This was published in the San Francisco Examiner, not exactly a conservative tool.
THERE IS NO CONSENSUS ON GLOBAL WARMING
Richard S. Lindzen, The Examiner
Jul 12, 2006 5:00 AM (6 days ago)
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SAN FRANCISCO - By Richard S. Lindzen
According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms — unless we change the way we live now.
Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."
That statement, which Gore made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate that Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first place.
The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it.
So, presumably, not all scientists belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Gore's preferred global-warming template — namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts.
To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that island land, which is depicted so ominously in Gore's movie.
In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming. They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.
The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia — mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth.
Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can't attribute any particular hurricane to global warming.
A general characteristic of Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended — at least not in terms of the actual science.
A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system.
This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.
There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 ppmv (parts per million by volume) in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatsoever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas — albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed.
The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.
So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.
First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists — especially those outside the area of climate dynamics.
Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.
Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce — if we're lucky.
Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.
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Comments: 44
I personally have never looked at Global Warming as a stand-alone issue. To me it's always been part of the arguement of whether or not human activiety is degrading the air we breath, the water we drink, and the land we grow our food on.
If these things are happening (which for some strange reason never seems to be the real focus of either left or right politics), shouldn't it be an issue of bipartisan concern ?
A new "Global" issue has recently raised its head.That is the issue of Global Dimming. In the three days following 9/11 , when all air traffic was grounded, record levels of sunlight reaching the earth were recorded around the world. ( See "Nova") http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/
Aren't we arguing a technical point that has no real merit when we argue whether or not Global Warming is real ? Isn't the real question, " Are we robbing ourselves of the resources we need to survive ?"
Why isn't the debate distilled down to that question by both Republicans and Democrats ? Global Warming may not be 100% measurable, but overall air, water, and land quality is.
What are the levels of pollutants filling our envirnment , and why do we need conservative or liberal scientists to tell us ? (I personally think the air, in general, is as dirty as sin. This is based on my ability to breath, or lack thereof )
I don't care who is causing it, or what party they come from, I just think it's a bad idea.
The real question is " How much pollution can we (meaning the whole world, not just the U.S.) dump into our envirnment before we cause ourselves permanent damage ?"
Is that a partisan question ?
We started to focus on those issues in 1948 with the first water pollution control act followed by the Clean Air Act in 1955. Since then there have been several amendments to each.
But we have lost our momentum in the last 10 years or so and we have been quite lax in enforcement. One of the problems is that we are now down to dealing with details and detailed work takes effort and does not make for big news. Our environmentalists depend on spectacular news in order to bring in funds to support the large costs of the infrastructure they have built up. Thus they have mainly concentrated on big issues that bring in big bucks, issues like global warming that scare people.
Like you, I believe that we need to concentrate on pollution. We are really hurting ourselves with mercury emissions from coal burning, run off from farmers' fields and a whole bunch of other sources of pollution.
I actually believe that the greatest hazard to our health is our food supply. We have loaded our food with toxins and chemicals, greatly degraded its nutritional value through heat and processing, and greatly degraded our protein sources by using grain as feed for farm-raised fish, chicken and beef. Omega-3 which is critical to our health is no longer available in our food supply compared to 100 years ago when we had plenty and did not have heart disease or cancer.
I agree that these are not partisan questions. The question is will we be able to turn our attention from the sensational to the mundane?
Best regards, Ben
Author "Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed"
put that in your bio.
I think Gore's putting a political face on this issue is detrimental because it will turn off the very conservatives that need to take a good look at how their actions affect us all. Then again, who knows if they would listen anyway.
confusing comments, j.
you believe that we need common sense concerning production and consumption. you say conservatives call anyone concerned about the issue "environmentalist whackos", and you are wise enough to acknowledge that they probably wouldn't listen to reason, anyway.
and yet - it's gore's fault for raising any possibility of consequence, for "putting a political face on this issue".
well, what makes this a good article, then?
the conservative slant is that there's no such thing as global warming, nothing to see here, the planet has been doing this for thousands of years.
iow - keep your grubby hands off my oil drill and my smokestack.
preach on, mr. ben.
