CHAPTER 5 ATMOSPHERIC ISSUES The ozone layer, acid rain, and the supposed greenhouse effect and global warming are salient in public thinking, and hence call for mention here. I am not an atmospheric scientist, however, and on the technical issues I can only refer you to recent reliable scholarly assessments. I shall try to put these issues in some reasonable perspective, however. The Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming For full background, please see Landsberg (1984), Michaels (1992), Balling (1992), Elsaesser (forthcoming), and Idso (1989). My guess is that global warming will simply be another transient concern, barely worthy of consideration ten years from now in a book like this one. Consider that, when I first ad- dressed environmental matters in the late 1960s and 1970s, the climatological issue of major public concern was still global cooling. These quotations (from Bray, 1991) illustrate the prevailing thinking about climate in the early 1970s, only a decade before the hooha about warming began in earnest. ... [climatologist J. Murray Mitchell, then of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, noted in 1976: The media are having a lot of fun with this situation. Whenever there is a cold wave, they seek out a proponent of the ice-age-is-coming school and put his theories on page one...Whenever there is a heat wave...they turn to his opposite number, [who predicts] a kind of heat death of the earth. [The cooling has already killed hundreds of thou- sands of people in poor nations. It has already made food and fuel more precious, thus increasing the price of everything we buy. If it continues, and no strong measures are taken to deal with it, the cooling will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000. --Lowell Ponte, The Cooling, 1976. The facts have emerged, in recent years and months, from research into past ice ages. They imply that the threat of a new ice age must now stand along- side nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind. --Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist and producer of scientific television documentaries, "In the Grip of a New Ice Age," International Wildlife, July 1975. At this point, the world's climatologists are agreed...Once the freeze starts, it will be too late. --Douglas Colligan, "Brace Yourself for Another Ice Age," Science Digest, February 1973. I believe that increasing global air pollution, through its effect on the reflectivity of the earth, is currently dominant and is responsible for the tempera- ture decline of the past decade or two. Reid Bryson, "Environmental Roulette, Global Ecology: Readings Toward a Rational Strategy for Man, John P. Holdren and Paul R. Ehrlich, eds., 1971. [Bryson went so far as to tell the New York Times that, compared to the then-recent period, "There appears to be nothing like it [in warmth] in the past 1,000 years", implying that cooling was inevitable. (New York Times Staff, 1975, p. 170) Indeed, many of the same persons who were then warning about global cooling are the same climatologists who are now warning of global warming - especially Stephen Schneider, one of the most prominent of the global-warming doomsters. [It is interesting to reflect on the judgments that would be made now of past decisions if the world had followed the advice of the climatologists only fifteen years ago who then urged the world to take immediate steps to head off the supposed cooling threat.] Should we not be glad that governments did not act upon the anti-cooling advice they were given back then? Does this not call into question the warming forecasts? And does this not distract further from the credibility of the doomsaying environ- mental spokesmen who have been systematically wrong in every prediction that they have made during the past three decades, and who are now up in arms about global warming? Curiously, within days after drafting the above paragraph, there appeared a newspaper story (The Washington Post, May 19, 1992, A3) entitled "Volcano Reverses Global Warming: Scientists Expect Mean Temperature to Drop 1 Degree Over 2-4 Years". The event in question was the eruption in June, 1991, of Mount Pinat- ubo in the Philippines. Then within a few days more there ap- peared a scholarly article finding that smoke particles may lead to cooling rather than warming, as had previously been assumed (Penner, Dickinson, O'Neill, 1992). Whether or not the climate models will be right about Mt. Pinatubo, and about the cooling effect of smoke particles, is in question, of course. The problem here, as with the global warm- ing issue generally, is that our planet contains many forces about which scientists as yet know very little, and which they can predict poorly if at all - for example, volcanic eruptions. It is an act of hubris and great imprudence to proceed as if there is solid tested scientific knowledge when - as is the case here - a single article in a single journal can nearly reverse the basic conclusions. This is what I glean about global warming from the refer- ences above, especially Balling (1992). Before the "concerned" reader concludes that the following treatment is simply a white- wash, however, it would be fair to examine the state of your own knowledge on the subject - what you know about technical facts, and the sources of the supposed information. The basis of most people's thoughts on the subject is simply newspaper and televi- sion stories by journalists who have never seriously read the relevant professional literature. 