Global Warming - Again

There is a discussion thread at the Two Masters blog that those interested in global warming might find of interest.

There is, to state it briefly, a big space between the position that the magnitude and the effects of anthropogenic global warming are still uncertain, and the position that no real evidence exists for the phenomenon. My feeling is that many of the people who claim that there was a scandal at a lab in England, and that the evidence for global warming is faked, oppose the idea of anthropogenic global warming for a number of personal, political, and business reasons. Their desire to have the evidence go away doesn't mean that the phenomenon is not real.

If I owned a coal mine or a coal-fired power plant, I, too, might be reluctant to believe that my actions are leading to a disaster. But, if I owned a coal mine, I'd also be used to having my actions lead to disasters, and I'd be used to lying about it.

Time will tell. Do you have your liferaft?

Geoengineering - An Answer or an Abyss?

In the March/April 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs there's an article by David G. Victor, M. Granger Morgan, Jay Apt, John Steinbruner, and Katherine Ricke called "The Geoengineering Option: A Last Resort Against Global Warming?" The article can be found linked to my title or here. It is a very interesting article, and the author's main concern is that we need some sort of international regime concerning geoengineering before some country goes off on its own and does something disastrous.

One of the problems is that geoengineering solutions to things like global warming are cheap enough, and technically accessible enough, that many countries would be able to apply them. For example, a number of countries would be able to launch a rocket into space to distribute sulfur powder, aluminum powder, or water, in order to increase the albedo of the earth. This would cause more solar energy to be reflected, which would counteract global warming. However, it wouldn't do anything about the acidification of the oceans due to increasing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, and it might have side affects which would do great damage.

The authors acknowledge that much of the risk of the geoengineering approach is that a single country could undertake such an initiative, without even consulting its neighboring, which all of the measures required to limit and diminish carbon emissions require cooperation among many countries. About the ninth time China and the United States refuse to take effective action to reduce carbon emissions, the Netherlands - which is at real risk from rising sea levels - might be tempted to hire an Ariane from the ESA to put up some protective shield.

In discussing this concept with some of my friends, I find that most of them are really concerned about the unknown unknowns. That someone would undertake a measure which could have really unintended, and unanticipated consequences. After that, there's the concern that one man's meat is another man's poison - that is, a sudden increase in albedo, with consequent cooling, might slow polar ice melting, but it might also cause draughts in the Sahel or flooding in the Rockies.

There are, of course, other large-scale geoengineering projects, besides those aimed directly at global warming. Exploitation of tidal flows, or harnessing the heat of volcanoes might be examples.

However, even if these ambitious measures don't have evil consequences, it would be very easy for the public to perceive them as the causes of any destructive events which followed their implementation. You and I might know that post hoc ergo propter hoc is fallacious reasoning, but to most people it's just common sense. That is, after all, what most common sense is: fallacious reasoning. So I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of the guys who drill a thermal tap into the side of Mt. Rainier a week or so before an eruption wipes out Tacoma.

The Problem with the Energy Problem

In response to my recommendation of Crude Awakening, a friend raised a good point with a comment that the problem isn't that we're going to run out of fossil fuels, but that we aren't. He is, of course, thinking of the problem of global warming.

It is a good point, but it is also wrong. It's a good point because the causal chain of burning fossil fuels, increases in greenhouse gases, atmospheric warming, climate change, potentially catastrophic physical changes to the planet is well-established. The more fossil fuels we burn, the more input goes into that causal chain, and the greater the magnitude of the consequences.

Where this formulation of the problem goes wrong is in the statement that this is "the problem." A lot of experience and study have taught me that whenever someone says "the problem is ...," he's wrong. At the very least, she is about to give us a very partial picture of the situation, in which she will identify as "the problem" that issue which happens to be most salient to herself and her concerns. If there were only one problem tied to our use of fossil fuels, it wouldn't be nearly so hard to figure out a way to solve it. There are, however, several problems, and finding a course of action which will solve all of them is very, very difficult.

First, to acknowledge my friend's point, there's global warming. The solution to global warming is to burn a lot less fossil fuels, coal, natural gas, and oil.

Next, there's the evidence that the world oil supply is at or near its peak, if it has not already passed it, so that we are going to have steadily declining reserves. We may be seeing the beginning of steadily declining annual production. The solution to this problem is to burn a lot less oil.

Third, there is the Malthusian problem of a large and rising population, which is facing limits upon the resources necessary to sustain it. The solution to this problem is to limit population growth, and to increase the production of food and other basic necessities.

Now, it would seem that the first two problems have solutions which are mutually consistent, if not reinforcing. If we are burning less oil, are we not burning less fossil fuel? Well, no, because when we stopped (mostly) using oil for electric power generation after the oil shock of the 1970s, we turned to natural gas and coal. Coal is less energy dense than oil, I believe, so you have to burn more of it to get the same amount of heat, and, therefore, electricity, so you tend to put more carbon into the air. Moreover, at this time oil is the only stuff that's really good for transportation. Even those two-mile-long coal trains that run out of Wyoming to the East coast are powered by diesel fuel. Substituting other stuff for oil in transportation is complicated (because of the lack of infrastructure), expensive, and often self-defeating. It takes about as much oil to make a given quantity of ethanol (from corn) as the ethanol replaces. It takes, with current technology, more oil to make a given quantity of hydrogen than the hydrogen replaces. (Much more, like four or five times as much.)

