Answering Malotky:
Showing the Data
On September 9, 2007 the Record
Searchlight,
http://www.redding.com/news/2007/sep/09/can-a-few-parts-per-million-really-warm-the/
The essence of Malotky’s viewpoint can be summarized as follows:
1) There are two sides to the global warming debate, both of which have a “political spin” and no data, which causes Malotky to “get so aggravated by everything” he reads or sees on the subject.
2) Those who believe that human beings are responsible for global warming are “protagonists.” Note that he does not refer to them as scientists and does not acknowledge any scientific basis for this view.
3) He appears to acknowledge the reality of global warming, (although his “proof” is a joke about southern hospitality) and he accepts “the fact that humans are adding lots of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.” However, he claims there is no connection between the two. Malotky cannot believe that rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere can cause the temperature of the Earth to increase because it exists in such “tiny amounts” in our atmosphere.
4) A much better explanation for global warming, according to Malotky is “sunlight” and/or the “slow cooker at the Earth’s core,” a “radioactive molten iron spinning dynamo.”
Since this subject is a purely scientific one at its “core,” Malotky is correct to argue that anyone who makes claims regarding it, should “show data.” The best method for doing this is the scientific method. This requires us to test our theories in experiments, obtain results and publish our findings in reputable, peer-reviewed science journals. “Peer-review” refers to the fact that all published studies must be reviewed by two or three anonymous “peers,” scientists with extensive knowledge and experience in that particular field of study.
While many of us are not in a position to conduct our own experimental studies, we can always review the results of studies conducted by others. Anyone who has attended college or graduate school has likely spent long hours in the library or on a computer conducting research into the published literature on a subject. The reason for this, of course, is so we can write with authority and thorough understanding of the field based upon the accumulated body of knowledge that scientists have developed in the previous years and decades on our subject of interest.
The first section of any professional science paper is the literature review, which Malotky seems to have neglected. This is a critical section because it establishes the context for the study, informs the reader of the background or basis for the specific line of inquiry and reminds those who may not be familiar, what previous studies have found to be factually true.
Climate science, for example, and the relation between CO2 and temperature in particular, is a mature field of study, extending back over 100 years. The questions Malotky raises are hardly new but have been debated and studied for decades. In fact, according to the Atlas of Climate Change, 17,761 studies on climate change were published between 1971 and 2005. 2000 studies (five or six a day) were published in one single year (2005).
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/10694.html
It is surprising that a person who presents himself as science-based would offer alternative theories to explain climate change without conducting any research or review of the literature to see if these questions had already been tested and “proved.” One wonders if he believed he might be the first to consider the possibility that sunlight might play a role in global warming. Would it not make more sense to read the published papers on the subject and discuss the evidence for or against his claim? Would this not be a more scientific manner of investigation? To write a column on the possible causes of global warming without any review of or reference to the huge and extensive collection of scientific “data” that he claims to value is puzzling.
One cannot begin to understand the science behind our changing climate without reading about the “Giants of Climate Science,” the scientists who first studied and taught us the facts surrounding climate.
Fourier
Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier, a French mathematician and physicist, was the first scientist to recognize what we now call the “greenhouse effect” when he proposed in an 1827 essay that atmospheric gases might affect the planet’s temperature. He wrote, “Light finds less resistance in penetrating the air, than in repassing into the air when converted to non-luminous heat”.
Tyndall
In 1859, the Irish physicist, John Tyndall invented the ratio spectrophotometer, and used it to study the capacities of various gases to absorb or transmit radiant heat. Tyndall proved that the main atmospheric gases, nitrogen and oxygen, are transparent to radiant heat, while “tiny amounts” of water vapor and carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are opaque and trap part of the sun’s heat as it is reflected by the Earth’s surface.
Tyndall wrote:
“The solar heat possesses. . . the power of crossing an atmosphere; but, when the heat is absorbed by the planet, it is so changed in quality that the rays emanating from the planet cannot get with the same freedom back into space. Thus the atmosphere admits of the entrance of the solar heat, but checks its exit; and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.”
(http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/general/history/JTyndall_biog_doc.pdf)
Tyndall recognized that were it not for the “tiny amounts” of what we now call greenhouse gases that all of the sun’s energy would escape back into space. He wrote:
“Aqueous vapour is a
blanket more necessary to the vegetable life of
Tyndall also, “established beyond a doubt that the radiative properties of water vapour and carbon dioxide were of importance in explaining meteorological phenomena such as the formation of dew, the energy of the solar spectrum, and possibly the variation of climates over geological time.”
