Reader Response: Global warming not ‘blown out of proportion’

By Jeremy Azevedo
Capital High School

I never thought I'd ever see someone who had read "State of Fear." It's one of those books that you find on the Internet but not something you'd expect to hear about in Flipside. But bringing up this book provides a great illustration for how global warming denial gets spread.

The majority of objections to global warming come from corporations, such as Exxon Mobile, in much the same way Big Tobacco tried to object to the growing science that smoking is bad for you. "State of Fear" makes the claim that global warming is blown out of proportion by 300 percent, and this is where you can see how people commit intellectual dishonesty to advocate their position.

The study that is referenced in "State of Fear" is one of the earlier computer simulations for future climate change, produced by Columbia University and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in 1988. There were three climate simulations -- A, B, and C, each fed a different level of future CO2 emissions.

Scenario A assumed a high level of emissions, B was in the middle and C was a low level. Since there was no way of telling how much CO2 was going to be produced, the study produced a range estimate, which is what most climate models do.

Michael Crichton didn't use B in "State of Fear," nor did he even look at the entire study. He chose A and represented it as the only model, which is 300 percent above what has actually happened.

In logic, this is what's known as a straw man argument. A straw man is a logical fallacy where you take the position of an opponent, distort it and proceed to argue against the distorted position.

Ironically, when you look at 1988's "most plausible" scenario, scenario B, you'll find that the prediction is actually "right on the money," according to one of the researchers, James Hansen.

Most of the April FlipSide article, "Global warming blown out of proportion," follows what I like to call a frequently objected template for global warming. It's almost like there's a website out there where every global warming denier goes to in order to attack the very solid science of climate change.

Some of the common objections to global warming arise from misunderstandings of what climate science is. Others are just factually untrue.

One of the more popular untrue objections is the idea that the medieval warm period was warmer then today. This comes from an urban legend that the Vikings were growing food on Greenland during this time.

According to the legend, they called it "green" because it very easy to cultivate back then. But really, Greenland was so named because Erik the Red thought people would come there if it had an attractive name.

The medieval warm period was mostly limited to the northern hemisphere and during the summer. Other parts of the planet were affected as well, but we know for a fact that it was not nearly as hot as it is today.

According to data from 2000 by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, "The idea of a global or hemispheric ‘Medieval Warm Period’ that was warmer then today has turned out to be incorrect."

The line of reasoning that the medieval warm period is supposed to support is that since climate change is normal, current global warming shouldn't be any different. However, this is fallacious because we know that in the past, climate change has always been caused by some sort of external factor.

The little ice age, for instance, is believed to have been caused by increased volcanic activity and a decrease in solar intensity. Most large changes in temperature have been caused by solar cycles, and they are very predictable.

Glacial periods historically come in a pattern every 25, 40 and 100 thousand years, coinciding with our orbit around the sun. Scientists don't just label these patterns as "natural" and move on; this would be bad science.

So scientists didn't just look at current warming and conclude that the temperature is rising for no apparent reason. They asked why the Earth is getting warmer and found out that the reasons are almost entirely caused by human activity. The largest driving force of global warming is, of course, a greenhouse gas known as CO2. Because of human activities, CO2 and other greenhouse gases are significantly higher today then they have ever been for more than 650,000 years.

One of the biggest problems with claiming that global warming is part of some sort of natural cycle is that these cycles indicate that the Earth should be getting cooler right now, not warmer. And for roughly 8,000 years, the temperature has in fact been decreasing, not increasing.

When we hit the Industrial Revolution, this several thousand-year trend ceased and started moving in reverse. The data obviously shows that the current rise in temperature is not because we're "coming out of an ice age." It's much more accurate to say that we're supposed to be heading into another ice age, but anthropogenic factors are disrupting the natural order of things.

But these are just factual problems with the article. The rest are common misconceptions that many people have about global warming. One of the biggest, I think, is the idea that since scientists at one time predicted global cooling, which turned out to be wrong, we shouldn't trust scientists today who talk about global warming.

Most of the attention towards global cooling came from the media, but it all originated from a 1974 National Science Board statement, "Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end ... leading into the next glacial age."