And the example of ethanol brings us to the interaction of the third problem with the other two. The so-called Green Revolution, which radically increased food yields, and which allows us to sustain a population of over six billion people, was really a petroleum revolution. (Crude Awakening has a discussion of this point.) In addition to providing fuel to power tractors and other farm equipment, oil and natural gas are the feedstocks for the fertilizers that allow increased yields, and the pesticides which allow the bulk of those yields to be harvested. Trucks and trains and ships, all powered by oil, allow us to move food around the world, so that people almost anywhere can have a balanced diet at any time of year, and no matter how limited the locally-grown crops may be. Plastics also protect food from pests and decrease spoilage. According to some figures bruited about on Crude Awakening, if oil runs out (should I say, when oil runs out), the planet will only sustain a population of about 1.5 billion people. 1.5 billion is the population of just two countries - China and the United States - today. (Or India and the European Union. Or any number of other combinations, each of which contains only a small minority of the countries of the earth.)

Now, then, according to some guesses (and they are guesses), global warming may displace a few hundred million people from their current living areas. It will increase the difficulty of cropping some areas, but will increase production elsewhere. A lot of the effects of global warming we can deal with, as long as we have a plentiful supply of energy. But the end of the era of oil could mean the deaths of five billion human beings, as well as of huge numbers of the animals dependent upon them. So, which should get the priority?

Global Warming: A "Complete Hoax"

I was listening to the radio the other day. I was in my car, driving home from the office, and I had tuned into Rush Limbaugh. I listen more commonly to either my local classical music station, or the NPR affiliate station based at Colorado College, but I had decided to try AM radio. (I will even admit that I sometimes find Rush Limbaugh entertaining. He's almost always wrong on the substance, but he's pretty acute on some of the political personalities around.)

On this particular program, a woman called in from Oklahoma, as I recall, and they talked about this and that. But the main thing I recall, and about which I wanted to comment, was that Rush asked this woman what she thought of global warming. He said it pretty much that way: "What do you think about global warming?"

"I think it's a complete hoax," she replied.

I found that interesting because, while I can see a lot of ways for people to differ in their opinions about climate change, to characterize global warming as a complete hoax strikes me as unjustifiable. I should probably note that I have heard Rush Limbaugh, himself, attack Al Gore over the use the former Vice President has made of the issue, perceived exaggerations, and so on, but I don't think I've ever heard that Limbaugh has asserted that global warming is a complete hoax.

The first problem I have with this characterization is that, as I understand the terms involved, a hoax is a deliberate attempt to mislead and deceive. There can be honest mistakes; there can be honest differences of opinion, but there cannot be honest hoaxes. A hoaxer knows that he is making untrue statements and misrepresentations of facts, usually in order to induce some particular response from his audience. The "missile gap," so prominent in the 1960 campaign, comes close to having been a hoax. Hoaxes such as the Piltdown Man have involved not only lying about the evidence, but creating or faking evidence.

In general, although there could be exceptions in terms of people trying to use misstatements about global warming for personal or political gain, I don't detect a lot of falsifying of evidence in the climate change area. As I stated in a post over at the Two Masters blog, there are a lot a ways to interpret such evidence as there is, that evidence is pretty scanty compared to the timeline on which climate changes unfold, and a lot of the computer models may be open to methodological questions, but the same is true of stock market predictions (remember Dow 36,000?), without all such predictions constituting frauds or hoaxes.

Second, while it is true that, as I said above, the evidence can be interpreted differently through the use of different models and assumptions, it is really hard to contend that there is no evidence of global warming. National Geographic magazine ran a long piece - actually, a couple of pieces, in the June 2007 issue on the subject. One of the pieces was called "The Big Thaw." A lot of other publications, popular and peer-reviewed, have documented shrinking glaciers, warmer average temperatures, thinner polar ice, and so on and so forth. I, myself, have observed some species of birds appearing around here some weeks earlier than was the norm years ago.

A lot of this evidence is anecdotal. A lot of it is spotty. In the nature of the thing, we don't have a very complete dataset for the past 18,000 years, let alone the entire Cenozoic period. Accurate thermometers and barometers are quite recent inventions. But to deny that such evidence exists is to deny brute facts.

So, setting aside the idea that some group of liberal scientists are faking evidence in order to force the government to nationalize the oil companies, or in order to obtain huge grants to study wind-generated electricity, or whatever you might think their motive could be, and setting aside the idea that the various reports are all faked or grossly mistaken, there seems to be little doubt that something by way of global warming is occurring.

What I see as the real issues here are these:

I. How long will this warming trend continue?

II. How much will conditions (e.g., sea levels) change before the trend stops or reverses itself?

III. What could we do to slow or reverse this trend sooner, or with fewer effects?

IV. What could we do to avoid or palliate the effects of the warming?

As John Miller points out in QBQ! (The Question Behind the Question), asking "who" or "why" questions is not terribly helpful. To ask who caused global warming is to put on the defensive people and institutions whose help may be vital if we are to limit the effects of climate change. To ask why U.S. consumers use so much energy is to forego public support for efforts to find alternatives to our present consumption patterns. Rather, we should be asking what we can do to alleviate the problems, and how can we contribute to minimizing the social and economic consequences of whatever climate change is going to occur.

Sure, there are interesting scientific questions about how much of this warming trend is due to human agency, but that isn't a useful question from the political point of view. To state that global warming is a "moral" and not a "political" problem, as Al Gore has done, is to ignore the fact that all (that would be ALL) of the potentially useful approaches to the problem require action by the government. Maybe it isn't a political problem, per se, but its solution raises political questions all over the place.

Which brings me back to where I started. Why would someone have the (mistaken) idea that global warming is a "complete hoax?" Because she has been gone from hearing people who want to use global warming as a reason for making unwelcome (to her) social and economic changes, to concluding that they are concocting the idea of global warming in order to promote such changes. To put it the other way around, if she can believe that global warming is a hoax, then she doesn't have to concur in any of the policies - many of which will cost her money - that may be proposed to deal with the problem.