Thin Ice
Freakonomics gets chilly response to tech fixes for global warming
24th October 2009
A poll came out two weeks ago measuring American attitudes toward global warming. According to media accounts (gleeful media accounts, in the case of Faux), only 57% of Americans believed in global warming, compared to 77% in 2007.
At first I thought it was an unbelievably sloppy poll. If someone came up to me and asked if I believed in global warming, I would say I didn't. “Believe in” suggests faith without evidence, religiosity. “Believe in” means you have an opinion, and you want that opinion to come true, because, well, you happen to like that opinion. I believe there is intelligent life out in the universe, not because I have a shred of evidence supporting such a view, but because I want it to be so. I have faith.
I don't believe in global warming. I acknowledge its existence, based on a lot of solid evidence, and its potential to do severe harm to us. I don't accept it on faith; I accept it on evidence.
So I thought that the pollster had just been unbelievably sloppy. Except it turned out it was Pew Research, and when I went to the source to find out what they actually asked, I discovered that the phrase “believe in” wasn't there. What they did ask was, “Is there solid evidence the earth is warming?” There's a flaw in that question, too, but the flaw depends from a lack of thought by the respondents, rather than lack of thought on the part of the pollster.
Since there haven't been a rash of fires at college libraries around the world in the past year, its safe to assume that all the solid evidence that existed in 2007 still exists today, and it's also a safe supposition that more evidence has been added since then. Since none of it has been falsified by new findings (believe me, Faux News would have let us know immediately if it had), then the only possible legitimate poll result would be 100% saying yes, since the evidence is still there.
Mind you, that doesn't delegitimize the poll, which gives an accurate result. It just shows how willing people are to embrace the philosophy of “I'll see it when I believe it”. One in five respondents changed their minds, and in order to accommodate that change of mind, decided that all the evidence they had seen before was now a figment of their imagination or something.
The same poll also asked how serious a problem they considered global warming to be, and 35% said it was very serious, and 30% said it was somewhat serious.
Hmmm. So of the people willing to acknowledge that the evidence was there for global warming, at least 114% of them felt we should take it at least somewhat seriously.
Paging Olive Oyl to the white courtesy phone. Or maybe it's the red courtesy phone. Tell you what, Olive; you decide. You're exactly halfway between the two phones. Folks, I bet she starves to death before she picks a phone.
The same set of questions last year produced 71% who saw serious evidence of global warming, and 71% who felt we should take it at least somewhat seriously.
That we see such a discontinuity this year suggests to me that we're seeing the reprocessing of thinking by people who have been successfully depersuaded on the issue of global warming by the slick propaganda campaigns. The problem with spending billions to persuade people that something isn't true when in fact it is, is that inconvenient truths have a way of disrupting the new-found faith, and it is hard to maintain.
So if the denialists are chortling that they are winning the battle of public opinion, their behavioral psychologists will be shaking their heads and warning them that one big heat wave next summer will undo all that hard work.
Denialists got more hoped-for news from Paul Hudson, the Climate Correspondent at BBC News. Hudson wrote an article with the provocative title, “What happened to global warming?” The article begins, “This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.” Unfortunately, the lead is misleading, and at least partially inaccurate. 2007 was as hot as 1998, but what is really misleading is the implication that global temperatures subsided to pre-1997 levels, with only a spasm of heat in the past two years. The fact is that of the 11 years since 1997, eight are the hottest ever recorded.
Hudson attributes the “end to global warming” to the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO), which is sort of a long-term (20-30 year) background oscillation to the short-term El Niño Southern Oscillation. Hudson suggests that the PDO is entering a cool phase, which will reduce global warming for the next 20 to 30 years. He doesn't dispute the actual fact of global warming, but believes the PDO may provide a respite.
The charts for the phenomenon (available here http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/ ) don't suggest such a respite. If the PDO is longer than the ENSO, it's also much weaker, and the chart bears this out. It shows trends of 20-30 years, and suggests that we may have entered the cooling phase of such a trend some four years ago. (That would include two of the three hottest years on record). The trends, weak to begin with, are easily and visibly disrupted by the El Niño and La Niña events.
So, far from stopping global warming dead in its tracks, it might, at best, slow it down a little.
Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, the authors of Freakonomics, a contrarian look at basic economic principles (highly engaging, well worth the read) found themselves under attack from environmentalists last week when it came to light that their new book, Freakonomics II, included suggestions on how to handle global warming if we can't control our CO2 emissions.
