Science

Supertrees

Scientists at Japans Toyota Motor Corp. have reported that through genetic engineering they enhanced the ability of trees to absorb vehicle emissions. It takes 20 regular trees to absorb the annual emissions of one car, but Toyotas scientists say they can improve this performance by 30 percent. They have already created trees that absorb nitrous oxides by doubling the number of chromosomes in experimental trees widening air inlets on stems and leaves.

Some environmentalists, however, are not pleased. “If we want to reduce [nitrous oxide], we should reduce our automobile production and set lower emission standards,” says Yuichi Sato, deputy director of research at Japans Forestry Agency (Business Week, March 30, 1998).

CO₂ Eating Algae

Yoshihisa Nakano, a professor of nutrition chemistry at Osaka Prefecture University says that manmade carbon dioxide could be used to breed a single-cell algae called euglena. Euglena, which is used to feed cultivated fish, increases survival ratios among stocks. Nakano also believes that the algae could be used to feed domestic livestock and maybe even humans.

Nakano discovered that the algae reproduces most rapidly in air containing 15-20 percent carbon dioxide and his studies indicate that one-hectare tank of the cultivated algae would absorb about 410 tons of carbon dioxide (The Daily Yomiuri, March 31, 1998).

Satellite Data Under Attack

There is little doubt that the political debate surrounding global warming has turned science into a political tool that threatens the credibility of the scientific community. The most recent evidence of this is a scientific paper, submitted on February 23 to Nature by physicist Dr. Frank Wentz, a remote-sensing expert. Wentz claims to have found an error in the satellite data that, when corrected for, reveals a slight warming trend instead of a slight cooling trend the weather satellites have been tracking since 1979.

Drs. Roy Spencer of NASA and John Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, who manage the satellite data, reject the papers conclusions. They have found two countervailing effects orbital procession and a calibration drift on radiometers that create a false warming. The false cooling and false warming effects cancel each other out leaving the cooling trend intact. Furthermore, the satellite temperature data closely tracks temperature readings from weather balloon radiosondes which do not experience any of the warming or cooling anomalies present in the satellite data.

The disturbing aspect of this story is how the paper was distributed prior to being peer-reviewed, to the Clinton Administration, Robert Watson, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, various government-funded global warming scientists and very likely the press. Moreover, the paper has been rushed through peer-review a process that normally takes between four and six months.

For more information on this story see www.vision.net.au/~daly/ and www.sepp.org.

One of the scary scenarios repeated ad nauseum has been global warming induced spread of malaria, dengue, and yellow fever to higher latitudes in the temperate regions and higher altitudes in the tropics. As with so many warming claims (including the global warming hypothesis itself) a little historical perspective reveals the silliness of these concerns.

A letter published in the British medical journal The Lancet (March 14, 1998) by Dr. Paul Reiter with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dengue Branch, discusses the past of these diseases. “Until the 20th century,” writes Reiter, “malaria was a common disease throughout much of the USA, and it remained endemic until the 1950s.” Yellow and dengue fever were also common until the 1940s.

He also writes that “Even in the present century, devastating epidemics [of malaria] occurred as far north as Archangel on the Arctic Circle, and the disease remained endemic in such untropical countries as Holland, Poland, and Finland until after World War II.”

Recent malaria epidemics such as the one in Madagascar have been blamed on global warming. Rieter, however, points out that “they occurred well below the maximum altitude for transmission and were clearly a sequel to a breakdown of control infrastructure. Moreover, similar epidemics had taken place in the same areas in 1878 and 1895, and local records show no great change in temperature.”

Dr. Reiter concludes, “The distortion of science to make predictions of unlikely public-health disasters diverts attention from the true reasons for the recrudescence of vector-borne diseases. These include the large-scale resettlement of people (often associated with major ecological change), rampant urbanization without adequate infrastructure, high mobility through air travel, resistance to antimalarial drugs, insecticide resistance, and the deterioration of vector-control operations and other public-health practices.”

