current mood: contemplative
current music: Massive Attack – Unfinished Sympathy
(or, more spam for my friend’s friend pages)
[update]: This article no longer reflects my current opinion of global warming – after much research, I can no longer identify with global warming skeptics. My current views can be found here.
Behold, the pale blue dot.
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader”, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
On February 14, 1990 the spacecraft Voyager I, having crossed 6.4 billion kilometers on its tour of the solar system, looked back on the Western Spiral arm of the galaxy to a small yellow star, around which orbited what appeared on the film to be a nothing more than a speck.
That would be Earth.
While I rarely directly quote famous people here, astronomer Carl Sagan had the above to say about the picture, and he said it far better than I ever could. And he was right. The Earth is the only planet we’re going to be living on for the foreseeable future. We can’t just hop onto the Enterprise and travel a few parsecs over to the next M-class planet.
Not surprisingly, like any piece of real estate shared by more than one person, there are many differing opinions on how to best take care of the earth. Most college students can’t even decide on what pizza to order – getting six billion people to agree on how to care for the planet is impossible. So what do you get when you add political activism, poorly-understood scientific principals, celebrity endorsements, sensationalistic journalism, former vice-presidential films, and religious fundamentalism? You get the world of public opinion on climate change.
So is this whole “global warming thing” a complete farce? A hoax? A vehicle for militaristic Greenies to try and wipe Hummers off the face of the planet? Is it the beginning of the Apocalypse? Will Florida be underwater in twenty years?
What do people agree on? Well, that the Earth is on a warming trend. Glaciers and ice caps have been shrinking alarmingly. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are higher today than at any time in least the past 650,000 years. It’s about 35% more concentrated that it was before the industrial revolution, and a significant part of this increase has been caused by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels. Very few people debate these things. And that’s where the certainties end.
Correlation is not causation, (Just ask the parent of any vaccinated child with Autism) and I have to be perfectly honest and say that I am so grossly ignorant about the physics and forces involved that I cannot offer any meaningful analysis about whether or not We’re All Going to Die. And neither can anybody else. Most of the IPCC charts and graphs are based on Global Circulation Models, which have a margin of error larger than the effect they attempt to predict1. The Earth is one of the largest and most complex machines that human beings know anything about, and we don’t know much about it. There are supercomputers that sit there and crunch numbers all day, meteorologists with years of school and experience and we still can’t say for certain if it will rain tomorrow.
Think about that.
Have you actually looked at the data? I haven’t. I have never personally pored over the data from unmanned oceanic buoys, or examined the CO2 content of an ice core under a gas chromatograph. I’ve looked at someone’s interpretation of the data. And his interpretation probably depended on someone else’s interpretation, and…you see where this is going? Despite what Disney would have you sing, the Earth is actually pretty big, and the data we can currently gather about how it works is limited. Certainly, we know more about it than ever before, and all around the world, some very smart climatologists are working to understand it even better. All of the evidence, at best, merely suggests that anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 is causing the current warming trend, but large swaths of the physics of Global Circulation Models (CGMs) are very poorly understood2. The right answer to this uncertainty is to attempt to use science to the best of our ability to try to understand the physical and climatological processes better, which is exactly what we’re doing. Extreme belief either way is completely lacking in evidence.
But global warming aside, pumping carbon dioxide, or any other contaminants into our atmosphere, is a bad idea.
America relies almost entirely upon coal, oil, and natural gas power plants. Various studies put the number of annual premature deaths in the United States caused by emissions from these power plants in the thousands.3, 4. That’s caused just by our power plants. We all agree that atmospheric pollution is a bad thing. It’d be great if the generation of electricity came from a magical land of ponies and rainbows and created no pollutants or carbon dioxide. But we don’t live in a magical world of ponies and rainbows, and we have to contend with many sources of energy that cause significant amounts of airborne pollution. Shutting them all down right now, this second, simply isn’t possible, and would be extremely counter-productive.
So, we shouldn’t keep pouring pollutants and CO2 into the atmosphere, and we can’t just shut it all down. What’s an environmentally, fiscally, and intellectually responsible citizen to do?
The standard green answers (hybrid vehicles, eat locally or self-grown foods, compost, etc.) are all well and good, but it will take more than eating veggies grown in your backyard to make a different. Nor is simply banning certain forms of energy, or uses of energy (incandescent bulbs come to mind) an economical or practical suggestion. The United States tried banning alcohol in the 1920’s, and it simply created a bootlegging industry. Imagine cheap Chinese incandescent bulbs being smuggled into California. Is that what America needs? To begin to see how we can make a dent in the output of atmospheric pollutants, we need to look at the two biggest offenders that we can actually do something about: the transportation and energy creation industries.
