Bryan Zepp Jamieson: Thin Ice

Brian Zepp Jamieson, October 26, 2009

A poll came out two weeks ago measuring American attitudes toward global
warming. According to media accounts (gleeful media accounts, in the
case of Faux), only 57% of Americans believed in global warming,
compared to 77% in 2007.

At first I thought it was an unbelievably sloppy poll. If someone came
up to me and asked if I believed in global warming, I would say I
didn’t. “Believe in” suggests faith without evidence, religiosity.
“Believe in” means you have an opinion, and you want that opinion to
come true, because, well, you happen to like that opinion. I believe
there is intelligent life out in the universe, not because I have a
shred of evidence supporting such a view, but because I want it to be
so. I have faith.

I don’t believe in global warming. I acknowledge its existence, based on
a lot of solid evidence, and its potential to do severe harm to us. I
don’t accept it on faith; I accept it on evidence.

So I thought that the pollster had just been unbelievably sloppy. Except
it turned out it was Pew Research, and when I went to the source to find
out what they actually asked, I discovered that the phrase “believe in”
wasn’t there. What they did ask was, “Is there solid evidence the earth
is warming?” There’s a flaw in that question, too, but the flaw depends
from a lack of thought by the respondents, rather than lack of thought
on the part of the pollster.

Since there haven’t been a rash of fires at college libraries around the
world in the past year, its safe to assume that all the solid evidence
that existed in 2007 still exists today, and it’s also a safe
supposition that more evidence has been added since then. Since none of
it has been falsified by new findings (believe me, Faux News would have
let us know immediately if it had), then the only possible legitimate
poll result would be 100% saying yes, since the evidence is still there.
Mind you, that doesn’t delegitimize the poll, which gives an accurate
result. It just shows how willing people are to embrace the philosophy
of “I’ll see it when I believe it”. One in five respondents changed
their minds, and in order to accommodate that change of mind, decided
that all the evidence they had seen before was now a figment of their
imagination or something.

The same poll also asked how serious a problem they considered global
warming to be, and 35% said it was very serious, and 30% said it was
somewhat serious.

Hmmm. So of the people willing to acknowledge that the evidence was
there for global warming, at least 114% of them felt we should take it
at least somewhat seriously.

Paging Olive Oyl to the white courtesy phone. Or maybe it’s the red
courtesy phone. Tell you what, Olive; you decide. You’re exactly halfway
between the two phones. Folks, I bet she starves to death before she
picks a phone.

The same set of questions last year produced 71% who saw serious
evidence of global warming, and 71% who felt we should take it at least
somewhat seriously.

That we see such a discontinuity this year suggests to me that we’re
seeing the reprocessing of thinking by people who have been successfully
depersuaded on the issue of global warming by the slick propaganda
campaigns. The problem with spending billions to persuade people that
something isn’t true when in fact it is, is that inconvenient truths
have a way of disrupting the new-found faith, and it is hard to maintain.

So if the denialists are chortling that they are winning the battle of
public opinion, their behavioral psychologists will be shaking their
heads and warning them that one big heat wave next summer will undo all
that hard work.

Denialists got more hoped-for news from Paul Hudson, the Climate
Correspondent at BBC News. Hudson wrote an article with the provocative
title, “What happened to global warming?” The article begins, “This
headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that
the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in
1998.” Unfortunately, the lead is misleading, and at least partially
inaccurate. 2007 was as hot as 1998, but what is really misleading is
the implication that global temperatures subsided to pre-1997 levels,
with only a spasm of heat in the past two years. The fact is that of the
11 years since 1997, eight are the hottest ever recorded.

Hudson attributes the “end to global warming” to the Pacific decadal
oscillation (PDO), which is sort of a long-term (20-30 year) background
oscillation to the short-term El Niño Southern Oscillation. Hudson
suggests that the PDO is entering a cool phase, which will reduce global
warming for the next 20 to 30 years. He doesn’t dispute the actual fact
of global warming, but believes the PDO may provide a respite.
The charts for the phenomenon (available here
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/ ) don’t suggest such a respite.

If the
PDO is longer than the ENSO, it’s also much weaker, and the chart bears
this out. It shows trends of 20-30 years, and suggests that we may have
entered the cooling phase of such a trend some four years ago. (That
would include two of the three hottest years on record). The trends,
weak to begin with, are easily and visibly disrupted by the El Niño and
La Niña events.

So, far from stopping global warming dead in its tracks, it might, at
best, slow it down a little.

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, the authors of Freakonomics, a
contrarian look at basic economic principles (highly engaging, well
worth the read) found themselves under attack from environmentalists
last week when it came to light that their new book, Freakonomics II,
included suggestions on how to handle global warming if we can’t control
our CO2 emissions.