Furthermore, “Concerning climate, Tyndall thought that changes in the amount of any of the radiatively active constituents of the atmosphere—water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, or hydrocarbons—could have produced “all the mutations of climate which the researches of geologists reveal . . . they constitute true causes, the extent alone of the operation remaining doubtful.”
(http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/general/history/JTyndall_biog_doc.pdf)
However, the scientist who was the first to clearly draw the connection between CO2 and temperature was the Swedish Chemist, Nobel Prize winner, and “father of climate change science,” Svante Arrhenius, who “set out his theories on the origins of ice ages in an 1895 paper to the Stockholm Physical Society, 'On the influence of carbonic acid in the air upon the temperature of the ground'.” (http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/page.asp?id=5971)
Please take note that over 112 years ago “Arrhenius calculated the capacity of the Earth's surface at different latitudes and seasons to absorb and reflect solar radiation” and “From this…produced a series of temperature predictions, reasoning that large changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would trigger feedback mechanisms causing glacial formation and retreat.”
Furthermore, “While…some of Arrhenius's calculations have been shown to be in error, it is nonetheless remarkable that his estimates of the temperature increases likely to be caused by rising carbon dioxide concentrations are very close to modern predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, based on sophisticated computer simulations.”
While Arrhenius was the first to suggest the theoretical connection between CO2 and the Earth’s temperature, British engineer and meteorologist, Guy Callendar was the first to claim proof it was actually happening in a 1938 paper he published entitled, "The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and Its Influence on Temperature." This was “the first of many articles aimed at reviving the carbon dioxide theory of climate change.”
(http://ams.confex.com/ams/annual2003/techprogram/paper_58908.htm)
“Callendar took his own weather
observations at his home in
Furthermore, “In 1944 climatologist Gordon Manley noted Callendar's valuable contributions to the study of climatic change. A decade later, Gilbert Plass and Charles Keeling consulted with Callendar before beginning their research programs. Just before the beginning of the IGY, Hans Seuss and Roger Revelle referred to the ‘Callendar effect,’ defined as climatic change brought about by anthropogenic increases in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide, primarily through the processes of combustion.”
(http://ams.confex.com/ams/annual2003/techprogram/paper_58908.htm)
In the 1950’s a series of scientific articles began to appear related to humanity’s production of CO2 and its effect on the planet’s temperature. One paper in particular was significant:
Revelle, Roger, and Hans E. Suess (1957). "Carbon Dioxide Exchange between Atmosphere and Ocean and the Question of an Increase of Atmospheric CO2 During the Past Decades." Tellus 9: 18-27.
This reference and others can be accessed at Spencer Weart’s excellent and comprehensive review of the history and “Discovery of Global Warming.” Many citations from this chronology come from this site.
(http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html)
It was in Revelle’s and Suess’s 1957 paper that Revelle wrote, “"Human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future."
Ian Sample in the Guardian published an article on June 30, 2005 entitled, “The Father of Climate Change,” in which he wrote,
The existence of an
increasing greenhouse effect was hotly debated until the postwar funding of the
1950s kicked in and researchers began to get firm data. In 1956, physicist
Gilbert Plass confirmed adding CO2 to the atmosphere would increase infrared radiation
absorbed, adding that industrialisation would raise the Earth's temperature by
just over 1C per century. By the end of the 1950s, Plass and other scientists
in the
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1517938,00.html)
Several of Plass’s articles can be found here:
Plass, G.N. (1956). "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change." Tellus 8: 140-54.
Plass, G.N. (1956). "The Influence of the 15 Band on the Atmospheric Infra-Red Cooling Rate." Quarterly J. Royal Meteorological Society 82: 310-29.
Plass, G.N. (1956). "Infrared Radiation in the Atmosphere." American J. Physics 24: 303-21.
Plass, G.N. (1956). "Carbon Dioxide and the Climate." American Scientist 44: 302-16.
Plass, G.N. (1956). "Effect of Carbon Dioxide Variations on Climate." American J. Physics 24: 376-87.
Plass, G.N. (1959). "Carbon Dioxide and Climate." Scientific American, July, pp. 41-47.
In 1958 Charles David Keeling, professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography began his now famous measurements of CO2 levels in the atmosphere and was “the first to report that global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide were rising.”
