A Skeptic's Primer
I don't know why, but I've been encountering a growing number of folks who outright deny global climate change, or at least relagate the phenomenon to the Less Than Worth Anyone's Attention category, or who feel the costs in the next five minutes greatly outweigh the chance of savings in the next five years.
If you count yourself in any or all of the above, do yourself a favor. I've re-written up a little primer that should outline evidence in support of a coming Shitstorm of Negative Consequence. I did this not because I am a self-important blowhard who values my own opinions over those belonging to lesser, not-me beings -- well, not just because -- but because I recognized gaps in my own lifetime of information acquisition that made it until very recently difficult for me to understand what the global kerfuffle really meant. I've organized it into an FAQ list of points I've most commonly encountered, either on my own or from my very close friends and perfect strangers with whom I happened at the time to be speaking.
What is global warming anyway?
"Global warming" is a term given to what will happen as more and more carbon-based molecules are introduced into the atmosphere, especially the most common of these, carbon dioxide (CO2). Since many of the more immediate affects of this growing concentration will not immediately warm many areas, but may even make things in the short run cooler, scientists have also coined the term "global climate change" to describe the same phenomenon and avoid confusion.
Won't plants inhale this "extra" carbon dioxide, clean it, and release oxygen from it? Isn't that what they do?
For years, that's what I thought, too. To understand the dynamics of global warming, one must face the fact that, for the most part, we Americans have gotten pretty spotty science educations. It turns out that to understand global warming, one must more clearly understand how plants and animals grow.
I specifically remember my high school/junior high chemistry and biology classes, classes I for the most part aced. One book mentioned the CO2 -> O2 transformation phenomenon, but stated that isotope experiments showed that the oxygen release from plants came not from the carbon dioxide they absorbed, but from the water. Plants organically electrolyze the H2O as an element of photosynthesis, releasing oxygen and hydrogen the plant does not immediately need.
I recall another textbook illustration that showed some guy standing next to a tree in an earthen bucket, a tree he had grown to see if the source of its mass could be determined. The textbook stated that, when the guy in the picture (probably Belgian physician Jan Baptista van Helmont, but my textbook didn't say) finally separated the tree from the soil in the bucket, the tree weighed more than the lost soil and the water added over its life.
The textbook didn't, however, state where the tree had gotten its mass.
Now, if I could get through my primary education with a 3.85 average (damn those phys ed grades!) without knowing precisely how plants gain mass and produce oxygen, how many others out there have the same handicap? It turns out that understanding how plants function is essential to understanding the implications of global warming.
Plants do indeed absorb CO2, but not to make O2 as many assume. When the sun shines, the plants absorb gasses and, with help from water and other nutrients, transform them into plant food. Some of that food is used to help the plant function, some is used to help the plant gain mass, to grow.
Let's refer back to the guy with the potted tree. Let's say we make a reverse of his experiment, but do in on ourselves. What if we weighed all of the food we ate and all of the waste we excrete. (Gross, I know, but let's just say.) You would find that we excrete less material than we eat even when we don't gain weight, just as the tree gains more mass than the tree absorbs through water and soil. So what is the source of the balance of the weight lost and gained?
Carbon dioxide, folks.
All creatures respirate, absorb nutrients and expel wastes. We use pretty much the same nutrients as plants, but do not, like plants, photosynthesize our nutrients. We get our sustanance from food, mostly from plants and animals that eat plants. Both plants and animals expel waste CO2; plants are able to reabsorb and reprocess the gas when the sun is shining.
Consider this the link between carbohydrates and hydrocarbons, a link I have only recently made myself.
I am not alone in my ignorance, it seems. From Skeptic magazine:
. . . shouldn't all students be able to explain how photosynthesis works, since they encounter it throughout their academic careers? Yet, they are often unable to do so. A fascinating video . . . shows that Harvard and MIT graduates are no better able than young children at explaining where all of the mass of a tree comes from as it develops from a small seed. When shown a tiny tree seed and a large cross section of a tree trunk, these students often incorrectly explain that the mass of the tree comes from water and nutrients in the soil. They even seem genuinely puzzled to learn that the majority of the tree's mass comes from carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere, assembled into larger molecules through photosynthesis. Somehow the facts of photosynthesis they learned throughout school failed to cohere into a logcial model of what photosynthesis acutally does. (Phil Mole, Skeptic, Vol. 12 No. 3 pp. 63-64)
I make this observation because some "scientists" have selectively noted plant respiration in an attempt to undermine the global warming debate:
Fossil fuels exhausts are not the only source of CO2. Forests release it, too.
True, but as I stated above, only at night. If you were to measure the carbon gasses both during the day and during the night, and compare those gas measurements to the overall weight of the plants in the forest, you would find that, on balance, plants only grow when absorbing carbon dioxide. (That's why, when speaking of global warming, forests are sometimes referred to as "carbon sinks," or repositories of atmostpheric carbon.)
In fact, Dr. Charles Keeling, measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii since 1958, was able to detect two surprising aspects of carbon dioxide levels over his years of careful observations. The first, that one could detect seasonal fluctuations by measuring the CO2 levels; in spring through summer, the gas levels fall as plants grow, absorbing CO2 and converting the gas to mass. Fall through winter, the levels rise as plants die and/or retreat into hibernation, slowly burning some of that accumulated energy over the cold months.
