I am a passionate environmentalist, but I pretty much try to keep my feelings to myself, the reason being I am sure I am in a small minority amongst Belizeans. Our Belizean people want development and modernization, and they are mostly unaware of the price we humans and planet earth have paid and are paying for “progress.” Let me throw out a statistic, for “kicks”. 46 million Americans drink water daily which is known to contain at least trace amounts of pharmaceuticals, according to an Associate Press investigation released last year. The ground water of the United States has been contaminated.
A couple weeks ago, we had a bad problem with fires at the garbage dump just outside of Belize City. The eventual solution was to pump millions of gallons of water into the dump, which is not far from the sea. We were all, of course, relieved to have the fires extinguished, but there is no one who can prove to me that water laden with toxins and carcinogens did not then drain to the sea, there to enter the food chain of crabs and fish.
The American people have enjoyed development, and now they have produced experts who have scientifically evaluated the damage to the planet.
Two of my best friends, Bill Lindo and Dr. Leroy Taegar, laugh at me when I bring up the topic of global warming/climate change. They say that it is all a concoction of conspirators, but the fact of the matter is that the world’s most profitable and most powerful company, the oil company Exxon, is an opponent of the global warming/climate change concept, because it has negative implications for their profit margins. Lindo and Taegar are both scientists, and I am not. So they have the upper hand when the global warming topic comes up.
In today’s column, I would like you readers to bear with me while I reproduce some material on the subject from the June 2009 issue of DISCOVER magazine. I believe the subject is an important enough one, that you will find your time well spent reading what world class experts have to say.
DISCOVER’s editor in chief, Corey S. Powell, interviewed four experts. DISCOVER brought the experts together in conjunction with the National Science Foundation and the San Francisco Exploratorium.
The experts are: Robin Bell, who is a senior research scientist at Colombia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. She has coordinated eight major Antarctic expeditions and studies the mechanisms of ice sheet collapse; Ken Caldeira, a professor at Stanford University and staff member in the department of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Caldeira works at the nexus of climate, the carbon cycle, and energy; Bill Easterling, Dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. Easterly studies global warming and its potential effects on the world’s food supply; and Stephen Schneider, a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Schneider has been a principal member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1988. In 2007, he joined four generations of IPCC authors, including Easterling, in receiving a Nobel Prize for their groundbreaking work.
POWELL: One question I hear all the time is whether the current change in climate is truly extraordinary. Even if humans are contributing to global warming, isn’t this just like the natural variations that have happened many times in the past?
ROBIN BELL: A little background first. I spend a lot of time studying the ice sheets at the bottom of the planet – how they form and how they collapse. The poles are like the planet’s air conditioner. When things are working well, the poles keep the planet nice and cool and we don’t think about it. When things stop working, the poles can start to melt and there’s a puddle on the floor. Today both poles are getting warmer; in Greenland and Antarctica you can see the surface of the ice dropping, and you can see there’s less mass when you measure the ice from space. The process has been ongoing, but it looks like it’s happening faster than it was. We know the ice sheets have come and gone in the past. Why is this any different? One of the most compelling reasons is that in the past the ice sheets from the two poles didn’t move together – one would lead and the other would follow. This time, both the north and south are spewing ice into the global ocean, accelerating at the same time.
KEN CALDEIRA: Another indication of how unusual all this is can be seen by looking at ocean chemistry. When we drive our car and carbon dioxide comes out of the tailpipe, within a year it has spread throughout the atmosphere and is integrated with the surface ocean. When carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater, it forms carbonic acid, and in high enough concentrations carbonic acid is corrosive to the shells and skeletons of many marine organisms. To measure the impact, people go out in ships and drill holes in the ocean floor, where shells of marine organisms have settled throughout geologic history. What we see is that if we continue in our current trends in burning fossil fuels, the ocean will become more acidic than it has been at anytime in the past 65 million years. The last time the ocean was as acidic as it has the potential to become in the coming decades, we saw a mass extinction event.
POWELL: Yet as you note, the earth got warm in the past, too.
CALDEIRA: That’s true, but it got warm over millions of years, and ecosystems had a chance to adapt. What we’re seeing are rates of increase in greenhouse gases and warming that exceed natural rates by a factor of 100. So what we’re doing is really unusual when seen from a geologic perspective.
POWELL: Humans are doing in centuries what natural processes do over millions of years?
