Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Climate-gate? – not here.

I haven’t written anything about “climate-gate” and I’m not likely to write much on it – although if you’re interested, you can find the dump of emails and source code that everyone’s talking about here. Before you go and download the file though I must warn you it’s fairly large. It’s sixty two megabytes of data. Second, there’s not much point. Everyone who’s talking on one side of the issue is saying pretty much the same thing – that this is evidence of a conspiracy to shut out “skeptics”, and to apply fudge factors and other “tricks” to make the case for anthropogenic global warming look stronger. And just about everyone on the other side says that it isn’t. The “scientists” are even going so far as to say that new data shows that everyone that thinks it’s gotten cooler over the last decade or so is wrong.

All I can say is… read what the researchers at the University of East Anglia actually wrote, and how researchers in other countries responded to them. Those of you that can understand FORTRAN and IDL, read through the source code they used. Arm yourself with knowledge and make up your own mind – but don’t forget climate change research is still ongoing. Someday researchers may come up with a real smoking gun demonstrating that anthropogenic climate change is real – until they do I remain a skeptic.

Almost of more interest to me than the motivations behind the debate about anthropogenic climate change are the terms we use to talk about it, as well as the assumptions we make about the people in the debate. Why did I use the term “climate-gate” to introduce the topic for example? The term is certainly not original with me and anybody who’s been paying attention knows that. Typically the people that use that term – at least in the articles I’ve read – are using it to derogate the behavior of the researchers (or the alleged hackers) in the scandal over the allegedly hacked emails. But why is it that everything having to do with big scandals and cover-ups (assuming there is one here) has to reference the Watergate affair? At least that scandal was named after the hotel where the incident that brought the corruption in the Nixon administration to light took place. Have we no more imagination than that?

Now I say “allegedly” hacked, because the identity of the person or persons that have released this material has not been determined. There are some who are saying that this was the act of a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, and there are some that are saying it was the act of a criminal breaking in to the University’s computer system. I have no idea which is the truth. If it was a whistleblower then it’s about time that this data was released. If it was hackers – their actions are reprehensible – even if the results of those actions are of benefit to people interested in knowing what has gone on behind the scenes. I certainly don’t condone breaking through the security of computer systems to steal data. To me that’s akin to breaking and entering in the physical sense – Ah! Perhaps that’s why they’re calling it “climate-gate”.

Well, maybe that’s not why. After all, so many scandals get tagged with the “-gate” suffix that have nothing to do with breaking and entering. It seems to be a catch-all suffix to make any scandal seem somehow more outrageous. Do you see why I might be interested in the choice of terms we’re using?

To listen to the “media” we’re talking about “anthropogenic climate change”. Often we’ll hear this simply shortened to “climate change” and sometimes we’ll hear the subject described as “global warming” or “human induced global warming” or “human induced climate change”. It doesn’t matter which of these terms is used to label it, for the most part when any of them is used the subject is really “human induced climate change”, and in particular “human induced global warming”. The part that is of interest to most people is the “human induced” part, even if that’s only implied when we talk about it.

As I understand it, there has been an observed “cooling” trend since 1998. Maybe that information is out of date, maybe it’s not. What I do know is that in the 1980s the public was being warned about the “coming ice age”. Some time later, the warnings shifted to “global warming”, and recently there have been noises about “global cooling” and “global warming” at the same time from different sources. The most recent article I read about this in one of the popular “science” magazines (Scientific American) warns about global warming. This article was a response to a study released shortly after the data from the University of East Anglia became public and it mentioned that event downplaying its significance, so I have to assume that the term “climate change” as used by the “consensus” scientists still refers to global warming.

Now then, it is a fact that humans have an influence over their environment. All life forms have an influence over their environment. Perhaps the most radical effect any life form has had upon the environment was that of the first photosynthesizing organisms. If scientists like Stanley Miller (whose early work on the chemical origins of life sparked my interest in science some forty years ago) are to be believed the Earth’s early atmosphere was very much different than it is today and we have photosynthesis to thank for the relatively high percentage of free oxygen in it.

Anyone who has had the unfortunate experience of sitting in a traffic jam upon our nation’s roadways can attest to the influence humans with motor vehicles have upon their immediate environment. Look out the windows of your car and you can see the trash that careless people have thrown onto the roadside. Often it’s fast food wrappers (yes, it’s a benefit to the environment that we’re using paper products for that these days instead of Styrofoam, but that’s a topic for another day), but sometimes it’s the strangest stuff – car parts, baby strollers, soiled diapers, and household appliances. If you’re stuck behind a truck with a poorly tuned diesel engine you can actually see the exhaust emissions as well as taste and smell them. In fact, one way that I can tell when I’m about to suffer from a severe cold is when the exhaust emissions from diesel trucks start to irritate my soft palate. For some reason that always seems to be a bad sign for me and a warning to stock up on medication to relieve my coming symptoms.

