Government officeholders at federal and state levels assume that global warming is chiefly, if not entirely, due to mankind’s growing carbon dioxide emissions, but they have not examined the science enough.
Most of our political leaders see the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports as presenting an indisputable scientific consensus. Meanwhile, lawyers successfully argue that CO2 is now a pollutant, and around the world armies of regulatory bureaucracies eagerly anticipate expansion of their funding and power to “save the planet.”
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This belief is amplified by many in the world’s media and from environmental advocacy groups, who ask sponsors and supporters to help them promote a CO2-reduction crusade.
In Maryland, Gov. Martin O’Malley’s administration is preparing policy initiatives based upon implied statewide ecological consequences of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, thanks largely to the Maryland Commission on Climate Change that O’Malley created.
But all this frenetic activity resembles an inverted pyramid — a massive weight with only a single point of support.
And just what is this single support? It certainly does not follow logically that CO2 emissions drive a warming trend that began prior to widespread fossil fuel use and that has yet to reach the magnitude of the medieval warm period when Vikings colonized Greenland.
Nor is a climate catastrophe implied by the presently observed rate of warming.
Those conclusions are reached only if one accepts two intermediate steps: (1) that science has separated anthropogenic effects from natural climate oscillations; and (2) that the atmosphere-ocean system is metastable so CO2-induced warming will trigger a runaway process.
Neither point has widespread support among those of us who have actually worked with atmospheric processes. Not only is the debate not over; it is expanding.
In today’s overly politicized culture, however, outsiders hastily dismiss such skepticism by following the lead of former Vice President Al Gore. As readers of his books have learned, Mr. Gore came to resent tobacco companies’ use of scientific “deniers” to cover up the linkage between smoking and lung cancer after watching his beloved sister die of it.
Unfortunately, he has transferred that hatred to anyone who denies his belief in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. His environmental disciples mimic him, using the ad hominem retort that we all are oil company lackeys.
Let’s hope that as the fall semester gets under way, science teachers will motivate their students to study the anchor questions of points (1) and (2) rather than accept a document generated by a U.N. bureaucracy that provided no final comment by its scientific authors.
Too many valuable resources are needed for justifiable environmental management to waste them on a speculation for which there is no scientific consensus. Such inverted pyramids are dangerous.
Charles Clough is an atmospheric scientist and was chief of the Atmospheric Effects Team with the Department of the Army at Aberdeen Proving Ground from 1982 until 2006.