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/globalchange/keeling_curve/01.html
Keeling measured CO2 levels at the time at 315 parts per million (ppm) and his “Keeling Curve” continues to express the inexorable rise of this gas in our atmosphere as a result of humanity’s continued reliance on fossil fuels. Recently Dr. Jeff Price, IPCC scientist at CSU Chico announced that CO2 levels in 2007 had risen to 383 ppm.
In 1975, Wallace Broecker, currently a Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and a scientist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory published a paper entitled: "Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" The opening sentence of the abstract reads:
"If man-made dust is unimportant as a major cause of climate change, then a strong case can be made that the present cooling trend will, within a decade or so, give way to a pronounced warming induced by carbon dioxide.”
http://members.aol.com/trajcom/private/broecker.htm
In 1983 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences conducted a
comprehensive study of the impacts of rising CO2 and concluded they were
“deeply concerned” and pointed out that “we may get into trouble in ways that
we have barely imagined.” (
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Govt.htm#L_M005
That same year, the Environmental
Protection Agency released a report of its own about the greenhouse effect and
said, “Substantial increases in global warming may occur sooner than most of us
would like to believe.” According to
Spencer Weart, “A ban on fossil fuels seemed out of the question on both economic
and political grounds” so the EPA “saw no practicable way to avoid a rise of
temperature, perhaps a big rise.” The
report said there could be "a change in habitability in many geographic
regions" within a few decades, with potentially "catastrophic"
consequences. (Seidel, Stephen, and Dale
Keyes (1983). Can We Delay
a Greenhouse Warming? (2nd, Corrected Ed.).
In 1986 a study entitled, “Future global warming from atmospheric trace gases” was published in Nature. It said:
Human activity this century has increased the concentrations of atmospheric trace gases, which in turn has elevated global surface temperatures by blocking the escape of thermal infrared radiation. Natural climate variations are masking this temperature increase, but further additions of trace gases during the next 65 years could double or even quadruple the present effects, causing the global average temperature to rise by at least 1 °C and possibly by more than 5 °C. If the rise continues into the twenty-second century, the global average temperature may reach higher values than have occurred in the past 10 million years.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v319/n6049/abs/319109a0.html
In 1987 Dr. Broecker appeared before the U.S. Senate's Subcommittee on Environmental Protection, and reported that his studies revealed the possibility of "very sharp jumps" of climate within the near future. He said, "I come here as sort of the prophet.” He added, "There are going to be harsh changes." (U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Environmental Protection, Hearings, Jan. 26-28 1987, pp. 21-23.)
In 1988, then President Reagan
signed a "Global Climate Protection Act" that required the
administration to prepare a plan to stabilize the level of greenhouse
gases. Of course this never
happened. (Pomerance, Rafe (1989).
"The Dangers from Climate Warming: A Public Awakening." In The Challenge of Global Warming,
edited by Dean Edwin Abrahamson, pp. 259-69.
As pressure continued to build from the scientific community, The U.S. government recommended to international agencies the creation of some kind of new "intergovernmental mechanism." In fairly short order other governments agreed, and an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988. (Agrawala, Shardul (1998). "Context and Early Origins of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change." Climatic Change 39: 605-20.
Agrawala, Shardul (1998). "Structural and Process History of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change." Climatic Change 39: 621-42.
Hecht, Alan D., and Dennis Tirpak (1995). "Framework Agreement on Climate Change: A Scientific and Policy History." Climatic Change 29: 371-402.)
In 1990 the IPCC (www.ipcc.ch) confirmed the world was warming and would be several degrees warmer by 2050. Two years later the Rio Earth Summit was held and 155 nations signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) that designated 2000 as the year nations would reduce their greenhouse gas levels to where they were in 1990. No serious attempt has ever been made to honor this agreement, however. Fifteen years have passed and there is no evidence that any progress has been made in reducing CO2 production.
In 1995 the IPCC issued their Second Assessment Report (SAR) and concluded that “greenhouse gas concentrations have continued to increase” and “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”
In 2001 the IPCC released their Third Assessment Report (TAR) in which they concluded that available scientific evidence showed that “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”
Science
In March of 2001, Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science magazine wrote an editorial about the scientific consensus on climate change. He wrote,
“By now the scientific consensus on global warming is so strong that it leaves little room for the defensive assertions that keep emerging from the cleverly labeled industrial consortium called the Global Climate Coalition and from a shrinking coterie of scientific skeptics…During the past year in these pages, we have published over 30 peer-reviewed reports and articles documenting findings that relate to global climate change. Some of these extended the kinds of modeling studies cited in the IPCC report. Others documented the intensification of the El Niño events that has accompanied the warming we have already experienced. Still others measured the retreat of glaciers, the thinning of polar ice caps, the extraordinary growth in the heat content of the world's oceans, and other indicators…And that's just from one journal. Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science. But there is little room for doubt about the seriousness of the problem the world faces.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/291/5513/2515
In May of 2001, President George W. Bush asked the United States National Academy of Sciences to assess our current understanding of climate change. The report they released was entitled, “Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions.” A summary statement concluded:
“Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.”
