Dr. David Vernon on Global Climate Change
Robert Hennkens, a regular reader whose presence here I value greatly, introduced me this afternoon to Dr. David Vernon, and asked him to write a piece for us here at 2GreenEnergy, which I’ve reproduced below. I note from his CV that Dr. Vernon holds a BS in Forestry from Penn State, an MA in Botany from Cal State LA, and a Ph.D. in Ecology from Indiana State. He writes, “PSU Forestry requires courses in economics, finance and business management. I took climatology at Cal State. I have over 100 credits in Life Sciences and 15 in Earth Sciences. I am a member of AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science).”
Here’s his article on climate change. I hope you’ll find it as compelling as I did.
In 1971 I took a class in climatology. The subject of global warming came up. The attempt to measure the average temperature of the world was begun by Isaac Newton and the Royal Society in the 1600s. British naval officers were issued thermometers and told to take the temperature every day, recording the time and place as exactly as the instruments of the time allowed. The Royal Society received the logs when the ships returned to England and calculated a statistic called The Average Earth Surface Temperature from them.
For the next 100 years AEST demonstrated no trend. Like all weather and climate data, it has high relative variability, so rather than a neat line it produces a zigzag. In the late 1800s, it was observed that the zigzag had started to climb, and was increasing outside the previously normal variation. By 1900 there was a big issue in the climate science community – is the increase real, and if so, what could be causing it? In the late 1920s, a Nobel-prize winning chemist named Svante Arrhenius showed that the change could be due to increased lower atmospheric CO2, and there was already some data to indicate that global CO2 was also variable, variable enough to make a big difference in the thermal balance of the earth. You see, the earth is heated by the sun and cooled by re-radiation of infrared back into space. The atmosphere is transparent to most incoming solar energy, but opaque to some outgoing heat, so some heat is trapped, accounting for the fact that the average temperature of the moon is below freezing while the average temperature of the earth is above freezing. At the time I took the course the data were not good enough to prove that the increase was not due to changes in heat delivery, or that the change was due to the increasing CO2, which was also observed. I asked my professor to nominate me for AAAS, so I could follow the subject in the literature as more studies were published.
There was a lot of work published by AAAS over the following 20 years. One study in the 1970s showed that the so-called natural cycles should be causing a cooling trend, ending the present inter-glacial and bringing on the next ice age. There are cycles of solar output that effect solar energy production, and cycles of astronomical geometry that increase and decrease the exact distance from earth surface to the sun and cause increases in thermal input when closer and decreases in thermal input when farther away. Based on data from glaciers, sedimentary rocks, and other things, it is possible to demonstrate how climate is warmed and cooled by these effects.
The predicted cooling has not occurred. The observed warming has increased. Glaciers and icecaps are measured to be shrinking. Sea level is measured to be rising. As of 1990, we had enough knowledge of the astronomical cycles and enough computing power to demonstrate that it is extremely unlikely statistically for the present warming to occur by chance while the present astronomical effects are tending to cause the opposite. The earth is getting farther from the sun and hotter at the same time. On the other hand, the correlation between increasing AEST and increasing tropospheric CO2 is extremely high, especially for messy data like weather and climate. Mathematically, there is about a one in a million chance that the warming we see is not due to the increase in CO2 that we measure. Remember, the causal chain was demonstrated over seventy years ago, and correlation plus causal chain is how we define scientific proof. There is no reasonable doubt – the globe is warming and increasing CO2 is the cause.
The amount of carbon required to double the concentration of CO2 in the lower atmosphere from the 0.04% of Isaac Newton’s day to the presently measured 0.08% is immense. It cannot be accounted for by deforestation or agriculture. It does correspond to the tonnage of coal mined and burned since 1750. That too is a mathematical certainty.
All these findings were published in peer-reviewed articles in AAAS’ Science magazine. Like the other 400,000 AAAS members, I was appalled when the W Bush Administration attacked James Hansen of the NOAA for predicting that global warming, now proven real, threatened the economy and survival of mankind.
The question “is it real?” is considered closed. The question “what is causing it?” is closed. The remaining scientific debate is about how fast the climate will change in the future, how much the sea will rise, and how much observed weather anomalies can be blamed on the warming effect. No climate scientists doubt the facts. The scientists that do are not climate scientists and do not actually know what they are talking about. For example, few know that the infra-red resonance of CO2 is so high that CO2 is used as the lasing medium in infrared lasers used since the 1980s to cut cloth and steel.
The “Climategate” controversy surrounds some e-mails from the East Anglia researchers about some modeling they are doing. The warming effect from CO2 alone should be increasing the temperature of the world faster than it is actually going up. If not explained, this disparity between model and fact could discredit the real findings in the eyes of non-scientists. The explanation is simple – the model did not incorporate the cooling effects of the astronomical cycles, which reduce the net heating.
Al Gore did not discover global warming. He just went around publicizing it. Some of the predictions he displayed are still debatable – but he said that. Nobody yet knows how much hotter it will get, how long it will take, and how much land ice will return to the sea.
I have heard it said that the losses of the Snows of Kilimanjaro predate global warming. They don’t. They predate our knowledge of global warming. The numbers began climbing, actually, in the 1750s, now that we look back at them with our best computers.
