THE AGE OF POLLUTING AT WILL

When I was growing up in New York City in the forties and fifties I watched great billows of smoke belching from the stacks of factories. The emanations were putrid and foul. Even the smell of baking bread from the huge Wonder Bread Bakery was kind of sickly sweet and overpowering. [My mother wouldn’t allow any of that “cheesy” white bread in the house. We ate nothing but good German rye.]

My parents allowed me to freely wander all over the city---but they wouldn’t let me swim in the Hudson River. I never did have any desire to swim in Brooklyn’s notorious Newton Creek---it looked like used crankcase oil. After a storm the air became clear and sweet for while---except when the stench of Newton Creek was wafted to our neighborhood by shifting winds. Eventually Newton Creek caught fire.

I was fascinated by the tugboats pushing multiple barge loads of garbage down the Hudson River and across New York Harbor to be dumped at sea. But when I wondered out loud if all those barge loads of garbage didn’t pollute the ocean I was told that the ocean was big enough to absorb anything we could dump into it.

I was lucky to get a really good education under strict New York State guidelines from the capital at Albany. I was not only taught the Earth is round but what that means. The Earth is finite, limited, enclosed. Despite the stuff that falls on us every day from space and the stuff leaving the atmosphere and entering space, there is only so much of Earth. But what did I know about pollution? I was just a dumb-ass kid.

Years later the Hudson River and New York Harbor were cleaned up in a famous environmental campaign. New York’s waterways are, in many ways, cleaner than they were in my youth.

THE AGE OF SCIENCE

When we entered the space age I expected Americans to embrace a more universal awareness and seek a better understanding of science. Seeing Earth from space should have made us aware of our finite planet and the vulnerability of life within the narrow surface layer we all inhabit. The unity and interconnectedness of things is, after all, a principle common to both science and religion.

The public should at least have gained some minimal trust of science---by far the most reliable process for comprehending and explaining material reality.

But these days, scientists who correctly (and conservatively) predicted global warming and made specific, correct predictions about hurricane events such as Katrina are still viewed with suspicion. Much of this mistrust and misunderstanding has been deliberately sown by the corporate, political and cultural enemies of science.

The intellectual crime of the mind-numbing antievolution movement was not in criticizing or questioning the findings of science---but in distorting the meaning of science, vilifying scientists and, worst of all, labeling it’s own inherently unscientific ideas as “science.” (see “Notes” below)

Now, at a time when Americans most need to understand the way the world works and the science that rationally explains it---what with endangered polar bears, walruses, global warming, peak oil, pesticide pollution, declining fisheries, ocean warming, ocean acidification, erosion of coastlines and the economic need for alternative energy development just for starters---there is widespread misunderstanding and mistrust. A corporate-political-religious gumbo is given “equal” time with real science.

THE CORPORATE MEDIA CAMPAIGN

For years without fail---in the depths of the coldest weeks of winter---the old Anchorage Times editorial writers would more or less ask the same question: Where’s your global warming now?

This simplistic (but still popular) view ignores the actual science. The Anchorage Times was a good newspaper---except in matters involving it’s oil industry sponsor. The “warming” part of global warming got the headlines but the predictions were explicit---very small average global temperature changes would cause chaotic weather. It takes only a few degrees to upset the global balance but your local weather may vary.

A GLACIAL CHILL

About ten years ago I met a nice lady (a teacher of all things) at the Mint Glacier Mountaineering Hut. We were discussing the obvious and drastic melting back of Mint Glacier. We were in complete agreement on the fact that the glacier had been severely reduced in size within just the past five years.

But the weather inside the cozy mountaineering hut suddenly became quite frosty when I used the term “global warming.”

“Climate change,” she insisted.

I never argue politics in the wilderness so I let it go. Both terms were technically accurate. The climate was warming. The climate was changing. But this was my first personal introduction to the vehemence of the political correctness angle on “climate change” (or whatever).

It’s the same today---humans don’t want to admit that our activities cause the climate to change because if they did it would mean we would have to stop or reduce the burning of fossil fuels like gasoline and coal that have contributed so much to our “advanced” civilization and made life so easy.

There has never been an everyday fuel so concentrated and handy as gasoline---one gallon and a small engine can do the same amount of work that would take two weeks for a human to do by hand. Think chainsaw. Who wants to give up that kind of efficiency?

CLIMATE SCIENCE -

The climate system of Planet Earth is exceedingly complex and we have only recently begun to gain a scientific understanding. This complexity accounts for the fairly recent and erroneous predictions of another possible ice age. [Yes, science makes mistakes and not all scientists agree on everything---but science ruthlessly corrects itself. See my archived blog “The difference between science and religion.“]

After World War II the Air Force and Navy funded programs of climate and weather research. One focus was the concept of deliberately changing the weather as a military tactic. Scientists soon realized we may have already influenced the climate without even trying.

It was only in the 1960s that climate scientists began to formulate “models” of how the climate system of Planet Earth operated. But these were crude models. The atmosphere was considered but not the oceans---now known to be obvious engines of climate and weather. Ultimately, supercomputers allowed the integration of the vast amounts of oceanic and atmospheric data for better climate models.

Early on in climate research, warming of the planet was found to be outside the natural curve for the past millennium and maybe even further back. CO2 was among the emissions being studied as possible causes but it was difficult to get a consistent method of measurement.

In the early 1960s, C. D. Keeling began to make the first accurate and consistent scientific measurements of CO2 levels in the atmosphere. To nearly everyone’s surprise it was found that the concentrations of this greenhouse gas were rising every year. [Bear in mind that CO2 is only one of many human-emitted greenhouse gases.]