(For those skeptics who cry foul at the fact that the earth's seasons are reversed across the equator at any given time and that the growing season in the Southern Hemisphere should therefore counteract the dormant season in the Northern, please look carefully at a globe. The Northern Hemisphere has more than double the land mass of the Southern, and overwhelms easily any absorbing contribution the south can provide.)
If the forest burns or dies, that carbon is released. If not. . . .
Layers upon layers of dead plants accumulate, forming the soil upon which the newest forest grows. The dead ancestors of the top growth continue to hold the carbon. Wait many years, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, and the dead layers become more than buried plants.
Sometimes those layers liquify, and become oil. Sometimes they gassify, and become natural gasses. Sometimes they solidify, and become coal. So, for millions of years, the carbons in coal, crude and natural gas has been trapped beneath the earth. We have essentially released millions, perhaps billions of years worth of stored carbon in less than 200 years. The result of this release could be just as dramatic as the scale.
Other folks have tried to thwart this observation with:
Volcanos release more carbon gasses in their erruptions than tailpipes and smokestacks ever could!
Volcanos are indeed a source of CO2; but make their contribution in sharp spikes. Over thousands of years their erruption cycles tend to be more or less constant; therefore the amount of CO2 the atmosphere gains from erruptions likewise remains constant, averaged over time.
Still, the gasses can be deadly. Vents like the ones shown below regularly kill animals and people that wander too far inside the oxygen-poor depressions.
A burning stick is extinguished by a mazuku, Swahili for "Evil Wind."
By contrast, let's return to Dr. Keeling and his second observation. Note that his graph reveals both the seasonal fluctation of CO2 concentrations and a steady increase in overall concetrations, adding to the gasses released by volcanic activity.
Okay, now that I've covered the gasseous culprit to our impending warming trend, on to how this works.
How does accumulating CO2 make global warming occur?
The first scientist to isolate specific greenhouse gasses and reveal their effect was actually trying to approximate a perfect atmosphere by removing these gasses. By creating a laboratory mini-atmosphere of only nitrogen and oxygen in the same proportions one would find on earth, John Tyndall discovered:
. . . the vast differences in the abilities of "…perfectly colourless and invisible gases and vapours…" to absorb and transmit radiant heat. He noted that oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen are almost transparent to radiant heat, whilst other gases are quite opaque.
To properly understand that last quote, consider the following picture, one my dad took last Christmas.
This beery confection is properly known as a Black & Tan. Essentially, one fills a pint glass with half Harp, and tops it off very slowly with Guiness, using a tool such as a spoon (or the Lagerhead, the blurry metal turtle-esque object resting at the foot of the Guiness can) to diffuse the pouring stout so it does not readily mix with the lower stratum of Harp. The effect; a layered beer.
Properties of the different beers allow this layering. Guiness has a higher percentage of alcohol than Harp, giving it a lower specific gravity and allowing it to literally float on the surface of the lager like oil on water. . . or oxygen on carbon dioxide.
What does beer have to do with Tyndall?!?
Patience, patience.
Let's go back to the Tyndall quote. He demonstrated that while most atmospheric gasses are equally clear to human eyes they are quite opaque to different frequencies of light quite invisible to us. Oxygen, he demonstrated, can become ozone when it absorbs ultraviolet energy. Think of ozone molecules in the upper reaches of the atmosphere being as black as Guiness to solar UV radiation.
By contrast, neither of the two most common gasses in our atmosphere, oxygen and nitrogen, absorb infrared radiation, the frequency of light that carries thermal energy. We on the surface of the planet may be warmed by the daytime sun; but after it sets, we stay warm thanks to other gasses shedding the infrared radiation they earlier absorbed.
Gasses like carbon dioxide.
Therefore, as CO2 builds in the atmosphere, the global climate will warm.
To make an easy experiment that shows this is true, try making yourself an invisible, gasseous Black & Tan (thanks to Bill Nye). Find yourself two open-topped identical containers. They have to be at least three feet tall and a foot wide, and must have non-porous surfaces, ie. something waterproof. Get two identical thermometers and two identical heat lamps.
Place a thermometer at the bottom of each container. Place each heat lamp directly over each container, the same distance from the tops of the openings. Turn on the lamps and wait for the highest temperatures to read on the thermometers.
Now your are ready for the science. Get yourself some carbon dioxide (it's pretty cheap, provided you can find a pressure bottle to carry it) and discharge a bit into one of the containers. Releasing pressurized gas will cause that gas to cool, so you must wait a bit before taking the next measurements. Also, discharge it from its carrying container slowly, just like adding Guiness. The heavier CO2 will settle toward the bottom of your container like Harp.
Watch the added carbon raise the temperature.
Don't believe your own eyes? Dump the CO2 and start again, perhaps with the other container. Switch the lamps. Switch the thermometers. See how much or how little CO2 added makes a measureable difference. Get a third thermometer to see that the ambient air -- the air surrounding your containers -- is affecting the results.
Do be careful, though. This experiment should only be attempted in a large, well-ventilated room. A concentration of more than 20% CO2 will become a laboratory mazuku with potentially lethal results.
(One more thing to note, something I actually remembered learing the hard way in high school chemistry: Gas molecules, though of different atomic structures, occupy the same volume. A molecule of hydrogen (H2) occupies the same amount of physical space as larger and perhaps more complex gasses, like methane (CH4), oxygen (O2). I was shocked to learn this. We were shown two beakers capturing the gasses from electrolizing water, and were asked to explain which gas is in each beaker. I figured a couple of bound oxygen atoms, with 8 electrons orbiting the nucleus each, would fill more space than those puny single-electron hydrogen wannabees; therefore oxygen filled the beaker with the most gas. Not so. Split H2O and you get twice as much hydrogen, which then displaces twice as much water.)
