10 Green Heresies to Accept

by David R. Butcher | May 27th, 2008

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Global warming is promoted with a ferocity and intensity that is similar to a religious fervor. Skeptics are treated as heretics, and believers are considered lunatics. In preparation for tomorrow’s biweekly IMT e-mail on energy, here are 10 recently proposed “inconvenient truths.”

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Note: Welcome back, dear readers! Hopefully, you had Monday off and used the three-day weekend to rejuvenate. Leading up to tomorrow’s energy-themed issue of IMT, we’re going to ease back into the post-holiday workweek with a cafeteria-style post: rather than eat the full meal, you can pick and choose what you’d like to consume.

The phrase “climate change” has grown in preferred use to “global warming” by many because, as the National Academies has said, it helps convey that there are changes in addition to rising temperatures.

Earth’s climate has changed many times during the planet’s history, with events ranging from ice ages to long periods of warmth. However, beginning late in the 18th century, human activity associated with the Industrial Revolution has also contributed to changing the composition of the atmosphere and, therefore, very likely is influencing the Earth’s climate.

(The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report last year stated that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and that “most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely [+90 percent] due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”)

“Winning the war on global warming requires slaughtering some of environmentalism’s sacred cows,” according to Wired Magazine in its latest issue, which offers brain food for even the most hard-line believer/nonbeliever.

“The planet is already heating up, and the point of no return may be only decades away,” Wired continues. “So combating greenhouse gases must be our top priority, even if that means embracing the unthinkable.”

The magazine proposes we accept these “10 inconvenient truths”:

1) Urban living is kinder to the planet than the suburban lifestyle.

2) Air-conditioning actually emits less C02 than heating.

3) Conventional agriculture can be easier on the planet than organics.

4) Old-growth forests can actually contribute to global warming.

5) China may be the solution, as the People’s Republic leads the way in alternative-energy hardware.

6) Genetically engineered, super-efficient “frankencrops” could put a real dent in greenhouse-gas emissions.

7) Carbon credits were a great idea, but the benefits are illusory.

8) Face it. Nuclear power is the most climate-friendly industrial-scale form of energy.

9) Don’t buy that new hybrid! Test-drive a used car instead.

10) Prepare for the worst. Climate change is inevitable. Get used to it.

Whether global warming is real or not, climate change is very real — a natural planetary cycle or man-made — and instead of hopelessly trying to stop it, we should probably be trying to figure out how we’ll adapt to it.

Agree or disagree with these “inconvenient truths” above?

Related from IMT’s Archives:

21st Century’s Grand Challenges for Engineering

A Nuclear Revival: Are We Ready, Willing and Able?

Dirtiest Fossil Fuel the Future’s ‘Cleanest’?

Alternative-Fuel Vehicles on the Road: A ‘Real-World’ Guide

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Comments:

Dave

May 27, 2008

Man caused global warming is probably a myth promoted by governments to control people and production.

Climate will change; it always has, it always will. We have had much warmer periods in history and obviously much colder.

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Antigone

May 27, 2008

I love how people think they can control everything, including the cycle of the planet. Remember, this planet has gone through ice ages and tropical ages. We see this in the fossil record.

Or, should we just ignore the physical historical record and be narrow minded about it?

Ponder this one: the same people that want so badly to destroy religion by pointing to the fossil record are the same ones that scream about global warming, ignoring the same records.

We don’t have control of the environment to the level that these people think we do. So, deal with it.

You want to “save” this plant from mankind? Well… GET OFF IT!

Let’s get serious about space exploration. Only by moving off this planet will we be able to really take away our influence on it.

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Sherwyn

May 27, 2008

Dave is full of it!

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AEGeneral

May 28, 2008

Here’s an inconvenient truth:

The longer global temperatures continue to drop (maybe you haven’t noticed), and the longer CO2 levels soar to unprecedented heights, the more likely people are going to notice the lack of correlation between the two.

Maybe some of you would like to plot the two on a graph and stare at it, because it’s just not working out over the past 6 years.

And since the IPCC has already dismissed the warming of the early 20th century as largely a natural event, that leaves about a 30 year period where it appeared CO2 emissions were driving global warming….until about 6 years ago, where the correlation abruptly went south, and continues to do so.

The gig is up. It’s all over but the crying.

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David P. Vernon

May 28, 2008

“Global warming” may be news to the general public, but the scientific community has been aware of the data and has been working on answers since the 1920s. We now have a better than 90% correlation between average global atmospheric temperature increases and global atmospheric CO2 concentration increases, along with geologic evidence for what the world will look like if we put all the carbon back into the atmosphere that was fixed and buried as fossil fuels in preceding geologic ages. The issue is simple – burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric CO2, whereas all other agricultural and biological activities merely cycle the same CO2 between air and biomass. The only other net sources of CO2 are volcanoes and meteors, each miniscule.

The answer is equally simple – stop burning carbon to generate power! We get there only by harnessing all the energy sources that do not increase combustion – wind, waves and tides, falling water, sunlight, geothermal energy and nuclear power. There are current, technically and economically viable ways to harness every one of these sources. The principle obstacle at present is inertia – the installed base of the combustion economy, the lack of investment history for calculating returns on investment for non-combustive energy sources, and the rats nest of red tape and government regulation skewed at present to favor the status quo. Change requires three things – political will to cut the red tape, public support for non-combustive energy despite aesthetic and safety issues, and the courage of investors to put their money into non-combustive energy projects with faith that their money will be repaid at a nice profit.

The trend is unmistakable, the eventual end point will destroy civilization as we know it, and the only questions really left unanswered are how bad it will get in how much time. Will Greenland melt off in our lifetimes, or not? Will Antarctica melt off in our lifetimes, or not? How much land ice will return to the sea as water in each of the next decades? It is futile to debate the timing and degree of eventual certain catastrophe, when we now could at least mitigate, if not prevent, such a disaster.

For the skeptics, I encourage spending a couple of days in a university library with back issues of AAAS Science. There you will find what is known, what is still not known, and what the consensus is among people who work on this stuff every day. There have been new findings every year since 1972.

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Bill Lane

May 28, 2008

As has been said many times, the earth goes thru many cycles and it will again. What we do to affect the climate realy has little to do with the change. It is a natural course of events. I will never understand the level of self importance we place on ourselves.

Should we be good stewards and do the best each of us can for the betterment of our world? Of course we should.

Each of us should always begin an action with the question, “How will my action or demand for rights or priviledges effect the rights of others”. Follow that rule and our whole world attitude will change.

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Vicki

May 29, 2008

Now, I am not a scientist, or an environmentalist or any kind of “ist” for that matter, so I may be missing something here. But it seems to me that the argument is about whether or not we as a race have had a hand to play in climate change. Yes, through the ages the world’s climate has altered significantly, and we cannot change that. It is just the natural evolution of things. But has it been considered that with the amount of toxins and pollution that we pump into the atmoshpere everyday, we may just be speeding up the evolution of change? In my humble non-”ist” opinion, it is extraordinarily arrogant to thing that we have not had any effect on climate change.

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Jen

May 30, 2008

Thank God for the lunatics.

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