http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10139
American
Geophysical
In 2003 the American Geophysical Union (AGU) announced that “Human activities are increasingly altering the Earth’s climate” and “Scientific evidence strongly indicates that natural influences cannot explain the rapid increase in global…temperatures during the second half of the 20th century.”
http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/policy/climate_change_position.html
Oreskes’ Literature Review
In 2004 Naomi Oreskes published a study in Science in which she reviewed a sample (928 studies) of all the climate change papers published between 1993 and 2003 and failed to find a single study that disagreed with the consensus view that human activity is responsible for global climate change. To date this finding has never been challenged in any peer-reviewed science journal.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
Joint Science Academies
In 2005 the Joint Science Academies released their statement on the “Global response to climate change.” The Joint Science Academies include the Academia Brasiliera de Ciências (Brazil), the Royal Society of Canada, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Academié des Sciences (France), the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina (Germany), the Indian National Science Academy, the Accademia dei Lincei (Italy), the Science Council of Japan, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society (United Kingdom), and the National Academy of Sciences (United States of America).
http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf
The statement read in part, “It is likely that most of the warming in recent decades can be attributed to human activities.” The statement continued:
The existence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is vital to life on Earth – in their absence average temperatures would be about 30 centigrade degrees lower than they are today. But human activities are now causing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases – including carbon dioxide, methane, tropospheric ozone, and nitrous oxide – to rise well above pre-industrial levels. Carbon dioxide levels have increased from 280 ppm in 1750 to over 375 ppm today – higher than any previous levels that can be reliably measured (i.e. in the last 420,000 years). Increasing greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise; the Earth’s surface warmed by approximately 0.6 centigrade degrees over the twentieth century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that the average global surface temperatures will continue to increase to between 1.4 centigrade degrees and 5.8 centigrade degrees above 1990 levels, by 2100.
In 2005 the President of the National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone, was called as an expert witness to speak before the U.S. Congress on the subject of Climate Change Science and Research. Dr. Cicerone stated:
“Laboratory measurements of gases trapped in dated ice cores have shown that for hundreds of thousands of years, changes in temperature have closely tracked atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Burning fossil fuel for energy, industrial processes, and transportation releases carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now at its highest level in 400,000 years and continues to rise. Nearly all climate scientists today believe that much of Earth’s current warming has been caused by increases in the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels. In fact, recent analyses of measurements of the Sun’s total brightness argue against any detectable long-term trend in the energy Earth receives from the Sun, making it difficult to conclude that the Sun has been responsible for the warming observed over the past 25 years.”
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ocga/testimony/Global_Climate_Change_Policy_and_Budget_Review.asp
As mentioned earlier, there were 17,761 articles published in professional scientific journals on climate change from 1971 to 2005, with over 2000 articles published in 2005 alone or five or six papers a day. The IPCC reviews these articles before publishing their findings that paint an increasingly confident view that human activity is the principle driver behind global climate change.
Hansen and Wilson
In 2006 NASA’s James Hansen announced that the world has only ten years left before it will be too late to solve this problem (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14834318/).
He and other scientists are warning us that there is a point of no return where “tipping points” take over and we will no longer be in a position to mitigate the effects of greenhouse gas pollution. Predictions are made of melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, prolonged droughts, heat waves, powerful hurricanes, and according to biologist, E.O. Wilson, the likely extinction of 50% of all plant and animal species before the end of the century.
“In a staggering forecast, (eminent Harvard
biologist Edward O.)
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/05/gone-2.html
On July 27, 2006, Dr. Cicerone, the President of the National Academy of Sciences appeared before a U.S. House of Representatives hearing for the Committee on Energy and Commerce and said, “I think we understand the mechanisms of CO2 and climate better than we do of what causes lung cancer…In fact, it is fair to say that global warming may be the most carefully and fully studied scientific topic in human history.”