Trees on the March

Another environmentalist bugaboo is about to fall by the wayside. Environmentalists have been predicting that rapid global warming would lead to the mass extinction of trees because they would be unable to migrate fast enough to cope with changing temperatures. However, The New York Times (March 10, 1998) reports on research showing that “many of the most important and valued species of trees have in the past migrated fast enough to keep up with temperature changes as least as large and rapid as the global warming of 2 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit that is predicted, as an annual average, over the next 100 years.”

According to Louis F. Pitelka, an ecologist at the University of Marylands Appalachian Laboratory this “downgrade[s] the rate of migration as an issue” in climate change. Some have suggested that humans have fragmented the natural landscape to such an extent that it may hinder the tree migration in the case of global warming. But, says Dr. Dorothy M. Peteet, a paleoecologist with the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, if the climate were to warm quickly, “I would think the trees would do exactly what they did in the old days.”

El Nio Is No Child of Global Warming

According to research at Australias Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), El Nio events in the 1990s cannot be blamed on manmade global warming. The researchers, led by Dr. Rob Allan of CSIROs Division of Atmospheric Research, spent eight months analyzing global climatic records from the last 125 years. The data collected at 700 land locations and by ships showed no correlation between global warming and El Nio events.

The research did, however, discover other climatic factors that influence the frequency and nature of El Nio. “I have found,” said Dr. Allan, “two additional longer climatic fluctuations [fluctuations in atmospheric pressure and sea-surface temperature] linked with El Nio. One occurs every 11 to 13 years; the other, every 15 to 20 years.”

These fluctuations, says Allan, “are occurring at the same time as the El Nio that we tend to focus on with the two- to seven-year time frame,” and have “probably occurred for thousands of years.” They interact with El Nio in such a way that they sometimes reinforce it and dampen it at other times. “Its the interaction between the three climatic patterns that is giving us the variations that we see, like long El Nio sequences in the 1990s,” Dr. Allan said. “At the moment, we dont know what the physical mechanisms underlying them are” (The Canberra Times, March 10, 1998).

Leading Climate Change Myths

John Christy, as a key contributor to the 1995 IPCC report, “participated with the lead authors in the first and the final drafting sessions, and in the detailed review of the scientific text.” He writes in the Montgomery Advertiser (February 22, 1998) that much of what passes for common knowledge in the press regarding climate change is either “inaccurate, incomplete or viewed out of context.”

Many of the misconceptions about climate change, Christy contends, originate from the six-page executive summary, the “Summary for Policymakers (SP).” It is the most widely read and quoted of the three documents published by the IPCCs Working Group I, but had the “least input from scientists and the greatest input from non-scientists.”

The “true believers,” as Christy calls them, rests their entire case on one sentence from the SP; “The balance of evidence suggests a discernable human influence on global climate.” Christy is quick to point out that “2,500 IPCC scientists did not write, sign or otherwise endorse the Summary for Policymakers” nor the one sentence statement.

Other statements in the SP are equally disturbing. It states, “. . . the 20^th Century global mean temperature is at least as warm as any other century since at least 1400 A.D.” This statement, argues Christy, is not meaningful. The temperature of the Earths atmosphere has warmed in the last 150 years but the Earths atmosphere is cooler now than it was 1,000, 5,000, or 10 million years ago. Warming over the last 150 years occurred because the planet has been emerging from the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1400 to 1850.

Christy says that the line was lifted, out of context, from the scientific text to make it look like the global warming of the last century is due to human factors while ignoring the fact that the warm weather 1,000 years ago could not have been manmade.

So what does the report really say? Essentially this: we know that climate has always changed naturally. But, “We cant actually measure human impact on the climate, however, because we dont know enough about how or why the climate changes naturally.”

A new study published by Switzerlands Federal Institute of Technology corroborates recent studies that find that variations in the suns brightness contributes significantly to climate change. The institute pointed out in a statement that “Very small variations in the suns brightness are sufficient to cause noticeable changes in climate.”

The study reconstructed the suns brightness since 1874 and adjusted the measurements to take account of the 11-year sunspot cycle. The Swiss astronomers, Sami Solanki and Marcel Fligge, who did the study also found that the earth has warmed up faster in the last 20 years than would be expected from such variations which they attribute to “other sources” (AAP Newsfeed, February 23, 1998).

