Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, Updated and Expanded Edition
Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, Updated and Expanded Edition – Review
Unstoppable Global Warming introduces author S. Fred Singer as founding dean of the School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences at the University of Miami, now professor emeritus of ecological science at the University of Virginia. And it introduces co-author Dennis T. Avery as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, with a background that includes service at the U.S. Dept of State (under President Reagan), the U.S. Dept of Agriculture, and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In short, one scientist, one non-scientist. And that’s the way the book translates, as well. It intertwines two arguments, one that feels very scientific, a second argument that doesn’t. One argument becomes a case that seems science-based that there’s an uneven cycle of cooling and warming in the earth’s climate, over a cycle that’s about fifteen hundred years long, give or take a few hundred, with fluctuations in solar radiance the main cause. The second argument becomes a much less scientific, more tendentious case that those who fear greenhouse gases and the threat of global warming are not to be widely listened to because their arguments are faulty, they’re in it only for the money, and, even worse, they hate new prosperity. Given the clear disparity between the two arguments, I would guess scientist Singer is primarily responsible for the chapters on the 1500 year cooling and warming cycle, while non-scientist Avery is most likely the lead author on the chapters that critique greenhouse-driven global warming. My view is that global warming is quite a major issue, but I also believe that people on both parts of this debate should actually read books on both parts of the debate. If greenhouse-style global warming does really worry you, buy this book and widely read it. If greenhouse gases don’t concern you, buy and actually read The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery. Especially read Chapter Five, and its version of the great release of CO2 and the great extinctions that eventually took place 55 million years ago. Concerned environmentalists have a responsibility to engage the overall case that Avery and Singer build. Will global warming produce mass extinctions? Their case says No. Will global warming cause more fierce storms? Their case says No. Will global warming cause famine, drought, and bare soils? Their case says No (no more than usual). Will there be millions of death from insect-born diseases? Their case says No. It’s important for environmentalists to test their special concerns by studying the counter-arguments of their critics. The overall Avery-Singer case against greenhouse-driven warming is compromised by a very grave flaw. The authors punt the main issue – the rapidly accelerating addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the slowly burning of fossil fuels. Do they mention the fact that atmospheric CO2 is up thirty six per cents (as of 2006) from its pre-industrial norm? No. Do they point out that cumulative CO2 is rapidly growing at seven per cents a decade, now, and greatly accelerating? No. This quick acceleration is at the sensitivity of the global warming issue, and on this matter, they are dead silent. They are equally silent on the distribution of solar dimming, the ability of human-released particulates to cut down the quantity of sunlight making the earth. They don’t still consider the possibility, well-covered on a recent NOVA program, that greenhouse-induced warming has been partially – and temporarily – brutally suppressed by particulate pollution in the atmosphere. Most serious of all is their technique for narrowly avoiding the cumulative CO2 issue – basic assertion. Early on, they contend without substantiation that atmospheric CO2 is already “saturated” with infrared, so, therefore, adding further CO2 won’t make any difference. Near the purpose of the book, they produce their one and only footnoted quote on this special issue, a statement they attribute to the North Dakota climatologist John Bluemle to the effect that doubling atmospheric CO2 would have only a small greenhouse effect. If one tracks this down on the Internet, here’s what one learns. John Bluemle, it turns out, was North Dakota’s geologist, not a climatologist at all, and Bluemle subsequently spent his career mapping lignite resources in North Dakota on behalf of the coal industry. Hmm. Nor was “small effect” even Bluemle’s argument to begin with – in the source from which his quote is drawn, he generously acknowledges that the argument went to him via email from one David Jenkins, who it turns out is an oil geologist in the United Kingdom. Well, there you have it. In the worldview of Singer and Avery, rising CO2 levels aren’t a concern because an oil geologist in England previously assured a lignite geologist in North Dakota by email that rising CO2 isn’t an issue, and in the hands of Singer and Avery, the North Dakota geologist has been repackaged as a climatologist. That sure settles the fundamental question, doesn’t it? A second grave flaw is the book’s claim that prosperity is impossible without fossil fuel energy. Two or three centuries from now, when coal and oil finally run out, do Avery and Singer feel we’ll all go back to possibly living in caves? I’m not sure what they think, but obviously we wouldn’t. We’d find energy technologies that’d keep the world prosperous even without coal. And if humanity is tring to make itself prosperous without coal eventually, isn’t it safer to do so now rather than wait a couple hundred years, when atmospheric CO2 will be five or six times higher than today? A legal question, but not a question they address. Let’s grant the first half of the Singer-Avery argument – the proposition that the climate becomes through a 1500 year cooling and warming cycle, and that we’ve been in the warming half of the cycle for the last two or three hundred years. If, unlike Singer, Avery, and North Dakota’s lignite geologist, we do think collective carbon dioxide is a important matter, we should be even more concerned about global warming now than we were before. Not only are greenhouse gas accumulations rapidly accelerating, not only will reductions in particulate pollution boost the effect of rising greenhouse gases even further, but we also have a couple hundred years of Singer’s cyclic warming ahead of us as well. Global warming turns out to be a triple-threat problem.