For evidence correlating your experiment with ice core samples dating back 420,000 years, take a look at this graph.
As the graph fairly clearly shows, this recent increase in temperatures is no mere cycle. The most alarming element should be the tiny vertical red line right at the edge of the graph which represents carbon buildup over the last 150 years. At today over 377.3 ppm, the CO2 levels have shot to levels not seen since the age of the dinosaurs.
Further evidence mounts that shows our climate is responding to this increase. Forests in Alaska and Canada literally fall over as the permafrost beneath them melts for the first time in 50,000 years. Receding glaciers in the Italian Alps reveals an ancient human kept beneath the ice, also for thousands of years.
So, we have evidence of climate change in falling forests and receding glaciers, ice core evidence that strongly suggests CO2 might be a culprit for that change, and a simple experiment which demonstrates how CO2 accumulation might easily be the mechanism. Those that accept the evidence but reject disastrous conclusions sometimes try looking at the bright side with pithy observations:
Global warming can be a good thing! Think of all the new farmland that will open for crops!
Well, true, warming temperatures will shift agriculture to the north -- whether we like it or not. There have already been such shifts. The troubles start when someone actually starts to think that way, and heads north to plow.
Where will you get the water for your crops? Look at a map. Many of the rivers in the United States flow north to south, and outward to the coasts. Along these rivers people have situated cities large and small, most that rely on the flowing water for their own consumption. Heading north for agriculture may be fine if you find yourself to be the only farmer around, but if everyone does it, those rivers will start to flow more slowly as the water is spread on the crops. That is likely to upset a large number of people in a large number of large cities.
Also, never mind the agriculture, what happens to the already established ecosystems when the seasonal changes vary? Ross Gelbspan, in his book The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, The Cover-up, The Prescription wrote:
In May 1995, following New Orleans's fifth consecutive winter without a killing frost, the city was overrun by mosquitoes, cockroaches and termites. "Termites are everywhere. The city is totally, completely inundated with them," said Ed Bordes, a New Orleans health official, who added that "the number of mosquitoes laying eggs has increased tenfold." Bordes attirbuted the infestation to the lack of frost, combined with unusually high levels of rainfall -- it totaled 80 inches in the previous year." (Gelbspan, 1997, p. 15)
That's right, folks, the starry-eyed apologists for rapid climate change forgot to consider the bugs. Everyone who has ever seen a cloud of locust descend upon a field of wheat ready for the harvest can tell you the dangers of not considering the bugs.
Looking back, New Orleans right now has more problems to worry about than the number of roaches and mosquitoes. That, too, can be explained by the rising carbon. Bigger storms, more frequent storms, all of this can be found in climate change predictions.
In fact, speaking of storms, let's consider an intergral element of farming; the weather.
Ask yourself: Why has a publication as well-known as The Farmer's Almanac been in publication since 1792? The answer is surprisingly simple for those who have never farmed, and obvious to all who have. To plant a crop and properly harvest it, you must know when to plant and when to harvest. You must know how long your crop must sit in a field, how much water you can expect, how much sunlight, how much fertilizer. The Farmer's Almanac gives that information, along with probable patterns of weather expected for the published year.
Like everyone else, the folks at the Almanac rely upon historical trends to make their predictions.
What if those predictions were wrong? They very easily may become more and more wrong, simply because of the carbon in the air. Historical trends depend upon what happened yesterday, when the carbon was at more or less this level. It isn't anymore.
The problem is further compounded when one looks at the rapidity of past changes. Researchers drilling the ice sheets in Greenland were looking for clues to past ice ages, how quickly they formed and dissapated. They were shocked by the results: Some ice ages, rather than becoming increasingly cold year after year, seem to have snapped into and out of existance -- in three years.
Think about canoeing. You sit in a canoe, gently rocking to and fro, with no adverse consequence (other, perhaps, for landlubber seasickness). Suddenly, you tip just a bit too far to one side or another, and water gushes over the gunnels, sinking or swamping the canoe. That is the analogy one Berkeley ice core researcher used to describe the rapid onset of past weather pattern changes.
Meaning that any farmer reading the almanac in a change year will be reading, essentially, old news, no longer applicable to today's farming. Meaning that, when the changes come in earnest, we can expect rampant crop failures, perhaps for a number of years.
We may just say goodbye to inexpensive and adequate food.
Why would anyone deny such an astounding abundance of suggested cause and effect?
Won't "doing something" about global warming destroy our economy?
There are those that assert the primacy of the human race in making decisions affecting the human race. I am not one of them, but do not overly object to their philosophy. I am, after all, human. The difference between myself and certain Human Primeists (to coin a term) is the level of change we can expect carbon buildup to cause. For the Primeists, the earth has changed in the past and will change in the future, and is large enough to absorb a bit more carbon without undo consequences. To react to fears that might or might not be realized would be to disrupt the lives of millions without sufficient merit.
Me? I see the level of consequences, based upon the reasoned arguments of people far more intelligent than I, as more than disruptive enough. And I am not alone. Consider evangalists that now preach the gospel of carbon limiting. They and I share a belief that, if one considers the primacy of humans important, it might behoove others to realize that we humans have only one world. To ruin it is to ruin ourselves and the future of what descendants survive.
