View 563 March 23 - 29, 2009 (original) (raw)
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Saturday, March 28, 2009
You will have heard about turning your lights off for an hour tonight. (8:30 local time, I gather)
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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/
news?pid=email_en&refer=&sid=aY6tEqqelKBEEarth Hour May Prompt 1 Billion to Turn Off Lights
by Jason Scott
March 28 (Bloomberg) -- Earth Hour http://www.earthhour.org/home/ , an event created in Sydney two years ago by environmentalists keen to cut energy use and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, started today as residents of New Zealand�s Chatham Islands turned off their lights.
Inhabitants of the islands http://www.chathams.com/framesets/factset.html , 800 kilometers (500 miles) east of New Zealand, were among the 1 billion people worldwide organizers say may participate in the event. Lights at the Sydney Opera House were cut two hours later, one of 829 iconic landmarks expected to darken including the Empire State Building in New York, London�s Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Las Vegas Strip, according to an Earth Hour statement. A total of 3,929 cities in 88 countries are expected to take part.
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�Bjorn Lomborg, director of the Denmark-based think tank Copenhagen Consensus Centre and author of �The Skeptical Environmentalist,� said in the Australian yesterday that Earth Hour participants using candles after switching off their lights would probably emit more CO2 gases. Earth Hour is �an entirely symbolic gesture that creates the mistaken impression that there are easy, quick fixes to climate change,� Lomborg wrote. �
The Capital Records building in Hollywood (and I assume City Hall) will take part. No data on whether Las Vegas glitter will be shut down.
Lomberg's point is a good one: there are no easy, quick fixes to climate change. Indeed, there's probably no fix at all, but one thing is pretty certain: wrecking the economy of the United States will have essentially no effect on world wide atmospheric CO2 levels. China has spent $2 trillion on coal fired electric plants; they're not going to tear them down. The only way the United States could prevent China from pouring millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere would be to declare war and forcibly prevent the burning of coal. I do not suppose there is anyone who advocates this.
For that matter the link between CO2 and global temperature is tenuous at best. The theory linking CO2 and global temperature is this: the Sun shines. The sun's rays, from Infra-Red (IR) to Ultra-Violet (UV) (and the visible light in between) pass through the atmosphere unabsorbed by the air and strike the ground. (Actually, the IR is subject to atmospheric absorption on the way down, so it never has a chance to heat the Earth, but that's a quibble.) Some of the energy from the Sun's rays is reflected back to outer space. That reflected energy doesn't warm the Earth.
The rest is absorbed by the Earth. The ground warms, and some of that heat is then re-radiated. Since it's heat, it's IR. CO2 absorbs IR better than Nitrogen and Oxygen, so the IR heats the atmosphere, and the IR re-radiated thus warms the Earth. Therefore, the theory states, if we reduce the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere we will reduce the IR absorption in the atmosphere, and thus slow global warming.
Freeman Dyson has pointed out a problem here; actually anyone who has studied high school physics should be asking a couple of questions at this point. First, of course, one should ask "how much?" It's always worth getting the numbers. One ought to ask, can anything else be absorbing that re-radiated IR? If absorbing re-radiated IR is causing (or at least significantly contributing to) global warming, is CO2 the principal stuff that's doing the absorption? And immediately we run into something else we learned in high school: water vapor absorbs IR, and does so a lot more efficiently than CO2. CO2 is measured in parts per million. There's a lot more water vapor: indeed, in many places, more than enough to absorb just about all the IR that's going through the atmosphere. Which means that CO2 is important in dry places, but has essentially no effect in humid areas. Most of the Earth is covered by water. Moreover, any rise in air temperature brings about an increase in the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, which means more absorption of reflected IR. But of course more water vapor in the atmosphere means more clouds; clouds reflect sunlight back out into space so it doesn't get absorbed. There are many other feedback loops, and while some computer models include some of them, none include all.
If the purpose of Earth Hour were to draw attention to the need for more genuine understanding of climate phenomena, it would be a good idea.
I have a better one: rather than propose Carbon Tax and various other extremely expensive measures to fix the CO2 problem when we can't be sure that CO2 is causing the problem (assuming there is a global warming problem to begin with and that we're not drifting into a new Little Ice Age) do this: Congress establishes a $1 billion prize for the first institution that produces a computer model that starts with the conditions known in 1950 and successfully predicts the climate of 2010. Well, that probably wouldn't work. It's actually pretty easy to make up such a model since you already know the answer you want. All right, establish a big prize for the first computer model that takes the initial conditions of the year 2000 and successfully predicts the climate prevailing in the year 2025. Come up with a number of such prizes for understanding climate, but in every case to win the prize one must do successful predictions: come up with falsifiable hypotheses and test them with real observations. There's a good bit of a devil in working out the details -- how close is "success" -- but it would be one heck of a lot cheaper than wrecking the US economy while China and India continue to pump out CO2.
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The true agenda is revealed.
<http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,510937,00.html>
--- Roland Dobbins
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