What irritates me about politicians and extremists alike is that the issues themselves (which are the real important thing, right?) get buried under close-mindedness or inability to see the other's point of view because they get too caught up in being right or getting elected.
The point I was making is part of this article is correct. The issue of "warming" just isn't what the media (and Mr. Gore) has sensationalized it to be according to many scientists.
as a career fossil-fuel man, i'd be interested in hearing mr. ben's ideas on clean energy production.
he has expressed that liberals are using global warming as a means to stuff their coffers. i'd be amazed that he'd see oil and conservatives in the same light.
re: cheney energy meetings of 2001.
What are your ideas on clean energy production, Martin?
Please also tell me what oil and conservatives have done to sensationalize an issue in order to get people to give them money. What issue?
Best regards, Ben
as a career nuclear-fuel man, i'd be interested in hearing mr. ben's ideas on clean energy production.
what happens to nuclear waste, ben?
my ideas on clean energy production are thus: i think it would a good thing for everyone.
here's the deal; you and your fellow energy buddies don't see much benefit for yourselves, i.e. profit, in making cheap power. say, with water or vegetable oil or cow poop.
not much profit in trying to sell us used french fry oil.
so, just as i don't look to the police to arrest themselves, i'm not expecting a rational conversation with you about clean energy production.
say, mr wolf - little help putting this henhouse together, please...
"Please also tell me what oil and conservatives have done to sensationalize an issue in order to get people to give them money."
refer back to me re: cheney energy meetings. it's not exactly the same as sensationalizing an issue, but then we are at war on bogus terms, aren't we....
Congrats, you evaded as usual.
I don't have any energy buddies. As an iconoclast who believed that regulated utilites were the bane of efficiency, creativity and inovation, and that they were very poor managers of people, prefering top-down command and control bureaucracies to servant leadership, I did not have any buddies. In fact, I have never had any buddies and don't believe that having them is a good course of action.
The nuclear Navy which trained me, and in which I had the honor to serve for over 15 years, was the epitome of support for its people. As such, it was able to create breakthrough technologies and achieve things other people believed impossible.
You talk as if you have the moral high ground to people like me. I acted similarly 40 years ago, found it to be dysfunctional and had to work hard on myself to leave it behind. I found it to be a great hindrance to any progress in any field of endeavor, social or technical.
I hope that you are having better results from it.
Best regards, Ben
i'm not selling a book and telling people how rosy the world is right now.
ikyabwai.
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No other country with operating nuclear reactors seems to have a problem. Just do what they do. One of their methods is to have the Russians store it in Russia. As I said before, it is possible that with our sorry court system, it may not be possible to have more nuclear plants in the U.S. and that extends to handling waste, but there are several different effective methods in use worldwide.
Best regards, Ben
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"In the half century of the nuclear age, the U.S. has accumulated some 30,000 metric tons of spent fuel rods from power reactors and another 380,000 cubic meters of high-level radioactive waste, a by-product of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. None of these materials have found anything more than interim accomadation, despite decades of study and expenditures in the billions of dollars on research, development and storage."
Chris G. Whipple, Can Nuclear Waste Be Stored at Yucca Mountain?
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why did you guys rush headlong into this as an industry when there was no method of disposal?
25,000 years is a long half-life.
someone else's problem?
He sounds like a kook.
WRT nuclear power, Martin is asking some of the right questions. Benji--true to form--refuses to answer the hard questions and prefers to repeat his mantra about when he was in the Navy as some kind of weird talisman.
I have a feeling Rickover would be turning over in his grave if he saw some of Benji's logic.
Even in the Navy's nuke power program, there were accidents. And this was in a program where the Navy piled layer upon layer of redundancy and safety measures on the system.
Now, imagine what a civilian program might look like where that redundancy is missing and safety is something of an afterthought.