1. All climatologists agree that there has been an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide in recent decades. But there is great disagreement about the implications (if any) for global temperature. In the late 1980s the range of thinking ran from those who believed that there will be warming of up to 7 degrees in the next mid-century to those who argued that the evidence is so mixed that one cannot predict any warming at all; by 1993, the top of the range had come down from seven to two degrees. The high-end-estimate climatologists have also scaled back the esti- mates of possible rise in sea level from several feet to at most a few inches. Some climatologists even argue that present imper- fect knowledge is also consistent with global cooling as a result of carbon dioxide buildup; they assert that it is possible that as scientists learn more, they might well decide that cooling is the more probable outcome. 2. Those who foresee much warming rely heavily on simula- tion models, believing them to be comprehensive and reliable. Those who foresee little or no warming mostly rely on the temper- ature data for the past century. Many of the skeptics of global warming believe that the simulation models lack solid theoretical basis and are built on shaky ad hoc assumptions. Skeptics also point to the absence of correlation between temperature and carbon dioxide buildup in the past. 3. Even those who predict warming agree that any likely warming would not be great relative to year-to-year variability, and would be swamped by long-run natural variability over the millenia. 4. If warming will occur, it is likely to be uneven in time and place. More of the effect would be at night than by day, more in the low-sun season and less in the high-sun season, and more in the arctic regions than in the tropical parts of the world. It should be noted that these effects are less unwelcome than if the effects were in the opposite parts of the daily cycle and the planet's geography. 5. If there will be warming, it will occur over many dec- ades, during which period there would be much time for economic and technical adjustment. 6. Any necessary adjustments would be small relative to the adjustments that we make during the year to temperature differ- ences where we reside and as we travel. A trip from New York to Philadelphia, or spring coming a day or two earlier than usual, is not very different than the temperature gradient for any likely warming within the next century. 7. The necessary adjustments would be far smaller than the effects of the advent of airconditioning in any of the places in this world where that device commonly is found. The alterations that air conditioning - let alone central heating - make in the environment in which we spend our hours dwarf any alterations required by any conceivable global warming. 8. If there would be warming, and if one is worried about it, the clear implication is substitution of nuclear fission for the burning of fossil fuels. This would have other benefits as well, of course, especially the lives saved from air pollution and coal mining. [One can gauge the effectiveness of the mass media in creat- ing public opinion on these subjects by the increase in just a single year in the proportion of the public that were "aware of the global warming issue" - from 59 percent in 1988 to 79 percent in 1989 (The Washington Times, ll-3-89, article by Cheryl Wetz- stein). There is no way that individuals can measure for them- selves the extent of global warming. Hence their thinking is labile and easily influenced by television and newspapers. Then the politicians and the environmental activists who give scare stories to the press cite public opinion as a reason to change public policy. [Assessing global warming increasingly resembles assessing the likely availability of raw materials - speculative theory not fitted to the historical data versus the historical data them- selves. The alarm about the greenhouse effect seems to come from those who pay attention only to various theoretical models - just as the alarm about global cooling came only from theoretical models in the 1970s (and from some of the same persons who were alarmed then) - whereas those who focus on the historical record seem unconvinced that there have been unusual changes and are quite unworried about the future. With respect to natural re- sources, the conclusion is inescapable that those who have be- lieved the historical record have been correct, and those who have believed theories without checking them against the record have been in error. Is it not likely that this would be the case with global warming, too? Acid Rain The acid rain scare has now been exposed as one of the great false alarms of our time. In 1980 the federal government initi- ated the huge National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP), employing 700 scientists and costing $500 million. The NAPAP study found - to the surprise of most of its scientists - that acid rain was far less threatening than it had been as- sumed to be at the onset of the study. It is mainly a threat to a few lakes - about 2 percent of the lake surface in the Adiron- dacks (Brookes, 1990, p. 2) - all of which could be made less acid with cheap and quick liming, and which were as acid as now in the years before 1860 when forests around them began to be cut and wood burned (which lowers acidity). In 1990(?) the Congress passed the Clean Air Act which will have large economic conse- quences upon the nation, with the NAPAP findings unknown to most or all of the Congress; the NAPAP director expressed disappoint- ment in 1990 that "the science that NAPAP performed...has been so largely ignored" (Brookes, 1990, p. 2). Indeed, the NAPAP find- ings were systematically kept from public view until the televi- sion program 60 Minutes aired a broadcast on the scandal. In Europe, the supposed effects of acid rain in reducing forests and tree growth have turned out to be without foundation; forests are larger, and trees are growing more rapidly, than in the first half of this century. (See ). The acid-rain scare re-teaches an important lesson: It is quick and easy to raise a false alarm, but to quell the