amherst, Mass., were largely agreeing with OMB. Science magazine reported that most of the attendees were pleasantly surprised by OMB's efforts to control Hansen: "I can't say I agree with censorship, but it seems OMB has better people than I thought. I'd have to agree with their angle," said Rick Katz of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, on eof the leading modelers. Conference leader Michael Schlesinger, another top modeler (University of Illinois), agreed: "[Hansen's] statements have given people the feeling the greenhouse effect has been detected with certitude. Our current understanding does not support that. Confidence in its detection is now down near zero." That conclusion was buttressed by one of the deans of U.S. climatology, Reid Bryson, a founder of the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, who said in July: "The very clear statements that have been made [by Hansen] that the greenhouse warming is here already and that the globe will be 4 degrees [centigrade] warmer in 50 years cannot be accepted." On Dec. 24, 1988, Hansen received an unwelcome Christmas present in the form of a new research paper by one of the world's most universally respected climatologists, Thomas Karl, and two of his colleagues at the National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration, Kirby Hanson and George Maul. Their review of the best climate record in the world - that of the 48 contiguous United States - concluded: "There is no statistically significant evidence of an overall increase in annual temperature or change in annual precipitation for the contiguous U.S. 1895-1987." Look at the chart on pages 96-97. As Karl says in an interview, "If there is a greenhouse warming effect, you can't find it in the U.S. records." That news alone should have cooled off the global warming movement. But the environmentalists accepted Hansen's dismissal of the paper as "not signifi- cant" because the data covered only 1.5% of the earth's surface, not nearly enough to identify major trends. But MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen says that Hansen's rebuttal is out of line. He points out that because of the law of large numbers - the fact that a large enough sample is likely to give an accurate picture of a larger population - "the absence of any trend in the record of the contiguous U.S. leads to the suspicion that all the trends in the global record may be spurious." The major reason for this is that when you fully subject global temperature records (as Karl did the U.S. records) to adjustments for the effects of unbanization (cities are heat islands that artificially inflate temperature records), the global warming trend since 1880 has been only a third of a degree centigrade, and over the Northern Hemisphere land masses, no trend at all. Here's another fact, noted by Hugh Ellsaesser of Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, that should trouble the calamity theorists: Most of the past century's warming trend took place by 1938, well before the rise in CO2 concentration. From 1938 to 1970 temperatures plunged so sharply a new ice age was widely forecast. Furthermore, the warming trend since 1976 has been just the opposite of that forecast by the greenhouse model, with cooling in both the northern Pacific and North Atlantic. In fact, the Northern Hemisphere shows no net change over the last 55 years, during which CO2 concentration rose from approximately 300 to 350 ppm and other thermally active trace gases were in their steepest growth phases. In spite of this clear lack of correlated warming evidence, one of the leading climate models now predicts that a 1% annual rise in CO2 should, over 30 years, produce a 0.7-degree centigrade warming. But when Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia applied that formula to the period from 1950 to 1988, when greenhouse gases rose 1.2% per year, he found a tiny 0.2-degree warming in land temperatures, where the model would have predicted 1.3 degrees. When a model cannot come within 500% of explaining the past, it is useless as a predictor of anything. As Reid Bryson concludes in a 1988 paper, "A statement of what the climate is going to be in the year A.D. 2050 is a 63-year forecast. Do the models have a demonstrated capability of making a 63-year forecast? No. A 6.3-year forecast? No. Have they successfully simulated the climate variation of the past century and a half? No. They are marvels of mathematics and computer science, but rather crude imitators of reality." The major weakness of the models is their assumption that the CO2 buildup is the significant climate variable, and should ceteris paribus (all other things being equal) generate warming. But, as it turns out, the ceteris are decidely not paribus. One of those variables is cloud cover, which is at least 100 times more powerful in affecting temperatures than greenhouse gases and is infinitely variable. Yet, because cloud cover has been documented only for a decade or so (by weather satellites), the models have have little to go on. Until recently, the modelers assumed that warmth gave rise to the kind of clouds that trap heat, contributing still further to warming, in a vicious cycle. But in June 1988, V. Ramanathan of the University of Chicago and a team of scientists at NASA concluded from preliminary satellite data that "clouds appear to cool earth's climate," possibly offseting the atmospheric green- house effect. The supreme irony is that this "cooling effect," most pronounced in the Northern Hemisphere, coincides with the paths of coal-burning emission plumes with their high concentration of sulfur-dioxide. That confirms a long-held thesis that sulfur