Heat, lies, and indifference
Martin Williams

(This article appeared in the June/July 1999 issue of Action Asia.)

Maybe you've recently experienced weather that seems unusual for the time of year, or just downright unusual. Like in Hong Kong, which at the end of April and beginning of May was buffeted by Tropical Storm Leo - the earliest tropical cyclone to affect the SAR since April 1978. Even as Leo developed over the South China Sea, Severe Tropical Storm Kate was heading north over the Pacific after dumping up to 360 mm of rain on the Philippines, and so helping bring the nation twice its average rainfall from the beginning of March to late April. Thailand and Vietnam also saw abnormally wet early springs. Deluges hit east-central China and southern Japan in April, a month when temperatures climbed as much as 8°C above normal across a swathe of land encompassing much of China and central India.
            Maybe, if you did experience unusual weather, you wondered if global warming was responsible. Maybe it was: unusual weather events are forecast by scientists concerned with global warming. But no one can say for sure: global warming is a science that is rife with "maybes" - "maybe" the temperature will rise by such-and-such an amount, "maybe" the sea will inundate huge areas, "maybe" these ocean currents will fail, or this ice sheet will melt (or, "for sure", everything will be just fine and dandy, if you're to believe a handful of folk.).
            For all the uncertainty, the most fundamental "maybe" of global warming has surely been laid to rest. No longer need we hedge and say "maybe" the planet is getting warmer. The data clearly show that temperatures are rising. And the only convincing explanation is that we are pumping ever more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
The greenhouse gases work chiefly by absorbing infra-red radiation that the earth's surface radiates after being heated by the sun, and in turn radiating some of the energy back to the surface. Without this "greenhouse effect", the earth's average temperature would be around -18°C instead of the present 14-15°C.
            Water vapour and carbon dioxide are the most important natural greenhouse gases, and it's carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, forests and so on that have many scientists worried. If these continue at current rates they look set to double the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide by the middle of the next century. Coupled with emissions of other greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide, CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), ozone and methane, they could cause significant warming.
            Already, temperatures are rising roughly in concert with carbon dioxide levels. According to the World Meteorological Association (established by the United Nations), the global temperature has increased by around 0.7 C. It has risen fastest over the past two decades, and last year jumped 0.2 C above the previous high - prompting a NASA announcement headlined "1998 Global Surface Temperature Smashes Record".
            This decade is the warmest since widespread, reliable record keeping began last century. Judging by paleoclimatology studies based on data including tree rings and historical documents, it is also the warmest decade in at least the last 600 years, and warming has been most dramatic since the 1920s. Paleoclimatologists have delved further back in time by examining ice core samples. Their results indicate there have been other warm periods, but it appears that - unlike the present one - none was global in extent, and all could be explained by natural factors.
For all the mounting evidence that global warming resulting from human activities is very real and is happening right now, there are loud voices protesting that there's no need for remedial measures. A small band of scientists and other academics - dubbed the greenhouse sceptics - vehemently promote the case for inertia. Simply put, their main arguments are that global warming due to our actions is a myth (they're quietly dropping this one, as reality increasingly shows otherwise); that it may be happening but is trivial, and that even if it does happen, it will be good for us.
            The sceptics have their own publications, including the biweekly World Climate Report. The backer of some of them, including the Report, is the Greening Earth Society. Check the web site of the society, and you'll find it, "believes that humankind's industrial evolution is good, and using fossil fuels to enable our economic activity is as natural as breathing." If you're not too distracted by images of greenery, you'll also notice that the society was created by Western Fuels Association, which is a US coal consortium. Various other sceptics' ventures are likewise supported by the fossil fuel industry, which from time to time also funds adverts and media campaigns downplaying the notion that global warming is a problem. According to a report in Multinational Monitor, the strategy paper for one campaign that was launched in the US revealed that it targeted "older, less educated men ... [and] young, low-income women" in districts receiving their electricity from coal.
            The sceptics don't include the scientists who are heavily involved in measuring global temperatures and amassing reams of data. Instead, they chiefly attack the work of scientists who are helping show the link between global temperatures and greenhouse gases. At times, they make astute, original contributions to the field. But the sceptics also seem fond of misrepresenting and selectively using data and scientists' comments.
            Until last year, the sceptics found some justification in arguing that global warming wasn't happening. Satellite measurements had confounded most scientists by revealing a cooling rather than a warming trend. But last autumn, the reason was revealed: the satellites were slowly losing altitude. Once corrected for this, the data showed the temperature was roughly constant, or slowly warming.
            But that barely troubled arch sceptic Patrick Michaels, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. He has lately pilloried the "Global warmers", suggesting the climate is warming mainly because of the sun's output increasing. He did, however, acknowledge we may have supplied "a bit of greenhouse warming", but noted that this occurs largely in the coldest air masses of winter.
            Michaels is also a senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, a public policy research foundation that recently published Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn't Worry about Global Warming. In an article called "Global Warming: Try It, You Might Like It" that appeared last June, the book's author, Thomas Gale Moore, said that if the globe warms it would mostly boost winter temperatures, making the US more livable. Transportation would benefit from lower disruption by ice and snow. While "doomsayers" had predicted that diseases spreading as temperatures rise, Moore's own research had shown that a warmer world would be a healthier one for Americans. Then, the increasing carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere would make plant life more vigorous, thus providing more food for animals and humans. After going on to assert that rising sea levels would cost Americans far less than they would gain through global warming, Moore concluded, "Warmer is better; richer is healthier; acting now is foolish."