Meaning business as usual takes a back seat to pure survival.
Also, regarding our altered, carbon-aware future economies, "destroy" is far too strong a word. In the short term, yes, there will be a definite effect, a noteable general economic slowing; but more accurate descriptors like "slow" or "alter" would be more to the point and far more accurate than "destroy." In the long run, however, projecting into the future, "doing something" would probably be enormously beneficial to our economy.
This has already happened, though for very different reasons. Adopting a gradual acceptance of policy to adhere to, for one example, the Kyoto Protocols would necessarily result in a reduction in petroleum comsumption similar to the sudden and dramatic cut-off in supply spurred by the 1973 OPEC embargo. Most reflect on those years with fear and terror, remembering the long lines at gas stations that actually had gas, the rationing, the vehicles still being paid for but which could not be affordably driven.
However, that crunch in supply did long-term wonders to our economy. Don't believe me? Alan Greenspan thought so:
In the United States, between 1945 and 1973, consumption of petroleum products rose at a startling average annual rate of 4-1/2 percent, well in excess of growth of our real GDP. However, between 1973 and 2004, oil consumption grew in the United States, on average, at only 1/2 percent per year, far short of the rise in real GDP. In consequence, the ratio of U.S. oil consumption to GDP fell by half. . . . (P)art of the decline in this ratio is due to improved energy conservation for a given set of economic activities, including greater home insulation, better gasoline mileage, more efficient machinery, and streamlined production processes. These trends have been ongoing but have likely intensified of late with the sharp, recent increases in oil prices. (Emphasis mine. -Peristaltor)
To summerize the dry dictation of our Federal Reserve Chairman; the high prices of the '70s spurred developments that eventually doubled the efficiency of our economy in only ten years!
(I know, I know, Mr. Greenspan states that the timeline in doubling efficiency reaches to 2004, not 1983; but after the price of crude peaked at "$39 per barrel by February 1981 ($75 per barrel in today's prices)," consumption rose equal to or greater than GDP, essentially stopping efficiencies gains. Removing the strong market incentive to improve efficiencies halted the continued improvements, at least at the pace the crisis in the '70s dictated. Don't believe me? Find a nice spot on an overpass and count trucks with one passenger. Thanks to the OPEC years and the technology spurred thereby, those newer trucks use far less fuel per pound hauled than their counterparts built prior to 1973, but the modern application of these beasts as big-ass grocery haulers represents a stagnation in efficiency progress.)
Call me an unabashed market economist, or at least a fan of economies properly guided by applied goverment taxation, but I don't think that a few years of shortage is too much to ask for a far more robust future.
There is also a more disturbing question I hear raised, usually from those with big trucks and land yachts. . . .
Are you trying to say that I somehow caused global warming?!
I kind of already covered that responding to the rantings of a coworker, when I said "Deflecting the validity of global warming deflects blame," but the attitude exists. I guess not everyone with a big-ass rig read my post. . . .
Essentially, when humans first learned to harness the energy found in fossil fuels, they did so out of a desire to improve their lots in life, not specifically to warm the surface of the earth. The first steam engines, designed by Thomas Newcomen to remove water from mine shafts, later were improved by James Watt and others to power the Industrial Revolution and move cargo on land and sea with unprecedented speed and ease. Watt's steam led to Rudolph Diesel, to Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, to John Rockefeller, to Henry Ford, to all the others, all who contributed both to increasing the standard of living by harnessing ancient energy and to increasing the percentage of gasses in our atmosphere inherent in that ancient cache.
Did they do any of what they did specifically to poison our air?
Hell, no.
And neither do any of you out there, when you fire up ol' Tin Lizzie to take a spin to the grocer. You, however, are at least aware of what happens. They were not.
My bike, freshly removed from the packing crate outside the old Electric Vehicles NW storefront
For those racked with guilt about your personal tailpipe spewings, take heart. I myself own what was billed just a few years ago as part of the solution, an electric vehicle. I put 2400 miles on that beast, and had a great time riding it, only to learn first hand what many already knew, that the technology was not quite ready for prime time. As a result, I may have the only bike of its kind in Washington State, and I definitely have one of only 200 ever built. That number has gone way down: I know of at least 4 others wrecked or otherwise destroyed. Mine now sits in my garage, waiting for the appropriate convergence of cash to replace the battery pack, an available mechanic/electrical guru to troubleshoot the non-functional go-parts, and a job site appropriately situated near my house. When that happens, in anywhere from a few months to a few years the bike should grace the roads of Seattle once more.
I knew that the bike would not pay for itself in energy savings before I bought it. I bought it not to save money on my travels, but to directly contribute to that sector of the economy that was attempting to find solutions to the current overreliance on fossils for energy, and thus to spur investment that sector. I admit, EMB went under, and so I bet wrong with my bike; but in my defense there was no other source for a true electric motorbike that met my requirements. (I still think that might be the only one, but in fairness, I haven't been shopping for another lately.)
So to those worried that their tailpipes are fouling the air as they go about their business; at the present time, other than not going about your business, there is no alternative. There are promising developments on the horizon, true, but very little is currently available that altogether avoids adding to CO2 accumulation.
Remember: Just as no single individual created the act of releasing fossilized gasses, no single one of us embodies the blame for today's problem -- and that means you.