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/exxon_report.pdf
In 2007 the IPCC released their
fourth report (4AR) and claimed 90% certainty that global warming was man-made
and will “continue for centuries.” It
said it was too late to prevent serious consequences but immediate reduction of
emissions might avert catastrophe. The
original report listed 99% certainty but government officials from
More than 2,500 scientific expert reviewers, 850 contributing authors and 450 lead authors participated in AR4. Over 130 countries were represented. The IPCC concluded that atmospheric concentration of CO2 in 2005 exceeded by far the natural range present in at least the last 650,000 years as determined from ice cores.
American Meteorological Society
Also in 2007, the 11,000 member American Meteorological Society (AMS) released its Information Statement on Climate Change that said, “Strong observational evidence and results from modeling studies indicate that, at least over the last 50 years, human activities are a major contributor to climate change.” The statement said, “Direct human impact is through changes in the concentration of certain trace gases…known collectively as greenhouse gases (including CO2)” and “Increases in (these gases) are nearly certain to produce continued increases in temperature.” The statement concluded with the sage advice that “Prudence dictates extreme care in managing our relationship with the only planet known to be capable of sustaining human life.”
http://www.ametsoc.org/POLICY/2007climatechange.html
American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science was founded in 1848 and serves some 262 affiliated societies and academies of science serving some 10 million individuals. Its most prominent publication, Science, has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated readership of one million.
In 2007 the AAAS released their Board Statement on Climate Change and said,
“The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now and it is a growing threat to society…The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now…The average temperature of the Earth is heading for levels not experienced for millions of years…We need an aggressive research, development and deployment effort to transform the existing and future energy systems of the world away from technologies that emit greenhouse gases…It is time to muster the political will for concerted action. Stronger leadership at all levels is needed. The time is now. We must rise to the challenge. We owe this to future generations.”
http://www.aaas.org/news/press_room/climate_change/mtg_200702/aaas_climate_statement.pdf
In June of 2007, the Proceedings of the
announced that “Global warming is accelerating three times more quickly than feared.”
pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.0700609104
The Independent wrote about the new findings:
The study, published by the US National Academy of Sciences, shows that carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing by about 3 per cent a year during this decade, compared with 1.1 per cent a year in the 1990s. The significance is that this is much faster than even the highest scenario outlined in this year's massive reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - and suggests that their dire forecasts of devastating harvests, dwindling water supplies, melting ice and loss of species are likely to be understating the threat facing the world.
http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2609305.ece
The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change,
An excellent review of climate science facts can be found in The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change, A Guide to the Debate by Andrew Dessler and Edward Parson.
“In this accessible primer, Dessler and Parson combine their expertise in atmospheric science and public policy to help scientists, policy makers, and the public sort through the conflicting claims in the climate-change debate. The authors explain how scientific and policy debates work, summarize present scientific knowledge and uncertainty about climate change, and discuss the available policy options. Along the way, they explain why the debate is so confusing.”
The authors evaluate from a purely scientific perspective “the six potential causes that have been proposed for twentieth century warming including human emissions and five natural processes.” These “natural” processes include orbital variations, tectonic activity, volcanoes, solar variability and internal variability.
Dessler and Parson state, “Scientists have concluded that solar variability was probably an important or even dominant driver of climate change up until the mid-twentieth century but has made at most a very small contribution to the rapid warming of the last few decades.”
The authors also “decisively eliminated as significant contributors” two of the “natural” processes, orbital variations and tectonic activities because “they are simply too slow to cause significant warming over time periods as short as a century.” Just like solar luminosity changes, the final two “natural” processes, volcanic eruptions and internal variability of the climate system “are unlikely to have contributed more than a small fraction of the rapid warming of the past few decades.”
Regarding an argument that somehow the molten iron core of the Earth is getting hotter and causing the atmosphere to warm is apparently not a subject of scientific study. I can only assume if there was any scientific credibility to this that a science paper would have been published on it by now.
Regarding human activity, the authors’ review of the scientific evidence leads them to state, “We know that human activities have been increasing the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere for the past century or two. Measurements show the concentration of CO2 has increased about 30% over that time, while other greenhouse gases have increased by similar or larger amounts. Basic physics provides strong theoretical reasons to believe that such an increase in greenhouse gases should warm the Earth.”
They conclude by stating, “It is likely that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities have caused most of the rapid warming in the last few decades of the twentieth century.”
Dessler and Parson state, “The pressure exerted by emissions from human activities is already substantially altering the Earth’s climate.” They warn in regard to future climate change impacts, “If climate change (moves) near the high end of the projected range (remember the PNAS study found that our current trend will take us well above the very worst case scenario envisioned by the IPCC earlier this year), impacts over the twenty-first century are likely to be severe and potentially unmanageable for everyone.” They also make the chilling pronouncement that this level of warming “may represent a climate change that has no precedent over the entire history of the Earth.”