alarm is hard and slow. The necessary solid research requires considerable time. And by the time the research is complete, many people have a stake in wanting the scientific truth not to be heard - advoca- cy organizations who gain public support from the alarm; and bureaucrats who have a stake in not being shown to have been in error, and who already have built some empire on the supposed problem. The Ozone Layer [This unprecedented assault on the planet's life-support system could have horrendous long-term effects on human health, animal life, the plants that support the food chain, and just about every other strand that makes up the delicate web of nature. And it is too late to prevent the damage, which will worsen for years to come (Time, Feb 17, 1992, quoted in MediaWatch, March, 1992, p. 1). For a reliable scholarly assessment on which I rely, please see F. Singer (1989; forthcoming). 1. The ozone layer and its "hole" over Antarctica certainly deserve study. But this is very different than recommending action. The best principle might be: "Don't do something. Stand there." As with other issues discussed here, it is impor- tant that the government not attempt to fix what is not broken. 2. Some long-run data are shown in Figure 5-1. These data show no trends that square with public scares. Figure 5-1. [Lansberg?] 3. Concern about the ozone hole is only recent. There has hardly been time for competent researchers to build a body of evidence on which to reliably judge what is happening. And scares come and go. The likelihood is very low that a scare that is only a few years old will turn out to be a truly difficult prob- lem for society, given the record of scares and subsequent de- bunkings. Indeed, the history of a closely-related scare should give special pause to those who are inclined to take action about the ozone layer: the saga of the supersonic airliners (Singer, 1989). In 1970 the alarm was raised that SSTs would emit water vapor that would destroy ozone. Before research work could even begin, critics of the SST urged that the planes be banned. Then it turned out that the relevant emission was not water vapor but nitrogen oxides. And further research showed that, if anything, SSTs would add to the amount of ozone in the strato- sphere. That scare is now dead and gone, but not without causing damage. 4. There is great controversy about the ozone layer, with some respected scientists arguing that there is nothing to worry about while some argue to the contrary. The press tends to report only on those scientists who utter warnings of catastro- phe. 5. Volcanic ash and sunspots are cited as possible "natural" causes along with the human-produced chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). It has been noted that (CFCs) at the peak production level were only a quarter of a percent (.0025) of the amount of chlorine released every year by the sea, which implies that the effect of reducing human-produced CFCs is very questionable (Ray, no date). 6. Even if the ozone layer should be thinning right now, it need not be a permanent thinning. If human intervention is caus- ing the change, human intervention can reverse it. 7. Perhaps most important is that even if the ozone layer is thinning, it need not imply bad effects for humanity. The chief threat seems to be skin cancers. But the evidence on the geography or the time pattern of skin cancers over the years does not square with the thickness of the ozone layer (Singer, 1989; forthcoming). And even if a thinner layer implies more skin cancer, all else equal, people can intervene in many ways - even with as simple a device as wearing hats more frequently. Increased ultra-violet radiation stemming from decreased ozone also may have beneficial effects in reducing rickets dis- ease, which results from too little sunlight and "Vitamin D" (Elsaesser, 1990). What Is the Mechanism Which Produces Progress Rather Than Dete- rioration? It is crucial to include in our environmental and resource assessments not only the short-run effects of additional people and economic activity, which can be negative for awhile, but also the positive long-run effects of the problems induced by the additional people and economic activity. It is this crucial adjustment mechanism that is too often left out of thinking on these matters. The process goes like this: More people and increased income cause problems in the short run. These problems present opportunity, and prompt the search for solutions. In a free society, solutions are eventually found, though many people fail along the way at cost to themselves. In the long run the new developments leave us better off than if the problems had not arisen. CHAPTER 6 FINAL MATTERS Can All This Good News Be True? Hearers of the messages in this book are often incredulous, and ask, "But what about the other side's data?" There are no other data. I invite you to test for yourself this assertion that the conditions of humanity have gotten better. Pick up the Bureau of the Census's Statistical Abstract of the United States and Historical Statistics of the United States at the nearest library, and consult the data yourself (see the index for such topics as Pollution, Life expectancy, and the various individual natural resources, plus price indexes) on the measures of human welfare that depend upon physical resources, for the U. S. or for the world as a whole: Food production per person. Availability of natural resources as measured by their prices. The cleanliness of the air we breathe and the water we drink in the U. S. The amount of space per person in our homes, and the presence of such amenities as inside toilets and telephones. Most important, the length of life and the incidence of death. You will find that every single measure shows a trend of improvement rather than the deterioration that the doomsayers claim has occurred.