A Convenient Opportunity
Is global warming a real threat, or just the newest environmentalist trend?
Eric T. Phillips
At the beginning of this semester, the GW Democrats hosted a screening of Al Gore's one hundred minute campaign commercial-I mean, movie-An Inconvenient Truth. Capitalizing on ever louder calls for US acceptance of the Kyoto Protocol and increasing stubbornness and close-mindedness on the part of some in the scientific community and many in the media, the GW Dems have taken it upon themselves to make global warming an issue on campus as national Dems do the same for the upcoming elections. Indeed, Democrats in general have succeeded in framing the debate about global warming, successfully pushing the idea that skeptics are nothing more than pseudo-scientific hacks doing "Big Oil's" bidding. Al Gore has led the recent charge, whipping up significant support on the left (he's got almost 10,000 students to join the "I am going to see 'An Inconvenient Truth'" Facebook group).
The movie takes fear mongering to a new level; using fancy technology, carefully selected data, and a calmer, more down-to-earth personality, Gore weaves together a tale of impending doom, which is about as entertaining as a glamorized slide show can get. Indeed, those who like the man and agree with his politics have understandably showered the movie with praise. If you're more like me, however, and see Gore's only useful role in this world as a humorous target for the likes of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, then you'll leave the movie theater with a migraine. There is absolutely no room for disagreement in Gore's mind about the presence of human caused global warming and its cataclysmic consequences.
Gore frequently likens global warming skeptics to tobacco companies denying the validity of evidence illustrating that cigarettes are harmful to smokers' health. Yet, curiously, he never likens himself and his fellow environmentalists to the global cooling alarmists of past decades. Familiar sounding alarmism dotted the popular press in the 1970's:
"If this increased rate of [pollution continues,] our calculations suggest a decrease in global temperature by as much as 3.5°K. Such a large decrease in the average surface temperature of the earth, sustained over a period of a few years, is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age." -- Science, "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Aerosols: Effects of Large Increases on Global Climate," July 9, 1971.
"Climatologists now blame those recurring droughts and floods on a global cooling trend. It could bring massive tragedies for mankind." -- Fortune, "Ominous Changes in the World's Weather," February 1974.
"The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extremely mild conditions, the earth's climate seems to be cooling down." -- Newsweek, "The Cooling World," April 28, 1975.
"Most scientists agree that today's ice movement may reflect a worldwide cooling trend..." --National Geographic, "What's Happening to Our Climate?" November 1976.
"However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing....Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round." -- Time, "Another Ice Age?" June 24, 1974.
Special emphasis should be placed on the last quote, as the first segment of Gore's movie is a collection of shots of specific glaciers melting and of areas that used to be covered in snow but now are dry. While he covers a wide range of areas, he specifically focuses on receding ice caps on Mount Kilimanjaro, Antarctica, and Greenland.
Since Mount Kilimanjaro is on the equator, according to scientists, it is particularly vulnerable to slight variations in temperature and, indeed, the top of the mountain has seen an 82% decrease in its mass of ice since 1912. Gore immediately blames the obvious culprit: human-induced global warming. But for those interested in more than political expediency, the story is more complicated.
In 2003, Douglas R. Hardy, a climatologist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, told National Geographic that it is deforestation, not global warming, that is causing the melting. "The loss of foliage causes less moisture to be pumped into the atmosphere, leading to reduced cloud cover and precipitation and increased solar radiation and glacial evaporation," the magazine reports. Stefan L. Hastenrath, a professor of atmospheric studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, concurs, "Less cloud coverage lets more sunlight filter through and hit the glaciers. That increase in sunlight then provides more energy for evaporation of the glacier." While this is a local environmental problem, the proposals to curb greenhouse gasses would do nothing to solve it.
Concerning Antarctica, University of Virginia climate scientist Patrick J. Michaels declares: "What has happened is that Antarctica has been gaining ice." That is, most of the continent has experienced a cooling trend for decades, leading to an accumulation of snow and ice. A 2005 study published by Science found that between 1992 and 2003, the continent gained 45 billion tons of ice per year, lowering the sea level by .12 millimeters annually. Antarctica has, however, been losing mass at a rate of 152 cubic kilometers a year since 2003 (.4 millimeters per year rise in sea levels) according to a new study by Isabella Velicogna, but three years is a miniscule blip compared to the enormous amount of time it takes for climate to evolve and hardly constitutes evidence of any lasting trend. The part of Antarctica that has been consistently warming over the past decades, the Antarctic Peninsula, makes up approximately 2% of Antarctica's surface area. This tiny area has been the focus of many alarmist studies and is the main focus of Gore's analysis of Antarctic warming.