Clouds and Climate Change

One of the unresolved issues in climate change research is how aerosols affect the nucleation (a process which concentrates the available water in a small number of large ice crystals) off different types of clouds. Aerosol particles act as “cloud condensation nuclei” which increase the reflectivity of cloud-tops.

According to Nature (February 26, 1998), “cirrus clouds ice-particle clouds that lie between a few thousand meters up and the tropopause, at 10 to 20 km exert an overall heating effect, because their reflectivity at solar wavelengths is low, and they absorb more rising infrared radiation than they emit to space from their very cold cloud tops.”

Recent studies have suggested that cirrus clouds can evolve from jet contrails, which consist of soot and sulphuric acid particles. Because of the altitude of aircraft emissions the affect can be comparable to natural and athropogenic sources.

One of the implications of these findings is that if jet contrails are indeed partially responsible for warming then this must be taken into account when determining the temperature affects of CO₂ emissions. “How changes,” concludes Nature, “in tropospheric aerosol concentration, including aircraft emissions, will affect all types of cloud is a vital question in assessing the overall climatic impact of anthropogenic emissions,” Nature concludes.

Ancient Climate Change

Climate scientists have searched into the far past, using ice core and deep ocean setiment samples, to compile climate records that contain clues about climate change. Until now, however, records of interglacial periods (as we are experiencing now) were scarce.

Now researchers have now been able to complete a detailed record that extends nearly 2 million years into the past. The results and analysis of this record is reported in a recent article in Science (February 27, 1998).

The record shows that temperature variations are far greater during glacial periods (ice ages) than during interglacial periods. North Atlantic sea temperatures, for example, varied by as much as 3 to 4.5 degrees C during glacial periods 450,000 and 350,000 years ago, while they only varied by about 0.5 to 1 degree C during the interglacial period which fell in between.

Another finding is that “the record shows that climate varies on regular cycles lasting form 1,200 to 6,000 years, in glacial and interglacial periods alike.” “Whatever the cause of the climatic gyrations,” says Science, “the records suggest that the worst climate swing likely in the present interglacial is another Little Ice Age.”

The article concludes, “a push toward warmth during an already-warm interglacial might boost climate shifts to devastating proportions. Then again, because past climate swings have been smaller in warm periods, continued global warming might dampen them even further.”

Its All Chaos

A serious challenge has emerged to the idea that manmade CO₂ is causing of global warming. Climate modeler James Hansen and 42 other researchers have published a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research (November 27, 1997) that describes their inability to isolate specific causes of climate change from the chaotic climate.

The researchers ran three computer models of the climate with no forcings and compared the results to average annual temperatures. They then added forcings such as stratospheric aerosols, greenhouse gas buildup, ozone depletion, and others to see if the models would correspond more closely to observed conditions. The experiment failed for the troposphere where weather originates. The researchers found no correlation between the various forcings and temperature changes in the troposphere.

The authors note that, “Scientists and lay persons have a prediliction for deterministic explanations of climate variations. However, climate can vary chaotically, i.e., in the absence of any forcing. The slightest alteration of initial or boundary conditions changes the developing patterns, and thus next years weather is inherently unpredictable. This behavior results from the nonlinear fundamental equations governing the dynamics of such a system” (Electricity Daily, February 13, 1998).

Warming or Cooling?

In a study published in Science (February 13, 1998) researchers have found evidence in the ~6000-year-old coral from the Great Barrier Reef, Australia that the tropical ocean surface was 1 degree C warmer about 5350 years ago. This work suggests that earth may be in a long-term natural cooling trend.

According to Dr. Michael Gagan, the lead researcher, “The beginning of this interglacial period was warmer than now. Theres been a long-term cooling trend.” He also says that the natural cooling effect may be too weak to offset human-induced global warming (The Canberra Times, February 14, 1998).