Since then, scientists have obviously changed their minds, so who's to say they won't change their minds in the future?

Today, there is a scientific consensus about climate change that is supported by every major scientific institution on the face of the planet. They warn us that temperatures are rising and that we are to blame.

Back in the 1970s, there was no large fluctuation of scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals about global cooling. There were no big news stories about U.N. treaties, no Weather Channel programming about global cooling and no documentaries about what all the fuss is about. To put it simply, there is no comparison between the 1970s and today.

And behind it all, they had just discovered that ice ages usually come in patterns and therefore we could predict the next one. Some people thought aerosol cans would escalate this process because particulate pollution from aerosols cause what's known as global dimming by blocking out light from the sun. Since then, we have successfully reduced aerosol emissions, largely reversing global dimming.

What a lot of people tend to conveniently leave out when discussing global cooling is the rest of that paragraph from the National Science Board, which reads, "However, it is possible, or even likely, than human interference has already altered the environment so much that the climatic pattern of the near future will follow a different path... "

So in reality, scientists really weren't even wrong about global cooling!

Global cooling is also wrapped up in the argument, "Research has shown that more carbon dioxide actually results in cooler temperatures, such as in the 1970s..." Here the date is wrong, because the mid-to-late 1970s actually saw an increase in temperature, coinciding with increased CO2 emissions.

The period of time that most people reference for this argument is 1940 to 1970, where CO2 emissions increased, but temperatures, at least temporarily, decreased. This is correlation study and a logical fallacy known as cum hoc ergo propter hoc or "with this, therefore because of this."

But despite being a logical fallacy, this doesn't contradict climate science simply because CO2 isn't the only force in the atmosphere. I think it's funny that most arguments against climate science rely on simplifications of what climate science actually is.

When you explain what is actually going on, these sorts of arguments tend to break down. In this case, particulate pollution from aerosol cans caused a sudden temporary shift in temperature that outweighed the effects of CO2.

The key feature here is that the temperature drops were temporary. The overall 100 or so year trend is one of warming, so we can't just pick out specific years and say, "Hey, the Earth didn't get warmer. Therefore, global warming isn't real!"

There is a large difference between weather and climate. Meteorology deals with both but when talking about global warming, we're actually talking about climate change, not weather.

The climate is actually very predictable, unlike day-to-day weather. It's kind of like the difference between predicting a snowstorm in January verses predicting that on average it's going to be much cooler in January than it is in July.

Climate models are extremely accurate. They have made many predictions that have been verified by actual data, and they have also made "predictions" about past climate trends that we have data for and are accurate for the past 200 or so years up to hundreds of thousands of years.

So why don't we just kick back and enjoy the warmer weather? Well, the problem isn't that the Earth is warming, the problem is in the rate at which the Earth is warming.

It's going to cause many hardships on our economy, and some of the effects are already being seen today. The idea about humans and other animals being able to "survive" comes from the fact that throughout history, humans as a species have survived many catastrophic events. We seem adaptable so to speak.

However, human societies have fallen completely many times in the past because of dramatic shifts in climate. Today's world is even more vulnerable because most societies are extremely interconnected with one another.

Right now, the Earth is warming at a rate 10 times faster than it has in the past several hundred million years and possibly its entire existence. If you want to see what happens when the climate changes a full 10 times slower then today, read about what happened during the Paleocen-Eocene Maximum. It was, to say the least, catastrophic. Many species, from land animals to deep-sea fish, went extinct.

But will current warming be disastrous? I don't know. I hope not. Scientists agree that global warming isn't a good thing, but we'll just have to wait and see how bad it really is.

I do agree that in politics, global warming is blown out of proportion. But I never was much a political person.

The science, regardless of what Al Gore or anybody else says, is very clear. The scientific consensus on climate change unequivocally tells us that global warming is real and that we are to blame. It is, in fact, one of the strongest scientific positions that has ever been taken. We know more about climate change then we do many other areas of science.

Donald Kennedy, the editor-in-chief of Science magazine, even noticed, "Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science." So don't listen to the politicians. Listen to the scientists.