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]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] CLIMATE OF FEAR [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
The Greenhouse Effect May Be Mostly Hot Air (2/28/89)
by Jonathan R. Laing
From Barron's, vol. 69, no. 9 (27 February 1989), p. 6
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
Weather and rain are on a lot of Americans' minds these days.
The freakishly warm and dry January in much of the U.S. seemed
only to reinforce a conviction that Mother Nature was somehow out
of kilter. Reservoir levels and water tables are dangerously low
from New England to Georgia. Communities in eastern Massachusetts
are already bracing for water-conservation programs because the
reservoir problem has only been compounded by the likelihood of
inadequate snow run-off. Likewise a poor snow pack in the Sierra
Madre mountains imperils cotton and alfalfa farming next summer
in some areas of Southern California.
Meanwhile, a large area of the Corn Belt west of the
Mississippi continues to suffer from insufficient subsoil
moisture despite mostly adequate rain and snow cover since last
summer's drought. Proper soybean and corn root development can't
take place without this reserve being replenished. And the U.S.
winter wheat crop, now lying dormant in the southern tier Plains
States of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska could suffer
irreversible damage if spring rains fail to materialize. Moisture
was mostly poor when the crop was planted in the fall --
particularly in the key growing area of Kansas, which has been
dry ever since. Conditions are even worse in the northern Great
Plains, where the spring wheat crop has yet to be planted. ``This
may be the biggest problem area of all because moisture is never
abundant here in the best of circumstances and droughts tend to
persist,'' observes Peter Leavitt, executive vice president of
Weather Services Corp., a private Bedford, Mass.-based
meteorological service used by many commodity speculators and
others.
Of course, as any grizzled commodity traders [sic] knows,
crops are often killed many times on their way to bountiful
harvests. But adding an edge to the general concern over the
weather is the hysteria that developed last summer after a
handful of prominent scientists and environmentalists warned of a
nascent pattern of uncontrollable global warming. In the
hothouse atmosphere of the summer heat wave, the once quaint
scientific notion of the ``greenhouse effect'' flowered
luxuriantly into accepted fact.
Simply put, the theory holds that ever-increasing amounts of
carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and other ``trace gases'' spewed
into the atmosphere by industry, agriculture and other human
activities is trapping too much solar heat and reflecting the
warmth back to earth. According to some greenhouse researchers,
global mean temperatures have already risen nearly one degree
Fahrenheit in the past century and could climb another three to
eight degrees by the middle of the next century. This, in turn,
could unleash an Old Testament succession of calamities from
endemic droughts and heat waves to rising seas and killer floods
and typhoons. The fact that the 1988 drought also was the first
since the Depression to coincide with a national Presidential
election year only served to heighten the hubbub.
To some scientists, even a return to the dismal days of the
Dust Bowl would be preferable to the long-term climate conditions
they see lying ahead. For they fear that the Drought of 1988 was
merely a prologue to a dangerous trend in global warming. The
Armageddon of the greenhouse effect is deemed the ultimate
payback for mankind's abuse of the environment in the same sense
that depression is the ultimate consequence of indiscriminate
credit practices and AIDS the punishment for promiscuous sexual
habits. One gets what one deserves.
The theory of global warming was first propounded in the late
19th century by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius [1859-1927; 1903
Nobel Prize in Chemistry]. He predicted that as the Industrial
Revolution gathered force and more coal-burning factories boosted
the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere, the earth would
warm markedly. It wasn't all bad news for Scandinavia, of
course. Northern climes would benefit from warmer weather and
longer growing seasons.
The greenhouse theory enjoyed a new vogue during the 'Fifties
when the summers grew hotter than normal. Its leading proponent
then was Roger Revelle, the director of Scripps Institution for
Oceanography. And though cooling temperatures in the subsequent
two decades sent the theory into hibernation, it was kept alive
by environmentalists and ``soft energy path'' supporters.