Climate Change and Storminess

One of the oft-repeated scare stories about climate change is that warmer global temperatures will lead to more frequent and severe storms, including cyclones. Dr. Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia points out, however, that climate models suggest that most warming will occur over the high latitudes in winter while the tropics will warm relatively less. Since it is the temperature gradient between the equator and the poles that fuels the jet stream and the jet stream that fuels winter storms, this would suggest that global warming would lead to fewer, less severe storms.

Several studies related to this phenomenon support Michaels contention. One paper, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (1996), found no trend in changes in intense cyclones from 1899 to 1970. It did, however, find a significant increase from 1970 to 1991. But over the Pacific, for example, there was a link between stronger storms and lower temperatures.

Another study published in the Journal of Climate (1998) found that from 1990 on there was a statistically significant increase in the number of strong storms. The researchers also found that cold years have more storms that warm years.

Finally, a study published in the International Journal of Climatology (1998) found that the cost of weather damage had risen precipitously since 1954 but after correcting for inflation, population, and the number of storm events, the researchers found no trend in weather related insurance losses. See www.nhes.com for more details.

Sun Sheds Light on Climate Change

Two papers delivered at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) shed light on suns role in climate change.

Brian Tinsley of the University of Texas presented research that shows that the electromagnetic solar wind can freeze particles on the tops of high clouds by changing the electromagnetic charges of the particles causing the clouds to dissipate.

“If you dissipate, then you get more solar radiation to the earth,” Tinsley said. Tinsley believes that more than half of all warming in this century is due to changes in sunspots and solar flares.

Harry van Loon of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Karen Labitzke of the Free University of Berlin told the AAAS meeting that they have found that temperature changes correspond to the 11-year sunspot cycle an effect that has been noted in the Northern Hemisphere. The correlation is strongest in summer and has been found in the Southern Hemisphere (Electricity Daily, February 19, 1998).

More on 1997 Temperatures

On January 8, federal climatologist Tom Karl announced that 1997 was the warmest year on record. The World Climate Report (WCR) disputes the claim. One of Karls graphics, for example, show that most of the warming over the last 50 years occurred in Siberia and northwestern North America, the two coldest air masses in the world. Little or no warming has been observed anywhere else. While this raises the global average temperature its not really global warming.

The WCR argues further that the Karls data is a “blend of global temperatures that mixes apples and oranges.” First, the land temperature was about the fifth highest on record. The ocean temperatures, which pushed global average temperatures to record highs, were taken from buoys that deployed to better measure El Nio. But better data on the above-the-ocean temperature is available from the Night Marine Air Temperature which is more consistent with both the land and satellite records. The WCR article can be found at www.nhes.com.

Between 600 and 700 Americans die each year of excessive cold and 240 die per year from excessive heat in normal years. Those most at risk from temperature extremes are the homeless, poor, elderly, those with severe health problems, and those who lack proper nutrition, housing and clothing. During abnormal years, deaths from temperature extremes can increase to well over a thousand for each extreme (Scientific American, February 1998).

The lesson that should be taken from these statistics is not that we must prevent temperature extremes but rather we should improve societys wealth so as to avoid the adverse consequences. Those who have proper heating and air-conditioning, nutrition and shelter are much less likely to suffer from extreme temperatures. The Kyoto Protocol will reduce wealth, and therefore, increase mortality from temperature extremes.

Ice Flows and Ocean Currents

Much has been made of possible disruptions to ocean currents as a result of global warming. One fear is that melting ice sheets will change the density of sea water, disrupting deep ocean currents and cooling Europes climate. The British Antarctic Survey (BAS), however, disputes these claims. According to Dr. David Vaughn, a glaciologist with the BAS, global warming would have to continue at the same rate for the next 300 years before there would be any affect on Britains climate (The Evening Standard, January 29, 1998).

Etc.

For a good overview on the shortcomings of the surface temperature record see www.vision.net.au/~daly/surftemp.htm. The article discusses the urban heat island effect, site maintenance problems, geographical spread, ocean temperatures, etc.

Was 1997 the Hottest Year to Date?

