Crazy But Able

Some hard-core Greens are now saying that nuclear power is the only solution to global warming which can be implemented fast enough to save the Earth. While I disagree with much of the global warming thesis and predicted effects of global warming, I agree with the stance on nuclear power.

For reference, I’m more convinced that global warming would very quickly lead to global cooling (within 10-20 years, if not faster) via this scenario; but nobody knows where the tipping point is in terms of climate change. There is evidence that it has been hotter in the past, within recorded history even, but disaster failed to occur, so don’t go moving to Canada or Mexico (depending on what you believe about the final outcome of global warming).

In fact, it may still be an open question whether or not global warming is even occuring. We can’t accurately measure average global temperature within 1 degree C, so those climate models that depend on a few degrees of average global temperature increase are pretty suspect in my opinion. But let’s assume that they are accurate. I’m going to use my psychic powers of computer programmer laziness and guess that most (if not all) computer models of global warming assume that one degree of average temperature change will mean that temperatures will increase by 1 degree C across the whole earth. That’s a 1 degree C increase at the arctic circle, everywhere. That feels pretty unrealistic to me. Why would temperatures have to increase uniformly across the globe? I’m guessing that global average temperatures would have to go up by a lot more than 1C to get the average arctic temperatures to go up by 1C. Of course, nobody knows what the pattern of heat distribution would be and we just don’t have the data to tell, and won’t have the data any time soon. In the meantime we create these models which assume average temperature increase, which biases them to predicting that New York will be flooded within the next five years.

But let’s assume that’s all true anyway: the Earth is warming up and it’s going to be a disaster. It’s one thing to assert that global warming is happening and another thing entirely to assume that its caused by human activity. As I said earlier, there’s evidence that the Earth was hotter in the past. The global warming we’re observing could be part of a regular cycle of warming and cooling; Gaia’s not dying, she just has PMS.

Don’t get me wrong, it is plausible, even likely, that human beings can affect the Earth’s climate. (What was the world like before the desertification of Africa and Australia (both of which were likely caused by human activity?)) The empirical question is how, and by how much? The earth is probably capable of far greater temperature swings than us humans can create with our fire and smoke. This brings up another point: I have yet to see any attempts made by global climate researchers to determine the natural direction of earth’s climate change. Now, it’s not like I scour the scholarly literature on global warming. But I’d expect to have heard something about this by now, unless it’s nearly impossible for us to determine such a thing because of incomplete data, incomplete theory, or both.

This is not just a niggling point. If the Earth was in a cooling phase, and our pollution caused the earth’s temperature to rise by an exactly offsetting amount, it would appear to stay the same; it would look like there was no crisis. But it could signal that something was very seriously wrong indeed. If we have no way of determining which direction the earth would have taken without human interference (cooling, warming, by how much?) then we have very little hope of figuring out how much we should point the big finger of blame on the overgrown technological monkeys.

(My best guess is that humans are having some warming effect, but that it’s minimal compared to the direction the Earth is already headed. In other words, it’s like running from the back end of a train to the front end of a train, thinking that will get us where we’re going faster.)

The fact is, we just don’t have enough data to make any solid conclusions.

But. We can assume again. Lets assume that the Earth is going to hell in a handbasket and its all our fault. What should we do about it? (More importantly, who can we blame for it?) Well, that’s not as clear cut.

We do have this global pollution map (which, admittedly, only measures one kind of pollution). I was interested in the link between population, economic activity, and pollution, so I found a few more maps, and cropped them to be about the same size. The pollution map comes from a satellite measuring NO₂ from January 2003 - June 2004. The population map data is from 1995 from Columbia University. The economic map is a scan from the Handbook of International Economic Statistics [source], and it reflects GDP per capita in 1996. The scale goes from dark blue to dark red, which represent GDP per capita greater than 15k, between 15k and 10k, 3k and 10k, 1k and 3k, and less than 1k, respectively.

I’d like to see more global pollution maps of other types of pollution than just NO₂ before attempting to speculate on anything. Anyway, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2005 at 4:28 pm and is filed under general foofiness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.