Clive Best

I recently heard a comment on BBC Radio 4 which compared the powerful Climate Change movement  to an inverted pyramid, because the arguments are based on just a few basic scientific measurements. The recent controversy regarding the leaked emails between the two main groups that provide global temperature data to the IPCC highlights how sensitive these core results really are. The two main people involved are Prof. Phil Jones who leads  the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia and Michael Mann who is Professor at Penn State University and published the hockey stick data based on merging tree ring derived temperatures over thousands of years to CRU’s gobal data. This featured strongly in the IPCC 2001 reports and Al Gore’s film. The other famous Hockey stick shows a rise in CO2 levels since the industrial revolution following apparently steady levels over thousands of years derived from Ice cores. Taken together these two hockey stick graphs purport to show that there is overwhelming evidence that human emissions of CO2 are driving up global temperatures.

The scientific evidence for human induced climate changed is based on 3 main pillars:

1. Global temperatures are rising since the industrial revolution and particulary in recent decades. It is assumed this rise is due to increases in man made greenhouse gases particularly CO2

2. CO2 measurements at Maona Loa and elsewhere clearly show that CO2 concetrations are increasing caused by fossil fuel emmissions. CO2 is the most important anthropgenic greenhouse gas and drives the climate.

3. Global Circulation models predict a rise in temperaturs of between 1-6 degrees by the end of this century. These models have many unknown parameters. The predictions depend on these  parameters being  fined tuned to agree with the above temperature trends.

So lets look at these one by one.

1. Is it really beyond doubt that global temperatures have risen in recent decades? Mann’s graph would appear to make this clear. However his analysis is  based just on only one long term source for historic temperatures namely tree ring data. It ignores other historical measurements or derived data including estimates of falls during  the little Ice Age, rises during the the Warm Roman period. The flat tree ring data  are merged with the CRU/Hadley with the  (now challenged) global tempretature data for the last 20 years.

The hockey stick relies on the tree data to give the impression of a long flat and stable climate. Many reputable scientists think however that the climate was not that stable over the last thousand years. In particular the little Ice Age and the medieval warm periods with reports of Romans growing wine in York etc. Michael Manns hockey stick graph succeeds in eliminating both these periods. Did they really exist or  have they been deliberately suppressed in order to have a bigger political impact ? Tempretaure measurements using isotope concentrations in Ice cores in Greenland show detail of temperatures back to the last Ice age and support the historic evidence of medieval warm period and the little Ice Age.

The second graph above shows satellite global average temperatures of the earth’s near surface based on thermal microwave emission of oxygen. Note that the excessive rise recently is not apparent, but fine details like  the cooling during Mount Pinatoubo erruptions show up nicely.  This graph does not support the accentuated  hockey stick effect.

2. CO2 emissions. Data from Maona Loa and elsewhere show that CO2 concentrations have been rising since the 1950s. They are currently around 380 ppm having risen steadily from 316 ppm in 1959.  This is actually still a tiny number as it represents just 38 molecules of CO2 in every 100,000 molecules of air. On average there are 100 times more H2O molecules in air than CO2. Since both molecules vibrate to absorb infrared in a similar way you can see that it is actually water vapour which dominates the greenhouse affect on earth.  This is obvious to anyone who has spent the night in the desert where the air is so dry that heat loss can cool the air to freezing point over night. CO2 does not do much good for you in the desert in keeping you warm.

CO2 dissolves in water. The oceans contain large amounts of dissolved CO2 and more CO2 dissolves the colder it gets. Likewise the Oceans emit CO2 as they warm up thus increasing the concentration in the air. The effect is known to all of us. If you take a fizzy drink and leave it in the sunshine then it loses its fix fast, whereas put it in the fridge and it remains fizzy overnight as the water losses CO2 much slower.Al Gore seems not to know this fact because in his film he made the exagerated claim that a correlation of CO2 levels with previous Ice Ages proved that CO2 concentrations drive the Earth’s temperature. It is of course exactly the opposite way round. Ice ages are caused by astronomical effects related to slow changes in the Earth’s orbit and direction of spin. As the Ocean cools so it dissolves more CO2 out of the atmosphere and levels fall. In fact there is a clear time delay between the two signals of 1-2  thousand years.

Solubility of CO₂ at a partial pressure for CO₂ of 1 bar abs.

A 5 degree rise in ocean temperatures would seem to imply about a 15% decrease in CO2 concentration in the Ocean, causing a significant increase in the atmosphere.

Effect or Cause ?

