I had recently written on the ongoing global warming debate and why there are quite a number of scientists out there that are skeptical about global warming or cooling. It is not that these scientists believe that there is no anthropogenic influence on climate change. It is not even that these scientists believe man-made influence is infinitesimally small. It is rather that these scientists believe that we have not adequately developed the tools necessary yet to collect sufficient data and build process representative numerical models to quantitatively differentiate a number of simultaneous influences on climate change. [The difficulty in simultaneously capturing such process-related influences on the earth system and why we often fail to quantify these influences in our efforts will be discussed in a forthcoming blog.]
Global warming supporters claim that these anthropogenic influences are detrimental to the planet’s very survival, while those that vehemently oppose global warming want everyone to believe that there is nothing wrong with the climate as a matter fact. The supporters have managed to show horrific scenarios of disappearing glaciers, wild life, etc. to make their case. The opponents, on the other hand, often state that global temperatures have always gone up and down for the longest time and the sun’s radiation output reaching the earth has had a lot to do with such natural earth temperature variability. Obviously, it does not take a whole lot of inspection into the debate to ascertain the fact that there is ample confusion here and that confusion is precisely due to our lack of understanding of the solar-earth system.
In the midst of this heated debate and the above mentioned confusion, one critical aspect is often overlooked. The aspect pointed out here is about how willing we are to ignore our polluting ways to support our life styles and maintain our standards of living. Even if all of the pollution we introduce into the earth system is categorically proven to make no difference in the natural climate states, we should recognize our irresponsibility here and curb our pollution.
There is a concern, however, that such a drastic change, in our ways of living, being proposed here may lead to economic hardships and loss of standards of living for some people. This is a real concern and should be addressed rather carefully. In this regard, sensible policies should be made to pragmatically transition our ways of producing energy to much cleaner ways, without affecting standards of living. We all should improve our ability to tackle the overall difficulty in measuring and in simulating the earth system and always strive for cleaner ways of energy production and accomplish all of these daunting tasks responsibly, with or without global warming/cooling.
The bottom line is that we should not bury our pollution in the global warming debate and pollution is what seems to be lost in the current debate!
Dr. James R. Stalker is an atmospheric scientist, a mechanical engineer, an entrepreneur, and an inventor. You can learn more about Dr. James R. Stalker at www.respr.com or www.renewable-project-consulting.com.
December 19, 2009 at 1:44 am |
I checked out your blog and found it to be quite good, but I have one complaint. You were not clear about what the pollution was of which you were speaking. Hopefully, you do not consider CO2 to be a pollutant. If you were speaking of real pollutants, then I agree, but then I’m not sure they would fit into a discussion about global warming.
December 19, 2009 at 4:51 pm |
Whether to consider man-made CO2 a pollutant or not is part of this debate. Needless to say that debate is still ongoing.
The point I have made is that we are unable to answer the global warming/cooling issue from anthropogenic sources definitively, based on our current data and analysis capabilities. We need a lot of research to grapple with that issue. All three groups (see my previous blog titled ‘On the Global Warming Debate’) can talk as much as they want but such talk won’t do us any good in producing the required R&D.
In the meantime (and actually for a good portion of the industrial period), a more important issue has been about whether or not we should pollute our environment as much as we do, irrespective of whether that pollution or part of that pollution (i.e. CO2) causes global warming/cooling. For example, mercury, a dangerous pollutant that is known to cause autism, enters into our water streams mostly from coal-fired plants.
Whether anthropogenic CO2 leads to global warming or not, man-made CO2 has been well correlated with other pollutants that we release into our earth system. In other words, if we reduce our other pollutants, we will potentially reduce man-made CO2, especially introduced at certain energy generation facilities. So, there seems to be an indirect relation between man-made CO2 and the other pollution here. I am not sure if we can quantitatively establish that relation, though, especially on the global scale. Thus, my contention is that we need to do more
research–lots of it. Hopefully, this is pointing to why the “other” pollution may be considered part of the global warming issue. [This paragraph is an excerpt from my response to Robert K. Murray, who commented on my article also.)
From my standpoint, global warming/cooling is NOT as important an issue as the task of cleaning up our environment. And, that is why I say we are burying pollution in the global warming/cooling debate.