My gut reaction is to say, “No, the only good long-term solution is to control our emissions.” And I believe that it is something we must do. In the long run, nothing else will work.
But that's long term. In the short term, even if we could wave a magic wand and instantly reduce our emissions to 1970 levels, global warming would continue for at least three more decades.
Then there's the matter of political will. As we all know, getting the nations of the world to sacrifice now to avoid trouble thirty years down the road is difficult at best. It doesn't help that the world's most powerful nation, the United States, is little more than an enforcement arm for large multinational corporations, and if they don't want to sacrifice to cut CO2 emissions, than neither does the United States.
Even the somewhat sour hope that peak oil and the resulting economic stagnation would reduce CO2 emissions isn't panning out. Vast new reserves found in the past three months suggest that Cuba and Uganda may be the largest petroleum producing nations on earth in about 15 years. And in a bitter irony, Canada and Greenland are eying the nearly two million square miles of land presently under ice caps, and wondering what vast troves of minerals may emerge, including, of course, lots and lots of oil. Russia and the US are vying for drilling areas in the Arctic should it become ice-free.
In light of these factors (“these factors” being much easier to type than “Pure, blind human greed and stupidity”), we have to acknowledge that the political will to contain global warming might not be there. If getting people to prepare for problems thirty years down the road is difficult, getting them to reduce profits to prepare for problems thirty years down the road is impossible.
So Dubner and Levitt are looking at quick technological fixes. Contrary to what you may have heard, they don't underestimate the peril of global warming, let alone the fact that it is happening. Nor are they saying that alternate short term approaches are any sort of substitute for addressing the two biggest problems causing global warming: overpopulation and greenhouse gas emissions.
The range of tech fixes available range from the feasible to the ridiculous, and from harmless to potentially worse than the problem they are intended to address.
With present technology, there are several options available that can cause global cooling. One one that Dubner and Levitt look at is injecting sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. They argue this could be done for several hundred million dollars. In effect, it would replicate the effects of a large volcanic eruption. The sulfur dioxide becomes a sulfuric acid aerosol, which reflects sunlight, reducing the energy reaching the earth's surface. A large volcanic eruption can create such a mist for up to three years, resulting in a decrease of up to 4 degrees Celsius for the planet. We could duplicate the results of moderate volcanic eruptions and thus reduce temperatures. The big drawback is that of a major volcanic eruption were to occur randomly (as they are wont to do), then what might otherwise have been a couple of summers of poor crops becomes instead a global food supply crash.
Salting the ocean with iron oxide (rust) to induce a plankton growth spurt has been suggested. The problem is that if we don't do it just right, we could cause a population explosion in plankton that leads to a population crash, leaving the region that was salted with less oxygen-producing plankton than there was before.
One that I intend to take a closer look at that Dubner and Levitt mention is the idea “of increasing oceanic cloud cover by seeding such clouds with salt-water that is sprayed into the air by a fleet of solar powered dinghies.” The authors maintain that.”the estimated cost of building and implementing this technology is a few hundred million dollars.” Yes, it could change weather patterns. As if global warming wouldn't.
It's one thing to promote non-carbon energy such as solar, wind, and nuclear, but another to actually implement it. There have been enormous strides in recent years – solar panels alone are six times more efficient at one quarter the cost. Toshiba is working on a $25 million nuclear reactor the size of a kitchen fridge that could power a town of 1,000 for ten years before refueling. They promise no possibility of meltdown or toxic leaks, although they don't mention the issue of waste. Or the cost of digging it up and refueling it.
Of course, the real bottom line is that we need to reduce our birthrate and strive to get our population down to 3 billion by the end of the century. Even that seemingly modest goal will require incredible effort and sacrifice, and mean a lot of people not having children. As you may have noticed, we haven't had a great deal of luck in controlling our numbers, and we are rapidly approaching a fateful point where if we don't do it ourselves, nature will do it for us. We almost certainly won't like the answer nature comes up with. It will probably involve lots of people – billions – getting sick and dying miserably.
Even if Copenhagen, the big conference on emissions next month, is a success and they come up with a treaty, by itself it won't be enough. We simply cannot hope that we can reduce emissions fast enough or hard enough to avoid a catastrophe by 2060.
Dubner and Levitt are right: we need to look beyond just striving to reduce emissions to solve the problem. And we need to start doing that now.