 GUEST OPINION Don’t Confuse Me With The Facts The Environmental Movement Has Abandoned A Sound, Scientifically Based, Debate In Favor Of Radically Partisan Politics (Part II in a Series) By Perry Hicks One of the environmental movement’s more egregious errors is the taking of simple single issue slogans and then standing by them regardless of factual evidence. By focusing on a well defined “evil”, sloganeering can be a great tool for raising contributions. However, it ultimately undercuts the movement strategic position by giving rise to the notion there is a parallel agenda. Take for example, the issue of our “disappearing forests”. A couple of years ago I had come into a pen pal who was an environmental activist. She was dumb struck when I told her that America has more trees today than in the time of George Washington. My pen pal refuted this so I suggested an obvious visual reference: look at any Civil War-era photograph and you will see very few trees. Particularly along the east coast, trees had been felled for firewood, building materials, and to open up copious amounts of farm land. By Washington’s time, forests had been reduced to the point that in urban areas, coal was substituted for heating and cooking. She continued her rebuttal by claiming no environmentalist would say that the “total bio-mass of our forests” was greater today than 200 years ago. From her view point, this is probably true; an environmental activist probably would not say it. That likelihood, however, does not, make it a fact. There is good evidence that our national forestry has been expanding for nearly 100 years. Take Mississippi for example: · Mississippi has about 18.5 million acres of forest land · This is 1.5 million more forest acres than the state had in 1987 · This is 2.3 million more forest acres than the state had in 1934 · This increase despite continued urban growth and commercial logging Although I refrained from harrumphing every time she referred to President Bush as “frat boy”, any suspicions she may have had about me was confirmed when I told her that I was about to appear on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor”; my guest appearance was to defend private ownership of sport utility vehicles. Shortly thereafter she would not reply to my emails. Global Warming If differences in forest management are fraught with acrimony, one can only imagine the rancor associated with global warming. Of course, global warming is joined at the hip with the equally controversial CO2 issue. While we experience weather locally, weather is, in fact, driven globally. A fixture of the debate is where and how are the temperatures measured? Pro-global warming environmentalists cite ground based temperature measurements as solid proof that the earth is indeed warming. Anti-global warming environmentalists cite satellite measurements as proof that earth’s average temperature is either fairly constant or undergoing a very slight cooling trend. So which is it? Warming or cooling? And, do the ground based average local temperature tables support the global warming view? The tables below show regression model for average annual temperature data for Pascagoula Mississippi. Note the steady decrease in temperature between years 1907 and 2000. Data from U.S. Historical Climatology Network.
The ground based temperature record is also further complicated by an abundance of large thermal sources such as towns and cities. To climatologists, these are known as heat islands and science is beginning to recognize the dramatic impact heat islands can have on weather. It should be noted that the average annual temperature is only one climatological statistic. There is also rainfall, snowfall, and the extremes in temperature variance. If earth’s climatological record is so difficult to interpret, why are environmentalists so strident in their insistence that global warming is real and just as strident in their demands for a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions? To understand that, one must examine the origins of global warming. The Genesis of Global Warming The notion that human activity could impact the climate is an ancient one, assuredly spanning back many millennia to prehistoric man. However, the idea that man could alter weather came into a more rational focus near the end of the 19th century when a Swedish scientist published a paper suggesting that modern man’s burning of fossil fuel could put so much carbon into the atmosphere that a “greenhouse” effect could take place and so cause earth’s average temperature to rise. Archeological evidence as well as historical record gave witness to the earth’s climate having changed in the past and at times doing so drastically. The greenhouse effect was but one theory among many, including sun variability and volcanism, so it did not get the attention that it does today. In the 1930s meteorologists came to believe that the temperature was rising in the United States and had been doing so for nearly a half century. It was presumed that the rising mercury was only evidence of some natural cycle. An amateur meteorologist, G.S. Callendar blamed the temperature rise on CO2. However, being the 1930s, there was no money to begin a major study on a tasteless, colorless, seemingly benign gas like carbon dioxide. This changed in the 1950s when a ballooning Federal Government had both the money and newly invented computing power to study atmospheric CO2. The theory of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations was confirmed in 1961. Besides vastly improved computers, scientific instrumentation had undergone a revolution following World War II. Thus, not only were scientists able to automate complicated mathematical calculations that predicted global warming, scientists were able to employ brilliant new techniques to derive raw data. One of these new techniques enabled the extraction if climate data from the fossil record. The picture thus drawn for them gave scientists concern; climate changes could occur, not just gradually over the broad length of millennia, but do so suddenly, in as little as a few hundred years. Although a calculation made in 1967 indicated average global temperatures could rise over the next 100 years, no alarm was sounded at that time because a cooling trend had been underway since 1940. Scientific evidence and opinion varied wildly as to whether the earth’s climate would continue to cool into a mini ice age or take a dramatic turn for a warming trend. The economic stagnation of the 1970s availed little new funding for global warming studies. However, the slight cooling trend ended in the late 1970s and both research and debate picked up the pace. It was becoming increasingly clear that mankind was releasing far more stuff into the atmosphere than CO2, such as dust, diesel fuel particulates, chlorofluorocarbons (CFC refrigerant blamed for opening the ozone hole) and methane. Despite this expanding list of pollutants and questions about solar variability and volcanism, some scientists continued to focus on the single issue of CO2. This has resulted in very vocal demands for the industrialized nations to severely restrict greenhouse gas emissions. The demand for immediate controls on CO2 has pitted the environmental movement against that of personal freedom. By the 1990s, the brawl had spilled out onto main street USA and the issue came to the forefront of our political debate. The need for considerable public funding for research and ultimately intrusive government regulation, like restrictive forest policy, was adopted by the far left wing of an almost monolithically liberal Democrat party. Thus, the battle lines were again drawn, not over scientific merits, but over political philosophy; Left vs. Right; socialism and big government against free enterprise and limited government. That is why my environmentalist pen pal did not want to have anything more to do with me. To her, I was anathema to everything she politically stood for and so, in her view, nothing, no matter how true, I said had any value. Although it would seem that CO2 and global warming are inseparable, the issue of warming can be a stand alone issue. CO2, however, is another matter. Without global warming, the subject of atmospheric CO2 concentration would be irrelevant. So why, given the above narrative, would “environmentalists” insist on focusing almost exclusively on CO2? On what basis do they stake their argument? Next time, we will explore this question and the quite natural embrace environmentalists and socialists have for each other. Click Here for Part I
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It’s July.
It is Hot, Hazy, and Humid And I Haven’t Heard A Word Perry Hicks is a former Mississippi Coast resident and was a correspondent for the old Gulfport Star Journal. He has appeared on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor.” Perry has also hosted his own radio talk show on the auto industry with a mix of politics, and is a former Ford Motor Company technical trainer. He currently works as an Associate Professor of Automotive Technology at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond, VA. Contact the Author: royalenfieldcrusader@hotmail.com |