Mick Hartley

Politics and Culture

Heretical Thoughts

August 14, 2007

An interesting article by Freeman Dyson, on the need for heretics in science (via b&w):

My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated…

There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. I am not saying that the warming does not cause problems. Obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it better. I am saying that the problems are grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are more urgent and more important, such as poverty and infectious disease and public education and public health, and the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans, not to mention easy problems such as the timely construction of adequate dikes around the city of New Orleans…

My second heresy is also concerned with climate change. It is about the mystery of the wet Sahara. This is a mystery that has always fascinated me. At many places in the Sahara desert that are now dry and unpopulated, we find rock-paintings showing people with herds of animals. The paintings are abundant, and some of them are of high artistic quality, comparable with the more famous cave-paintings in France and Spain. The Sahara paintings are more recent than the cave-paintings. They come in a variety of styles and were probably painted over a period of several thousand years. The latest of them show Egyptian influences and may be contemporaneous with early Egyptian tomb paintings. Henri Lhote’s book, “The Search for the Tassili Frescoes”, [Lhote, 1958], is illustrated with reproductions of fifty of the paintings. The best of the herd paintings date from roughly six thousand years ago. They are strong evidence that the Sahara at that time was wet. There was enough rain to support herds of cows and giraffes, which must have grazed on grass and trees. There were also some hippopotamuses and elephants. The Sahara then must have been like the Serengeti today.

At the same time, roughly six thousand years ago, there were deciduous forests in Northern Europe where the trees are now conifers, proving that the climate in the far north was milder than it is today. There were also trees standing in mountain valleys in Switzerland that are now filled with famous glaciers. The glaciers that are now shrinking were much smaller six thousand years ago than they are today. Six thousand years ago seems to have been the warmest and wettest period of the interglacial era that began twelve thousand years ago when the last Ice Age ended. I would like to ask two questions. First, if the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is allowed to continue, shall we arrive at a climate similar to the climate of six thousand years ago when the Sahara was wet? Second, if we could choose between the climate of today with a dry Sahara and the climate of six thousand years ago with a wet Sahara, should we prefer the climate of today? My second heresy answers yes to the first question and no to the second. It says that the warm climate of six thousand years ago with the wet Sahara is to be preferred, and that increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may help to bring it back. I am not saying that this heresy is true. I am only saying that it will not do us any harm to think about it.

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8 responses to “Heretical Thoughts”

BlueKat

August 15, 2007

Uh, you might prefer it if you LIVE in the freakin’ Sahara. Otherwise, not so much. I’d prefer not having had to live through the last week in the American South in record breaking 100 plus degree temperatures and 90% humidity.
Where I live used to be under the ocean and the Blue Ridge used to look like the Rockies but I can see no advantage to wishing for that time to occur again.
Reasonable people do not conclude that human are the cause of global warming, but there is overwhelming scientific evidence that we are contributing to it. So why not stop, inasmuch as it is possible?
Doing so will inspire new growth in business opportunities, so why the right is adamantly against it is a true mystery to me, unless as a pointless political position inspired not so much for a better future than an opportunity to discredit Al Gore. How idiotic.

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Richard Dell

August 15, 2007

Dyson is one of the great visionaries of 20th century science, and scepticism is one of science’s key tools. However, scepticism is not much use should you, say, wish to build a nuclear power station in an earthquake zone – precaution becomes more appropriate. The attitude and policy you take on an issue must depend on the consequences of being wrong.
Evidence for global warming yielding highly undesirable consequences for humanity is significant. The IPCC report paints a very detailed and pretty grim picture. However it was subject to political editing, and “alarmist” conclusions were removed on the insistance of countries such as Saudi Arabia. Even worse, all effects that could not be quantified were excised, yet it is in just such areas that some of the most eminent scientists, such as James Hansen (Head of NASA’s Goddard Institute), are deeply concerned, particularly about the rate of glacier melting. Against such evidence, Dyson is dangerously complacent.
Another scientist of the calibre of Dyson, and with more pertinent qualifications, James Lovelock, holds a deeply pessimistic view of the consequences of global warming, to the extent that he believes that it is far too late to stop it, even if we found the resolve to do so. He bases this on evidence (from increasing magnitudes of natural oscillations) that positive feedbacks now predominate. We should all prepare for sea level rise, wild weather, loss of agriculture, disruption of trade, mass migrations, civil strife, pestilence and wars of extermination. Hope for the best, by all means, but prepare for the worst.

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Cleanthes

August 15, 2007

“Doing so will inspire new growth in business opportunities, so why the right is adamantly against it is a true mystery to me”
Because the AGW believers aren’t advocating anything of that nature. Technological solutions – the kind of thing that would indeed inspire new growth in business opportunities – are very specifically taboo. Only massively centralised, statist solutions are allowed. THAT’S why the “right”, as well as the “Right”, are against the hype.
You only have to look at the IPCC scenarios themselves to see this. The A1 family – more globalisation, more free trade – leads to lower population growth (7-8 Billion by 2100), much less poverty and less severe outcomes. The A2 scenarios – regionalisation, restriction of trade – ends up the opposite.
Guess which policies the right (as well as the “Right”) prefers? And which ones the AGW believers prefer?
I’ll believe the doomsayers when they start advocating solutions that they wouldn’t do otherwise.

