Civics came easily enough but I needed two tries to get through high school chemistry. Today, I refrain from ranking scientific theories but do know the signs when, to paraphrase the Cadet Prayer at West Point, academics, journalists or politicians are content with a half-truth when the whole won’t do.
From its first attempt to influence public policy, what is called the “climatology community” has often been disingenuous in the way it has presented the theory of carbon-induced global warming. The behavioral evidence:
* The “community” thinks as one and tolerates no dissent. Doubters dismissed as “Holocaust-deniers” — a despicable analogy.
* Exaggeration and mendacious alarmism — a typical example the public television program narrated by a Dr. Burke, who depicted mature palm trees in Massachusetts in 2030!
* The use of weather as synecdoche for climate by people who know better, but as a matter of propaganda are content to enter a heat wave in August or a thaw in January into “evidence.”
* “Heads I win, tails you lose!” If August and January offer up frosts and frozen-over saltwater ports, this too is written into the script as climatic instability predicted by the theory. This is plausible, but it does remind me of how an earlier cohort of well-educated true believers could rationalize anything Stalin did, even when he turned on a dime, as explained by the “class struggle.”
* For making that point in previous columns I have received more personal vitriol than for sour words about gangsters and such. If the “pure science” of the carbon theory is replicable and unanswerable the game is over. Why is it necessary to crush dissenters?
A fair answer is that carbon glut (my term) is seen as an emergency. But when a roll of “green” toilet paper at Stop & Shop finds willing buyers at 62 cents above a generic roll; or when banks reducing customer service get away with calling it “green banking,” more than science is involved. It’s Beatlemania or the cabbage-patch-doll frenzy we are caught up in. We are being manipulated and we need to get back to science.
A year ago, I had the privilege as a mere editorialist of reading, along with scientists of several disciplines, the draft of a paper on the causes of global warming written by Massachusetts native Dr. Peter Langdon Ward. Dr. Ward studied earthquakes, plate tectonics and volcanoes for 27 years at the U.S Geological Survey.
Viewing climate change over the whole history of the Earth, Dr. Ward noticed that warming patterns have appeared consistently during periods of very high volcanic activity. The immediate effect is cooling; warming follows as sulfur dioxide crowds out (my term) the oxidizing capacity of the OH radical. Small but relatively excessive amounts of sulfur dioxide thus pull the plug on the “tropospheric vacuum cleaner,” causing concentrations of greenhouse gases to build up, leading to rapid warming.
Carbon dioxide increases as well, but primarily as an effect, not a cause of warming. The warming ocean releases carbon dioxide just as a warm bottle of soda pop goes flat.
From borings in Greenland’s ice core, Dr. Ward has studied the ice ages of recent geologic times, the warming and cooling trends of the Christian Era, unto the reduction of anthropomorphic sulfur after 1979 in the effort to delimit acid rain. His findings are confirmatory, and he notably believes that the 18 percent reduction in atmospheric sulfur achieved by the acid-rain program had the effect of stopping further warming after 2000. But with hundreds of new coal-fired, sulfur-producing power plants opening around the world, the pause in warming is about to end.
Removing sulfur dioxide is simpler than removing carbon dioxide and the technology for doing so is more advanced. If sulfur, not carbon, is the main culprit, the implication is that climate change can be controlled without also pulling down capitalism and democracy. Distressing to some, but profoundly assuring to serious policy makers.
Dr. Ward’s paper was at first rejected out of hand by several scientific publications. But on Feb. 11 it was introduced at a press conference in Chicago and simultaneously published by the physics journal “Thin Solid Film.”
The late David Brinkley used to say that if you want an honest opinion, “find a man who has paid his mortgage” — who remembers life’s pressures but no longer has a personal stake in the game. Peter Ward has seen the tempest of life from many perspectives for a very long time. Like Prospero in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” his wisdom becalms the spirit. At his retirement home in Wyoming his company — Teton Tectonics — is a one-man band.
To incur the wrath of the carbon-is-the-one lobby would seem to be absurdly quixotic. Peter will face such a storm with good humor and perfect integrity. I do not endorse the findings, just the man.