So don't worry. . . too much.
Edited March 25; February 10; August 1, 2006; August 27, 2006; April 1, 2007.
If you count yourself in any or all of the above, do yourself a favor. I've re-written up a little primer that should outline evidence in support of a coming Shitstorm of Negative Consequence. I did this not because I am a self-important blowhard who values my own opinions over those belonging to lesser, not-me beings -- well, not just because -- but because I recognized gaps in my own lifetime of information acquisition that made it until very recently difficult for me to understand what the global kerfuffle really meant. I've organized it into an FAQ list of points I've most commonly encountered, either on my own or from my very close friends and perfect strangers with whom I happened at the time to be speaking.
What is global warming anyway?
"Global warming" is a term given to what will happen as more and more carbon-based molecules are introduced into the atmosphere, especially the most common of these, carbon dioxide (CO2). Since many of the more immediate affects of this growing concentration will not immediately warm many areas, but may even make things in the short run cooler, scientists have also coined the term "global climate change" to describe the same phenomenon and avoid confusion.
Won't plants inhale this "extra" carbon dioxide, clean it, and release oxygen from it? Isn't that what they do?
For years, that's what I thought, too. To understand the dynamics of global warming, one must face the fact that, for the most part, we Americans have gotten pretty spotty science educations. It turns out that to understand global warming, one must more clearly understand how plants and animals grow.
I specifically remember my high school/junior high chemistry and biology classes, classes I for the most part aced. One book mentioned the CO2 -> O2 transformation phenomenon, but stated that isotope experiments showed that the oxygen release from plants came not from the carbon dioxide they absorbed, but from the water. Plants organically electrolyze the H2O as an element of photosynthesis, releasing oxygen and hydrogen the plant does not immediately need.
I recall another textbook illustration that showed some guy standing next to a tree in an earthen bucket, a tree he had grown to see if the source of its mass could be determined. The textbook stated that, when the guy in the picture (probably Belgian physician Jan Baptista van Helmont, but my textbook didn't say) finally separated the tree from the soil in the bucket, the tree weighed more than the lost soil and the water added over its life.
The textbook didn't, however, state where the tree had gotten its mass.
Now, if I could get through my primary education with a 3.85 average (damn those phys ed grades!) without knowing precisely how plants gain mass and produce oxygen, how many others out there have the same handicap? It turns out that understanding how plants function is essential to understanding the implications of global warming.
Plants do indeed absorb CO2, but not to make O2 as many assume. When the sun shines, the plants absorb gasses and, with help from water and other nutrients, transform them into plant food. Some of that food is used to help the plant function, some is used to help the plant gain mass, to grow.
Let's refer back to the guy with the potted tree. Let's say we make a reverse of his experiment, but do in on ourselves. What if we weighed all of the food we ate and all of the waste we excrete. (Gross, I know, but let's just say.) You would find that we excrete less material than we eat even when we don't gain weight, just as the tree gains more mass than the tree absorbs through water and soil. So what is the source of the balance of the weight lost and gained?
Carbon dioxide, folks.
All creatures respirate, absorb nutrients and expel wastes. We use pretty much the same nutrients as plants, but do not, like plants, photosynthesize our nutrients. We get our sustanance from food, mostly from plants and animals that eat plants. Both plants and animals expel waste CO2; plants are able to reabsorb and reprocess the gas when the sun is shining.
Consider this the link between carbohydrates and hydrocarbons, a link I have only recently made myself.
I am not alone in my ignorance, it seems. From Skeptic magazine:
. . . shouldn't all students be able to explain how photosynthesis works, since they encounter it throughout their academic careers? Yet, they are often unable to do so. A fascinating video . . . shows that Harvard and MIT graduates are no better able than young children at explaining where all of the mass of a tree comes from as it develops from a small seed. When shown a tiny tree seed and a large cross section of a tree trunk, these students often incorrectly explain that the mass of the tree comes from water and nutrients in the soil. They even seem genuinely puzzled to learn that the majority of the tree's mass comes from carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere, assembled into larger molecules through photosynthesis. Somehow the facts of photosynthesis they learned throughout school failed to cohere into a logcial model of what photosynthesis acutally does. (Phil Mole, Skeptic, Vol. 12 No. 3 pp. 63-64)
I make this observation because some "scientists" have selectively noted plant respiration in an attempt to undermine the global warming debate:
Fossil fuels exhausts are not the only source of CO2. Forests release it, too.
True, but as I stated above, only at night. If you were to measure the carbon gasses both during the day and during the night, and compare those gas measurements to the overall weight of the plants in the forest, you would find that, on balance, plants only grow when absorbing carbon dioxide. (That's why, when speaking of global warming, forests are sometimes referred to as "carbon sinks," or repositories of atmostpheric carbon.)
In fact, Dr. Charles Keeling, measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii since 1958, was able to detect two surprising aspects of carbon dioxide levels over his years of careful observations. The first, that one could detect seasonal fluctuations by measuring the CO2 levels; in spring through summer, the gas levels fall as plants grow, absorbing CO2 and converting the gas to mass. Fall through winter, the levels rise as plants die and/or retreat into hibernation, slowly burning some of that accumulated energy over the cold months.
(For those skeptics who cry foul at the fact that the earth's seasons are reversed across the equator at any given time and that the growing season in the Southern Hemisphere should therefore counteract the dormant season in the Northern, please look carefully at a globe. The Northern Hemisphere has more than double the land mass of the Southern, and overwhelms easily any absorbing contribution the south can provide.)