I’m certainly not the only person who has noticed that people and their technologies are the cause of a lot of local pollution. It’s patently obvious that others have noticed too, and they’ve banded together with the goal of doing something about it. You will not find me arguing against that anywhere. People make a mess of their environment, and we have a responsibility, each of us has a responsibility, to clean up that mess. The fact that we have local laws to discourage littering and the release of raw sewage into  our water supply is not an evil thing in my view. It’s a necessary thing to discourage the laziness and thoughtlessness of some from poisoning the rest of us.

I’ll go even further though and say that some laws that are designed for our protection from dangers that the public is not commonly aware of are not a bad thing. For example, some two thousand years ago Rome had an empire that was based upon superior technology and laws. This empire began as a representative democracy of sorts, with legislation deliberated upon and suggested by a Senate, but enacted by the people themselves. One of the great technological triumphs of Roman civilization was plumbing – the transport of water through lead pipes. The Romans used lead which in Latin is “plumbus” and the use of lead pipes is probably where the term “plumbing” comes from. They also used lead to sweeten wine.

Today we wouldn’t think about using lead for these purposes in the United States. It’s general knowledge that dietary exposure to lead can cause irreparable brain damage in children. There is some speculation that one of the causes of the insanity that was evident in later Roman emperors could have been caused by dietary lead exposure. This is why for example we have laws and regulations regarding lead-based paint for homes, lead in children’s toys, and in food. It’s also relatively common knowledge that lead fumes can cause brain damage even in adults, which is why there are laws that prohibit the sale of gasoline containing lead for use on the public roadways, despite the clear mechanical advantages that leaded gasoline might have (the valves and valve seats in gasoline engines benefit from the lead deposits left over from the combustion of the fuel, and the lead has a tendency to cheaply increase the octane rating of fuel, resulting in better engine performance under lean conditions).

In the case of lead, clear and settled science, together with well established documentation of the dangers of lead resulted in the laws in question. I strongly support local building regulations that prohibit the use of lead pipe in plumbing, or lead based paint for interior walls. I’m not so much in favor of federal regulations that do this though. On the other hand, I can get behind federal laws that prohibit the interstate transport and sale of lead based paint or lead based gasoline (the use of leaded fuel in racing being an exception – but only so long as the number of racers and the amount of racing fuel used remains a very tiny fraction of the total population using fuels). Of course in the case of federal regulations of this sort it’s the transport and sale – the interstate commerce that I support Congress regulating. I don’t support some federal bureaucracy doing the regulating and I don’t support Congress meddling in the internal affairs of the states.

In the case of “anthropogenic climate change” though I don’t think that the science is settled enough to even contemplate regulation. I will accept it as a fact that the climate is changing. Global climates as well as local climates have changed many times in the Earth’s history. On one of the more popular “science” channels available on cable and satellite I’ve watched programs that speculated about the “snowball earth”. As a student in elementary and high school I learned, not just once but many times, about the cycle of “ice ages” that the earth has experienced in the last few million years. Anthropologists speculate that the modern human species evolved near the end of the last ice age. More recently, there was the medieval warm period and the more recent “little ice age” that we occasionally hear about in discussions of climate change.

None of these events was anthropogenic in nature though. With such wild variations as that in the climate record I am left to wonder about the notion of human induced climate change. The “culprit” in our current notion of human induced climate change is said to be our massive exploitation of fossil fuels. This releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that otherwise wouldn’t be there. If we were using renewable resources such as wood or plant-based oils to provide the fuel we burn we would still be emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but that carbon dioxide would be removed from the atmosphere by the plants that we grow to replace the ones we burned up. Carbon dioxide, being a greenhouse gas is supposed to trap some of the solar energy that is re-radiated by our planet as infra-red radiation. Therefore, the logic goes – adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere traps more energy – leading to global warming.

As any good scientist will tell you though, logic is only a part of the scientific process. It’s not enough to come up with a logical explanation of a phenomenon. It’s not enough to speculate – even if the speculation is based upon logic and facts – that something might happen as a result of a given action. Science also requires observation and experimentation. Before an idea can be accepted as more than just a theory it must be verifiable not just by the person that came up with the idea but by independent researchers that can reproduce the first researcher’s results. Even then, the theory isn’t accepted as a fact, except in the popular mind. There may be future results that demonstrate flaws in the theory and which require a revision of that theory. As for our climate we haven’t really been able to do any real experimentation of the truly long term effects of human interaction with the atmosphere, at least not any reproducible experiments where we have controlled for other factors such as nature’s own contribution to greenhouse gasses.

So it is that we have to look to the climate record to determine the causes of global climate change. Scientists take ice cores from places like Antarctica where the ice is miles thick and they examine the gasses trapped in the ice. They examine the growth patterns of trees – which each year grow fastest in Spring and Summer and slowest during the Fall and Winter, leading to a variation in the density patterns of the wood – tree rings. They look at other records and they try to correlate these records with recorded historical temperatures. They compare the pattern of tree rings to the composition of various layers in the ice cores to correlate the composition of the atmosphere with the growth of trees and thereby with global average temperatures. All of this is science in action. The raw data collected in this way is invaluable.

