- Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental
studies at the Cato Institute and author of "The Satanic
Gases."
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- The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has just issued
yet another report on global warming. A substantial part of it is based
upon the "U.S. National Assessment" (USNA) of global warming,
yet another government report that came out right before the last election.
In turn, it was based, in large part, on computer models used in yet
another
government report on global warming, from the United Nations'
Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change.
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- Together, the best I can tell, these were produced by
a total of a couple thousand people. Together, they were dead wrong about
the most fundamental aspect of climate change, namely how we are changing
our atmosphere.
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- First, a little physics. It has been known since at least
1872 that carbon dioxide--a byproduct of combustion, or the
meta-respiration
of civilization, dependent upon your point of view--traps warming
radiation.
It has also long been known that its warming effect becomes less at
increasingly
high concentrations. As a result, a constant increase in atmospheric carbon
dioxide results in less and less warming over time.
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- So, the only way to keep warming the atmosphere at a
constant rate is to add carbon dioxide at an increasing, or exponential
rate. This is what the U.N., the USNA, and the National Academy all assume
... at least inasmuch as the Academy report states its parentage is the
USNA, in its section titled "Consequences of Increased Climate
Change".
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- The fact is that carbon dioxide has not accumulated in
the atmosphere at an exponential rate for the last quarter-century: This
is obvious to anyone with an Internet connection (in order to download
a graph of the carbon dioxide history), eyeballs and a ruler. You will
see that the behavior of the last 25 years looks a lot more like a straight
line than an upward-pointing curve. Those with statistical expertise could
also enter the data into a program like Excel and see if drawing an
up-curve
through the data results in a significant improvement over a straight line.
The answer, for the last 25 years, is no.
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- This can only mean one thing. The linear change in carbon
dioxide for the last quarter-century will result in an inevitable and
inexorable
slowing of global warming in coming decades.
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- So why isn't carbon dioxide increasing exponentially,
even as the number of people are? Two reasons: We are becoming increasingly
efficient, and the planet is getting greener.
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- We now produce a (deflated) dollar's worth of stuff using
about half as much energy as we used to. Neither the U.N. nor the EU,
despite
their blustering, forced us to do this. Instead, stockholders made it
happen,
demanding more output for less cost. There's every reason to expect this
behavior to continue.
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- The earth got greener because more carbon dioxide made
the plants grow better, and a warming, primarily of the winter, lengthened
the growing season. Will this greening stop, as some fear, when forests
become mature and fall over? Not if they're turned into houses, which last
for hundreds of years. This is one very good argument for managed, as
opposed
to "natural" forestry.
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- How could the Academy, the National Assessment Team,
and the United Nations fail to notice that they got the basic behavior
of carbon dioxide (and therefore, future warming) wrong? Could thousands
of scientists simply miss what anyone with a hard drive and a ruler can
see? Of course not. But where would my profession be if we couldn't scare
you into funding us any more?
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- In a world where he who presents the scariest argument
gets the most funding, everything is threatening and nothing is
benign.
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- It's not just in climate science, either. How about
cancer?
We spend just about as much money there as we do on global warming. The
government regales us with impressively weak associations between diet,
urban air, polar ozone depletion and death, when the lion's share of cancer
deaths would go away if people would simply choose not to smoke ciggie
butts. Which causes more cancer--increasing ultraviolet radiation by 2
percent from ozone depletion (itself maybe too large an estimate) or going
to the beach and taking off 98 percent of your clothes? But simple behavior
changes cashier armies of regulators, who, thank you, would much rather
be employed. So we tout the obscure while ignoring the obvious.
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- Which, sadly, is why thousands of the best minds in
America
aren't eager to tell you that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide have
been so slow that global warming is likely to slow down in future decades.
Exactly when, though, no one knows. Please pass the funding until I figure
this out.
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- http://www.cato.org/commentary/index.html
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- MainPage
http://www.rense.com
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