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Global warming meltdown
Kevin Steel - Monday,31 July 2006
It's not just your imagination: global warming devotees are getting shriller in their calls for action. Al Gore, in his new movie An Inconvenient Truth, warns us we now have only 10 years left to fix the climate change problem. That's quite a bit shorter than the 50 to 100 years many were predicting barely a few years ago. And, in defending his film, Gore has publicly said that the debate on global warming theory "is over in the scientific community," and all those who continue to question it are "on the lunatic fringe." Here in Canada, the Sierra Club calls skeptics "crackpots." The federal Liberal party is noisily calling for the resignation of the environment minister, Rona Ambrose, because she dared to state the obvious, that this country cannot meet its Kyoto targets. And while the Conservative government has insisted that the Kyoto greenhouse gas reduction targets set by the former Liberal administration are unattainable (something that federal natural resources bureaucrats had concluded, even under the Liberal government, according to documents obtained by the National Post), the federal government's National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy produced a study on June 21 suggesting Canada could cut its emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, 10 times the amount required by the Kyoto Protocol. Meanwhile, in June, Quebec announced it would introduce a carbon tax--one way for the government to cash in before the global warming theory falls apart completely. There seems to be an air of, well, desperation out there.
Tim Ball, a climatologist and former professor at the University of Winnipeg, has been fighting environmental hysterics for more than 30 years--he proudly reminds people he fought the global cooling theory popular in the 1970s--and he's noticed this desperation in global warming theory adherents. "Their positions are getting so extreme. Gore says there's 10 years left," Ball says. "Well, [David] Suzuki said there's 10 years left--the problem is he said it 20 years ago. So people are saying, 'Hang on a minute.'"
The other big indicator is that global warming adherents have all but given up on "global warming" as a term. "Now it's 'climate change,'" Ball says. That, says Ball, allows proponents to say that any change at all in the weather is the fault of humans; if it's getting warmer, cooler, wetter, drier, this is all part of the same process. "When it was just 'warming,' they got stuck because the earth has been cooling since 1998, even though CO2 from humans has gone up. And what was it that Huxley said? 'The bane of science is a lovely hypothesis destroyed by an ugly fact.' So they switched to 'climate change' and they fall apart there because the climate is always changing, always has and always will," says Ball.
So is support for global warming theory on the wane? Not if you ask John Bennett, senior policy adviser for energy at the Sierra Club in Canada. "Despite the politics in Canada, we've been getting lots of positive response to our outrage with the government. The latest polls I've seen show that support for Kyoto is still in the 80s and 90s [per cent]. So I'm really convinced there has not been any change in the public will on this, but we do have problems with political will," Bennett says. And what does he think of the growing number of respected scientists who are now stepping forward to challenge the theory itself? "These guys are just crackpots who are just fronting for those who have an interest in the fossil fuel industry. But there is nothing they have to say that is credible whatsoever," he says.
Crackpot is not a term anyone could reasonably use to describe Petr Chylek. He's an adjunct professor in the department of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie University, and a past senior chair in climate research at the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. A specialist on the subject of the Greenland ice sheet, he certainly does not believe global warming is caused by CO2 generated by human activity, though he is willing to admit that, in the scientific community, scientists who oppose the hysteria are still in the minority. "But if you look at the scientists who dissent, really, these are the leaders in their fields," he says confidently.
Chylek is particularly upset with the way global warming supporters have been misrepresenting data to support their cause. For instance, in An Inconvenient Truth, Gore claims that between 1992 and 2005 the melt area of Greenland increased drastically. This is technically correct, Chylek says. But Gore fails to mention that a volcanic eruption from Mount Pinatubo in 1992 caused temperatures to become depressed all over the earth; the years following were naturally warmer. "He's comparing 1992 with 2005," says Chylek. "If he would compare 1991 with 2005, he would find that the Greenland melt area in 1991 was larger than 2005. So he just picks the special year 1992, when the melt area of Greenland was very, very small due to the Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption. And this lets him show and pretend that this difference between 1992 and 2005 is due to global warming and that's completely untrue," Chylek says.
