Q:  Is global warming true?

Photo courtesy of Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt and Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center.

A:  Global warming is often defined as "the observed increase in the mean (average) temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans in recent decades," which, unfortunately, leads to difficulties.

I am indebted to physicist and meteorologist Craig Bohren, distinguished professor emeritus at the Pennsylvania State University for sorting out problems, biases, and what objective answers that exist.  This is his answer:

In the atmospheric sciences it is difficult to get grants unless you can somehow tie your work to global warming, that is to say, to scare science. Because of my reputation, I immodestly believe that I could have jumped onto the global warming bandwagon. But I refused to do so because I would have found this repugnant.

At some universities, professors get only a fraction of their salary from the university, the rest coming from contracts and grants. Research associates and research professors often must scrounge for 100% of their salaries.

Professors not only directly profit from their research grants (summer salaries), they also indirectly profit. If Professor X has grants amounting to millions of dollars, this gives him leverage. He wants more money so he threatens to leave and take his bags of money with him if he doesn't get a whopping raise. Or he plays one university off against another. He gets an offer from another university in order to pressure his present university to increase his salary. I have seen this done many times. The system of federal grants, which hardly existed before WWII, has created a professoriate with greater allegiance to government agencies than to their universities.

Professors who get research money to work on aspects of global warming are not doing anything dishonest or illegal. This is not graft. But when it is in the best financial and career interests of professors to raise the alarm about global warming (or anything), we should be skeptical.

Perhaps some critics of global warming are in the pay of the oil and automotive companies. If so, they should be forthright about this. But so should folks on the other side of the debate. What fraction of their salaries comes from research on global warming?

Coal cars in Ashtabula, Ohio.  Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

Now to more of my biases. I have an MS in nuclear engineering. About 40 years ago I was designing nuclear reactors. I got out of the business mostly because of boredom, not because I felt guilty about killing babies or some such nonsense. I have long felt that burning fossil fuels is madness in the long run regardless of what this will do to climate. Burning fossil fuels creates air pollution, which is not good for anyone's health. Also, fossil fuels are the feedstock for all kinds of industries, and so burning them is like burning fine furniture to heat your house. And finally, most important of all, basing an economy on a commodity that is controlled by the most backward, unstable, and violent countries in the world is madness.

Nuclear power is dangerous but so is non-nuclear power. Several years ago Petr Beckmann published The Health Hazards of not Going Nuclear in which he did what is rarely done by the anti-nuclear folks: he tried to account for how many people die because of fossil fuels (not including automobile accidents). And this was before Gulf War I, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on. These recent wars are mostly a consequence of oil. All the countries in the Middle East could dry up and blow away without the US and Europe noticing or caring were it not for oil. Hundreds of thousands of people have died because of oil wars, and we've seen only the beginnings of the carnage.

Many years ago I was involved in a campus debate about nuclear power. I was willing only to take the middle ground, being flanked by a professor of nuclear engineering and an "environmental activist." I considered the latter to be nearly insane. His stated position was that "the loss of a single life" was not a price he would willingly pay for nuclear power. This is madness. We are willing to accept the loss of tens of thousands of lives every year in automobile accidents with hardly a peep. Coal miners die all the time, quickly in explosions or slowly by lung disease, with hardly a word of protest. Refineries go up in flames killing lots of people, and again where are the "environmental activists" to protest this? Several years ago I began reading a book on risk assessment. In one of the first chapters (which stopped me in my tracks) the author described Three-Mile Island as the "worst industrial accident" in U.S. history. And yet this was an accident in which no one died or was injured, in contrast with the thousands of people who have died in mining, refinery, and chemical plant accidents.

So it rankles me that many of the same folks who did their best to undermine nuclear power are also now screaming their guts out over global warming. Mind you, I have no more to gain from nuclear power than any other citizen. I have been out of this field for 40 years and at my age am not planning a comeback.

Another bias is many years ago I came to the conclusion that austerity was a desirable way of life in order to mitigate possible environmental degradation.

Mind you, I am not complaining. I consider myself to be extraordinarily fortunate, rich in fact. But this richness is not highly dependent on continuous spending on consumer goods.

Given my way of life, it rankles me that global warmers are not similarly frugal. In fact, many of them are profligate by my standards, and yet they enjoin the rest of us to cut back. They, however, as world savers, are exempt from austerity.

Now to the biases of others. It hardly comes as a surprise that the Wall Street Journal takes shots at global warming. Conservatives believe in unlimited growth, a consumer society that consumes more and more. Good for business. The Bush White House is in the hands of oilmen who will never accept that burning oil could have any deleterious consequences. They believe what they want to believe.

About 30 years ago I applied for a job at SERI (Solar Energy Research Institute) in Colorado. At that time SERI was growing by leaps and bounds. When the Reaganites took over, SERI was gutted. But both political parties, liberals and conservatives, are to blame for the US not having a rational energy policy.

Conservatives are correct in that a sudden decrease in the consumption of oil would have grave economic consequences. Like it or not, the US economy (indeed the world economy) is based on readily available cheap oil. We as a nation made lots of bad decisions: cars instead of mass transport in cities, trucks instead of railroads, suburbs and so on. The food that almost everyone eats is transported long distances by trucks. We are no longer a nation of self-sufficient farmers. We depend on all kinds of networks of food, water, and power kept in operation mostly by burning fossil fuels.

Liberals have a curiously puritanical view of global warming. Our contribution to it is evidence of our wickedness.

Stated simply (and probably unfairly), conservatives do not believe that global warming exists (because they don't want it to exist) whereas liberals believe in global warming (because they want it to exist).

And then there are religious biases. Certainly one means of mitigating the undesirable consequences of climate change, whatever its causes, would be population control. But this is not acceptable to many religions.

Some Christians seem to take the view that God cannot possibly let us destroy our planet, whereas others want us to perish because of our sinful ways. Some evangelical Christians seem to be eager for the end of the Earth.

Economists take a quite different view of global warming than do atmospheric scientists. Not long ago a group of prominent economists compiled a list of pressing problems for humanity. Global warming was near the bottom of the list, which outraged the global warmers. But in the short run global warming surely must be of little concern to someone in Africa dying of AIDS or malaria or malnutrition. Or who doesn't have clean water, education, a job.

People in China, India, and Brazil, where the bulk of humanity lives, aspire to the same standard of living as those of us in the US and Europe. No matter what we do, these other countries are going to consume more fossil fuels, and there isn't much we can do about it.

Fortunately, I'll be dead before the consequences of global warming become dire, if indeed they do. But I would like to stick around long enough to see this drama played out. I have done my small part: no children, austerity and nuclear power development (failed).

Further Reading:

Famine 1975! by William Paddock

Carbon dioxide continues its rise by David Shukman, BBC News

(Answered Aug. 08, 2006)