In December 1997, just in time to influence the Kyoto treaty negotiations, the British Meteorological Office predicted that 1997 would be the warmest year on record. On January 8, 1998 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed that, according to the ground-based temperature record, 1997 did reach record high global temperatures.

Temperatures taken from U.S. Weather satellites, however, indicate that 1997 was the 7^th coolest year since satellite measurements began in 1979.

Though no further evidence regarding man’s influence on the climate has come to light some scientists are proclaiming that 1997’s global temperature shows once and for all that man is warming the planet. “For the first time, I feel confident in saying there’s a human component,” said Elbert W. Friday, Jr., a meteorologist with the NOAA (Washington Post, January 9, 1998). It is very difficult, however, to pin 1997’s warmer temperatures on manmade greenhouse gases.

El Nio is responsible for most of the warming experienced in 1997. Sea surface temperatures were very high this year due to El Nio conditions, but land air temperatures were well below record highs. This year’s El Nio began in the spring of 1997 and will run its course by spring 1998. Normally El Nio begins around Christmas and lasts two years. Forecasters are predicting that La Nia, which will cool temperatures significantly, will predominate in 1998 (www.elnino.noaa.gov).

The urban heat-island effect strongly influences the surface-based global temperature record. In a paper published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 1989, Thomas R. Karl, senior scientist at the National Climate Data Center, corrected the U.S. surface temperatures for the urban heat-island effect and found that there has been a downward temperature trend since 1940. This suggests a strong warming bias in the surface-based temperature record.

Notably, climate change proponents have stopped short of adding the final nail. Though Tom Karl said, “We believe this tendency for increased global temperature is related to human activity,” he recognizes the influence of El Nio. “Whether it would have been the warmest year this century is a matter of debate, but it certainly would have been in the top 10,” said Karl. James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies said that the slight increase in global temperature is “not really significant” in determining the human impact on global climate (New York Times, January 9, 1998).

Warming May Be Natural

The fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) featured new papers which demonstrate the extent of uncertainty in climate science. Joyce Penner, a climate modeler at the University of Michigan and a noted contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, presented her most recent findings. She has found that carbon and sulfur emissions can cool down the planet. “Whereas greenhouse gases have led to a warming of 2.5 Watts per meter squared (W/m²), aerosols like soot particles and sulfuric acid reflect nearly twice as much energy under certain conditions,” said Penner.

Carbon aerosols, she explains, add between 0.16 and 0.20 W/m², warming the planet. But Penner’s latest simulations at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory show that carbon aerosols trapped in clouds may cool the earth’s atmosphere by as much as -4.4 W/m² or a net decrease of 0.7 to 2.1 degrees C. Since the models rely on uncertain estimates for natural sources of aerosols the actual number for negative forcing could be as low as -2.4 W/m².

“I had not expected to get such a large negative forcing from carbon aerosols in clouds. If these results hold up, we are going to have to do a lot more work to understand how climate might change in the future,” said Penner. According to Penner, if her findings are confirmed then “the warming we’ve seen over the last 100 years may simply be due to natural variability.” A January 8 news release reporting on Dr. Penner’s work can be found at www.umich.edu/~newsinfo/.

In another paper delivered at the AGU meeting, Harry Lins and James Slack of the U.S. Geological Survey reviewed U.S. flood records all the way back to 1914 and found no increase of flood activity. “We do not see any evidence of a change in large-scale national patterns,” says Lins.

Measuring Worldwide CO₂

To implement the Kyoto Protocol scientists must figure out an acceptable way to measure carbon dioxide emissions. Scientists have not yet been able to locate the natural sink that absorbs about half of all carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere. Some scientists think the ocean is the culprit while others believe it to be trees or soil. The bottom line is that scientists have very little understanding of natural sinks and it may be some time before they work out the details (Science, January 2, 1998).

Abrupt Climate Change

A new study in Nature (January 8, 1998) argues that there was an abrupt change in climate at the end of the Younger Dryas interval. Fractionated nitrogen and argon isotopes found in ice cores from Greenland have revealed that there was an abrupt warming about 11.6 thousand years ago. The warming (about 15 degrees C) occurred over a period of a few decades.