dioxide creates "cool clouds." Of course, it is very upsetting to an environmentalist to discover that a pollutant has a beneficial side effect. Sulfur dioxide emissions not only acidify rain, they combine with water vapor to form what are known as "aerosols," which have the effect of brightening clouds and making them reflect more heat away from the earth. Wisconsin's Reid Bryson described this effect as early as 20 years ago. Bryson's thesis was scorned at the time. But last June, Thomas Wigley, one of England's top climatologists and global warming enthusiast, conceded in a paper in Nature magazine that sulfur dioxide cooling "is sufficiently large that the effects may have significantly offset the temperature changes that resulted from the greenhouse effect." Michaels says this could also explain in part why U.S. daytime highs (when brighter clouds have the most cooling effect) have actually declined substantially in the last 50 years, even as the nighttime lows have risen. "This should make you wonder," says Michaels, "why Hansen [and others] have only perturbed their models with CO2 and not with SO2 as well. If you only perturb the model with CO2, it will predict the greenhouse warming effect. If you only perturb it with SO2, you get an ice age." Hugh Ellsaesser says the main reason the models have been so completely wrong in "predicting" the past is that they completely ignore the counter- vailing, thermostatic effects of the hydrological cycle of evaporation and condensation. Two-thirds of the predicted global warming is due not directly to CO2's radiative power but to an indirect effect: Carbon dioxide warming supposedly causes a threefold amplification of water vapor surface evaporation into the atmospheric blanket. But Ellsaesser says in the warmer, tropical latitudes, where the temperature change from sea-level upward is most rapid, evaporation has the opposite effect. There, water vapor rises by deep convection in fast-rising towers. This in turn leads to more rapid condensation and precipitation, which then causes a drying and thinning of the upper atmosphere in a process called subsidence. "In the lower latitudes, a rise in CO2 emissions will produce a 3-to-1 rise in greenhouse blanket *thinning* due to condensation. That's exactly opposite to what the models predict," he says. As eminent British scientist, Sir James Lovelock, says this hydrological process "is comparable in magnitude with that of the carbon dioxide green- house, but in opposition to it." National Oceanographic scientist Thomas Karl agrees: "We will eventually discover how naive we have been in not considering CO2's effects on cloud cover and convection. As CO2 speeds up the hydrological cycle, more convection creates more clouds and more cooling. So, the greenhouse effect could turn out to be minimal, or even benign." MIT's Richard Lindzen thinks that correcting for deep convection alone could lower the global warming estimates by a factor of six. As a result, he says, "It is very unlikely that we will see more than a few tenths of a degree centigrade from this cause [CO2] over the next century." In the face of such mounting evidence, U.S. businesses may stop worrying about devastating legislative enactments. That could be a mistake. As Nobel economist James Buchanan argues, what drives Washington policymaking is not economic or scientific realities, but "public choice," the pursuit of power and funding. The public choice potential of global warming is immense. Under a global warming scenario, the EPA would become the most powerful government agency on earth, involved in massive levels of economic, social, scientific and political spending and interference, on a par with the old Energy Department. Don't forget the energy crisis: During the 1970s, a great many less-than- honest scientists confidently predicted the world was about to run out of fossil fuels, and that by 1985, we'd be paying $100 a barrel for oil, or more. We wasted billions on energy subsidies. Senator Albert Gore is evidence of this public choice phenomenon. He seems determined to run his next presidential campaign at least in part on climate change, saving Mother Earth. Every year, at least one-sixth of the U.S. is classified by the government's Palmer Index as being in drought. Even though that index overstates the case, Gore could be looking at some very big political states - maybe California or Texas or Iowa - where his message will resonate with farmers and business. All he has to do is wait for a warm spell, and capitalize on what mathematicians call noise in the statistics. Patrick Michaels explains: "We know that the Pacific Ocean current known as El Nino tends to warm and cool in two-year cycles. Just as its warming cycle produced 1987-88 droughts, in 1989 it cooled sharply, making the U.S. much cooler and wetter than Hansen had forecast, and that is likely to happen in 1990, again. But that means that 1991 and 1992 should be warmer and drier than usual as the El Nino current warms. It won't matter that this has nothing to do with global warming, the media will perceive it that way, and people will tend to believe it." Bernard Cohen, a physicist at the University of Pittsburgh, warns, in a 1984 book: "Our government's science and technology policy is now guided by uninformed and emotion-driven public opinion rather than by sound scientific advice. Unless solutions can be found to this problem, the U.S. will enter the 21st century declining in wealth, power and influence...The coming debacle is not due to the problems the environmentalists describe, but to the policies they advocate." "Global warming" may well prove Cohen right. By Warren T. Brookes. (from FORBES, 12/25/89)