Some Global Warming Observations

Last Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal printed an editorial entitled "Global Warming Delusions," by Daniel Botkin, a scientist with 40 years of experience working in environmental sciences, and currently president of the Center for the Study of the Environment.

In this piece, Mr. Botkin describes the delusional fixation some of his brethren have developed for causing near-hysterical concern about global warming. He writes, in part,

"And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.

Case in point: This year's United Nations report on climate change and other documents say that 20%-30% of plant and animal species will be threatened with extinction in this century due to global warming -- a truly terrifying thought. Yet, during the past 2.5 million years, a period that scientists now know experienced climatic changes as rapid and as warm as modern climatological models suggest will happen to us, almost none of the millions of species on Earth went extinct. The exceptions were about 20 species of large mammals (the famous megafauna of the last ice age -- saber-tooth tigers, hairy mammoths and the like), which went extinct about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and many dominant trees and shrubs of northwestern Europe. But elsewhere, including North America, few plant species went extinct, and few mammals.

Instead, like fashions that took hold in the past and are eloquently analyzed in the classic 19th century book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," the popular imagination today appears to have been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.

Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. "Wolves deceive their prey, don't they?" one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change."

Mr. Botkin describes an article in which the author explains the melting of the snows on Mount Kilimanjaro as due to radiant heat, not air temperature. Because his conclusions did not fit the global warming views of many other scientists, Botkin writes that the scientist's paper "is scorned by the true believers in global warming."

Botkin goes on to provide examples of significant environmental changes that are not due to the earth's air temperature. He bemoans his colleagues obsession with raising consciousness on the subject at any cost,

"My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.
Many of my colleagues ask, "What's the problem? Hasn't it been a good thing to raise public concern?" The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves."

When someone who is both a scientist and an environmentalist holds these views, you know the global warming craze has gone too far.

Ethanol's Water Problems

Last Wednesday's Wall Street Journal's main editorial was entitled "Ethanol's Water Shortage." That title says it all.

It turns out that a Cornell ecology professor has determined that each gallon of ethanol requires 1,700 gallons of water.

As a result, Kansas and Nebraska are near a lawsuit over water rights. A North Dakota ethanol plant application was withdrawn when, according to the Journal,

"it became clear that the plant's million-gallon-a-day appetite would drain too much from a local aquifer."

Another method of measuring various energy sources, power density, finds oil to be more efficient than, say, solar, because it merely requires a hole in the ground, rather than acres of panels.

Solar power, which is 1,000 less dense than oil, is still 10x denser than ethanol. Peter Huber, of the Manhattan Institute,

"predicts a world-wide leveling of forestland as farmers turn vegetation into fuel,"

according to the Journal article. Even worse, the article cite two scientists, Renton Righelato and Dominick Spracklen, who wrote in Science magazine,

"in order to replace just 10% of gasoline and diesel consumption, the US would need to convert a full 43% of its cropland to ethanol production. The alternative approach- clearing wilderness- would mean more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere than simply sticking with gasoline, because the CO2-munching trees cut down to make way for King Ethanol absorb more emissions than ethanol saves."

But, wait! Wasn't greenhouse gases and carbon footprints why we are going from oil to ethanol in the first place?

Let's hope, as the Journal editorial notes, that Congress figures this out before the last, big ethanol legislation pushes through. It's just too awful to contemplate- water shortages, more CO2, runoff, water pollution, higher food prices, etc. All in the name of replacing a very efficient fuel source- oil.