If the forest burns or dies, that carbon is released. If not. . . .
Layers upon layers of dead plants accumulate, forming the soil upon which the newest forest grows. The dead ancestors of the top growth continue to hold the carbon. Wait many years, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, and the dead layers become more than buried plants.
Sometimes those layers liquify, and become oil. Sometimes they gassify, and become natural gasses. Sometimes they solidify, and become coal. So, for millions of years, the carbons in coal, crude and natural gas has been trapped beneath the earth. We have essentially released millions, perhaps billions of years worth of stored carbon in less than 200 years. The result of this release could be just as dramatic as the scale.
Other folks have tried to thwart this observation with:
Volcanos release more carbon gasses in their erruptions than tailpipes and smokestacks ever could!
Volcanos are indeed a source of CO2; but make their contribution in sharp spikes. Over thousands of years their erruption cycles tend to be more or less constant; therefore the amount of CO2 the atmosphere gains from erruptions likewise remains constant, averaged over time.
Still, the gasses can be deadly. Vents like the ones shown below regularly kill animals and people that wander too far inside the oxygen-poor depressions.
A burning stick is extinguished by a mazuku, Swahili for "Evil Wind."
By contrast, let's return to Dr. Keeling and his second observation. Note that his graph reveals both the seasonal fluctation of CO2 concentrations and a steady increase in overall concetrations, adding to the gasses released by volcanic activity.
Okay, now that I've covered the gasseous culprit to our impending warming trend, on to how this works.
How does accumulating CO2 make global warming occur?
The first scientist to isolate specific greenhouse gasses and reveal their effect was actually trying to approximate a perfect atmosphere by removing these gasses. By creating a laboratory mini-atmosphere of only nitrogen and oxygen in the same proportions one would find on earth, John Tyndall discovered:
. . . the vast differences in the abilities of "…perfectly colourless and invisible gases and vapours…" to absorb and transmit radiant heat. He noted that oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen are almost transparent to radiant heat, whilst other gases are quite opaque.
To properly understand that last quote, consider the following picture, one my dad took last Christmas.
This beery confection is properly known as a Black & Tan. Essentially, one fills a pint glass with half Harp, and tops it off very slowly with Guiness, using a tool such as a spoon (or the Lagerhead, the blurry metal turtle-esque object resting at the foot of the Guiness can) to diffuse the pouring stout so it does not readily mix with the lower stratum of Harp. The effect; a layered beer.
Properties of the different beers allow this layering. Guiness has a higher percentage of alcohol than Harp, giving it a lower specific gravity and allowing it to literally float on the surface of the lager like oil on water. . . or oxygen on carbon dioxide.
What does beer have to do with Tyndall?!?
Patience, patience.
Let's go back to the Tyndall quote. He demonstrated that while most atmospheric gasses are equally clear to human eyes they are quite opaque to different frequencies of light quite invisible to us. Oxygen, he demonstrated, can become ozone when it absorbs ultraviolet energy. Think of ozone molecules in the upper reaches of the atmosphere being as black as Guiness to solar UV radiation.
By contrast, neither of the two most common gasses in our atmosphere, oxygen and nitrogen, absorb infrared radiation, the frequency of light that carries thermal energy. We on the surface of the planet may be warmed by the daytime sun; but after it sets, we stay warm thanks to other gasses shedding the infrared radiation they earlier absorbed.
Gasses like carbon dioxide.
Therefore, as CO2 builds in the atmosphere, the global climate will warm.
To make an easy experiment that shows this is true, try making yourself an invisible, gasseous Black & Tan (thanks to Bill Nye). Find yourself two open-topped identical containers. They have to be at least three feet tall and a foot wide, and must have non-porous surfaces, ie. something waterproof. Get two identical thermometers and two identical heat lamps.
Place a thermometer at the bottom of each container. Place each heat lamp directly over each container, the same distance from the tops of the openings. Turn on the lamps and wait for the highest temperatures to read on the thermometers.
Now your are ready for the science. Get yourself some carbon dioxide (it's pretty cheap, provided you can find a pressure bottle to carry it) and discharge a bit into one of the containers. Releasing pressurized gas will cause that gas to cool, so you must wait a bit before taking the next measurements. Also, discharge it from its carrying container slowly, just like adding Guiness. The heavier CO2 will settle toward the bottom of your container like Harp.
Watch the added carbon raise the temperature.
Don't believe your own eyes? Dump the CO2 and start again, perhaps with the other container. Switch the lamps. Switch the thermometers. See how much or how little CO2 added makes a measureable difference. Get a third thermometer to see that the ambient air -- the air surrounding your containers -- is affecting the results.
Do be careful, though. This experiment should only be attempted in a large, well-ventilated room. A concentration of more than 20% CO2 will become a laboratory mazuku with potentially lethal results.
(One more thing to note, something I actually remembered learing the hard way in high school chemistry: Gas molecules, though of different atomic structures, occupy the same volume. A molecule of hydrogen (H2) occupies the same amount of physical space as larger and perhaps more complex gasses, like methane (CH4), oxygen (O2). I was shocked to learn this. We were shown two beakers capturing the gasses from electrolizing water, and were asked to explain which gas is in each beaker. I figured a couple of bound oxygen atoms, with 8 electrons orbiting the nucleus each, would fill more space than those puny single-electron hydrogen wannabees; therefore oxygen filled the beaker with the most gas. Not so. Split H2O and you get twice as much hydrogen, which then displaces twice as much water.)