Jade says that "Even in the Navy's nuke power program, there were accidents. And this was in a program where the Navy piled layer upon layer of redundancy and safety measures on the system. Now, imagine what a civilian program might look like where that redundancy is missing and safety is something of an afterthought."
Jade, what civilian reactor plant systems have less redundancy and safety than those in naval nuclear reactor plants? Please restrict your response to civilian PWRs.
And, Jade, what nuclear reactor accidents do you contend occurred in the Navy reactor plants?
Best regards, Ben
ben, all of them.
sweeping your mess under yucca mountain is not cleaning up. your mom knows that.
1954--USS SEAWOLF reactor scuttled off MD/DE coast
1955--Arco, ID-partial core meltdown
1959--One killed, 3 injured when prototype reactor for USS TRITON explodes
1961--Arco, ID: A reactor explosion killed 1 Navy tech and 2 Army techs at NRTS.
1961--USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT contaminated with radioactive waste in a blowback accident
1963--USS THRESHER lost
1968--Radioactive coolant water accidently released from USS SWORDFISH
1968--USS SCORPION lost
1971--Radioactive coolant water released by USS DACE during transfer op
1975--USS PROTEUS releases radioactive coolant water
1978--USS PUFFER releases radioactive coolant water
The first nuclear submarine was commissioned in 1954 and the Seawolf was not placed in commission until 1955 much less ever have a nuclear accident. Apparently, you don't know the difference between a "nuclear accident" and any other event such as a sinking due to flooding or running into a sea mount or a release of radioactive water. The USS Proteus doesn't even have a nuclear reactor. The prototype reactor for the Triton did not explode and that is not possible with a PWR. Your knowledge of this subject is woefully inadequate to any purpose.
hey - you have more knowledge about nuclear subs than me. go figure.
however, that doesn't qualify your postulations.
On Martin's nuclear argument, I think one solution is to find a use for the nuclear "waste," much as we are starting to do with our regular waste. It will be stored until a time that it can be used. It's funny, Martin, that you speak of leaving this problem for someone else to solve. Isn't methane harvested from former landfills?
Jade, I love you, faults and all.
Ben: I forgot to say, great post, sir!
As we both know, the SEAWOLF initially had a sodium-cooled reactor. But this reactor suffered so many casualties, the Navy pulled the reactor and scuttled it offshore.
But notice how enji has deflected the discussion? He makes a typo the point of discussion--ignoring the fact the Navy's nuke program has suffered numerous accidents.
AND the reactor was not replaced and disposed of because of suffering "so many casualties" as you contend. Rickover and his staff had not known which design, PWR or sodium, would be better. So they decided to produce one of each, Nautilus with water cooled in '54 and Seawolf with sodium cooled in '55. By '58 they decided to concentrate on the PWR for a myriad of reasons, not the least of which was that it would have been far too expensive to maintain design teams for both. There were many who literally loved the sodium design including most of Seawolf's crew.
You characterized the replacement and subsequent disposal at sea as a "nuclear accident", one of the Navy's "numerous accidents". You completely misrepresent the truth in all the cases you cited.
An ugly smear campaign!
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blow me
"Picking holes in the IPCC is crucial. The notion that if you're ignorant of something and somebody comes up with a wrong answer, and you have to accept that because you don't have another wrong answer to offer is like faith healing, it's like quackery in medicine – if somebody says you should take jelly beans for cancer and you say that's stupid, and he says, well can you suggest something else and you say, no, does that mean you have to go with jelly beans?"
brilliant logic. obviously global warming is a money-making scam.
You had said "Even in the Navy's nuke power program, there were accidents. And this was in a program where the Navy piled layer upon layer of redundancy and safety measures on the system. Now, imagine what a civilian program might look like where that redundancy is missing and safety is something of an afterthought."
I then asked "What civilian reactor plant systems have less redundancy and safety than those in naval nuclear reactor plants? Please restrict your response to civilian PWRs."
I still await your answer.
