Kicking the Sacred Cow

by James P. Hogan

  Environmentalist issues are also the kind of thing that can easily lead scientists feeling a need to "make a difference" to allow ideology to bias their professional judgment. Of course, scientists have as much right to an opinion on these matters as anyone else. The danger comes when authority earned in some totally unrelated field is accepted—by themselves as much as anyone, in some cases—as qualification to speak for "science" on matters in which their information is really no different from anyone else's, being drawn from the same sources.

  If being an environmentalist means preferring to eat wholesome food, drink clean water, and not be poisoned by the air one breathes, then surely we're all environmentalists. But in many of its manifestations the term these days has come to mask an ideological campaign rooted in disenchantment with technology and hostility toward the Western style of capitalist industrialized civilization. At its extreme, this assumes the form of a neo-Malthusian world view that sees us heading inexorably toward a disaster of overpopulation and diminishing resources, making such pursuits as abundant wealth and cheap energy foolish delusions that would simply produce too many people and hasten the day when everything runs out. I happen to disagree, but these are perfectly valid concerns to hold.

  New technologies create new resources. And when breakthroughs occur such as harnessing a qualitatively new realm of energy density, they do so on a scale dwarfing anything that went before, opening up possibilities that were inconceivable within the limits of earlier paradigms. Powered flying machines were impossible by the sciences known to the Greeks and the Romans, and spacecraft unattainable by the engineering of the nineteenth century. The average Englishman today lives a life style that commands more accessibility to energy, travel, communication, and variety than was available to Queen Victoria.

  A resource isn't a resource until the means and the knowledge exist to make use of it. Oil was of no use to anyone until the industries had come into being to extract and refine it, and produce devices capable of applying it to useful purposes. Oil is nothing more than hydrogen and carbon configured into molecules that lock up a lot of energy. Both elements are plentiful, and it seems far more likely to me that human ingenuity and a sufficiently concentrated energy source will produce cheaper, more convenient alternatives long before the last barrel of the stuff we're squabbling about today is pumped out of the ground. A suitably concentrated source would be nuclear, when the world gets over its present phobia, and the disincentives that arise from the commitment to the current worldwide commercial and political infrastructure lessen. This is one of the reasons why nuclear technology—not just in energy generation, but for eventually obsoleting today's methods in such industries as metals extraction, refining, and processing; chemicals manufacture; desalination, all forms of waste disposal, to name a few—represents a breakthrough into the next qualitatively distinct realm, while the so-called alternatives, do not. 142

  In earlier societies that existed before the days of life insurance, retirement pensions, social services, and the like, children were an economic asset. They contributed to a family's productivity, and having a couple of strong sons to run the farm provided the security in later years. But since half the family on average would be girls, not all the sons might be fit and healthy, and with untold perils lying in wait along the road from infancy to adulthood, it was better start out with a dozen or so to give two strong sons reasonably good chances of making it. In today's modern state, by contrast, children are an expense to raise, to educate, and to prepare for life; families are correspondingly smaller—and raising families in the traditional way ceases to be the automatic choice of a great number of people, in any case. The result is that as wealth and living standards improve, new factors come into play that cause populations to become self-limiting in numbers in ways that Thomas Malthus never dreamed of. And neither, it seems, do his ideological descendants today, who apply results taken from the population dynamics of animals, who consume resources and create nothing, to humans. No big noise is made about it, but the populations of all the advanced industrial nations are now reproducing at below the minimum replacement rate—to the point that some European states are offering cash incentives for couples to have larger families. (Malthus was obsessed by the geometric growth rate of population, compared to what he assumed could only be an arithmetic growth for food supplies. But once a decline sets in, the collapse is geometric too.)

  But for populations where traditional values and customs still exist alongside the increased longevity and reduced mortality that come with the shift to industrialization, of course, for a while, the population is going to increase as numbers adjust to come into balance with the new conditions. It's a sign of things getting better, not worse. 143 The increases happening in the Third World today are following the same pattern that occurred in Europe in the eighteenth century and in America in the ninteenth. But since the 1950s, the UN projections for the future global population have consistently been revised downward, meaning that the curve is already leveling out again.

  No one is questioning that the world today is experiencing social and political problems that are perhaps going to call for some radical reappraisals of long-held attitudes and cultural values to solve. But abandoning the gains we have achieved in improving the quality of life as far as material comfort and security goes would be an irrational reaction and contribute nothing to the solving them, besides being a travesty in throwing away unquestionable triumphs of the human intellect. Some would argue that our material gains have been taken too far, and that's the largest part of the problem. Maybe so. But the point I would contend is that our material problems are effectively solved. We have the knowledge and the ability to ensure that every child born on the planet can grow up with a healthy and well-fed body, an educated mind, and the opportunity to make of themselves as much as they are able. The real problems that confront us are social and political—deciding who gets what share, and who gets the power and authority to make such decisions.