There are some interesting things to note about all of this though. First, the ice core record is longer by far than any available tree ring record. We can look at fossilized trees and the like, but otherwise we have no way of using tree ring data for anything that goes back more than a few thousand years. Second, according to some scientists, the carbon dioxide signature in the ice core records lags behind the temperature record suggested by tree ring data – by as much as a few hundred years. Third there appears to be a significant divergence in the temperature record as actually recorded by various weather stations and the temperature record as suggested by tree ring data – at least since 1960. Fourth, I’ll just observe that the ice core record doesn’t necessarily reflect annual accumulation of ice and snow, but rather each snowfall.

Each time it snows, the top layer of snow will melt a bit after the snowfall has ended and the snowpack is exposed to the sun and to warmer temperatures and it will refreeze each time the temperature drops. Subsequent snowfalls will add a less dense layer of snow on top of that denser “crust” and it is this that makes it possible to distinguish snowfall events. There’s really no way of knowing for certain how many snowfalls there were in a given year in the area where the ice core was taken, although we can guess based upon what may likely have been the last snowfall for that year. Even determining that can be difficult though if there is a period when there is no snowfall for a large part of a given winter and another one late in the winter.

There’s one last thing to observe about the evidence given to us by ice cores, tree ring data, and even the temperature record given to us by individual observation stations. That’s that each and every one of these come to us thanks to purely local events. Ice cores taken in Antarctica can tell us nothing at all about the conditions in the northern hemisphere. Ice cores taken in Greenland can’t give us quite as extensive a climate record as ice cores taken in Antarctica, but they can help to work out what was going on in Greenland. Arctic sea ice can’t give us any kind of reliable ice core – it floats and moves about from month to month. In all of the places we can take ice cores, there are no trees growing that we can use to make a direct correlation between what we find in the ice core and what we find in tree rings. I won’t even go into the actual historical temperature record we have available. It’s far to short to be that useful and there are way too many factors that can influence the local temperature reading.

My point in all of this is that while we have lots of historical data, the connections between the various temperature “proxies” we have available to us are just tenuous enough to raise a shadow of doubt in my mind about the conclusions we can reach based upon them. What’s worse, in the wake of the so-called “climate-gate” scandal, it seems that the original raw data used by the University of East Anglia has been destroyed. We’re only left with the “adjusted” data and so we can’t be certain that the data we have is any good. They don’t really tell us much about anthropogenic effects on the global climate either. At least I don’t believe they tell us enough about anthropogenic effects to be basing policy decisions on.

Now don’t get me wrong here. I won’t deny that there are human induced effects on our climate, or that when we know what those effects are we should do something about it. But when we don’t know I don’t think it’s wise to try to make policy based on speculation – even if that speculation looks like science. For example, the conversions of forestland to grassland or farmland have a significant effect on the local climate of the area where the conversion takes place. Forestlands have a different moisture cycle than grasslands or farmlands do – and that conversion can cause a significant change in local weather patterns. We have historic and contemporary evidence of this.

When I was going to school students were taught about the drought that took place in the 1930s and the causes for it. Part of this was due to the increased need for wheat during the first “world war” and part due to the return of the land to grazing and pastureland afterward. The distressed topsoil was easily susceptible to erosion – particularly wind based erosion and severe dust storms ruined the land for crops and other purposes. It took government intervention and new methods of farming that prevented erosion to put an end to the problem. Today, China and several other nations are suffering from the desertification of large amounts of their land – due to erosion and drought. These problems are not due to “global warming”, but to other agricultural practices that we have learned to deal with. Since we know the source of the problem and its consequences, we can address the problem and do something about it.

With “global” climate change though we don’t really know that it’s got anything to do with human activities, but many scientists speculate that it is so. For that matter the shifting terminology that we are exposed to raises some doubt about the nature of the change we’re experiencing. Neither do we really know what the consequences of the change might be. Is our climate undergoing global warming? If so, what consequences can we expect? To know the answers to that question we need to look at times when the climate has undergone global warming or been warmer than it is now in the past. We know for a fact (at least according to paleontologists) that humanity has survived at least one significant period of global warming, as Homo Sapiens came into the fossil record at about the time the last ice age was ending. As a species we are nothing if not adaptable – that is nothing but extinct. So if our climate is undergoing global warming then we must be prepared to adapt to a warmer climate. And if the climate change we’re being warned about is purely natural – as opposed to anthropogenic – then adaptation is a better strategy than attempting to prevent it.

And finally, to those that would tell me that it is better to act now to prevent catastrophe in the future, even if we’re not certain that we’re the cause of the problem – I have to ask you a question. How is that idea any different than the notion of a “pre-emptive” strike in wartime or a “preventative war”? Both actions will cost lives and livelyhood. For those on the left that ridiculed the Bush administration for taking action against Saddam Hussein to prevent a recognized but not imminent threat, is it OK for me to ridicule you for doing the same with Global Warming?

Or should I pack my bags and reserve a ticket to Nuremberg?