But all that changed on June 23 of last year [1988] during a
Senate Committee hearing on global warming. That day, James E.
Hansen, a physicist and chief of NASA's Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, testified to a hushed, crowded chamber that the
greenhouse effect, far from being a theoretical construct, had
arrived with stunning certainty. He based his conclusions on
global temperature and climate data showing that mean
temperatures had risen by nearly one degree since the 19th
century. Moreover, he maintained that an elaborate NASA computer
model indicated a consistent relationship between the rise in CO2
and other trace gases in the atmosphere and temperatures.
The appearance was a bombshell, and the greenhouse theory
attracted plenty of media attention in the weeks ahead. For the
fit between scientific theory and reality seemed too close for
coincidence with the drought ravaging the corn and soybean crops
in the Midwest and the heat wave withering much of the rest of
the country.
Climate experts and conservationists repeated the notion that
the decade of the 'Eighties had seen four of the hottest years on
record. This was a consequence of a 25% rise in CO2 levels in
the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and
the situation was destined only to get worse as the gas buildup
doubled by the middle of the next century. According to several
oft-cited computer models, these elevated gas levels would mean
an increase in global mean temperature of three to 10 degrees.
The news stories left little to the imagination. The verdant
growing areas of the Midwest might migrate to Canada, rendering
Iowa a parched wasteland. Ocean levels might rise six to 10 feet
as the polar icecap melted and water expanded, threatening not
only the Netherlands and Bagladesh [sic] but also Malibu and Cape
Cod. Eastern cities would be choked with smog while the West
faced blazing temperatures and raging forest fires. Devastating
typhoons and hurricanes would visit many areas of the globe.
Aquifiers from Florida to Long Island would become tainted with
sea water. In short, ecological disaster loomed.
Contributing to the greenhouse effect are a myriad of human
activities, according to the theory. CO2, for example, is
discharged variously by automobiles, and by power plants and
factories powered by coal, oil and natural gas. Adding to the
effluvium in the atmosphere is methane gas, which is a byproduct
of wood burning, rice farming, garbage dumps and livestock
flatulence. Chemical fertilizers and car emissions are, in turn,
releasing nitrous oxides into the atmosphere. And finally, there
are chlorofluorocarbons from plastic foam, industrial solvents
and refrigerator coolants thaj`r&cæNot only blamed for shredding
the earth'ÀÍ—zone layer in the stratosphere but also for adding
to the gaseous witches' brew in the atmosphere below.
Of course, naturally occurring CO2 in the atmosphere is a key
element in making the earth habitable. Without this atmospheric
blanket, which both admits sunlight and then reflects back a
portion of the infra-red radiation emitted by earth, the planet
would suffer the icy temperatures of a Mars.
But more than a century of fossil-fuel burning and other
pollution has irretrievably upset this natural balance, say
greenhouse theorists. To make matters worse, warming oceans will
give off rather than soak up CO2. Further, the earth's
fast-disappearing rain forests can't be counted on to absorb as
much CO2 as formerly.
The greenhouse furor already has sparked a flurry of activity.
Several Senate bills have been introduced proposing drastic cuts
in the emission of fossil fuels. An international conference in
Canada last summer attended by a number of government officials
featured speeches by the prime ministers of both Canada and
Norway calling for an international agreement on the problem.
Much pressure is being applied to Brazil and other developing
nations by international agencies to curb their destruction of
the environment in industrializing. Funding is building for
additional academic research on the question.
Even the nuclear lobby is quietly galvanizing, for nuclear
reactors emit no CO2. Nuclear proponents make strange bedfellows
with their erstwhile environmentalist opponents. Kinder and
gentler reactor designs using safer materials and virtually
immune to meltdowns are under active development (Barron's, Feb.
20). However, plans for the new nukes are being kept somewhat
under wraps until the industry succeeds in getting all of its
existing dinosaur plants activated and into the rate base.
