Not all experts agree that man is to blame; others point the finger at oceans or the sun

By Andy Ho
May 1, 2007
The Straits Times

COME July 7, megastars of the pop music world will hold seven mammoth concerts across the world to bring attention to global warming.

This initiative comes on the heels of former US vice-president Al Gore's Oscar for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Arguably the most famous layman's account of how human activities are causing global warming that will lead to cataclysmic climate disasters, it has all but settled the debate, fans say.

True, average global temperatures have risen 0.2 deg C in the last 30 years or so. Yet when Hollywood gets into the act, red flags should go up. Furiously.

Yes, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and British premier Tony Blair believe in it. Even US President George W. Bush, the last holdout, gave in to the hype in February. After all, environmental groups, government reports and the media assert that there is virtually unanimous agreement among the best scientists about human-induced ('anthropogenic') global warming. It is now sacrilegious to doubt this theory that the burning of fossil fuels by humans leads to rising levels of carbon dioxide or CO2, said to be the principal greenhouse gas, thus heating up the earth.

One prominent sceptic is Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In a recent debate organised by the Rosenkranz Foundation in New York, Prof Lindzen said: 'The Earth is always warming or cooling, at least a few tenths of a degree. And we're talking about, so far, something on the order of six-tenths of a degree centigrade.

'We're not even arguing about whether greenhouse gas emissions are contributing at some level to warming. They most certainly should (but) I would suggest it would be very little.'

Writing in the Wall Street Journal recently, the MIT don pointed out that, 'if all else were kept equal, the increase in CO2 should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed'.

And in a controversial hour-long documentary shown recently on Britain's Channel 4 called The Great Global Warming Swindle - which you can view on the Internet - Prof Lindzen observes sardonically: 'One thing you must not say is that this (increase in CO2) might not be a problem.'

Is he a lone voice in the wilderness? After all, we have been repeatedly assured that a consensus exists among thousands of the world's best scientists on the matter.

In the same documentary, John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, lead author of the 2001 IPCC (the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report and a contributing author of the 2007 IPCC report, flatly says there is no consensus. In Congressional testimony last month, he argued that 'a more modest atmospheric warming' was more likely than what popular theory would suggest.

On the documentary, Prof Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute and a member of the IPCC panel also rubbished the claim about a consensus among the world's top 2,500 scientists. He pointed out that none of them were asked to agree and those who disagreed were included in the list of authors anyway, as were several non-scientists as well.

While some environmentalists might concede that the IPCC report is a political document, they would also point to what they see as Mr Gore's knockout punch, a dramatic video based on the world's climate record preserved in ice cores.

The air of ancient times is trapped inside ice, so scientists drill into ice at the poles and take these ice cores back to the lab where the sealed ancient air is released under carefully controlled conditions to study its carbon levels.

A chicken and egg question

IN HIS presentation, Mr Gore shows how ice core data translate into a sawtooth graph of the world's temperature fluctuations from eons past. He then strategically places below this graph yet another one of carbon level changes in the atmosphere over the same period.

The two graphs obviously move in lockstep with each other, he says. With great panache, Mr Gore concludes that when carbon goes up, temperature inevitably follows.

As surely as night follows day?

Yet if the graphs are mapped onto each other instead of being counterposed one above the other, as Mr Gore does, it becomes very clear that, very consistently, every temperature rise actually precedes the carbon rise by some 800 years.

This undeniable time lag is critical since what it says is that more carbon in the air did not lead to global warming in times past. If so, factors other than carbon must have set off the various periods of global warming in times past.

If so, the most fundamental assumption of the carbon theory of human-induced global warming rests on shaky ground. In fact, carbon is a bad candidate for such a theory. After all, methane is 27 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

Even more significantly, water vapour and nitrous oxide are each 380 times more powerful than CO2 as greenhouse gases. In addition, there is just so much more water vapour in the atmosphere - 40,000 parts per million by volume of air - compared to C02 which makes up only 370 parts per million by volume of air.

Yet the IPCC specifically and completely excludes water vapour from its climate models because it says it cannot find a consensus on the greenhouse warming capacity of water. Instead, carbon dioxide is made out to be the principal greenhouse gas.

True, we are a carbon-based life form but humans produce just a small fraction of 1 per cent of all carbon. Dying vegetation produces much more.

But the greatest reservoir of carbon is actually the oceans, a fact that accounts for the 800-year gap mentioned above. What something called Henry's Law dictates is that as oceans heat up, they release CO2 dissolved in them. Conversely, as they cool down, oceans suck CO2 in.

Oceans are huge bodies of water, so they take hundreds of years to warm up or cool down, which is why there is an 800-year lag between warming and carbon rises.

Back to the crux of the matter: Since carbon follows temperature, carbon cannot be causing the current global warming.

True, the mean global temperature today is about 0.6 deg C higher than it was 100 years ago but most of that rise occurred before the modern era of industrialisation. During the post-war boom from, say, 1945 to 1975 - or what economists call the Golden Age of Capitalism, when CO2 output rose dramatically - global temperatures actually were on a downtrend.

Thus when I was growing up in the 1970s, the environmentalists' war cry was about a coming Ice Age. Global cooling, it was said, would lead inexorably to an unstable climate with storms, tornadoes, droughts and floods globally. Of course, this sounds exactly like their present mantra about the very opposite or global warming.

True, after 1975, global temperatures have been climbing for three decades now - by just 0.2 deg C. Memories of the coming Ice Age have all but faded away.

If carbon emissions aren't causing temperature increases, what is?

In 2003, Dr Willie Soon Wei Hock, an astrophysicist at the Solar and Stellar Physics Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, told the Harvard Crimson newsletter that 'natural climate fluctuations could be a dominant factor in the recent warming. In other words, natural factors could be more important than previously assumed'.

Sun and water

WITH Dr Sallie Baliunas, another astrophysicist at the centre, Dr Soon is well known for arguing that most global warming is actually caused by changes in the amount of energy the sun emits.

When the Danish National Space Centre looked at 400 years of sun spots and global temperatures, it found that when sun spot activity rose, global temperatures rose too - and vice versa - with no time lag. The record even showed a dip in solar activity in the 1945-1975 period of global cooling noted earlier.

The sun's direct rays heat up the air which then heats up the land. More importantly, solar activity impacts cloud formation.

Specifically, when cosmic ray particles penetrate the Earth's atmosphere, they meet water vapour rising from the oceans to form water droplets, which coalesce to form clouds. The more cosmic rays, the more clouds they help create, the cooler the air gets. Cosmic rays come from exploding stars called novas.

When solar activity increases, what happens is that the sun's magnetic activity increases. When that occurs, cosmic ray particles tend to get blocked off, so fewer penetrate the Earth's atmosphere and thus fewer clouds form.

So when solar activity increases, the sky is less cloudy. With less cloud cover, temperatures rise.

In short, global temperatures are controlled by clouds (water vapour), which are controlled by cosmic rays which, in turn, are controlled by the solar activity.

If the engine driving the Earth's climate change is the sun - not carbon - and the transmission belt is water, then the impact of human activity on global temperatures must be small. It's a good thing then that Singapore has no binding carbon emission reduction targets under the Kyoto protocol.

Enjoy the July 7 concerts if you must but don't listen to what their rock stars are saying. On how to combat global warming, singer Sheryl Crow earnestly suggested last week: 'I propose a limitation be put on how many squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting.' I think you want to discount that kind of inanity.

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