Etc.

Somebody at the Calgary Herald is not happy about the Kyoto Protocol. Two articles appearing in the newspaper have lambasted the protocol. An article (January 8, 1998) in the business section titled, “Thank the U.S. for killing Kyoto,” begins, “Calgarians shivering in the dark in recent days have been getting a preview of what life would be like if last month’s disastrous international agreement to slash greenhouse gases were implemented.”

“The federal government’s treachery and breathtaking incompetence would not only leave us shivering in the dark, a lot of us would be out of work,” the article continues. “Take comfort in the fact that the absurd deal reached in Kyoto, Japan will never come to pass.” Article author Barry Nelson argues that the U.S. Senate will never ratify the treaty and Canada will follow suit. “The U.S. is saving us from ourselves,” says Nelson.

An editorial in the same edition titled, “Witch-doctor tactics won out at Kyoto” begins, “In primitive civilizations, political rulers sacrificed their people to mystical beliefs and deities. Egged on by priests or witch-doctors, the rulers ordered the construction of massive pyramids and temples with the blood, sweat and lives of their subservient masses. Mysticism served as an effective means of gaining and maintaining dictatorial power.”

“The recent UN Framework Conference on Climate Change in Kyoto indicates that nothing, in essence, has changed. Despite the fact that manmade global warming is an unsubstantiated hypothesis, the world’s political leaders worked frantically to reach a legally-binding treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions, thus sacrificing our liberty and prosperity to environmentalist scaremongering.”

Natural climate fluctuations and changes in vegetation due to widespread human activities like grazing, deforestation and agriculture can make regions hotter and drier or cooler and wetter, say scientists.

Nearly 100 studies in recent years support the claim that improving the vegetation in drylands regions may cause significant cooling in some of the world’s hottest regions. In the eastern U.S., changes in land use may be overwhelming all other human effects, according to Gordon Bonan of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Among these studies’ findings:

• Temperatures along the Mexican-American border between the states of Arizona and Sonora can be more than 8 degrees Celsius cooler on the undergrazed U.S. side than the overgrazed Mexican side.

• The mean temperature on lands between the 10th and 50th northern latitudes warmed between 1901 and 1990 at a rate equal to 0.4 degrees C per century.

• The warming rate has been greater in areas designated by the United Nations as overgrazed, 0.6 degrees C per century; whereas areas the U.N. designates as “not overgrazed” have warmed at a rate of only 0.3 degrees C per century.

• Conversely, in the eastern U.S., the replacement of forests by agricultural crops has resulted in a 1.0 degree C cooling.

Thus some scientists say international efforts to rehabilitate vegetation on drylands, such as the Sahelian or sub-Saharan region of Africa, could significantly cool areas thought to be hotter due to global warming.

Source: Robert C. Balling (Arizona State University), “An Oasis of Cooling? Combating Desertification,” World Climate Report, January 19, 1998.

Global Warming and the Spread of Disease

Among the many predicted effects of climate change the least plausible is an increase of vector-borne diseases. The British medical journal, The Lancet (December 20, 1997) discusses these predictions in two articles.

In an open letter signed by physicians, and distributed in Kyoto, warned that a rise in temperature of 1-3.5 degrees C would result in a public health disaster from the spread of diseases such as malaria, dengue and yellow fever.

Paul Epstein, the foremost advocate of this hypothesis, admits that public health programs, poverty and other factors are important, but insists that global warming is also responsible. He also claims that higher temperatures have increased the number of disease-carrying rodents which he believes may have caused the 1993 US hantavirus infection outbreak. Andrew Haines, a London physician, said, “There are some early signs of malaria and other vector-borne diseases being experienced at higher altitudes than was previously the case.”

Another article, however, casts doubt on the claims of Epstein and others. At a symposium on climate change and vector-borne disease at the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene annual meeting Paul Reiter of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Puerto Rico said that “it is simplistic and misleading to say that climate change will necessarily bring an increase in all these diseases.”