My gut reaction is to say, “No, the only good long-term solution is to
control our emissions.” And I believe that it is something we must do.
In the long run, nothing else will work.

But that’s long term. In the short term, even if we could wave a magic
wand and instantly reduce our emissions to 1970 levels, global warming
would continue for at least three more decades.

Then there’s the matter of political will. As we all know, getting the
nations of the world to sacrifice now to avoid trouble thirty years down
the road is difficult at best. It doesn’t help that the world’s most
powerful nation, the United States, is little more than an enforcement
arm for large multinational corporations, and if they don’t want to
sacrifice to cut CO2 emissions, than neither does the United States.
Even the somewhat sour hope that peak oil and the resulting economic
stagnation would reduce CO2 emissions isn’t panning out. Vast new
reserves found in the past three months suggest that Cuba and Uganda may
be the largest petroleum producing nations on earth in about 15 years.
And in a bitter irony, Canada and Greenland are eying the nearly two
million square miles of land presently under ice caps, and wondering
what vast troves of minerals may emerge, including, of course, lots and
lots of oil. Russia and the US are vying for drilling areas in the
Arctic should it become ice-free.

In light of these factors (“these factors” being much easier to type
than “Pure, blind human greed and stupidity”), we have to acknowledge
that the political will to contain global warming might not be there. If
getting people to prepare for problems thirty years down the road is
difficult, getting them to reduce profits to prepare for problems thirty
years down the road is impossible.

So Dubner and Levitt are looking at quick technological fixes. Contrary
to what you may have heard, they don’t underestimate the peril of global
warming, let alone the fact that it is happening. Nor are they saying
that alternate short term approaches are any sort of substitute for
addressing the two biggest problems causing global warming:
overpopulation and greenhouse gas emissions.

The range of tech fixes available range from the feasible to the
ridiculous, and from harmless to potentially worse than the problem they
are intended to address.

With present technology, there are several options available that can
cause global cooling. One one that Dubner and Levitt look at is
injecting sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. They argue this
could be done for several hundred million dollars. In effect, it would
replicate the effects of a large volcanic eruption. The sulfur dioxide
becomes a sulfuric acid aerosol, which reflects sunlight, reducing the
energy reaching the earth’s surface. A large volcanic eruption can
create such a mist for up to three years, resulting in a decrease of up
to 4 degrees Celsius for the planet.

We could duplicate the results of
moderate volcanic eruptions and thus reduce temperatures. The big
drawback is that of a major volcanic eruption were to occur randomly (as
they are wont to do), then what might otherwise have been a couple of
summers of poor crops becomes instead a global food supply crash.
Salting the ocean with iron oxide (rust) to induce a plankton growth
spurt has been suggested. The problem is that if we don’t do it just
right, we could cause a population explosion in plankton that leads to a
population crash, leaving the region that was salted with less
oxygen-producing plankton than there was before.

One that I intend to take a closer look at that Dubner and Levitt
mention is the idea “of increasing oceanic cloud cover by seeding such
clouds with salt-water that is sprayed into the air by a fleet of solar
powered dinghies.”

The authors maintain that.”the estimated cost of
building and implementing this technology is a few hundred million
dollars.” Yes, it could change weather patterns. As if global warming
wouldn’t.

It’s one thing to promote non-carbon energy such as solar, wind, and
nuclear, but another to actually implement it. There have been enormous
strides in recent years – solar panels alone are six times more
efficient at one quarter the cost. Toshiba is working on a $25 million
nuclear reactor the size of a kitchen fridge that could power a town of
1,000 for ten years before refueling. They promise no possibility of
meltdown or toxic leaks, although they don’t mention the issue of waste.
Or the cost of digging it up and refueling it.

Of course, the real bottom line is that we need to reduce our birthrate
and strive to get our population down to 3 billion by the end of the
century. Even that seemingly modest goal will require incredible effort
and sacrifice, and mean a lot of people not having children. As you may
have noticed, we haven’t had a great deal of luck in controlling our
numbers, and we are rapidly approaching a fateful point where if we
don’t do it ourselves, nature will do it for us. We almost certainly
won’t like the answer nature comes up with. It will probably involve
lots of people – billions – getting sick and dying miserably.

Even if Copenhagen, the big conference on emissions next month, is a
success and they come up with a treaty, by itself it won’t be enough. We
simply cannot hope that we can reduce emissions fast enough or hard
enough to avoid a catastrophe by 2060.

Dubner and Levitt are right: we need to look beyond just striving to
reduce emissions to solve the problem. And we need to start doing that now.