Letter 124: Climate Change as a Critical Issue

"The conquest of nature, in which the bourgeois [engineering] mind trusted so much, enriches life but also imperils it."

--Reinhold Niebuhr, 1944.

Introduction. This essay will come across as very pedantic to most people, including me. As I articulate my thoughts on climate change, I have to apologize for the stilted style of this letter. As a student of the humanities – primarily languages and political theory – I am not well equipped to discuss a scientific topic, particularly one as nuanced as climate change. My thoughts follow my reading of a long and thoughtful essay published by the American Institute of Physics, “The Discovery of Global Warming”, published in February 2016.

Précis of the Article. The article itself requires at least an hour of one’s time, carefully focussed. The summary supplied by the A.I.P. is long, too (https://www.aip.org/history/climate/summary.htm).  The article is worth the investment, especially for the uninitiated like me. In a capsule, then, this essay reviews the history of the hypothesis and research of the Greenhouse Gas Theory, dating back almost two centuries. The pace of research had been slow-going for a century or more due to the imprecision of measurement tools and the greenhouse theory being incidental to a ceaseless scientific quest to explain the ice-age.

The open-air tests of the atomic bomb during the 1950s and the power of computers in the 1960s re-focussed concern on the emissions of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere and their possible effects on the wider ecosystem. As scientists better understand the complexity and interaction of different components of the atmosphere, together with absorption rates of CO2 by the oceans, the implications of a thermally imbalanced future now supersede the fascination with an icy past. Arguments against global warming persisted but the data confirming a scenario worse than anticipated overwhelmed them.

My view. To avoid dumping a lot of verbiage on people better informed than I, I will state my unscientific reasoning – though quite deferential to those minds far deeper than mine – as to why this issue needed to be addressed and debated seriously in 2016. From my perspective, one informed by reading philosophy and trying to pay attention to ethics, I submit the following propositions.

1. No matter who is right or wrong in general – and the timing of specific scenarios in particular – we know that the emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses have accelerated exponentially over the last century.
2. Since the ecosystem for all living things, sentient or not, is delicate, dumping more and more CO2 indefinitely cannot confer long-term benefits for man and the lower species under his stewardship.
3. Using hydrocarbons profligately and dumping CO2 into the air heedlessly then becomes unethical at some point; current evidence points to crossing that threshold very much sooner rather than later.

That is my opinion, unscientific as it is. We face a matter of ethics, now. Assuming a significant risk of disrupting the delicate equilibrium of the ecosystem for the sake of our convenience and comfort becomes increasingly difficult either to justify or countenance. 

Additionally, insisting on irrefutable proof of the greenhouse effect will delay a response to a time when such counter-measures will likely be too late. Beyond the rarefied world of ethics and stewardship comes likely geopolitical consequences of confronting the possible, and increasingly probable, hazard of a greenhouse effect:

• locked-in poverty for poorer nations;
• permanent suppression of economic advancement of the global working class;
• competitive pressures forcing all competing economies to fall back on hydrocarbons; and,
• a marginalized impact of renewables.

To stanch the CO2 belch across the world means that developing countries like China, Russia, México, India et al. can no longer rely on cheap hydrocarbons to lock in pricing advantages. One can see why, quite easily, these nations are reluctant to forfeit an advantage that, after all, once aided the Western Powers (including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Canada and the U.S.) to enjoy unheralded prosperity, often at the colonial expense of these same emerging economies.

Further, free-trade compounds this prisoner’s dilemma as developed countries become competitive once again when wages rise in developing countries. This on-shoring phenomenon will last only as long as it takes for the developing nations’ wages to depress once again to sweat-shop levels. Then workers in the developed countries will suffer a renewed suppression of earnings power as the on-shored companies gradually off-shore once again; this alternating of on-and-off-shoring will become a ‘double-dribble’ at the bottom by the bottom three billion.

The pressure to relax CO2 emission standards for economic reasons may overwhelm environmental ethics. Consequently, alternative trade arrangements, besides the free-fall of free-trade, may be necessary for nations to pursue policies aimed at stemming the dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (http://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2016/06/letter-121-uk-breaks-it-or-brexits.html). Such policies may well be viewed as acts of economic hostility by developing nations dependent upon cheap hydrocarbons.

The necessity of a concerted effort to render renewable energies viable will be, to re-use an old political term, the “moral equivalent of war”. Such renewables ought properly to include nuclear power, itself beset with challenges around safe disposal. Some use of hydrocarbons may be inevitable for the Navy, etc. Policymakers need to determine whether syn-fuels, including bio-fuels, sufficiently reduce CO2 emissions.

Rebutting the Rebutters. Most of the arguments I have come across seem to zero in on inconsistencies in the findings of proponents of the greenhouse gas theory. The logic seems to say that these exceptions belie the consensual theory, rather than prove the rule. There have been disturbing reports of greenhouse skeptics being hectored by members of a ‘politically driven’ consensus. Nevertheless, the convergence of several disciplines toward a uniform consensus places the burden of proof upon these skeptics.

Thus far, in my mind at least, the anti-greenhouse partisans have failed to meet that burden. While many argue that these skeptics are supported by hydrocarbon interests, that affiliation, however, does not suffice to discount their counter-arguments but does expose an irony. Pro-business perspectives base their practices and arguments on the ‘equilibrium’ established by the market-place. Yet these same people appear to be willfully oblivious to the delicate environmental balance upon which humanity itself depends.

Given the sensitivity to changes in initial conditions brought out in computer simulations and Chaos Theory, ignoring the possible fragility of such a systemic equilibrium over millions of years makes the skeptics look like wishful thinkers only too willing to play Russian roulette with the ecology that sustains all life. Of the many counter-greenhouse arguments I have heard informally, the two most compelling, for me a least, have been:

• the idea that a slight shift in the Earth’s orbital course around the Sun is likely to create a countervailing cooling of temperatures; as well as,
• the thesis that the drawing of conclusions from the study of that last sixty years of greenhouse data is akin to someone watching six seconds of a gridiron game and making inferences about what the rules are; who the teams are; what the final score will be; which team will win; as well as, how the rushing and passing statistics will break-down.

Almost two generations ago at college, one Economics Professor had us reading about the greenhouse effect while a History Professor cautioned us that a new ice-age was in the offing (in ten thousand years). The comparative timing of any fall-out from the former trumped that of the latter (i.e., centuries, at the most optimistic at that time, for the greenhouse effect versus millennia for any ice age). Subsequent research from other disciplines began to argue for a far more imminent impact. That is to say: any countervailing cooling from a change in the Earth’s orbit would be far too little, far too late.

The second argument about calling the football game in six seconds has an intuitive appeal to anyone acquainted with statistical testing and sampling. Yet this argument has broken down over the past generation as testing of air-bubbles in ancient glaciers has lengthened the sample from six seconds of one game to a whole season of sixteen games played by all thirty-two teams in the National Football League. That paradoxically newer, yet much older, evidence successfully breaks down this intuitive skepticism.