He pointed out that malaria, dengue and yellow fever were all once common in temperate regions, but have disappeared as a result of better housing and sanitation. Duane Gubler of the Center for Disease Control claims that a breakdown of mosquito control, increased mobility and other factors are to blame for increases in these diseases.

Yellowstone Park: Environmental Criminal

Cindy Werner, a geoscience graduate student at Penn State, has found that the Mud Volcano area of Yellowstone National Park emits about 176,300 tons of carbon dioxide each year. Extrapolating these numbers to the entire park Werner estimates that it emits as much as 44 million tons of carbon dioxide per year. That’s equivalent to about ten medium-sized power plants that burn fossil fuels. “We believe,” concluded Werner, “that geothermal systems are significant contributors to global estimates of carbon dioxide” (The New York Times, December 26, 1997).

Another Modeling Error

In an article appearing in Earth Interactions (Vol. I, 1997), a publication of the American Geophysical Union, researchers Y.C. Sud and G.K. Walker look at possible simulation errors that may occur as a result of ignoring the effects of oceanic salinity on the near-surface specific humidity gradient, a primary determinant of oceanic evaporation. All of the general circulation models (GCMs) used at the Goddard Laboratory for Atmospheres ignore oceanic salinity.

A 5-year-long salinity simulation revealed “discernible systematic errors” in the way the models handled “global evaporation, boundary layer specific humidity, and several key parameters that affect the onset of moist convection . . .” The researchers state that “we infer that coupled ocean-atmosphere models that ignore the influence of salinity on ocean evaporation might also benefit from the salinity correction. Indeed, the correction is so trivial to include, its neglect in the modern state-of-the-art GCMs is unwarranted.”

Another Mitigation Option

The atmosphere is not the only place where carbon could end up. The most obvious way to sequester carbon dioxide is in trees. Others possibilities also have been suggested. One option is to pump carbon dioxide in to the deep ocean. Some may balk at transferring “pollution” from medium to another, but given that the ocean already contains 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere the impact would be proportionally smaller.

The most practical option may be putting the gas underground. Oil companies already inject carbon dioxide from underground deposits into deep-seated formations to flush oil from depleted reservoirs. Indeed, a new offshore oil rig constructed by Statoil, a Norwegian oil company, will separate carbon dioxide from natural gas returning the carbon dioxide to a nearby underground formation. By doing this the company will avoid the Norwegian carbon tax (Scientific American, January, 1998).

Etc.

An article in The Economist (December 20, 1997) with the subheading, “Forecasters of scarcity and doom are not only invariably wrong, they think that being wrong proves them right,” pooh-poohs environmental scare stories propagated by the greens. About global warming the article notes: “Today the mother of all environmental scares is global warming. Here the jury is still out. . .” According to The Economist, “Just one environmental scare in the past 30 years bears out the most alarmist predictions made at the time: the effect of DDT (a pesticide) on birds of prey, otters and some other predatory animals. Every other environmental scare has been either wrong or badly exaggerated.”

The story continues, “Environmental scare stories now follow such a predictable line that we can chart their course.” The first year a “scientist discovers some potential threat.” The second year a journalist “oversimplifies and exaggerates it.” In the third year the environmentalists “polarize the issue.” “Either you agree that the world is about to come to an end and are fired by righteous indignation, or you are a paid lackey of big business.” The fourth year a conference is called which keeps bureaucrats “well supplied with club-class tickets and limelight,” moving the debate from science to politics. “A totemic ‘target’ is the key feature.” Fifth year, “pick a villain and gang up on him.” Sixth, the skeptics, who say the fear is exaggerated, come on the scene, “driv[ing] greens into paroxysms of pious rage.” Seventh, “the year of quiet climbdown.” The population explosion went from a maximum of 15 billion to less than 10 billion. “Greenhouse warming was originally going to be ‘uncontrolled’. Then it was going to be 2.5-4 degrees in a century. Then it became 1.5-3 degrees.”

The story concludes with, “Environmentalists are quick to accuse their opponents in business of having vested interests. But their own incomes, their advancement, their fame and their very existence can depend on supporting the most alarming versions of every environmental scare.”