For evidence correlating your experiment with ice core samples dating back 420,000 years, take a look at this graph.
As the graph fairly clearly shows, this recent increase in temperatures is no mere cycle. The most alarming element should be the tiny vertical red line right at the edge of the graph which represents carbon buildup over the last 150 years. At today over 377.3 ppm, the CO2 levels have shot to levels not seen since the age of the dinosaurs.
Further evidence mounts that shows our climate is responding to this increase. Forests in Alaska and Canada literally fall over as the permafrost beneath them melts for the first time in 50,000 years. Receding glaciers in the Italian Alps reveals an ancient human kept beneath the ice, also for thousands of years.
So, we have evidence of climate change in falling forests and receding glaciers, ice core evidence that strongly suggests CO2 might be a culprit for that change, and a simple experiment which demonstrates how CO2 accumulation might easily be the mechanism. Those that accept the evidence but reject disastrous conclusions sometimes try looking at the bright side with pithy observations:
Global warming can be a good thing! Think of all the new farmland that will open for crops!
Well, true, warming temperatures will shift agriculture to the north -- whether we like it or not. There have already been such shifts. The troubles start when someone actually starts to think that way, and heads north to plow.
Where will you get the water for your crops? Look at a map. Many of the rivers in the United States flow north to south, and outward to the coasts. Along these rivers people have situated cities large and small, most that rely on the flowing water for their own consumption. Heading north for agriculture may be fine if you find yourself to be the only farmer around, but if everyone does it, those rivers will start to flow more slowly as the water is spread on the crops. That is likely to upset a large number of people in a large number of large cities.
Also, never mind the agriculture, what happens to the already established ecosystems when the seasonal changes vary? Ross Gelbspan, in his book The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, The Cover-up, The Prescription wrote:
In May 1995, following New Orleans's fifth consecutive winter without a killing frost, the city was overrun by mosquitoes, cockroaches and termites. "Termites are everywhere. The city is totally, completely inundated with them," said Ed Bordes, a New Orleans health official, who added that "the number of mosquitoes laying eggs has increased tenfold." Bordes attirbuted the infestation to the lack of frost, combined with unusually high levels of rainfall -- it totaled 80 inches in the previous year." (Gelbspan, 1997, p. 15)
That's right, folks, the starry-eyed apologists for rapid climate change forgot to consider the bugs. Everyone who has ever seen a cloud of locust descend upon a field of wheat ready for the harvest can tell you the dangers of not considering the bugs.
Looking back, New Orleans right now has more problems to worry about than the number of roaches and mosquitoes. That, too, can be explained by the rising carbon. Bigger storms, more frequent storms, all of this can be found in climate change predictions.
In fact, speaking of storms, let's consider an intergral element of farming; the weather.
Ask yourself: Why has a publication as well-known as The Farmer's Almanac been in publication since 1792? The answer is surprisingly simple for those who have never farmed, and obvious to all who have. To plant a crop and properly harvest it, you must know when to plant and when to harvest. You must know how long your crop must sit in a field, how much water you can expect, how much sunlight, how much fertilizer. The Farmer's Almanac gives that information, along with probable patterns of weather expected for the published year.
Like everyone else, the folks at the Almanac rely upon historical trends to make their predictions.
What if those predictions were wrong? They very easily may become more and more wrong, simply because of the carbon in the air. Historical trends depend upon what happened yesterday, when the carbon was at more or less this level. It isn't anymore.
The problem is further compounded when one looks at the rapidity of past changes. Researchers drilling the ice sheets in Greenland were looking for clues to past ice ages, how quickly they formed and dissapated. They were shocked by the results: Some ice ages, rather than becoming increasingly cold year after year, seem to have snapped into and out of existance -- in three years.
Think about canoeing. You sit in a canoe, gently rocking to and fro, with no adverse consequence (other, perhaps, for landlubber seasickness). Suddenly, you tip just a bit too far to one side or another, and water gushes over the gunnels, sinking or swamping the canoe. That is the analogy one Berkeley ice core researcher used to describe the rapid onset of past weather pattern changes.
Meaning that any farmer reading the almanac in a change year will be reading, essentially, old news, no longer applicable to today's farming. Meaning that, when the changes come in earnest, we can expect rampant crop failures, perhaps for a number of years.
We may just say goodbye to inexpensive and adequate food.
Why would anyone deny such an astounding abundance of suggested cause and effect?
Won't "doing something" about global warming destroy our economy?
There are those that assert the primacy of the human race in making decisions affecting the human race. I am not one of them, but do not overly object to their philosophy. I am, after all, human. The difference between myself and certain Human Primeists (to coin a term) is the level of change we can expect carbon buildup to cause. For the Primeists, the earth has changed in the past and will change in the future, and is large enough to absorb a bit more carbon without undo consequences. To react to fears that might or might not be realized would be to disrupt the lives of millions without sufficient merit.
Me? I see the level of consequences, based upon the reasoned arguments of people far more intelligent than I, as more than disruptive enough. And I am not alone. Consider evangalists that now preach the gospel of carbon limiting. They and I share a belief that, if one considers the primacy of humans important, it might behoove others to realize that we humans have only one world. To ruin it is to ruin ourselves and the future of what descendants survive.