Early CO2 measurement data

It turns out that there were also regular CO2 measurements made before 1960 which have been dismissed as inaccurate and ignored (see above). So what are we to make of all this? Maybe the old CO2 measurement data were biased by local polution at the time. Maybe the temperature data are themselves  biased by their proximity to urbanisation. My strong feeling is  that the case for CO2 to be a primary driving force for climate change has not yet been made. Water Vapour and clouds are between one and two orders of magnitude more important. Several estimates place water vapour as being 95% of the greenhouse effect on Earth with CO2 providing about 3%. Human additions to CO2 concentrations on this scale are < 1%  of greenhouse gas effects. This does not mean to say that it is not important to curb emissions,  but the doomsday scaremongering on climate which sometimes seems more politically motivated than justified is miss directed. The best way to curb CO2 emissions is anyway to expand dramatically Nuclear Power rather than industrialise yet more of the countryside for very little return.

3. Climate Models. These predict future climate based on complex theoretical interpretaion of how earth systems work. they attempt to model, solar heating, radiation balance, atmosphere/Ocean interactions, Ice dynamincs, Cloud dynamics, Carbon cycle, solar variation, albedo changes, phytoplancton feedback etc. The variables are endless with many unknowns. Only by fitting to past climates is it hoped that some of these parameters be pinned down to give reliable future predictions of climate. Currently models that correctly follow the observed past temperature profiles of recent years need to include CO2 effects to some degree. This would appear to support that CO2 has begun to effect temperatures. However if there are natural variations at play which are causing warming such as a continuing recovery from the little ice age, these effects are of course not included in the models.

The Earth’s climate is such a complex system that I doubt whether anyone can be 100% certain one way or the other. Human damage to the Earth’s environment is self evident and we don’t need the one issue of climate change to dominate all others for political reasons. One thing is for certain is that the next 10 years of  data will decide  one way or the other. I think a far greater threat to the Earth and to the natural environment is human over-population with the consequent destruction of the natural environment. James Lovelock estimates that the  world population which the Earth can sustain long term is about 1 billion people. On the same timescale as the IPCC predictions of a 1-6 degree rise in global temperatures the world population will rise to 9 billion.  So I would like to see a IPPC - Intergovernmental Panel on Population Control, although I doubt whether this will ever happen.

The current emissions of CO2 from burning fossil fuels is about 5 Giga tons per year.  A back of the envelope calculation estimates that  9 billion people will emit 3 Giga Tons of CO2 a year just by breathing ! Is it not time for a reality check ?

references:

1. http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy

Overpopulation

Here is an incomplete  list of various environmental problems facing planet Earth.

• Biodiversity and loss of species
• Water pollution, water quality, agricultural run-off
• Oceans  - overfishing, acidification, bleaching coral
• Deforestation, loss of rain forests
• Air pollution,  aerosols
• Land degradation, desertification, agriculture
• Rising CO2 levels and other greenhouse gasses - climate change
• Acid rain, algal blooms
• Ozone depletion

Why is it that politicians and activists have siezed on just one of these issues, namely “climate change” and avoided others? For politicians Climate Change may seem to be actually a less controversial issue because it is  something conveniently external to their daily responsibilities. They can make broad pledges, statements and policies which they  will never  have to account for later  within  their short careers. Nor  does it impinge too strongly or directly on their constituents, as, for example, a new housing estate  might, but can even earn them the moral support of these constituents.
While it is true that modifying our lifestyles and adopting better energy policies and so-called green technologies can allay some of this environmental impact, it misses the real point.  Mankind’s impact on the environment is enormous and will keep increasing for one simple reason. There are just too many of us. Current world population growth is unsustainable at current rates and something is bound to happen sooner or later. One can argue that each Westerner has n-times  larger environmental impact than Africans but that still doesn’t alter the basic fact that development and better environmental practices can never succeed while population continues increasing at current rates.

exponential growth since 1750 (data Wikipedia)

I was born in 1952 when the world’s population was about 2.5 billion. In 2009 the population reached nearly 7 billion. This means that there are more people younger than me alive today than people who have ever lived and died throughout human history. Put another way it means that the Earth must now support more humans than have ever lived on Earth since Homo Sapiens evolved. Mankind already deforested Europe for farmland by  medieval times. Imagine the impact of this many people on the Earth’s natural balance. This has nothing to do with how carbon neutral we are or how well we recycle waste. These are only side issues. Somehow, over the next 50 to 100 years, we have to curtail population growth. The real risk to mankind is not a couple of degrees rise in temperature but our own inability to control reproduction.