A similar process is underway in Greenland. The ice sheet is losing mass at the margins, but the resulting warmer temperatures in the surrounding oceans is leading to greater snowfall and accumulating ice in the interior. Richard Lindzen of MIT has noted, "If you're just going to look at what's falling off the sides and ignore what's collecting on top, that's not exactly kosher." Taking into account both the coast and elevation, Professor Michaels has pointed out that Greenland has, on net, been losing small amounts of mass for the past five years; from 17 cubic kilometers in 2000 to 92 cubic kilometers in 2005.
When taking into account losses from both Antarctica and Greenland, Manhattan looks like it will stay dry after all. In 2005 Jay Zwally of NASA published a study in the Journal of Glaciology which concluded that ice mass changes from 1992 to 2002 have led to a sea level rise of just .05 millimeters per year. At this rate, it will take 1000 years for the sea to rise five centimeters.
Gore goes on to blame a whole host of environmental problems, including stronger hurricanes, on global warming. Yet, a recently released study written by Chris Landsea of the National Hurricane Center challenges the fact that hurricanes have gotten more powerful in the past 30 years. Rather, new technological improvements have produced more accurate-and often higher-estimates of a storm's power.
What about the flashy graphs that Gore's computer models predict? Lindzen notes that the impact of CO2 is nonlinear in that each added unit contributes less to heating than its predecessor. The effect is similar to painting over a pane of glass. The first coat blocks out a lot of light, while each successive coat blocks out less and less because, by this time, the pane has become opaque. Just considering this, a simple doubling of CO2 would lead to a rise in temperature of 1°C. Yet, the most important greenhouse gases, water vapor and clouds, act in such a way as to amplify the response to anthropogenic (human produced) greenhouse gases, thus leading climate models to predict a rise of 4 degrees. The problem is, Lindzen explains, "all assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have stated (at least in the text--though not in the Summaries for Policymakers), the models simply fail to get the clouds right...Thus, the model predictions are critically dependent on features that we know must be wrong."
Despite these lingering questions, environmentalists would have you believe that there is no debate about global warming. Any questioning of the validity of the global warming alarm and immediately comes the answer, "There's a scientific consensus. It's not debatable." Gore, specifically, concedes that although there may be some skepticism in the popular press, he maintains that a survey of peer-reviewed articles found no serious skepticism. Thus there is no debate. How legitimate are these claims? They're not. Dr. Arthur Robinson, a former faculty member of the University of California at San Diego and founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, briefly circulated a petition among the scientific community expressing doubt about the alarmist global warming theories and opposing the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Even with limited resources, 17,000 signatures were collected (see the petition at http://www.oism.org/oism/s32p31.htm). But why aren't there peer-reviewed articles? Academia has a powerful establishment like no other. Going against the grain is never popular as any non-neoclassical economist or conservative historian will confirm. Scientists are not in some mythical, purely independent position as Gore claims; they are as human and as prone to bias as anyone else. As Lindzen explains, "even scientific literature and institutions have become politicized-Since the societal response to alarm has, so far, been to increase scientific funding, there has been little reason for scientists to complain." Gore has himself played an active part in this. In the early 1990s Ted Koppel announced that Vice President Gore had asked him to find connections to unsavory interests of scientists questioning his side of the global warming debate. Respectably, Koppel did not comply and publicized the request. That this is not better known is a further indictment of the media's role in the fear mongering.
And of the Kyoto Protocol which Gore laments "is only controversial in America"? Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research estimated that full implementation of Kyoto would prevent .07°C of warming by 2050. And to achieve this, the US Energy Information Administration estimates that the treaty would cost between $300 and $400 billion. Gore's response that the economy would not be harmed because new jobs would be created in the clean energy industry is simply idiotic. An equivalent assertion would be to say that banning automobiles would not hurt the economy because it would stimulate the bicycle and livestock industry.
One last point for the SUV haters. Several times in the movie Gore claims that the Chinese are ahead of us in environmental policy. Yet, he fails to mention that China burns 1.5 billion tons of coal per year to produce energy and will continue doing so until at least 2020. It would take 3 billion Ford Explorers running 15,000 miles per year to match this one sector of the Chinese economy.
Global warming, however large or small of a problem it turns out to be, however much of it is caused or isn't caused by humans, is only difficult to cope with from a large-scale, central planner's view of society. As economist George Reisman points out, "it would certainly not be too great a problem for tens and hundreds of millions of free, thinking individuals living under capitalism to solve-.this is because, under capitalism, the actions of the individuals, and the thinking and planning behind those actions, are coordinated and harmonized by the price system." As a result, the problem would be solved in the way much greater problems have been solved-including the replacement of the horse with the automobile, the settlement of the American West, and the economy's transition from agriculturally-based to industrially-based. The aspect of global warming that must concern us most is the possibility that bureaucrats and politicians in Washington and the UN will use it as a convenient opportunity to take more responsibility and money away from us.