Chylek can't help but be amused at the accusation that those who oppose the global warming theory are shilling for the oil industry, he says. In his entire career, he has been supported by governments, not once receiving a penny from industry.
If anything, the increased shrillness of global warming theory devotees may be a sign of scientific weakness, says Chylek. "What is very discouraging is that many people who strongly support global warming caused by carbon dioxide are trying to suppress scientific discussion," he says. Legitimate scientists welcome challenges that test their theories. They can help make a scientific argument stronger. "You have to think about it [the opposition], discredit it eventually, and then go forward. But if you try to suppress dissenting opinion, it shows that you are really weak in your positions," he says.
But, in many cases, Canadian scientists had little choice but to toe the line of the previous federal Liberal government. Environment Canada transformed into a church of global warming theory, and researchers looking for funding were frozen out unless they signed on to the official dogma. "Obviously, if you are against the measured direction pushed for by governments, it will slow down your professional progress," Chylek says. "You will have difficulty at university getting tenure, you will not be getting grants, et cetera." But he says that friends of his, who have since retired, have come clean with doubts about anthropogenic global warming. "So now they say, 'Now I am retired; now I can say what I really think,'" he says.
Tad Murty is one former government scientist now speaking out about flaws in the global warming science. Murty retired from his position as a senior research scientist in meteorology and oceanography at the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in 1994. A specialist in storm surges (tsunamis, hurricanes, et cetera) he is now an adjunct professor in earth sciences and civil engineering at the University of Ottawa. Currently, Murty's leading an international scientific team that includes the United Nations and the Canadian Weather Service, in the preparation of a storm surge manual following the Asian tsunami. He doesn't adhere to the global warming theory at all. "I really do not see any evidence that humans are influencing, through carbon dioxide emissions, the global climate," Murty says.
So, the supposed scientific consensus on global warming may be breaking down (on June 22, a U.S. National Academy of Sciences panel officially debunked environmentalists' long-held claim that the Earth is the warmest it's been in a thousand years). But what of public opinion? "I am not convinced that global warming alarmism has ever received the support of a majority of people in the major western democracies, despite the best efforts of the various interest groups, abetted by the surprisingly uncritical complicity of the press," says Bob Carter, a professor of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia, and an opponent of global warming theory.
The polling data backs up Carter. The BBC World Service released in January the results of a poll on the most significant events of 2005. The survey of 32,439 people in 27 countries asked, "In the future, when historians think about the year 2005, what event of global significance do you think will be seen as most important?" The war in Iraq and the Boxing Day tsunami in Asia came out on top, both at 15 per cent. Global warming trickled in at three per cent, behind the London bombings (four per cent) and just ahead of the avian flu (three per cent). The Pew Global Attitudes Project, a worldwide public opinion survey of 90,000 individuals, released results on June 13, and found "no evidence of alarm over global warming in either the United States or China--the two largest producers of greenhouse gases. Just 19% of Americans and 20% of the Chinese who have heard of the issue say they worry a lot about global warming--the lowest percentages in the 15 countries surveyed. Moreover, nearly half of Americans (47%) and somewhat fewer Chinese (37%) express little or no concern about the problem."
But even if everyone agreed that global warming was something to worry about, would that necessarily make the theories that it was caused by cars and factories, any more legitimate? Does consensus equal truth? Not a chance, says Carter. "There was once a scientific consensus that the earth was flat, and that witches should be burned at the stake," he says. "Science is not about consensus but about empirical data, tested hypotheses and rational argument."
And given all the portentous environmental theories of the past--from DDT dangers to the ozone hole--that supposedly enjoyed scientific consensus at one point and yet turned out to be baseless (see sidebar for some more unfounded panics of the last century), it's not surprising that so many of us are unwilling to believe shaky scientific theories, even when they're held by a large number of scientists. Eventually, we figure, this disaster, too, will pass. And if there's one thing we do know with certainty, it's that, before long, there will surely be another to take its place.
A HISTORY OF FREAKING OUT:
In 1841, Charles Mackay published his famous and enduring work on mass hysteria, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. A century and a half later, the moral of the book still offers a useful lesson to modern readers: popularity and truth don't necessarily go hand in hand.
