Call for Kyoto Debate An Attempt to Muddy the Waters? Sixty scientists call on Harper to revisit the science of global warming, with a view to avoiding squandering the billions of dollars earmarked for implementation of the Kyoto protocol. NaPo Of the sixty scientists who signed the letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, only four, Richard Lindzen, Freeman Dyson, Hugh W. Ellsaesser and Sally Baliunas, have much of a public profile. Of these four, only Richard Lindzen, of MIT, is a well-known climate modeller (his research focuses on negative feedbacks that counteract the effect of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration on the temperature at the earth's surface, which is important, but is not the focus of mainstream research). Although a reputable scientist, Lindzen is something of a contrarian whose views are not widely accepted among his peers in the climate modeling world). Freeman Dyson is an octogenenarian, British-born mathematician and one-time adviser to the U.S. government on nuclear deterrence, nuclear rockets, etc. His greatest claim to fame is to have shown the mathematical equivalence between Richard Feynman's Nobel-prize winning work on quantum electrodynamics with the very different approach of Shin-Ichiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger. Hugh W. Ellsaesser is a long-retired, former U.S. Army meteorologist, consultant and an assertive global warming skeptic. Ellsaesser has no record of published research relating to the question of greenhouse gases and climate change. Sally Baliunias is best know for several highly controversial papers purporting to explain global temperature fluctuations as a consequence of variation in solar activity. These people do not represent the mainstream of climate modelling research. As for their demand for a public consultation session, what is the point? Anyone interested in the state of knowledge in climate change research can read all about it in Science and Nature and the specialist journals. There should be no need for the government to "revisit" the science of global warming. If Environment Canada is doing its job, it will have competent experts keeping track of the literature and writing assessments for ministerial use. Their advice is likely to be more useful than anything that this group of odd-balls, retirees, former weathermen, lobbyists and self-promoters could offer. As for funds being wasted, that goes without saying. Virtually, all of the recent Liberal government's Kyoto-related programs were pork barrel. There was 600 million designated for Ontario farmers to grow corn for conversion to ethanol, an expensive process for converting fossil fuel to biofuel with little if any net energy gain but with increased groundwater contamination from irrigated production of heavily fertilized corn crops. But the Liberals needed votes in Southern Ontario, where the bulk of the money was to go. The Liberals had a whole lot of other dumb ideas, like paying the Russians for not burning hydrocarbon fuels that they were not going to burn anyway; paying Latin american governments a few million dollars to plant trees, etc., etc. There was nothing in the program that would signficantly impact Canada's global warming activities. The only effective action would be to tax carbon emissions, but Jean Chrétien promised the oil industry at the outset that the Liberals would not do that. And the Conservatives, as Tweedle Dee to the Liberals' Tweedle Dum, won't be taxing carbon emissions -- ever. As for cutting subsidies to corn farmers, the Tories need those southern Ontario votes too. It is probably that we should be at least as concerned about the physiological effects of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration as about its climatic consequences. That there will be a doubling in atmospheric CO2 concentration by the end of the century is virtually certain, and that will have a huge impact on plant life, and will likely bring about large changes in ecosystem structure and function. Modelling these effects is something that plant physiologist are currently attempting to do, but it is doubtful if we'll really know the consequences until they occur. Forest production in some regions has already been measureably enhanced as a consequence of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration or global warming or both, and species responses to increased CO2 have been observed to differ, which means that the species composition of plant communities will change, as will that of the animal communities that the plant communities support. In time, if we keep pumping out CO2, it will begin to affect us directly (At the same time we are adding CO2 to the atmosphere, we are depleting it of oxygen). And there's no doubt that we have enough hydrocarbon resources (a trillion barrels or more in the Canadian oil sands, three trillion in the Venezueland heavy oil deposits, for a start, and perhaps ten times as much energy in natural gas as in oil) to asphyxiate ourselves if we burn it all. Climate modelling is probably more straight forward than modelling the effects of rising atmospheric CO2 concentration on the biosphere, although effects on the biosphere have feedbacks on the climate and so cannot be altogether ignored. Climate modelling is just futurology, and you cannot predict the future with certainty, but you can try, which is what people always do (try going a day without anticipating the consequences of anything you do). Basic futurology is a matter of straight-line projection of empirically observed trends. More advanced futurology applies some physics, e.g., the effect of atmospheric CO2 on the absorption of outgoing infra-red radiation. Such calculations tell you what will happen all other things being equal. And as all other things never are equal, the modellers can spend any number of billions of dollars making more and more complex models to take account of the things not equal, or what in the trade are known as "feedbacks." Although they will never be exact, and may never be even approximately correct, the models are, nevertheless, useful, and even worth the billions they have cost, because they provide a perspective on what may happen. They allow anticipation of events based on the best calculations of some clever people who have spent decades on the task. And what they suggest, i.e., that the climate is warming, is consistent with the observation that glaciers and ice fields are melting faster now than a few decades ago, ocean temperatures are rising and dates of budbreak of trees in Scandinavia, where for some reason they have records going back more than a hundred years, are advancing. And according to the best estimates, mean surface temperatures are higher than for decades if not centuries. Unfortunately, the best possible empirical evidence is not being collected. In theory, satellite-borne instruments could measure the balance between incoming and outgoing global radiation accurately, from which we should be able to infer precisely what the current trend in global temperature is, and what the cumulative changes are (something that is very difficult to do in the short term from the ground). However, the Bush Administration recently cancelled the most advanced satellite data-gathering project. They presumably don't want to know. The position of the U.S. Government is probably based on a rather old National Academy of Sciences report which argued thast America, as the world's most technologically advanced society, could handle global warming more easily than any other country and that the cost would be at most one or two percent of GDP -- for extra air-conditioning. Global warming, in other words, is just part of the America's competitive advantage. And as America's most willing side-kick, the Harper government in Canada no doubt takes the same view. Permanent Link

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