Editorial comment

	Vol. 230 No.7
PERRY A. FISCHER, EDITOR

Global warming consensus, giant insects and musings from the closet

In the Great and Silly Debate about global warming, a recent poll surprised me. But it wasn’t the results that were interesting; rather, it was the fact that a poll was taken at all. There is supposed to be some sort of danger in “consensus science.” But I have never agreed with that. Yes, of course there are dangers in most human endeavors—science is no different. Herd mentality, going along with the crowd so as to play it safe for the sake of one’s career—these are some of the worries with consensus science. But the alternatives are also rife with problems.

Still, I take comfort in the fact that some things in science, despite a lack of certainty, do have a consensus—most cancer treatments, for example. Or how much mercury is “safe” to eat. One cannot be an expert in all things, so most of the time I simply choose to trust those who are experts in a given field.

Peter Doran, University of Illinois at Chicago associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, along with former graduate student Maggie Zimmerman, conducted a survey. They sought the opinion of the most complete list of earth scientists they could find—those listed in the 2007 edition of the American Geological Institute’s Directory of Geoscience Departments. More than 10,200 experts in academia and government research centers around the world were emailed invitations to participate in an online poll. Computer IP addresses were used to prevent non-invitees and repeat voting. The nine-question survey was reviewed by a polling expert who checked for bias in phrasing.

The results found that earth scientists overwhelmingly (90%) agree that in the past 200 or so years, mean global temperatures have been rising. A separate finding was that 82% felt that human activity is a significant contributing factor. The data showed that the farther away that a scientist was from being an active climate researcher, the more likely he was to doubt global warming. Climatologists, for example, were 97% convinced of the human involvement question, while only about half of the petroleum geologists were so convinced. Meteorologists stood at 64% on that question. I continue to be struck by the supposed importance of human involvement in climate change. I’m convinced that it is a red herring.

If you think about it, the solution set for global warming is pretty much the same regardless of whether the cause is manmade or natural. In either case, we can remove greenhouse gases and/or add less of them to the atmosphere. We can sequester them underground, or in the soil, or in the oceans; or we can place huge reflectors or diffraction rings in orbit to shade the place. So if the solution set is the same, why is the naturalness of climate change paramount? It isn’t. All that’s important is whether we humans have the requisite arrogance to think that we can change God’s will—or at least Mother Nature’s.

In medicine, the naturalness of a successful outcome is rarely paramount. Would you reject a life-saving organ—a kidney or heart or liver—just because it was artificial? Does the naturalness of the Carboniferous Period—the age of great swamps and giant insects—appeal to you?

I don’t like extremes in temperature or weather. I want to live on planet Hawaii. Let’s be honest. We’ll eventually have to manage the oceans, wildlife, rainforests and watersheds for the entire planet anyway, so why not just own up to it? So let’s terraform the place—you know, re-engineer it. Arnold Schwarzenegger did it on Mars in the movie Total Recall. He just held his breath and let his beeg boolging eyes and neck muscles contain his blood pressure until a really big fan blew little puffy white clouds and a blue sky into the Martian atmosphere. If Ahhrnold can do it, so can we.

If the hippies and the Left were honest, they’d come out of the closet and fess up. Sure, they talk about global warming, but what they really want is clean air—their hidden agenda is to stop the epidemic of asthma in the cities. They get some in their group to talk about the association between heart attacks, lung disease and city air, while others preach the dangers of an ice-free Arctic. Still others on the Lefto side of the fence think that the Middle East would be ignored if not for its oil, that the reason for all the bloodshed is closely tied to oil. They are peaceniks to be sure. They’ve even stooped to stealing the two-fingered salute for victory as a symbol for peace.

The Phar Right isn’t much better, though. They constantly hide behind a false pretense that science has to have proven, irrefutable facts or it should remain silent. Of course, should they get cancer, or just want to know the strike probabilities of a hurricane five days away, they’ll settle for a consensus opinion. Their hidden agenda is simple: Change nothing. They’ve made a lot of money with the status quo, and with a little inaction, they can make a lot more.
Sure, they’ll say that they like clean air. It’s just that every sentence has the word “but” in it, as in, “Sure I like clean air, but you don’t realize how much of our food supply depends on fossil fuels. And we need heat and light in the cold dark winter months. Clean air would cost so much that... Look, do you want to starve and freeze to death in the dark?”

If I were king, I’d pass a law that no action could be taken about global warming unless there’s an unrelated, independent benefit to that action. CO2 sequestration for EOR comes to mind, as does converting CO2 into usable products, but never just CO2 sequestration for its own sake. Nuclear power could be sold under the global warming banner too, especially fourth- and fifth-generation and thorium-based reactors, where the inherent reactor dangers, fuel supply and waste disposable problems are all greatly diminished.

Efficiency and improvement in energy intensity is worth doing in its own right. If you want to tax something, tax inefficiency. Businesses will respond dramatically if they know that efficiency will pay off double: less tax and higher profit margins. Cap and trade has layers of trading shenanigans, the vagaries of calculation and the stretched-out palms of politicians.

The ideology of climate change has nothing whatsoever to do with science of global warming, and even less to do with its supposed solutions. So fess up. Admit that you probably know very little about climate research. Come out of the closet and say what you really want.