While it may seem to be an example of “overkill” to use 20 pages to respond to a single newspaper column, I could easily write 20 more. In fact, in an attached bibliography I have listed 29 books from my own private collection, which expound upon these facts. Malotky’s essential argument betrays a stunning lack of curiosity. While he claims to have learned in med school to not trust anyone’s word without “data,” his entire piece proves he never bothered to do any research to see what data exists, an example of astonishing (but quite common) “intentional blindness.” He appears to have completely ignored a century of science, brushed aside a scientific consensus that is unrivaled in the annals of science history and instead come up with his own quirky climate theories as if he knows more than tens of thousands of climate scientists who have devoted their lives and careers to professional pursuits of science and factual truth.
Having said all this I must now admit that none of this matters. The hard truth is that it is no longer enough to have science on our side. Science has proven that cigarette smoking contributes to lung cancer, over-eating to obesity and other diseases, excessive alcohol consumption to its share of physical health maladies and premature death. The reality is that people smoke, overeat and over-consume alcohol despite the warnings.
Even more so, there is tremendous, some might say insurmountable economic and political pressure to not solve the climate crisis. We are addicted to our internal combustion engines, and our endless, gluttonous consumption of fossil fuels. Everyone agrees suitable alternatives are lacking. And despite the warnings, we will not change. There is no immediate incentive to do so and it is too easy to do as Malotky does: ignore the evidence, continue business as usual and mislead others. Ask any alcoholic; denial has its rewards. The consequences come later.
The hard truth is we have ignored the science for decades and thanks to the Malotkys of the world we will always have a ready supply of deniers and contrarians to assure us we can continue. Ignorance may be bliss but clear foresight and knowledge of the tragedies that lie ahead is excruciating. To know that we could have solved this and to know that we will not is beyond sorrow, beyond imagination, beyond ones power to comprehend or grieve. Our only hope is that one day reason and scientific truth will be revered by all even if it is too late to save us. Perhaps one day as a species we will at long last humbly acknowledge the full facts and ramifications of our choices. Unfortunately, as Malotky’s piece proves, that day is not yet.
Douglas W. Craig
September 21, 2007
Bibliography
These are books from my private collection, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in learning more about the science of climate change.
DWC
Bowen, Mark. Thin
Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in
the World’s Highest Mountains.
Cox, John, D. Climate
Crash: Abrupt Climate Change and What It
Means for Our Future.
Dessler, Andrew E., and Parson, Edward A. The Science and Politics of Global Climate
Change: A Guide to the Debate.
Press, 2006.
Dow, Kristin, and Downing, Thomas E. The Atlas of Climate Change: Mapping the World’s
Greatest Challenge.
2006.
Flannery, Tim. The
Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the
Climate and What It
Means for Life on Earth.
Fleming, James Roger. The Callendar Effect: The Life and Work of Guy Stewart Callendar (1898-1964): The scientist who established the carbon dioxide
theory of
climate change.
Gelbspan, Ross. The
Heat is On: The Climate Crisis, the
Cover-Up, the Prescription.
Gelbspan, Ross. Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists, and Activists Have Fueled the Climate Crisis—and What We Can Do to Avert
Disaster.
Gore, Al. An
Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary
Emergency of Global Warming and What We
Can Do About It.
Hartmann, Thom. The
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate
of the World and What We
Can Do Before it’s Too Late.
1998.
Hillman, Mayer, Fawcett, Tina and Rajan, Sudhir
Chella. The Suicidal Planet: How to
Prevent Global Climate Catastrophe.
2007.
IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), 2001. Climate Change 2001: Mitigation. The Contribution of Working Group III to the Third
Assessment
Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Press,
Kister,
Kolbert, Elizabeth. Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.
Lovelock, James. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth.
Lovelock, James. The
Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis
and the Fate of Humanity.
Lynas, Mark. High
Tide: The Truth About Our Climate Crisis.
Maslin, Mark. Global
Warming: A Very Short Introduction.
Maslin, Mark. Global
Warming: Causes, Effects and the Future.
McKibben, Bill. The
End of Nature.
Monbiot, George. Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning.
Ochoa, George, Hoffman, Jennifer, and Tin, Tina. Climate: The Force That Shapes Our
World and the Future of Life on Earth.
2005.
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