CALDEIRA: Yes, and the other timescale mismatch is that what we do over the next decades will affect life on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years. We are at a critical juncture in earth history. If we don’t do the right thing and there are geologists around 50 million years from now, they’ll be able to look at cores and see the remnants of a civilization that developed advanced technology but didn’t develop the wisdom to use it wisely.
POWELL: Climate change is such a huge issue that people tend to feel paralyzed by it. Stephen, you’ve framed it in a helpful way as a problem of risk management. What does that mean?
STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: I often testify before Congress and talk to the media, and they always ask the same question: Is the science settled enough for us to have policy? Do we know enough to spend money fixing this? But science, and especially system science, is very complicated. Now, in any system that’s complicated there are some components that are well established. In other words, they’re relatively settled. We know that the world is now 0.75 degrees Celsius warmer than it was a century and a half ago. We know that the ice sheets are decreasing. But then there are other components with competing potential outcomes – for instance, will a change of three degrees make crop yields go up or down?
POWELL: So how should we separate out the well-established parts, and how do we evaluate the ones that are not so certain?
SCHNEIDER: When you’re covering climate change, you don’t get somebody from a deep ecology group to tell you we’re near the end of the world and then somebody from the Competitive Enterprise Institute who’s going to tell you carbon dioxide is a fertilizer while forgetting about ocean acidification. If you do that, the two lowest-probability outcomes get most of the time in the media and you get this dumbed-down debate. It’s bipolar, and that’s not how system science works. There are multiple potential outcomes. What we do is whittle out the relative likelihood of each of these outcomes so we can make a value judgment about whether or not the risks are adequate to move forward. Risk is what can happen, multiplied by the probability of its happening. That’s what we call an objective or scientific assessment. We try to make the risk aspects clear and then leave the risk management where it properly belongs, which is out among the public and in the political world.
POWELL: What about you, Bill? You’re looking not at climate records but rather at agriculture. Do you see a real break from the past there, indicating a unique signature of global warming?
EASTERLING: One of the problems with agriculture is that it’s a highly managed ecosystem. So it’s often tricky to try to separate out the climate change signal from what might be a host of other things relating to how we manage crops and livestock. But we have seen an increase in the length of the frost-free season. We have seen changes in the incidences and the life cycles of critical agricultural pests, which can be explained only by a general warming. Of course, this is all circumstantial. What made all this come into sharp focus for me was not what we were observing but what we were able to stimulate on a computer. Over the past 10 to 15 years, we have been running experiments with very complex and increasingly reliable global climate models. When we entered into the computer all the various things that forced the climate to change, we were able to faithfully reproduce the temperature record of the past 100 years globally. When you take out the component of human-generated carbon dioxide, the models don’t work at all. There are all these people who say, “Well, what about the sun? Why don’t they think about solar variability?” Of course we think about the sun. The models think about all these things, but the models work only if you put all the components in, and one of the big components is us.
POWELL: How do you deal with skeptics, both in Congress and in the public, who always seem to have a contrary statistic?
CALDEIRA: Climate science has reached the point that plate tectonics reached 30 years ago. It is the basic view of the vast majority of working scientists that human-induced climate change is real. There is a real diversity of informed opinion on how important climate change is gong to be to various things that affect humans, and there is a diversity of opinion on how to address this problem, but the debate over human-induced climate change is over.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I work in a hard-rock mining industry, and the majority of my colleagues tell me I’m crazy when I talk about climate change. Where are some good sources of information that rationally discuss all of these different naysayers’ theories?
CALDEIRA: One useful Web site is realclimate.org.
SCHNEIDER: I have a contrarian section of my Web site, which is climatechange.net. We’re able to triple it because we had to deal with those famous climate professors, you know, professors Limbaugh and Crichton. [Laughter] They have a standard technique, doing much the same thing that the American Tobacco Institute did for a long time, which is to cite the three studies that were equivocal and ignore the 33 studies that were definitive. They use the argument that we still do not, to this day, understand the detailed biological connections between smoking and cancer, but the evidence and data are so overwhelming you’d have to be nuts not to act on it – unless you’re in the business.
CALDEIRA: There was a climate contrarian who testified before the Senate last week. He made the claim that climate scientists were some kind of club and they all made money by somehow supporting each other’s findings. The reality of science is that a scientific career is made by showing that all the people around you believe something that’s not true. If a scientist could provide evidence that the climate theory is incorrect and that global warming is not a product of human activities, he or she would be held up as the Darwin or the Einstein of climate science. We’re highly incentivized to show that all our colleagues are wrong. If we could come up with good evidence that they’re wrong, we would be out there publishing it. The evidence just doesn’t exist.