Cars and trucks are a major source of pollution, and we already know how to lessen the impact of vehicles on our environment: make them more efficient, and convert them to hybrid vehicles and alternative fuels. If plug-in hybrid electric vehicles were to replace the 198 million cars, vans, SUVs and light trucks in the US, it would be a huge step in reducing oil imports. Even though you’re basically burning coal to replace oil, it would still reduce overall pollutant emissions. But this has to be done globally. Developing countries (particularly China and India, which produce huge amounts of pollution) would have to import our nifty hybrid cars, and massive amounts of mining would have to take place to produce the metals required for the step up in battery production – and the cars themselves would have to be inexpensive enough for poorer countries to be able to buy them en masse.
By far one of the biggest arenas in which we could improve our current pollution situation is in the area of electrical production. The environmental movement has basically killed nuclear power. (Remember the premature deaths caused by coal, natural gas and oil? Thanks, Greenpeace.) And that’s a shame, because despite gross misunderstandings of the technology involved by the general populous, nuclear power is extremely safe. If a nuclear power reactor was to be built today, it would be a generation III+ reactor, which produce dramatically less waste than a generation I or II reactor. Some on the drawing board produce none at all. We’ve already generated most of the dangerous nuclear waste that we’re going to – it’s out there. (It should be on Yucca Mountain, but there’s a huge list of stupid reasons why it’s not. That’s another story.) And then there’s fusion power, which is the Holy Grail of power generation. Most of the radioactive stuff stays inside the reactor, and the stuff that does come out stops being radioactive in a much, much shorter time than fission reactors. And the material it would create is less damaging biologically, and the radioactivity burns off within a time period that is well within existing engineering capabilities. There’s a great way to help with pollution and generate large amounts of clean power, and that way is nuclear power. Chernobyl isn’t going to happen, (that was a generation I reactor) Three Mile Island was a perfect example of the safety systems working as they should have (Nobody got a dose of radiation greater than a single chest x-ray) and it was a generation II reactor at that.
Whether or not you believe that global warming will make the oceans rise, destroy Florida and doom us all, we can all agree that air pollution is a bad thing that we should be working to fix. I don’t know if I believe that global warming will destroy us all, but I do believe that working to take care of the planet in the best way we know how is a good thing. I believe in the soul. I believe in the small of a woman’s back…the hangin’ curveball…good scotch…that the novels of Dan Brown are self-indulgent overrated crap…I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a Constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot…opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve. And I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.
But I digress.
Doing more scientific studies on the climate and working to understand the inner churnings of the atmosphere is what we should be doing, and it’s what we are doing. Earth is the only planet we will be living on in the near future, and we must strive to take care of it to the best of our ability. Our children deserve no less.
Exit, stage left.
Sparks
1. Patrick Frank, 2008, “A Climate of Belief”. “Skeptic” Magazine, V. 14, no. 1, page 26.
2. Phillips, T.J., G. L. Potter, D. L. Williamson, R. T. Cederwall, J. S. Boyle, et al. 2004. “Evaluating Parameterizations of General Circulation Models.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 85, 1903-1915
3. www.catf.us/publications/reports/Midwest_Sulfur.pdf, EPA website, 2003 Technical Support Package for Clear Skies: Section B: 2003 Human Health and Environmental Benefits.
4. Journal of the American Medical Association (Vol. 287, No. 9: 1132-1141)
Where do I begin. I guess I should begin with kudos and dittos. I could cut and paste several fantastic additions or responses from people far more educated than I on the subject of climate change, but that would take the fun out of it. The problem that I, and I believe the majority of sane people on the planet, have with the AGW extremist is that there is a concerted effort to silence anyone that does not agree with them. Therefore they are no longer scientist, but bullies. The evidence for gravity speaks for itself, no one needs to tell me about a concensus of scientist and their beliefs because one can show me empirical evidence that backs up the claim that gravity is real. The evidence of AGW is not strong enough to come to the conclusion that human activity that releases CO2 causes global warming that will kill us all. Because of my enjoyment of arguing with people that have strong beliefs with no evidence, I enjoy asking greenies why they believe in AGW. Of course the response is always because of the opinion or research of “scientist”. Once this occurs, the proper question is, “Which scientist or scientists would that be?” Of course no one knows who these people are, nor have they read any papers or journals that the so called scientists have written. The AGW just participates in a mass group talk exercise in which they have heard something enough times that it becomes gospel. The hilarity in my opinion is that many of these alarmist are the same people that bash religious people for irrationality in their beliefs. However, they are doing the same thing that they accuse religious extremists of doing. They are running around telling us to repent because the end is near. Continuing on my overly long paragraph, I am glad that you brought up the fact that margin of error is a part of these climatology escapades. The most famous AGW hitpiece, “An Inconvenient Truth” constantly pushes the infamous hockey stick graph that has repeatedly been criticized and yet is still used to argue that we are all going to burn. What is the main criticism? The maker of this graph did not publish his means for measering margin of error. Once he did, several reviewers immediately found that his calculations were faulty. Also, the graph is based upon evidence from the tree rings of bristlecone pine trees. This is a variety of tree that has widely been dismissed as an innacurate means of gauging temperature. Anywho, I have to get back to work. If I get angry about this again I will post more, including a behind the shed beating for James Hansen.