NO BLAME

The notion that human activities do not effect their surroundings is blatantly and tragically mistaken (see part one). In such matters the most primitive and early pagan and animist societies were far more prescient than the so-called “civilized“ societies. It is a fact of life and science that humans affect their surroundings. And yet, the ability to deny this basic fact seems part of the mindset of modern civilization.

AN AIR OF UNREALITY - THE 90% FACTOR

What just happened? America seemed to have it all---wealth, power, technology, world leadership and moral authority. All driven by the assumption that Nature would just keep on giving and giving without complaint.

Now global warming science threatens people with vested interests in the unrestricted consumption of fossil fuels; persons hoping to maintain affluent, fossil-fueled lifestyles; corporatists hoping to make a killing by developing and selling off remaining fossil fuel resources; and the politicians and ideologues who are the paid or unpaid concubines of corporatists. Powerful economic and political forces are trying to convince the public that the science of climate change is “uncertain,“ that global warming is a hoax and that fossil fuel emissions don’t cause it.

The scientific consensus is overwhelming---climate is changing even faster than predicted and greenhouse gases produced by fossil fuels are a significant factor. There are also cascade effects where warming causes the release of yet more greenhouse gases such as methane emitted by melting permafrost in the arctic tundra which then enters the atmosphere to cause yet more warming.

Ninety percent is the key number to this “inconvenient truth.” The so-called “rich nations” are responsible for 90 percent of the emissions of greenhouse substances. And climate scientists agree, to a degree of certainty of 90 percent, that these human emissions are changing the climate.

Notes:

Climate hypotheses abound on the web---often presented as “alternative theories” to accepted scientific theories. Such tactics were widely used by creation “science” and intelligent design proponents. These religious movements tried to legitimize their own unscientific ideas by dressing them up as some sort of competing “theories”---and therefore “equal” to accepted science.

One responder to part one of this series offers the alternative notion that a meteor caused a volcanic eruption which flash-froze wooly mammoths 8000 years ago and contributed to the rise in CO2 that I cited in a Scientific American article. That article by Ruddiman hypothesized that human CO2 emissions may have delayed the natural cycle of a coming ice age.

Volcanoes produce CO2 (individual volcanoes vary)---a greenhouse gas that does prevent heat from escaping the planet. But super-volcanoes usually trigger cold spells instead of warming periods. A meteor-induced volcano would most likely have poured enough particulate matter into the atmosphere to cool things down by preventing the sun’s energy from reaching us. See below for more info from the US Government Volcano Watchwebsite.

The “evolutionofacreationist” web site cited by the afore-referenced responder is, by the standards of science, unreliable---and I am being very kind. I read the book written by that simpleton dentist (courtesy of some creationist friends) and it was execrable.

Creationist literalists are in a quandary---how to squeeze 4.5 billion years of Earth geology and millions of years of pre-human and human evolution into a coherent narrative to make it appear scientifically-plausible that everything just popped into existence 6000 years ago.

Another perennial responder, blame-the-liberals-guy, appears tired like his comments. Global warming? Just another liberal plot to “raise money,” he says.

Yeah, sure---a real career-builder. Except that Nature doesn’t do political ideologies.

However, as Robyn Blumner pointed out in her column “GOP closes door to our best hope for better future” (ADN 8-16-09) only 12% of scientists claim to be Republican.

That’s even fewer than the percentage of scientists who claim to believe in a deity. Obviously a liberal conspiracy!

Another responder wants to hear my solutions and the costs.

All in good time. This series is slated for three parts and maybe even more.

An additional responder also claims that the greenhouse emissions of volcanoes swamp human emissions.

Volcanoes are certainly awesome. But for all those who are overawed by the spectacle without knowing about the science of volcanic emissions I present the following from the US Government Volcano Watch website:

“For numerous reasons, volcanologists have been interested in CO2 release from volcanoes for years and have been working to improve estimates on the amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere and oceans by volcanic processes.

“Carbon dioxide is released when magma rises from the depths of the Earth on its way to the surface. Our studies here at Kilauea show that the eruption discharges between 8,000 and 30,000 metric tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each day. Actively erupting volcanoes release much more CO2 than sleeping ones do.

“Gas studies at volcanoes worldwide have helped volcanologists tally up a global volcanic CO2 budget in the same way that nations around the globe have cooperated to determine how much CO2 is released by human activity through the burning of fossil fuels. Our studies show that globally, volcanoes on land and under the sea release a total of about 200 million tonnes of CO2 annually.

“This seems like a huge amount of CO2, but a visit to the U.S. Department of Energy's Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) website (http://cdiac.ornl.gov/) helps anyone armed with a handheld calculator and a high school chemistry text put the volcanic CO2 tally into perspective. Because while 200 million tonnes of CO2 is large, the global fossil fuel CO2 emissions for 2003 tipped the scales at 26.8 billion tonnes. Thus, not only does volcanic CO2 not dwarf that of human activity, it actually comprises less than 1 percent of that value.

“A short time ago (geologically speaking) the question "Which produces more CO2, volcanic or human activity?" would have been answered differently. Volcanoes would have tipped the scale. Now, human presence, activity, and the resultant production of CO2, through the burning of fossil fuels, have all climbed at an ever-increasing rate. On the other hand, looking back through the comparatively short duration of human history, volcanic activity has, with a few notable disturbances, remained relatively steady.
Volcanoes are still awesome, even though they don't produce CO2 at a rate that swamps the human signature, contributing to global warming. In fact, spectacular eruptions like that of Mount Pinatubo are demonstrated to contribute to global cooling through the injection of solar energy reflecting ash and other small particles.

“There is now agreement at the top government level of the Earth's most prolific fossil fuel CO2 producer-the United States-that we need to reduce our dependence on oil in order to confront the challenge of global warming. As we work toward that goal, let's look forward to the day when volcanologists will give a different answer to the question "Which produces more CO2, volcanic or human activity?"