As for the economics: all non-renewable resources are granted a resource depletion allowance under the tax code. The argument is that the company, by doing its business, is exhausting the means for doing that business, so is deserving of lower tax rates than companies that do not use up their means of production in production itself. All mines and oil wells enjoy this benefit. So do commercial landfills – they have a hole that is being used up by getting filled! Since renewable resources cannot be depleted in this way, renewable resource exploiters do not get a resource depletion allowance. In addition, development of new fossil fuel resources is expensive, and energy is critical to our economy, so numerous additional tax credits and deductions are in the tax code to promote fossil energy development activities, like deep-water drilling, fracking, and mountain-top removal mining. Some alternative energy sources also have promotional credits and deductions – in Arizona, for example, a firm can be rebated up to 40% of the cost of construction of a solar photovoltaic power plant, after the power is actually being delivered. The size and scale of fossil fuel benefits is about three times the size and scale of renewable energy benefits.
The fossil fuel industry has spent a lot of money trying to discredit global warming science and scientists. There is a lot of advertising about the benefits of “clean” coal, “cleaner” natural gas, and domestic petroleum production. Mandates to reduce CO2 emissions are fought every step of the way. More than a dozen Senators and Congresspersons are beholden to fossil fuel interests, and so continue to dispute the scientific facts and argue that the lack of proof of the extent adverse consequences justifies no vigorous action to eliminate carbon burning as for heat and power.
I have the Science magazine articles in boxes in my closet. There is no legitimate, honest and knowledgeable opposition to the idea that burning coal caused the global warming we have already experienced.
Hansen, the foremost expert on this subject on the planet, says that sea level will rise about fifty feet in the next 100 years if nothing is done. Huge areas of habitation and food production are on coasts and within fifty feet of present mean high tide. The cost of not doing something to end carbon fuel use dwarfs the profit from the same. We cannot wait 25 million years for the oncoming ice age to solve this problem for us.
Regards
David P. Vernon
It would be interesting to determine what global warming deniers would accept as adequate proof that CO2 emissions are causing global warming. This is similar to the tobacco industry’s denying that smoking is hazardous to the health; the industry never accepted anything as proof. It always found alternative explanations, regardless of how far fetched they were.
Even if the average temperature of the earth increased by 10 degrees C in one year, the deniers would probably assert that we had nothing to do with it. This could easily create a disaster that greatly exceeds the bubonic plagues in Europe; by some estimations, the plagues killed half of the people of Europe in some areas.
At long last reading David Vernon’s article enables me, as a non-scientist to clearly understand the significance of CO2 and its causes in Global warming. While my work is in renewables in developing countries, I have undertaken it for its pragmatic agricultural, health, social, fiscal and employment benefits, with climate change mitigation as a very welcome and valuable by-product.
Articulate explanations such as this are rare and should be more widely disseminated outside the RE industry – Well done Robert Hennkens for bringing it to our attention and to you Craig for publishing it.
Yes, it is a good article. However, the problem is that many people, after making up their minds, will not read or listen to any material that contradicts their opinions. Instead, they read only material that supports their opinions. Although overcoming that problem is not totally impossible, it is exceedingly difficult and usually cannot be done simply by repeating facts. This is a psychological phenomenon which is widely recognized.
In the case of global warming, there are additional factors at work. Certain politicians may understand global warming but, for political reasons, deny it. They will accept it only when it is politically advantageous to do so which requires convincing a high percentage of their constituents of the realities of global warming. Also, people whose economic interests depend on denying global warming may deny it even though they understand the problem.
I don’t have a solution for these problems. Dealing with them is perhaps best done with the assistance of experts on human behavior. These experts should be enlisted in the effort to combat global warming.
Excellent piece, Dr. Vernon, and thank you for publishing it, Craig Shields. It’s possibly the clearest, simplest overview of global warming, its deniers, and its implications I’ve read, and I’ve read quite a few of them. It should be widely disseminated, ideally in public schools at the middle-school level. An accompanying study guide for teachers would be helpful.
That, Mr. Eggers, is one way to combat fixed opinions, close-mindedness, and confirmation bias: get to people before they have made up their minds. The most inflexible deniers tend to be either those full of passionate conviction, such as Fred Singer, or those being paid handsomely, such as the employees of the Heartland “Institute” and the dismayingly vast embrace of the oil-and-gas cohort. But the weight of popular opinion is against them, and so is the growing (and far more powerful) tide of popular self-interest.
Mr. Parrett,
You’re right; getting to people BEFORE they have made up their minds is far more effective than trying to get them to change their minds later. But even when people have been convinced of the reality of global warming, a few will still change their minds in response to economic self-interest.
Getting sound global warming information into public school curricula surely would be a reasonable thing to do and strong efforts should be made to do so. However, it might be more difficult, at least in some areas, than one might suppose. School boards are often highly political and many would fight tooth and nail to keep such information out of curricula. Note how some school systems and legislative bodies are fighting to keep the teaching of evolution out of the curricula.
Attempts to predict the future have always been fraught with peril. It may be that the public will become so disgusted with the efforts of large corporations to influence the media and legislation that large corporations will lose much of their influence thereby making it easier to make desirable changes in school curricula and to take more effective steps towards safeguarding our environment, including limiting global warming. During the Robber Baron era, the public finally became sufficiently incensed to force politicians to limit the influence of the Robber Barons. History tends to repeat itself, so probably something similar will happen to make it easier to take steps to limit global warming.
While I’m cynical about our ability to change the right minds quickly enough about global warming to avert lots of suffering and dislocation — human nature is fatally optimistic when facing impending disaster — we won’t be in the dark about it, and those in denial are already a smallish minority. There will always be bad teachers, wrongheaded schools, and idiotic school boards — big wave to Texas — but ignorance is harder to impose in the Internet age. Any kid spoonfed “intelligent design” can quickly get a counter-argument from Wikipedia, and many will.
Facts will always subvert disinformation, though there is no guarantee about the time scale. I for one am hopeful that we’ll turn the corner before we blow past all the tipping points and turn earth into Mars.