Not that anyone listens to Mackay. In fact, if the English poet and journalist were alive today, he'd easily have a steady diet of material to put out an updated edition every year. He could even fill an entirely new book with all the doomsday hysteria, environmental and otherwise, the world has endured over the last half century. Here are just a few of the frights we've seen come and (unfailingly) go.
ALIEN INVASION: In 1938, Orson Welles broadcast on radio a reading of H.G. Well's sci-fi novel War of the Worlds. It caused mass panic in New York and New Jersey when many mistook the stories of alien invasion for fact. Thousands fled the cities to escape the extraterrestrial attacks.
DANGEROUS DDT: In 1962, Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring kick-started the environmental juggernaut by twisting science to argue that synthetic pesticides, particularly DDT, were ruining our ecosystem (she claimed DDT made the shells of birds' eggs thinner). With ominous chapter titles, such as "And no birds sing" and "Elixirs of death," Carson offered a powerful, emotional argument that led to the banning of DDT in most countries. Her book has since been debunked by scientists (though that didn't stop Al Gore from writing the introduction to a 1994 reissue), but not before the bans on DDT (which had been effective in killing malaria-carrying mosquitoes in Africa and Asia) led to the preventable malaria deaths of nearly 90 million people, mostly children--so far.
GLOBAL OVERPOPULATION: Like the DDT scare, fears that the Earth would be overrun with more people than it could ever hope to sustain began with a book. Paul Ehrlich's 1968 The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation and environmental disaster, as the world ran out of food and was swamped with garbage. In the nearly 40 years since, the world's population has nearly doubled, but, by and large, food production and global standards of living are the highest they've been in history.
A NEW ICE AGE: Before everyone started worrying about global warming, they were worried about global cooling. The theory that the oceans would turn into skating rinks reached its apex in the 1970s.
In the July 1975 issue of International Wildlife, in an article entitled "In the Grip of a New Ice Age," Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, wrote: "The facts have emerged, in recent years and months, from research into past ice ages. They imply that the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind."
ACID RAIN: Once mankind averted the next ice age, by doing absolutely nothing about it, we realized, in the early 1980s, the real imminent and catastrophic danger: acid rain, from the sulphur dioxide in car exhaust, manufacturing emissions, et cetera. Kids were driven to nightmares over all the lakes and trees that would be scorched by toxic raindrops. Eventually, researchers--and time--would prove the doomsday predictions wildly overblown.
THE OZONE HOLE: Before we had time to breathe a sigh of relief over the end of ice ages and scorched earth fears, humans had a new apocalyptic threat with which to contend. In the early 1990s there was suddenly a huge hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica and we were told that we'd all soon develop skin cancer. Actually, it wasn't quite so sudden: scientists noticed it on satellite images as early as 1979, but panic set in when it appeared to grow, right around the time that Mount Pinatubo, the Filipino volcano, erupted in 1991, spewing chlorine into the atmosphere. Still, westerners readily accepted responsibility for the stratospheric rupture. Based on misinformed media hysterics resulting from two inconclusive and unsupportable press releases from NASA, we blamed our decadent modern air conditioners, Styrofoam and hairsprays for releasing chlorofluorocarbons, which supposedly harmed the ozone layer. In 1992, U.S. Congress passed laws demanding industry phase out chlorofluorocarbon use. Yet, between 1996 and 2001, the hole in the ozone kept growing. Then in 2002, it started to shrink again. And after that it grew. Turns out no one can say with any certainty what's going on.
GLOBAL WARMING: Take the fears of a new ice age that pervaded the 1970s, replace "global cooling" with "global warming" and you've got the world's hottest new fear: that too much gas production--from car emissions to industrial processing--has created a layer of insulation over the earth, making it into one big greenhouse. There are too many potential flaws in this theory--and it remains a theory--to go into here. One is that the largest period of greenhouse gas growth occurred during the industrial boom between the 1950s and the 1980s--the period in which we were told temperatures were dropping dangerously. Meanwhile, official U.S. National Climate Data Center thermometers show that, between 1998 and 2005, the earth cooled slightly. Fears of a new ice age, anyone?
