Overloading Emoh Ruo: the rise and rise of hydrocarbon civilisation - Page 8

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Murray Sayle (dec.)

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References and Supporting Information

Amid the Noah's flood of literature, printed and electronic, rapidly rising on this subject, I have not found an attempt to bring together the climate science, as far as it is known, with the economics, ethics and demographics involved. Hence this essay.

I have no solution to offer, not even a course of action to recommend, but rather a compilation of what seems to me relevant. I can claim no prescience. The present piece is the result of a very long, and often confused, journey, geographical and conceptual, made over many years.

Like most of us, particularly Australians, I saw the future in terms of our (fossil-fuelled) national development. In my youth, I hunted rabbits from a motorboat, drove thousands of outback kilometres to mine opals and chopped down trees for exercise. I owned an eight-seater off-road SUV to transport my wife, Jenny, our dog, three children and their friends, plus camping gear.

Being inquisitive (the journalist's ruling passion) I have kept up, as best I could, with the proliferating new studies - molecular biology, fractal geometry, chaos mathematics - that were steadily undermining the old certainties of high-school science. I have no special authority in any of these fields, only a general idea of where to look and what to look for. How we got to where we are now may or may not be a useful guide to what lies ahead for our planet and its human crew. But it is the only one we have.

Our consideration must begin with the observed, quantifiable facts we possess - the levels of carbon dioxide and the other "greenhouse gases" found in air bubbles trapped in the cores, some kilometres long, drilled into the ice that covers Greenland and Antarctica. The graph below shows that levels of carbon dioxide, taken as a marker for all the "gases" (one is actually a kind of soot), have peaked fairly regularly four times in the past half million or so years. Each period is about 120,000 years and, although a bit late, we seem to be headed for a fifth in the presumed series about now rather rapidly, as if to keep to a climatic timetable, according to the air samples taken at Cape Grim on the north-west coast of Tasmania over the past three decades. These steep peaks have ascended from low points that have also recurred with pulse-like regularity. But the pattern of peaks has been less clear and they failed to appear when the series, projected backwards in time, suggests they should have, around 550,000 and 650,000 years ago.

What are we to make of all this? The simplest deduction is that high CO₂ levels go along with high global temperatures, melting icecaps and glaciers, and so produce high sea levels, while low CO₂ levels have meant more ice, more glaciers and lower seas. Ice and snow, both being white, reflect the Sun's heat back into space (what astronomers call "albedo") and stay cold, while exposed earth, being earth-coloured, absorbs the sun's rays and warms up.

But what reverses the cycle at either end and why does it happen every 120,000 years or so, or at least, has lately? We have, in simple terms, not the foggiest notion. The variables that might be responsible, including sunspot activity, changes in the Earth's and Moon's inclination and orbit, continental drift, deep-sea metabolism, magnetic shifts and extraterrestrial strikes, are mind-bendingly complex, and none shows a periodicity anything like the observed 120,000 years. Human activity may well be accelerating, or "forcing", as climatologists say, the current upward climb but we could not have caused the previous ones as (by carbon dating of human and humanoid remains) we were not around then. Some religions put it down to God's (or the gods') inscrutable purpose but this is not much use for prediction, the ultimate aim of all science.

This gets us to the most vexed and heat-generating aspect of the whole subject - where is the proof of any of the gloomy predictions we hear every day (there seem to be fewer calls for proof of the optimistic ones)? What, indeed, is the nature of scientific proof?

The most accessible treatment of this subject is An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science by Rudolf Carnap, edited by Martin Gardner (my copy from Dover Books, 1995, ISBN 0-486-28318-6 (pbk). A former member of the Vienna Circle of philosophers who migrated to the United States and taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, Carnap recommends (at pp 35-36) particular precision in making what he calls metascientific statements, that is, assertions about science itself. Someone might well ask a scientist, he explains, "You tell me that I can rely on this law in making a certain prediction. How well established is the law? How trustworthy is the prediction?" The answer, says Carnap, has to take the form "the hypothesis is confirmed to a degree of 0.8 on the basis of the available evidence" and then has to list the evidence on which the scientist is relying.

In other words, if more evidence turns up, the hypothesis could become a very long outsider or even pure moonshine. This is getting a long way away from the deceptively crisp "to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" of high-school physics but it goes far to explain why the scientists of Working Group One of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced from Nairobi in 2001 a 60 to 90 per cent chance that CO₂ concentration in the air had not been higher in the past twenty million years, and Working Group Two, another galaxy of star scientists, offered similar odds that by 2100, the global air temperature would be up between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees C.

To nonreaders of Carnap, this might sound more a bookie's pitch than a clarion call to sacrifice, and few were moved to trade their SUVs for bicycles or boats. This clash - cautious science assailed by politicians, publicists and sceptics both informed and ignorant - will cloud the debate far into such future as we may have, with the chance of agreed action fading by the day.

In contrast, the findings of Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station are clear and open to the skies. The instruments on the cape's tip are often unattended and the area is closed to tourists, but a close approach is possible and the station has its own elaborate website with figures and many photos:

http://www.bom.gov.au/inside/cgbaps/cg_specs.shtml

The population statistics on which I confidently rely come from the CIA's exhaustive website:

http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/

For estimates of pre-modern human populations I have consulted:

A Concise History of World Population, second edition, by Massimo Livi-Bacci, Blackwell, 1998, ISBN 0-631-20455-5 (pbk)

The clearest account of the indictment of CO₂ and its noxious cousins I have found is:

The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer R. Weart, Harvard UP, 2003, ISBN 0-674-01157-0 (alk.paper)

On the early successes and reasons for the ultimate fall of the Dutch Republic, my best authority has been Simon Schama's The Embarrassment of Riches: an Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age, Knopf, 1987, ISBN 0-394-51075

For the daily ebb and flow of new science, old objections, arguments and counter-arguments, I am addicted to the lively Cambridge Conference (CCNet), a scholarly website edited by Benny Peiser, who teaches social anthropology (skirts rather than skulls) at Liverpool John Moores University, United Kingdom. Dr Peiser is exuberantly eclectic in his work and if there is an aspect of the climatic debate he hasn't covered, I have yet to spot it. A particular merit is that, as well as scientific papers with links, references and abstracts, he keeps in touch with journalistic accounts of new developments and the flood of rumours, praise (rare) and insults (many) sloshing around the web. Subscription is free at: l This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it V("subscribe cambridge-conference")

dilemma - Find out more versus Do something now - which was already being agonised over when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. As he has said:

"A recent survey among some 500 international climate researchers found that ‘a quarter of respondents still question whether human activity is responsible for the most recent climatic changes'. How decision makers and the interested public deal with these scientific doubts and uncertainties is another matter. But it is vital for the health and integrity of science that critical evaluation and scepticism are not scorned or curbed for political reasons."