Skepticism of the greenhouse theory runs rampant in the
scientific community. The voices of dissent have been mostly
silent, though, because of the natural reluctance of scientists
to dismiss new claims without investigation and deliberate
analysis.
One not so inhibited, however, is Reid Bryson, a professor of
geology, geography, meteorology and several other related
disciplines at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The
69-year-old self-proclaimed curmudgeon is a towering figure in
the climate field, well-known not only for articles in National
Geographic and his 'Seventies book classic, Climates of Hunger,
but also for a large body of academic work. To Bryson, the
memorable Senate testimony of NASA's Hansen was a ``phenomenal
snow job'' and the greenhouse theory ``a triumph of sociology
over science.''
According to Bryson, a number of problems exist with the world
temperature data used by researchers at NASA and elsewhere as
evidence of global warming over the past century. For one thing,
there are large gaps in the geographical coverage of the
readings, including the vast reaches of the south Pacific and
south Indian oceans.
In his testimony last June, Hansen confidently asserted that
1988 was likely to be the warmest year on record barring any
``remarkable and improbable'' cooling over the remainder of the
year. Well, the tropical Pacific Ocean did cool drastically even
as he was speaking. An enormous cold front also settled over a
remote area of Siberia as large as the Great Plains. So did 1988
set a global heat record? It depends on what data set one looks
at and which ``experts'' one consults. ``People's myopia about
climate occurrences is amazing,'' huffs Bryson.
At the same time, a goodly part of any rise in U.S.
temperatures is apparently due to a phenomenon called the heat
island effect. Namely, large heat-radiating cities have grown up
around once isolated temperature-reading stations. Airports are
not only popular thermometer sites but hot ones.
Bryson is also disdainful of the global-climate computer
models of NASA and other research groups. And indeed, these
models have stumbled in a number of respects. Global
temperatures in the past hundred years have risen less than half
as much as the models would have imputed, given the rise in
atmospheric CO2 levels. Also, a number of telltale effects of
global warming predicted by the models haven't come to pass.
More warming seems to have occurred in the Southern Hemisphere
(which is 90% covered by water) than in the Northern Hemisphere,
even though water is supposed to take longer to warm than land.
``The models also claim that far-northern latitudes should
warm the most because of diminished heat-reflecting ice and snow
cover, and yet Alaska had record cold this winter,'' Bryson
observes. ``So here we have the new computer models, which
neither back test nor explain contemporary weather patterns very
well, being used by the researchers and the media to make 50-year
weather forecasts. The models, in my estimation, are just mule
muffins.''
Even among experts who accept the greenhouse theory, much
controversy rages over the consequences of the phenomenon. Some
researchers, such as Patrick Michaels, professor of environmental
sciences at the University of Virginia, expect that increasing
clouds and precipitation could mitigate much of the negative
impact of any further temperature rise. Several eminent Soviet
climatologists agree with this position. ``We are already seeing
some of this pattern in the drastic reduction in daily
temperature ranges noted in the U.S. in the past 50 years,''
Michaels asserts. ``But the resulting warmer nights and cooler,
cloudier days, if it continues, is something we can live with.
It's not worth changing the world's energy policy for.
Particularly, when reliance on fossil fuels is likely to give way
to cheap nuclear power and electrical transmission exploiting
superconductivity and God knows what else in the next century.''
Through the eons, nothing seems more protean than the earth's
climate. The Rockies stand now where an inland ocean once
existed. Mysterious changes in climate have sparked mass
extinctions like the disappearance of the dinosaurs 65 million
years ago. Much of North America was covered with ice as
recently as 12,000 years ago.
Yet nature and climate are also ruled by cycles and
periodicity. The counterpoint of day and night and the passage of
the seasons are the most obvious examples. Lunar tides follow a
distinct monthly pattern. But climatologists have identified
many other cycles that are dictated by recondite, long-term
shifts and wobbles in the earth's orbiting of the sun and the
changing gravitational pull of the moon. Among the longest of
these cycles are the 95,000-, 123,000- and 413,000-year
Milankovich cycles. The orbital shifts and other astronomical
activity are thought to alter climate by causing major movement
in Earth's atmosphere, seas and continental plates, which, in
turn, trigger ocean cooling and warming, volcanoes and the like.