  But they should be acknowledged as social and political issues and dealt with openly as such, not hidden behind a facade of phony science. The main victim in the end can only be real science and its credibility. That's what this section is all about.

  Garbage In, Gospel Out:

  Computer Games and Global Warming

  Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big enough majority in any town?

  — Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  Out of all the environmentalist alarms that were raised from around the early seventies onward, global warming emerged as the banner issue that all the cohorts rallied behind. It was the perfect formula for everyone with stakes in the man-made-disaster business: scenes of polar meltdown, drowning cities, and dried-up farmlands providing lurid graphics for the media; a threat of global dimensions that demanded global action for political crusaders and the would-be abolitionists of sovereign nation-states; and all of the usual suspects to blame for opponents of industrialism and the Western world in general.

  The picture the world was given is sufficiently well known not to require much elaboration here. "Greenhouse gases" produced by industry, automobiles, and human agricultural practices, notably carbon dioxide (C02), nitrous oxides, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), are building up in the atmosphere. They trap heat from the Sun like an enormous hothouse, which will melt the icecaps and glaciers, raising raise sea levels hundreds of feet, and turn productive land into deserts, which will lead to famine, epidemics, riots, wars over dwindling resources, and the end of the world as we know it. The only solution is to end the world as we know it by other means, specifically by taking immediate and draconian political action to shut down or cut back offending economic activities of the industrialized Western nations—but curiously not those of the Third World, which are less effectively controlled and growing faster—and setting up an international apparatus for planning and policing future growth. The side less publicized was that the trillion
s-of-dollars cost, when you got down to taking a close look at what was really being talked about, would have the effect of cutting the world's economy to the level of being able to support only a drastically reduced population, with the remainder reduced for the most part to serving a global controlling elite and their bureaucratic administrators and advisors. The Soviet nomenklatura reinstated on a world scale. It seems to me that the world would want to check its facts very carefully before letting itself be sold a deal like that.

  A Comfortable Natural Greenhouse

  The first thing to be said is that the "greenhouse effect" isn't something new, brought about by human activities. It's a natural phenomenon that has existed for as long as the Earth has had an atmosphere. All objects above zero degrees Kelvin radiate heat. As an object gets hotter, the peak of the frequency band that it radiates (where most of the radiated energy is emitted) shifts toward shorter wavelengths. Thus, a warm hotplate on a stove radiates mainly in the infrared band, which while invisible can still be felt as heat. As the hotplate is heated more, its radiation peak moves up into the visible region to red and then orange. The Sun radiates a lot of energy at ultraviolet wavelengths, shorter than the visible. The atmosphere is transparent to certain bands of this, which reach the Earth's surface and are absorbed. But since the Earth is a lot cooler than the Sun, this energy is reradiated not at ultraviolet wavelengths but at the much longer infrared, to which the atmosphere is not as transparent. Atmospheric gas molecules that consist of three or more atoms typically absorb energy at characteristic wavelengths within the infrared band, which heats them up, and consequently the atmosphere. Note that this excludes the diatomic gases N2 and O2 that form the bulk of the atmosphere (78 and 20 percent respectively), and also the monatomic traces, argon and neon.

  This, then, defines the notorious "greenhouse gases" that are going to stifle the planet. The one that gets all the publicity is carbon dioxide, which human activities generate in five main ways: making cement (CO2 being driven out of the limestone used in the process); breathing; rearing animals; using wood (which once harvested, eventually decomposes one way or another); and burning fossil fuels. This translates into the release of about 3 million liters on average of CO2 per human per year, for a grand yearly total of 1.6 x 1016 liters, or 30 billion tonnes. 144 (1 tonne = a "metric ton" = 1,000 kilograms = 0.984 ton.) The other gases, while present in smaller amounts, have a greater relative absorptive capacity that ranges from fifty-eight times that of CO2 in the case of methane to several thousand for CFCs, and the amounts of them have been increasing.

  This all sounds like something that should indeed be a cause for concern, until it's realized that the atmosphere contains something like 1,800 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide already from such sources as volcanoes, the outgassing of oceans, and the natural functioning of the biosphere. In other words, all of human activity adds less than two percent to the gases that nature puts out anyway. And then it turns out that all of these gases put together add up to a minor player, for the greatest contributor by far is water vapor. Although the exact figure varies from place to place and season to season, water vapor is typically present at ten times the concentration of carbon dioxide; further, it is active across the whole infrared range, whereas heat absorption by CO2 is confined to two narrow bands. Without this natural greenhouse mechanism, the Earth would be about 33oC cooler than it is, which would mean permanent ice at the equator. Estimates of the contribution of water vapor vary from 95 to 99 percent, thereby accounting for somewhere around 32oC of this. The remaining one degree is due to other gases. The effects of all of human activity are in the order of two percent of this latter figure. But, of course, you can't put a tax on water vapor or lambaste your favorite industrial villains for producing it, and so water vapor never gets mentioned in the polemics. Even professionals uncritically buy the publicized line. An astronomer reports that in an impromptu survey, six out of ten of her fellow astronomers replied "carbon dioxide" when asked what was the major greenhouse gas. 145

