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Environment

Letters

January 24, 2005 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 83, Issue 4

Dec. 6, 2004, page 8: The amount of methyl isocyanate released during the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, in 1984 was misstated as 4 tons. The exact volume of the release is unknowable, but experts estimate it at between 25 and 40 tons.

Two takes on global warming


I have been a member of the American Chemical Society for more than 40 years and have generally enjoyed and valued C&EN for its informative and objective reporting.

However, on the issue of global warming, your reporting has been rather one-sided, particularly regarding the issue of the effects of slightly increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere. You have placed an appalling amount of blind faith in the predictions of computer models, which, in the humble opinion of many scientists, are at best rough extrapolations of just a few observations. As a scientist, you know how dangerous it is to extrapolate from observed short-term trends in the case of highly complex, interactive, multivariable systems.

What really got me upset was the Insights piece "An Urgent Plea On Global Warming" by Bette Hileman (C&EN, June 28, 2004, page 44). The worst part of this totally one-sided article was the photograph of a woman holding a child and being up to her waist in flood waters in Bangladesh during the monsoon season. Much of that country is flooded every year between June and September from monsoon rains, and this has been the case for thousands of years. I believe that Hileman's kind of reporting does a disservice to the whole field of climate research.

Much is being made of the fact that there seems to be an increased melting of ice in Greenland and in the glaciers of the Alps. However, to blame this on the slight rise in CO2 in the atmosphere during the past few decades is debatable. Recently, National Aeronautics & Space Administration scientists have found that much of this increased melting may be due to dust settling on the icy surfaces, significantly intensifying energy absorption from the sun at the expense of energy reflection. Also, it is a well-documented historical fact that Greenland's coastlines were ice-free and covered with grass and other vegetation about 900 years ago, when the Vikings actually had a number of permanent settlements there.

In addition, serious scientists have shown that, about 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, global temperatures were at least about 3 to 5 °C warmer than today. At that time, there were no automobiles or caloric power plants to spew CO2 into the atmosphere.

All this means that other important factors unrelated to human activities have overriding effects; for example, the long-term effect of changes in sunspot activity. These changes have been well documented and show a reasonable correlation with long-term average temperature variations. They may have been responsible for the "little ice age" that lasted from about 1400 well into the 1800s.

My main complaint here is that your magazine has not devoted sufficient space to present a fair and balanced view of the issues involved in global warming.

There is another thing to consider: Suppose there is a gradual global warming effect caused by a combination of effects, say 1 to 2 °C over 100 to 200 years. Would that necessarily be bad? I say that there is at least an even chance that the effect would actually be beneficial. Just think of Siberia or northern Canada being more like Pennsylvania or New York state. Wouldn't be so bad at all.

Another important angle: The warming that has been observed in the past couple of decades has mainly been a slight rise in nighttime temperature, not in daytime peaks. From a human comfort standpoint, there has been no significant change at all.

Just for the record, I am all for cleaning up emissions of "bad" gases, such as NOx, SO2, and CO. But CO2, in small quantities, is not a bad gas. On the contrary, as we know from high school chemistry, CO2 is essential for photosynthesis of carbohydrates such as starch and cellulose. Without CO2, there would be no grass, no trees, no bushes, no wheat, and no corn. It is that simple and that fundamental. Several well-controlled experiments have shown that plants grow better when the atmosphere is enriched in CO2.

The basic chemistry is CO2 + H2O + light CH2O + O2. As this basic equation shows, for every mole of CO2 converted to carbohydrates, we get 1 mole of oxygen, which definitely improves the atmosphere and which we need to breathe.

My plea to you, as editor-in-chief of C&EN, is to present both sides of this ongoing controversy whenever the subject comes up.

Oswald R. Bergmann
Wilmington, Del.

 

I am pleased that you appreciate the point I made in an earlier letter regarding the Bush Administration repeatedly masking environmental policy in general behind both subtly and blatantly cloaked rhetoric. Unfortunately, John J. Burton's "response" completely missed the point and used my name and letter to trumpet the putative scientifically superior character of the overwhelmingly oblique and politically painted term "climate change" relative to the straightforward and above-board "global warming" (C&EN, Oct. 18, 2004, page 6).

Science fiction author Philip K. Dick once offered the following: "The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If one can control the meaning of words, one can control the people who must use those words." Dick had firsthand experience with this notion when several of his novels were made into films. "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" became "Total Recall"; "Second Variety" became "Screamers"; and, most notably, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" became "Blade Runner." (Ridley Scott had originally based the movie loosely on Dick's novel. The film company then bought the rights to another novel by a different author and discarded everything but the title, "Blade Runner.")

Clearly, Hollywood executives insisted on the above titular alterations in an effort to make the marquee more appealing to the general public and to increase profits. Climate change is to global warming what the novel title is to the film title in the above paragraph, with the imperative exception that global warming is real and the movies are fiction. More pragmatically, the quality of life for humans in general varies directly, whereas industry profits vary inversely, with the degree of spectacle.

It is not surprising that things become hot for you after writing about global warming/climate change. Alcoa, Dow, DuPont, ExxonMobil, General Electric, General Motors, and others (aka the Bush Adminstration) are analogous to the previously mentioned Hollywood executives in the opposite sense and have no desire to see global warming mentioned in a weekly magazine correlated so strongly with their industry and profits. However, one needs to do some soul searching and do the right thing. As Franklin D. Roosevelt said, "The liberty of a democracy is not safe when the people tolerate the growth of a private power to the point that it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself."

In conclusion, the commonplace argument that some models of global warming indicate that negative forcings may give rise to cooling rather than warming effects concerns short-term weather behavior and not long-term climate modifications. It is identical in character to plugging the state lottery by calling attention to the winners, although one's expectation of winning is invariably exceedingly negative. The same is true for global warming: The average effect is that of an increase in temperature equivalent to two Christmas tree bulbs for every square meter of Earth's surface, burning night and day (C&EN, Dec. 15, 2003, page 27).

John Stanks
Dartmouth, Mass.

 

Pleasing union

Your recent article on plant safety highlights the desire of workers in chemical and rail unions to participate in the planning of plant security measures (C&EN, Nov. 22, 2004, page 51). Not only is this reasonable, but highly desirable. In helping companies formulate programs, whether they be cost reduction, profit improvement, or safety program implementation, we have found it most effective to have those at the grassroots level--plant operators, salesmen, chemists--to be in the best position to help identify trouble spots and opportunities for improvement, as well as to help formulate and execute the programs.

Peter R. Lantos
Erdenheim, Pa.

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