Weekend Edition
May 26 / 27, 2007
counterpunch.org
Explosion of the Fearmongers
The Greenhousers Strike Back and Out
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
I began this series of critiques of the greenhouse fearmongers with
an evocation of the papal indulgences of the Middle Ages as
precursors of the "carbon credits"-ready relief for carbon sinners,
burdened, because all humans exhale carbon, with original sin. In the
Middle Ages they burned heretics, and after reading through the hefty
pile of abusive comments and supposed refutations of my initial
article on global warming I'm fairly sure that the critics would be
only to happy to cash in whatever carbon credits they have and torch
me without further ado.
The greenhouse fearmongers explode at the first critical word, and
have contrived a series of primitive rhetorical pandybats which they
flourish in retaliation. Those who disagree with their claim that
anthropogenic CO2 is the cause of the small, measured increase in the
average earth's surface temperature, are stigmatized as "denialists,"
a charge which scurrilously combines an acoustic intimation of
nihilism with a suggested affinity to those who insist the Holocaust
never took place.
The greenhousers endlessly propose that the consensus of "scientists"
on anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming. By scientists they
actually mean computer modelers. The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change and their computer-modeling coterie include very few
real climatologists or atmospheric physicists. Among qualified
climatologists, meteorologists and atmospheric physicists, there are
plenty who do not accept the greenhousers' propositions. Many others
have been intimidated into silence by the pressures of grants, tenure
and kindred academic garottes.
Peer review, heavily overworked in the rebuttals I have been reading,
is actually a topic on which the greenhousers would do well to keep
their mouths shut, since, as the University of Virginia's Pat
Michaels has shown, the most notorious sentence in the IPCC's 1996
report ("The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human
influence on global climate") was inserted at the last minute by a
small faction on the IPCC panel after the scientific peer-review
process was complete. Here's how Dr Fred Goldberg describes the
probable culprit, Professor Bert Bolin, a politically driven Swede
who was the first chairman of the IPCC, from 1988 to 1998. Goldberg's
very interesting paper is entitled, "Has Bert Bolin fooled us all
concerned climate change caused by humans?":
"In 1995 IPCC presented its second report: The Science of Climate
Change". In this report a large number of researchers work through
hundreds of scientific reports and delivers a comprehensive report
where they conclude that there is no evidence that human beings have
had an influence on the climate. This conclusion is of course very
important for politicians and policymakers around the world. But what
happened? The editor of the IPCC report then deleted or changed the
text in 15 different sections of chapter 8 (The key chapter
concerning whether human influence exists or not) which had been
agreed upon by the panel of contributors involved in compiling the
document. In practice politicians and policymakers only read the so-
called Executive Summary for Policy Makers. In this document
consisting of a few pages it is clearly stated that humans have
influenced the climate, contrary to the conclusions of the scientific
report.
"Professor Fredrik Seitz, former chairman of the American Science
Academy, wrote in the Wall Street Journal already the 12th of June
1996 about a major deception on global warming: "I have never before
witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process
than the events that led to this IPCC report." He gave many examples
of changes and redefinitions and finished by demanding that the IPCC
process should be abandoned.
"Had somebody subordinate to Bert Bolin within IPCC made these
changes it is reasonable to think that Bert Bolin himself would
correct the errors. That he has not done is why I draw the conclusion
that it must be Bert Bolin himself who is responsible for the changes
and no subordinate person has dared interfere with his boss."
I should acknowledge one imprecision in my description of Dr. Martin
Hertzberg's graph in my first column-"the smoothly rising curve of
CO2"-that prompted several intemperate responses, charging that I
couldn't possibly expect CO2 or carbon levels to drop just because of
a one-third cut in manmade CO2. Indeed, I should have written "one
could not even see a 1 part per million bump in the smoothly rising
curve." Even though such transitory influences as day and night or
seasonal variations in photosynthesis cause clearly visible swings in
the curve, the 30 percent drop between 1929 and 1932 caused not a
ripple. Empirical scientific evidence that the human contribution is
in fact less than a fart in a hurricane, as Dr. Hertzberg says.
As for the alleged irrefutable evidence that people caused the last
century's CO2 increase, the "smoking gun" invoked by one of my
critics, Dr. Michael Mann, and his fellow fearmongers at
realclimate.com, the claim is based on the idea that the normal ratio
of heavy to light carbon-that is, the Carbon-13 isotope to the
lighter Carbon-12 isotope, is roughly 1 to 90 in the atmosphere, but
in plants there's a 2 percent lower C13/C12 ratio. So, observing that
C13 in the atmosphere has been declining steadily though very
slightly since 1850, they claim that this is due to man's burning of
fossil fuels, which are generally believed to be derived from
fossilized plant matter. On the naïve and scientifically silly
assumption that the only way that plant-based carbon can get into the
atmosphere is by people burning fuels, they exult that here indeed is
the smoking gun: decreases of C13 in the atmosphere mean that our
sinful combustions are clearly identifiable as major contributors to
the 100 ppm increase in CO2 since 1850.
This is misguided, simply because less than a thousandth of the plant-
based carbon on earth is bound up in fossil fuel. The rest of the
huge remaining tonnages of plant-based carbon are diffused through
the oceans, the forests, the grasslands and the soil. In other words,
everywhere. Obviously, lots of this C13-deficient carbon has the
opportunity to oxidize into CO2 by paths other than people burning
fuel, i.e., the huge amount of plant material that's naturally eaten
or decayed by the biosphere.
Perhaps even more significantly, cold ocean waters absorb lightweight
C12 preferentially, resulting in lots of C13-deficient carbon in the
oceans. This low-C13 carbon most certainly would have been released
massively into the atmosphere over the course of the world's warming
trend since 1850, when the Little Ice Age ended. All of these larger
natural pathways for emitting low-C13 carbon into the atmosphere have
been considerably accelerated by this same warming trend. So once
again, the greenhousers have got it ass-backward. The 100 ppm
increase in CO2 can't be uniquely attributed to humans because at
least as plausibly it could be the effect, not the cause, of the
warming that started after the Little Ice Age denied by Dr.
Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann.
I had promised that this third column would pose the question "Are
things really so bad," a theme I will take up in this series, along
with a continuation of these rebuttals. Originally I had hoped to
deal with criticisms at the end of the series. I have changed my
plans since committed greenhousers like George Monbiot (honorary
chairman of the King Canute Action Committee, committed to beating
back non-existent anthropogenic global warming by tactics which would
have zero impact anyway) that I have ignored their rebukes. In actual
fact I was offline, in Russia, flying thither over the Arctic and
thus able to make a direct review of the ice cap. So wait a couple of
weeks for my next column before you critics let fly again. Coming up:
how greenhouser theologians deal with the global water cycle and the
highly embarrassing and persistent lag between temperature and
subsequent atmospheric CO2 change. After that, I'll offer a real
treat: the nightmare visions of the greenhousers and how many of
their quavering predictions have fallen under the implacable
guillotine blade of reality.
A shorter version of this column ran in the print edition of The
Nation that went to press last Wednesday.