  Twiddling with Models

  So where does the idea come from that humans are upsetting the climate in ways that are already visible and about to spiral out of control? Just about exclusively from computer models. And despite the awe that many hold for anything that comes out of a computer, these are not yet models that can demonstrate realism or reliability to any great degree. They were created as research tools to investigate their usefulness in climatic simulation, and while such application no doubt has potential, that still closely describes the situation that exists today. The physics of planetary water vapor and the effect of clouds is not well understood, and so the models are unable to correctly represent the largest part of reality. Known phenomena such as the ocean transport of heat from the tropics to the polar latitudes are ignored, and the computational units used to simulate the dynamics across the Earth's surface might be as coarse as squares 500 miles on a side. But given the sheer complexity of the interactions taking place, this is to a large degree unavoidable even with the most advanced computers and methods available today. Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the Harvard- Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and deputy director of the Mount Wilson Observatory, points out that to reliably simulate a climatic change over several decades, an ideal computer model would need to track 5 million parameters and apply ten million trillion degrees of freedom. 146 Nevertheless, the outputs from programs that do exist—which can only be extrapolations of the assumptions built into them—are treated as authentic predictions.

  Thus, focusing on CO2 effects, models being used in 1990 postulating a doubling in concentration by the year 2100 showed a global warming typically in the order of 4oC. When the effects of concomitant increases in other gases were factored in, this became 6.5oC. On top of this, some theorists proposed that "biogeochemical" feedback could double that figure yet again to the range 12oC–14oC, with the warming in the polar regions twice the average or more, rivaling the 33oC natural greenhouse effect. 147 However, as the models became more sophisticated, the base temperature rise being predicted as due to CO2 in 2100 had reduced progressively to 3oC by 1992 and 2oC by 1996.

  One TV production brought it all vividly to life by portraying a 2050 in which it had all happened, with the world ruled by a "Planetary Management Authority" that invades South America to redistribute that land; beef so heavily taxed that the staple diet is "cactus potatoes," genetically engineered to grow in the desert that was once America's grain lands; and Florida slipping away beneath the waves. 148 This wouldn't have been so bad had it been portrayed as a piece of doomsday science-fiction entertainment, but it was advertised as if it were a science documentary.

  Meanwhile, in the Real World . . .

  Predictions of what will happen decades in the future or at the end of the century can't be tested, of course. But what can be tested are results from the same models of what temperatures ought to be today, given the known changes in the atmosphere that have taken place in years gone by. And when this is done, the models are found not to do too well.

  Accurate measurements of carbon dioxide concentrations through the last century are available. There's no dispute that it has risen from the region of 280 parts per million (ppm) at the end of the nineteenth century to 350 ppm by the close of the twentieth, an increase of 25 percent, attributed mainly to the burning of fossil fuels. When the "carbon-dioxide equivalent" of other gases is factored in, the effective figure comes closer to 50 percent. Depending on whose model one takes, this should have resulted in a temperature rise of 1oC to 2oC. Of this 0.5oC should have occurred during the period 1979–2001.

  The most precise measurements available for comparison over that period are from the Tiros-N satellites, which yield a figure of 0.08oC—a sixfold discrepancy. 149 Other analyses of satellite- and balloon-based measurements show no increase at all. Ocean measurements tend to be sparse and scattered, but a joint study of thousands of ships' logs by MIT and the British Meteorological Office indicate no ch
ange in sea-surface or marine-air temperature

  in the 130 years since 1856. 150 Land-based measurements do show some increase. However, meteorological stations tend to be located at places like airports and on urban rooftops that become centers of local hot spots created by expansion and development going on around them over the years. When allowance is made for such "heat island" effects, the figure that emerges as a genuine global temperature rise through the twentieth century is of the order of 0.5oC.

  Even if off from the predictions by 400 percent, this 0.5oC rise is seized upon by the global warming lobby as being due to the CO2 increase, hence proving the theory. And as is inevitably the case when the aim is to advance an agenda in the eyes of the public, anything that appears to fit is embellished with visibility and publicity, while equally irrelevant counter-examples are ignored. Thus, the hot summer of 1988, when the Mississippi was unusually low, was blamed on global warming, as was the record Mississippi high in 1993. Then the unusually mild 1998 winter in the Eastern United States was singled out as the long-awaited global warming "fingerprint," while the winter of 1996, when New York City froze under an all-time record of 75.6 inches of snow, was forgotten. Hot years through the eighties and nineties were singled out, but not the all-time lows in Alaska and subzero conditions across Scandinavia and in Moscow. Nor was it mentioned that North America's high was reached on July 10, 1913, when Death Valley hit 134oF, Africa's in 1922, Asia's in 1942, Australia's in 1889, and South America in 1905.