I was qualified on the reactors of three different cruisers and two different aircraft carrier nuclear reactors and am quite familiar with one civilian reactor plant. When I retired from the Navy and became familiar with the systems of a civilian reactor plant, I was struck by the considerable increase in levels of protection, safety and redundancy in the civilian plant over that in naval reactor plants.
So my experience indicates that the truth is the exact opposite of what you contend.
I await your support for your contention.
You're quite wrong; the sodium-cooled reactor aboard SEAWOLF was so fraught with problems--the Navy swapped it out in favor of a pressurized water reactor. They then scuttled the sodium reactor and its attendant 33K Ci off the coast of MD/DE. It remains, today, the single largest release of radiation released into the ocean.
As concerns the single largest release of radiation into the ocean, none of the radioactive material in the reactor has been released into ocean. Besides, what are the radiation levels outside the container, Jade?
Let's take a famous one: Three Mile Island. As you're aware, there was a problem at TMI about 30 years ago. The genesis of this problem was a very small problem (feedwater drains being clogged) being escalated into a catastrophe by a series of misjudgements and equipment failures. Out of a number of cascading problems at TMI-perhaps the greatest was the fact reactor operators were seeing relief valves (12 a and b) as being closed when they were, in fact, open. This mistake wasn't discovered until part of the core had melted.
The Navy would have configuration control measures in place that would have eliminated this problem. Additionally, the Navy wouldn't have designed a system without better logic systems and more redundant systems.
In fact, during the investigation after TMI--it was discovered the control room consoles were littered with "error tags" which were hand-written tags which described a particular control's function and how it actually functioned.
Is that how we do business in the Navy, Benji? I think not.
Indian Point is another civilian reactor I'd point out is ready for a problem. For over 10 years, it has been pointed out Indian Point's emergency cooling is both inadequate and will likely fail. To date, the problem hasn't been fixed. The Navy would have secured such a plant years ago.
Indian Point is the reactor plant about which I have considerable knowledge since I worked for Con Edison.
I was recommended to GPU by then Admiral Rickover to take charge of the Three Mile Island cleanup. In the process of evaluating whether or not I would even take such a position, I was instructed about the plant and the accident by a man I knew well and who had served on the Three Mile Island accident review group.
Your contention that civilian plants have less redundancy and less levels of safety is just plain BS.
Whatever you are smoking, I suggest that you stop before you suffer further.
i'll find it, hang on...
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yes, from this it's apparent that the private sector runs a tight ship.
Sadly, Benji, I know you're talking through your hat.
Are you seriously suggesting a Navy SSBN's control room is going to have error tags dangling from its lamps and buttons and switches?
I don' think so.
Benji, you really have to stop this pretense that you're the only one who has ever been in the Navy and been subjected to Rickover's interview process and the only one to have attended nuke power school.
Rickover's daughter said Rickover came to regrethaving convinced Carter to dilute the report.
Keep it up. Ben
Author "Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed"
Frankly, for one who cliams to be such an intimate of Rickover's--you know precious little about the man.
You must be easy on me because compared to you I know very little about much of anything.
Best regards, Ben
Author "Leading People to be Highly Motivated and Committed"
how about this one, instead.
i hope Stanley Lewandowski, Jr isn't a close friend.
0nly4 ad homs and a little sarcasm - are you under the weather?
Oh and didn't you realise that Be is on the cutting edge of green thinking with James Lovelock and Stewart Brand and Patrick Moore - oh I forgot - Moore's the Devil, sorry.
Love you to bits
Do I think we are in a warming trend?Maybe we are, but I do know that eventually we will also experience a global cooling trend and then again a warming, it is the natural cycle of the planet.
Should we strive for a clean environment? Yes, but don't use this issue as the stepping stone, it is full of a lot of BS by those more interested in destroying our way of life, destroying the dominance of the United States, securing that next research grant....not about "curing the planet of its fever".
In our state we have a lot of formerly polluted, toxic land and water that is now the cleanest its been in over a century, I say we are taking notice and are doing our job to clean up our environment, but just isn't good enough for extremists.