Moore and his ideas might not prove too popular in Alaska. In common with the rest of the Arctic, the state has been warming rapidly over the past hundred years, with a hike of 3C over the past three decades. The consequences are dramatic. Swathes of permafrost are melting, leading to utility poles and trees leaning wildly. Underground ice pockets are also melting, creating sinkholes that fill with water - in turn drowning trees - and wreak havoc on roads. Expanses of taiga forest, already suffering climate-related stresses, are being killed by spruce bark beetles that have spread as the temperature has risen.
            Scientists can't definitely finger global warming as the villain behind Alaska's woes - one reason seems to be a change in atmospheric circulation (itself perhaps linked to warming). But a group of climatologists who reported on Arctic warming concluded that growing concentrations of greenhouse gases "probably played an increasingly dominant role" since 1920.
            There are other changes being seen around the world that are similarly consistent with the predictions about global warming. The world's glaciers outside Antarctica and the Greenland Ice Sheet are shrinking at an increasingly accelerated rate - preliminary calculations on the shrinkage in the US's famed Glacier National Park indicate there will be no glaciers left there within a century. Two Antarctic ice shelves that are being studied by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and the University of Colorado are disintegrating. The Larsen B and Wilkins ice sheets had evidently been in retreat for 50 years, losing around 7000 square kilometres; but last year saw an abrupt escalation of the disintegration rate, with 3000 square kilometres of ice lost.
            Winters are shortening, less severe low temperatures are being recorded. Linked to these, some species of wildlife are spreading up mountains, and northwards in the northern hemisphere. While these include benign creatures such as butterflies, others are more harmful, such as the spruce bark beetles in Alaska. And, according to authorities such as Dr Paul Epstein, Associate Director of the Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, the species on the move include vectors of human diseases, like mosquitoes carrying malaria and dengue fever. (Epstein's view is, however, hotly contested by Paul Reiter, head of the dengue fever branch of the US's National Center for Infectious Diseases.)
            Also not certainly attributable to global warming, but meshing with projected impacts, was last year's unprecedented, widespread coral bleaching. And the apparent change in the frequency of El Nino, which has become more common in recent years.
            One computer study has suggested that the pattern of ocean temperatures that occurs with El Nino could become an almost constant condition if global warming is unchecked. If so, we could expect to see far more of the impacts like widespread drought in Indonesia and nearby areas. And, presumably, even more, massive-scale coral bleaching.
            There are plenty of other studies indicating that a warming world will be far from the utopia that sceptics like Moore would have us believe. Ecosystems like boreal forests may prove unable to adapt to the rapid temperature rise - and, as Greenpeace point out, dead forests won't be able to take advantage of increased carbon dioxide levels. Undaunted by Reiter's criticisms, Paul Epstein has predicted that global warming will have grave consequences for human health, both by nurturing the spread of diseases, and by leading to more killer heatwaves.
            More extreme weather events, including floods and droughts, are forecast. Indeed, researchers with the NOAA's National Climatic Data Center have reported that the upswing in such events is already occurring in the US, where weather-related insurance claims increased from US$2 billion in the 1980s to US$12 billion in the first half of the 1990s.
            A study employing computer simulations of typhoons over the western Pacific found that if the sea surface temperatures was increased by 2.2 C, the result was typhoons with wind speeds intensified by 5-12 percent. (Some typhoon and hurricane researchers dispute the finding.)
            Sea level has risen 4 to 10 inches this century, and is predicted to rise another 6 to 37 inches in the next century. If the higher figure proves correct, the rising sea will affect land that's currently home to 118 million people. Small island nations like the Maldives are already suffering as the sea rises, and are worried they will drown.
            There could be even more dramatic changes ahead. A warmer ocean just might melt the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which lies on land that is below sea level. If so, the process could take as little as 500 years, and could increase sea levels by up to 20 feet.
            Northwest Europe, meanwhile, could experience not warming, but a sudden, dramatic cooling. At present, the climate there is mild compared to other regions at the same latitude, thanks to warming by the Gulf Stream. But some research indicates that the Gulf Stream is unstable, and that this and other currents circulating in the Atlantic can abruptly switch - they did so during the last Ice Age. Maybe, some scientists suggest, the currents could switch again as a result of increased precipitation that's forecast to occur with global warming (it would disrupt the circulation by reducing salinity in the North Atlantic).
There are many ways of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Among them are boosting efficiency of energy use, cutting down on use of fossil fuels, reducing overall energy use, and protecting and planting forests on grand scales. More than 150 countries that signed a 1992 United Nations climate change convention have met to discuss these and other measures, most recently in Kyoto in December 1997. But so far, they have done little but meet and talk and make occasional promises. The US, which is responsible for almost a quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions, had aimed to cut emissions back to 1990 levels, yet by 1997 they were almost ten percent higher. While developed nations procrastinate, developing nations resist limiting their emissions.
            And so, for all that scientists believing in global warming appear to be on the right track, governments and industry (and the rest of us) are behaving much as the sceptics advocate. Given this, a recent study suggests the global temperature could rise by another 2°C over the next century. And so, like experimenters locked in our own test tube, we march into a warmer future. Will it really be better? It doesn't seem likely.
There's a plethora of sites from "global warmers" on the Internet. Among the most useful are sites by Wood's Hole Research Center, The Union of Concerned Scientists, NASA, and the World Wildlife Fund. Perhaps also read Greenpeace's extensive rebuttal of sceptics' arguments.
            For more info on global warming, see my blog/forum - DocMartin on Global Warming.