Compared with many of these forces, the greenhouse effect seems
ephemeral and trivial.
One believer in long-term weather cycles is Frank Koucky, a
professor of geology at College of Wooster in Ohio. He claims to
have identified an approximate 570-year cycle of alternate global
warming and cooling in recent millennia.
These cycles have lasted long enough to bring about dramatic
changes in climate to many areas. During the cooling phase,
temperatures drop and precipitation increases, causing glaciers
to advance in northern regions of the planet and deserts to
retreat in the Middle East and elsewhere. Then comes the warming
phase, when glaciers recede, deserts grow and multiple drought
years reappear, causing farming to push Northward.
Happily, the estimable professor's data indicate that the
world has reached the peak of the latest warming cycle, which
extends back to the end of what came to be known in Europe as the
Little Ice Age of the 18th century. And like the previous hot
cycle in the 12th and 13th centuries that effectively ended the
Crusades and brought decades of drought to the Great Plains, this
one will soon give way to a cooling phase. ``Greenhouse or no
greenhouse, the Earth is going to cool noticeably over the next
50 years, by my calculations,'' Koucky told Barron's.
His theory is the product of years of geological surveying at
archaeological sites in the now arid regions of the Transjordan
desert and the Negev. What intrigued him about many of the sites
were the corresponding waves of occupation for 200 to 300 years
and then abandonment for several centuries that formed 500 to 500
cycles going back to Neolithic times. History, of course, played
a role, as some of the cities fell to invading Assyrians and
Persians in the era before Christ and to Romans and Byzantines
after. But the seeming metronome regularity of the settlement
and relinquishment implied other factors.
Koucky theorized that these settlements, perched precariously
on the edge of the desert, probably were done in by drought and
cyclical advance of the desert. ``Any single year of the drought
the inhabitants could handle because they always kept seed and
breeding stock in reserve,'' he explained. ``But multiple years
of dry weather left them no choice but to leave.''
Buttressing his theory, he says, are the dendrochronology
records of bristle-cone pines in the American Southwest. After
carefully averaging the size of the tree growth rings, a similar
pattern of 560-year cycles emerges, according to Koucky. Even
more telling, Koucky claims that the times of occupation and
abandonment for the Middle Eastern border areas and the American
Indian sites in the Southwest both closely matched the wet and
dry cycles indicated by the tree rings.
Some years earlier, Koucky had done extensive studies and
carbon dating of recessional moraines [moraine, rock and debris
carried and finally deposited by a glacier] in the U.S. Midwest.
The debris, left layer by layer as glaciers advanced, retreated
and readvanced between 22,000 and 12,000 B.C., yielded evidence
of a similar 550-to-600-year cycle of warming and cooling. The
moraines became accessible for study only after large cuts were
made through them in the early 'Sixties during construction of
the Interstate Highway System.
Finally, Koucky asserts that the rise and fall of the water
level of Hudson Bay in Canada, as geologically preserved in beach
ridges, also shows a matching 600-year cycle. In addition, the
beach ridges fill in the gap between the glaciers and the
bristle-cone pine evidence, giving what Koucky asserts is more
than 20,000 years of supporting data.
The cause of the cycle Koucky hypothesizes remains something
of a mystery. Koucky thinks that an abstruse astronomical
phenomenon relating to a 556-year variation in the moon's orbit
path around the earth may trigger dramatic changes in ocean
currents and temperatures. The world's oceans, of course, are a
major climatic factor. Some other geologists note a
550-to-600-year cycle in volcano activity that might account for
the climate variations.
If Koucky is right, the Earth would escape the dire
consequences of further global warming. And that's relief
enough. Of course, then people might start worrying about the
next great Ice Age.
* * *
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