Meaning business as usual takes a back seat to pure survival.
Also, regarding our altered, carbon-aware future economies, "destroy" is far too strong a word. In the short term, yes, there will be a definite effect, a noteable general economic slowing; but more accurate descriptors like "slow" or "alter" would be more to the point and far more accurate than "destroy." In the long run, however, projecting into the future, "doing something" would probably be enormously beneficial to our economy.
This has already happened, though for very different reasons. Adopting a gradual acceptance of policy to adhere to, for one example, the Kyoto Protocols would necessarily result in a reduction in petroleum comsumption similar to the sudden and dramatic cut-off in supply spurred by the 1973 OPEC embargo. Most reflect on those years with fear and terror, remembering the long lines at gas stations that actually had gas, the rationing, the vehicles still being paid for but which could not be affordably driven.
However, that crunch in supply did long-term wonders to our economy. Don't believe me? Alan Greenspan thought so:
In the United States, between 1945 and 1973, consumption of petroleum products rose at a startling average annual rate of 4-1/2 percent, well in excess of growth of our real GDP. However, between 1973 and 2004, oil consumption grew in the United States, on average, at only 1/2 percent per year, far short of the rise in real GDP. In consequence, the ratio of U.S. oil consumption to GDP fell by half. . . . (P)art of the decline in this ratio is due to improved energy conservation for a given set of economic activities, including greater home insulation, better gasoline mileage, more efficient machinery, and streamlined production processes. These trends have been ongoing but have likely intensified of late with the sharp, recent increases in oil prices. (Emphasis mine. -Peristaltor)
To summerize the dry dictation of our Federal Reserve Chairman; the high prices of the '70s spurred developments that eventually doubled the efficiency of our economy in only ten years!
(I know, I know, Mr. Greenspan states that the timeline in doubling efficiency reaches to 2004, not 1983; but after the price of crude peaked at "$39 per barrel by February 1981 ($75 per barrel in today's prices)," consumption rose equal to or greater than GDP, essentially stopping efficiencies gains. Removing the strong market incentive to improve efficiencies halted the continued improvements, at least at the pace the crisis in the '70s dictated. Don't believe me? Find a nice spot on an overpass and count trucks with one passenger. Thanks to the OPEC years and the technology spurred thereby, those newer trucks use far less fuel per pound hauled than their counterparts built prior to 1973, but the modern application of these beasts as big-ass grocery haulers represents a stagnation in efficiency progress.)
Call me an unabashed market economist, or at least a fan of economies properly guided by applied goverment taxation, but I don't think that a few years of shortage is too much to ask for a far more robust future.
There is also a more disturbing question I hear raised, usually from those with big trucks and land yachts. . . .
Are you trying to say that I somehow caused global warming?!
I kind of already covered that responding to the rantings of a coworker, when I said "Deflecting the validity of global warming deflects blame," but the attitude exists. I guess not everyone with a big-ass rig read my post. . . .
Essentially, when humans first learned to harness the energy found in fossil fuels, they did so out of a desire to improve their lots in life, not specifically to warm the surface of the earth. The first steam engines, designed by Thomas Newcomen to remove water from mine shafts, later were improved by James Watt and others to power the Industrial Revolution and move cargo on land and sea with unprecedented speed and ease. Watt's steam led to Rudolph Diesel, to Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, to John Rockefeller, to Henry Ford, to all the others, all who contributed both to increasing the standard of living by harnessing ancient energy and to increasing the percentage of gasses in our atmosphere inherent in that ancient cache.
Did they do any of what they did specifically to poison our air?
Hell, no.
And neither do any of you out there, when you fire up ol' Tin Lizzie to take a spin to the grocer. You, however, are at least aware of what happens. They were not.
My bike, freshly removed from the packing crate outside the old Electric Vehicles NW storefront
For those racked with guilt about your personal tailpipe spewings, take heart. I myself own what was billed just a few years ago as part of the solution, an electric vehicle. I put 2400 miles on that beast, and had a great time riding it, only to learn first hand what many already knew, that the technology was not quite ready for prime time. As a result, I may have the only bike of its kind in Washington State, and I definitely have one of only 200 ever built. That number has gone way down: I know of at least 4 others wrecked or otherwise destroyed. Mine now sits in my garage, waiting for the appropriate convergence of cash to replace the battery pack, an available mechanic/electrical guru to troubleshoot the non-functional go-parts, and a job site appropriately situated near my house. When that happens, in anywhere from a few months to a few years the bike should grace the roads of Seattle once more.
I knew that the bike would not pay for itself in energy savings before I bought it. I bought it not to save money on my travels, but to directly contribute to that sector of the economy that was attempting to find solutions to the current overreliance on fossils for energy, and thus to spur investment that sector. I admit, EMB went under, and so I bet wrong with my bike; but in my defense there was no other source for a true electric motorbike that met my requirements. (I still think that might be the only one, but in fairness, I haven't been shopping for another lately.)
So to those worried that their tailpipes are fouling the air as they go about their business; at the present time, other than not going about your business, there is no alternative. There are promising developments on the horizon, true, but very little is currently available that altogether avoids adding to CO2 accumulation.
Remember: Just as no single individual created the act of releasing fossilized gasses, no single one of us embodies the blame for today's problem -- and that means you.
So don't worry. . . too much.
Edited March 25; February 10; August 1, 2006; August 27, 2006; April 1, 2007.