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DaninVan

August 15, 2007

Speaking of James Hansen, as commenter Richard Dell was, it would appear that his copy book has been blotted…http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2005/04/28/james-hansen-increasingly-insensitive/

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dearieme

August 15, 2007

There is no scientific evidence worth tuppence on human-caused Global Warming. What there is is the output of a bunch of simulations of a system about which we are far too ignorant to simulate it with even the roughest of accuracy. These outputs are then compared, in a rough way, with measurements that are scanty, approximate, and themselves the output of “correction” calculations whose nature is, essentially, kept secret. The little bits that are in the public domain leave me with the feeling that the “correction” algorithms used lie somewhere on the spectrum between battily incompetent and downright crooked.

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DaninVan

August 15, 2007

dearieme; in the public forum the whole ball of wax has been dumped in one pigeon hole. (pardon the hashed up metaphors). Unfortunately, by discounting efforts to control “greenhouse gases”, efforts to control chemical pollution both in the atmosphere and in water, get lost in the discussion.
Sulfurous compounds, mostly from coal burning in the East and pulp and paper manufacturing in the West, have been a scourge here in N.A.for decades.
Bleach, also from the pulp &paper sector, has caused tremendous environmental damage here in B.C. and Ontario. http://www.ccme.ca/assets/pdf/d_and_f_standard_e.pdf
I fear that Government focus on cleaning up chemical pollution has been lost to the new darling of the chattering classes, CO2, as someone so quaintly put it.
The next time someone says “Carbon Credits” to me, as if they had the foggiest idea of w.t.f. they were talking about…

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Richard Dell

August 16, 2007

To Daninvan. When last I looked, Ad Hominem was not a scientific technique. Would the AAAS suit you better?
http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/
There are many of similar eminence, who are also deeply concerned. The forcing function caused by the Milankovic orbit cycles are actually quite weak, yet cause our Ice Ages. Forcing from C02, and CH4 are significantly larger. But I am not too concerned about what people think on this, as it will make little difference – what will be, will be.

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DaninVan

August 18, 2007

In a ‘Canada.com’ article taken from the journal ‘Science’:
“Biofuels are bad, new report concludes
Scientists say it makes more sense to grow forests than ‘energy crops’
BY MARGARET MUNRO
Restoring and protecting forests would do far more to reduce the carbon load in the atmosphere than dedicating vast tracts of land to “energy crops,” a new report says.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently announced a $1.5-billion, nine-year plan to make Canada a leader in biofuel production. But there is concern in many quarters about the “green” energy boom, which critics say is having a serious environmental impact around the globe as forests are levelled and farm land is set aside to grow biofuel crops.
The report, published today in the journal Science, assesses biofuels — produced by using everything from sugar cane to wheat — and compared carbon emissions associated with their use over the next 30 years.
It concludes that growing trees and restoring forests is a far more effective way to reduce emissions linked with global warming and climate change.
“In all cases, forestation of an equivalent area of land would sequester two to nine times more carbon over a 30-year period than the emissions avoided by the use of the biofuel,” says the report by Renton Righelato of the World Land Trust and Dominick Spracklen of the University of Leeds. Taking this into account, “the emissions cost of liquid biofuels exceeds that of fossil fuels.”
They note energy crops require an enormous amount of land: to replace just 10 per cent of gasoline and diesel fuel would require an estimated 43 per cent of crop land in the U.S. and 38 per cent of crop land in Europe. And clearing grasslands and forests to grow energy crops releases carbon stored in existing vegetation and soil and creates large up-front emissions that the report says would “outweigh the avoided emissions.”
Only biofuel from woody biomass may be compatible with retention of the carbon now locked in forests, the researchers say. It might be possible to “sustainably” extract wood from standing forests to produce fuel without destroying the soil carbon stocks that are particularly important in temperate forests, Mr. Righelato said via e-mail.
“Of course, the woody biomass harvested would return to CO2, but trees would probably quickly regrow in the space vacated,” he said. “It remains to be established whether such extraction would be economically viable.”
The researchers did not look at Canadian forests specifically, but Mr. Righelato expects the carbon sequestration rates are not far off those of the U.S forests used for their calculations.
“I imagine the coastal southern Canadian forests fall within that range of carbon sequestration,” he said.
Mr. Righelato and Mr. Spracklen conclude that, where carbon emissions are concerned, it makes most sense to step up the conservation of fossil fuels now in use, and conserve and restore forests while pursuing development of noncarbon fuels for future use.
“If the prime object of policy on biofuels is mitigation of carbon dioxide-driven global warming, policy makers may be better advised in the short term (30 years or so) to focus on increasing the efficiency of fossil fuel use, to conserve the existing forests and savannahs, and to restore natural forests and grassland habitats on crop land that is not needed for food.”
– they needed scientists to figure that out?!

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