Fatal flaws in climate-change denial

Cape Cod Times - Opinion

• By David E. Fisher
  Posted Jun. 15, 2015 at 2:01 AM
  
  

  It’s not often that we hear an anti-global-warming voice that seems reasonable, so the My View piece by Bruce Everett (“Beyond the climate-change hype,” May 30) deserves comment. Sadly, the comment must focus on the flaws in his argument.

  Sadly, because it would be lovely if he were right, since it is true that combating the threat of warming will have an economic cost. We have built our civilization on fossil fuel energy, and now we find ourselves like a glutonous sugarholic who steps on the scales for the first time in years: Oh, God, we’ve gotten fat!

  Now Mr. Everett says that the fat is actually good for us. Yes, millions of years ago the Earth was several degrees warmer, and life thrived. But not human life. The dinosaurs were happy with a hot, humid, swampy environment, but I’m not. Much of the land we currently live on — including Cape Cod — was under tons of water then! Does that sound like the Good Old Days to you? How about you folks clamoring against offshore wind turbines because they spoil your view? What’s the view like from under 10 feet of water? Or have you not noticed the encroaching sea?

  Like most climate change antagonists, Mr. Everett can’t resist throwing in a red herring or two. It is true that water vapor is a more important greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but it’s irrelevant, because water vapor is not increasing. It’s the increase in greenhouse gases that is important. Adding CO2 to the air is like piling on more blankets to your sleeping body; it’s going to make you warmer. Similarly, the fact that the CO2 increase is “very small on a geological time scale” is true but meaningless; it’s the very rapid change on a human time scale that’s important to us.

  And yes, CO2 is a plant food, but that means it feeds weeds as well as beneficial plants. And a warmer earth breeds more insects. So more insecticides and weed killers get sprayed onto our agriland and into our water supplies and foods. Sound good to you?

  The most difficult point to argue against is his statement that global warming has stopped. It’s difficult because although it is simply false, you have to look at the actual data, preferably in a graphic form, which this paper cannot include. His error is what is known as “cherry-picking” the data — looking at only the portion of the totality that seems to give the answer you want. So it is true that for a few years around 2010 the warming trend was flat. But we have seen this in the past; it’s in the nature of a complex system to have a “sawtooth” character to the data. But overall the trend is certainly and without doubt one of increasing warming. And indeed the past few years have seen a return to distinct warming; last year was among the warmest seen in all the data, and this past March was the warmest March ever seen in 136 years of data. You can find the graph at data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3. Take a look for yourself.

  Finally, as befits someone who has spent a career working for Exxon, Mr. Everett doesn’t mention the benefits of cutting down our use of fossil fuels, which have nothing to do with global warming. For example, the pollution from these fuels has been killing tens of thousands of our citizens every year, dwarfing our fears of terrorist attacks, but it’s been going on for so long that nobody seems to care. And yes, fossil fuels are a renewable energy source — but on time scales of tens of millions of years! Our grandchildren cannot wait that long; for them, fossil fuels are finite, nonrenewable, and dwindling fast. How fast? We don’t know. Does it matter to you if it’s your children, grandchildren, or greatgrandchildren who get economically zapped when we begin to run out?

  When the dangers of warming were first seen, and could have been combated at minimal cost, the oil and coal companies took their cue from the cigarette makers and said the data weren’t clear. Now the argument seems to be that it will cost too much, and it’s not that bad anyhow, so just learn to live with it. To some extent this is true. No one is arguing that we can return the Earth’s temperature to pre-Industrial Revolution levels, or that we should go cold turkey and cease using fossil fuels altogether. But the more we can cut down our dependence on them, the fewer people will die choking on coal dust and carcinogens, the less the ultimate unavoidable economic costs of global warming will be, and the less will be our scary dependence on foreign supplies.

  So, sorry, but we do need nuclear energy, solar energy, wind energy, and conservation efforts. And we need them now.

  — David E. Fisher of East Orleans is professor emeritus of geo- and environmental science at the University of Miami. He has taught and/or done research at Harvard and Cornell, and at Brookhaven and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.

http://www.capecodtimes.com/article/20150615/OPINION/150619782