I would argue that the current fad of focusing  on Climate Change as the primary impact of man on the Earth is because we won’t face up to the real problem of controlling population. Politically this issue  is a minefield and no politician will discuss it because it necessarily breaches a number of correctness issues namely:          

• Religion. “Go forth and multiply”. All religions claim their beliefs as the only true path. They reject beliefs of others and children of believers are born into the religion thereby to further increase the diaspora. All promote procreation within approved organised marriages and often  restrict women’s rights to encourage child rearing at an early age, sometimes from their early teens. Very religious people have more children than secular people and educated women with careers have less children than illiterate women with little education. The end result could be that societies become more religious and intolerant as the percentage of such groups increase, thus undermining further the secular liberal society that existed previously. The age of reason could be short lived. Let’s hope not.
• Immigration. As population pressures grow, especially in Africa,  and  job/land opportunities for young men diminish  so will the efforts for a better life abroad grow. The flood of illegal immigrants from countries in crisis like Afghanistan and Somalia lead young men to take desperate measures, and who can blame them. Liberal asylum and human rights laws won over centuries in Europe were intended for a different era to protect exiled politicians and political activists (including Karl Marx). At some point the flood of immigrants to Europe will trigger more restrictive authoritarian laws which will damage all of our freedoms. There is also the recoil from and fear of racism and fascism from the thirties which still haunts Europe and curtails any rational debate. It is almost political suicide to bring this issue up.
• Women’s Rights. Women control population and when educated and given the choice of a career tend to have 2-4 children maximum. In primitive societies where women breast feed their child for 2-3 years and where available food determined how many people the land could sustain, natural birth control meant that a women would have 4-5 children in her lifetime and perhaps only 2 would survive to adulthood. Tribes or sects wishing to grow and spread seem always to control women’s rights by  placing them under  the control of first their father and then later their husbands to ensure a maximum number of paternally certain offspring.
• Development and Health care. The age of reason which is based on science and engineering has brought great benefits to mankind and has provided the framework whereby the population has been able to explode.  Understanding the causes of diseases and providing remedies and health care, increasing agricultural yields, mechanising food production, industry, transport, trade etc. have all resulted from applying science to problems. This can’t continue for ever and development in the third world can only work within a finite world population. There can never be enough resources for everyone to live at US standards and nor could the Earth sustain such excess with the current poulation. 

To date the only country with a successful population policy is China with its one child per family policy. China is often accused of not doing enough for CO2 emissions as its economic growth goes ahead unabated. However its biggest contribution to the Earth’s environment and to reducing CO2 emissions is by  stabilising its population at 1 billion. Recently the  environment minister who is a woman gave a speech at a climate  change meeting where she stated that this policy had stopped an extra 400 million Chinese being born who otherwise would have emitted 40% more CO2. Most people thought this argument offensive but it is still true.
Japan has also stabilised its population as it had to since it is an island and has little on no immigration. This seems to have happened consensually as women gained equal education and careers and so get married later. Similarly in European countries this was the case until recently, but immigration and higher birth rates are now reversing this trend with possible long term implications for society.
Birth rates in the UK seem to be rising, and according to the Office for National Statistics, there were 408,000 more people in Britain in 2008 than in the previous year. The total  population has risen by 2 million since 2001, to  61.4 million. The average UK-born woman now has 1.84 children – an increase of 10% in just four years –

while women living here who were born abroad have about 2.5 children. A quarter of the babies were born to women who were born outside of the UK while direct immigration itself added about 120,000 people.  Other European countries are experiencing a similar effect with Switzerland increasing its population by 1.4% in just one year. Clearly European economies can sustain this increase in the short term but this issue will not go away and could become contentious in the long term.
There is no simple answer to population control as no-one wants an autocratic state to decide who has children and who doesn’t. Similarly it is only natural that immigrants will want to take great risks to find a better life if there is no hope left in their own countries. At some level we are all immigrants from somewhere else as very few indigenous people are left in any modern country. Most Britons were originally  from Saxony and the Netherlands and we all came from Africa originally.
Several countries, however, will not be able to sustain their increasing populations, so we need to start talking about these issues in a non-emotive way. Otherwise there will be serious problems ahead for the world. There are only two outcomes to this exponential rise in world population, because it is obvious that it has to stop  within the next 50-100 years. Either the birth rate must fall or the death rate must rise. The former option is by far the best one for all of us since the death rate can only rise  through  nasty disasters like disease outbreaks or through warfare. A UN conference on population control would be a good start, but will probably never happen for political and religious reasons. It is instead easier to hold conferences on the effects caused by ever increasing human populations rather than address head-on the core issue: how to control population growth.