Doug Henwood Talks

The Nation - May 14, 2007 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070514/cockburn

BEAT THE DEVIL Is Global Warming a Sin? by Alexander Cockburn

In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the
frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to
the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian
millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human
sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet’s rapid downward
slide. Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman
Catholic Church sold indulgences like checks. The sinners established
a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today
a world market in “carbon credits” is in formation. Those whose
“carbon footprint” is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to
others less virtuous than themselves.

The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is
still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of carbon
dioxide is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present
warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely on unverified, crudely
oversimplified models to finger mankind’s sinful contribution–and
carbon trafficking, just like the old indulgences, is powered by
guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed.

Now imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a
crest, then slopes sharply down, levels off and rises slowly once
more. The other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slow arc.
The first, wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans
burning coal, oil and natural gas. It starts in 1928, at 1.1 gigatons
(i.e., 1.1 billion metric tons), and peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons.
The world, led by its mightiest power, plummets into the Great
Depression and by 1932 human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88
gigatons a year, a 30 percent drop. Then, in 1933, the line climbs
slowly again, up to 0.9 gigatons.

And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That’s the
concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by
volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, 307
in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These
days it’s at 380. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a
whopping 30 percent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn’t even cause a
1 ppm drop in the atmosphere’s CO2. It is thus impossible to assert
that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from people burning fossil
fuels.

I met Martin Hertzberg, PhD, the man who drew that graph and those
conclusions, on a Nation cruise back in 2001. He remarked that while
he shared many of The Nation’s editorial positions, he approved of my
reservations on the question of human contributions to global
warming, as outlined in columns I wrote around that time. Hertzberg
was a meteorologist for three years in the Navy, an occupation that
gave him a lifelong mistrust of climate modeling. Trained in
chemistry and physics, a combustion research scientist for most of
his career, he’s retired now in Copper Mountain, Colorado, but still
consults from time to time.

Not so long ago, Hertzberg sent me some of his recent papers on the
global warming hypothesis, a thesis now accepted by many progressives
as infallible as Papal dogma on matters of faith. Among them was the
graph described above, so devastating to the hypothesis.

As Hertzberg readily acknowledges, the CO2 content of the atmosphere
has increased about 21 percent in the past century. The world has
also been getting just a little warmer. The not-very-reliable data on
the world’s average temperature (which omit data from most of the
world’s oceans and remote regions, while overrepresenting urban
areas) show about a 0.5 degree Celsius increase between 1880 and
1980, and still rising. But is CO2, at 380 ppm in the atmosphere,
playing a significant role in retaining the 94 percent of solar
radiation that the atmosphere absorbs, as against water vapor, also a
powerful heat absorber, whose content in a humid tropical atmosphere
can be as high as 20,000 ppm? As Hertzberg says, water in the form of
oceans, snow, ice cover, clouds and vapor “is overwhelming in the
radiative and energy balance between the Earth and the sun…. Carbon
dioxide and the greenhouse gases are, by comparison, the equivalent
of a few farts in a hurricane.” And water is exactly that component
of the Earth’s heat balance that the global warming computer models
fail to account for.

It’s a notorious inconvenience for the Greenhousers that data also
show CO2 concentrations from the Eocene period, 20 million years
before Henry Ford trundled out his first Model T, 300 to 400 percent
higher than current concentrations. The Greenhousers deal with other
difficulties, like the medieval warming period’s higher-than-today
temperatures, by straightforward chicanery, misrepresenting tree ring
data (themselves an unreliable guide) and claiming the warming was a
local European affair.

We’re warmer now because today’s world is in the thaw following the
recent ice age. Ice ages correlate with changes in the solar heat we
receive, all due to predictable changes in the Earth’s elliptical
orbit round the sun and in the Earth’s tilt. As Hertzberg explains,
the clinical heat effect of all of these variables was worked out in
great detail between 1915 and 1940 by Milutin Milankovitch, a giant
of twentieth-century astrophysics. In past post-glacial cycles, as
now, the Earth’s orbit and tilt give us more and longer summer days
between the equinoxes.

Water covers 71 percent of Earth’s surface. Compared with the
atmosphere, there’s 100 times more CO2 in the oceans, dissolved as
carbonate. As the post-glacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up,
and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, like fizz
from soda. “The greenhouse global warming theory has it ass
backwards,” Hertzberg concludes. “It is the warming of the Earth that
is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse.” In
vivid confirmation of that conclusion, several new papers show that
for the last 750,000 years, CO2 changes have always lagged behind
global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.

It looks like Poseidon should go hunting for carbon credits. The
human carbon footprint is of zero consequence amid these huge forces
and volumes, not to mention the role of the giant reactor beneath our
feet: the Earth’s increasingly hot molten core.

Next: Who are the hoaxers, and what are they after?

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