The complete list of things caused by global warming, according to the media (the links to every item are given on http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm)

Air pressure changes, allergies increase, Alps melting, anxiety, aggressive polar bears, algal blooms, Asthma, avalanches, billions of deaths, blackbirds stop singing, blizzards, blue mussels return, boredom, budget increases, building season extension, bushfires, business opportunities, business risks, butterflies move north, cannibalistic polar bears, cardiac arrest, Cholera, civil unrest, cloud increase, cloud stripping, methane emissions from plants, cold spells (Australia), computer models, conferences, coral bleaching, coral reefs grow, coral reefs shrink, cold spells, crumbling roads, buildings and sewage systems, damages equivalent to $200 billion, Dengue hemorrhagic fever, dermatitis, desert advance, desert life threatened, desert retreat, destruction of the environment, diarrhoea, disappearance of coastal cities, disaster for wine industry (US), Dolomites collapse, drought, drowning people, drowning polar bears, ducks and geese decline, dust bowl in the corn belt, early spring, earlier pollen season, earthquakes, Earth light dimming, Earth slowing down, Earth spinning out of control, Earth wobbling, El Niño intensification, erosion, emerging infections, encephalitis, Everest shrinking, evolution accelerating, expansion of university climate groups, extinctions (ladybirds, pandas, pikas, polar bears, gorillas, whales, frogs, toads, turtles, orang-utan, elephants, tigers, plants, salmon, trout, wild flowers, woodlice, penguins, a million species, half of all animal and plant species), experts muzzled, extreme changes to California, famine, farmers go under, figurehead sacked, fish catches drop, fish catches rise, fish stocks decline, five million illnesses, floods, Florida economic decline, food poisoning, footpath erosion, forest decline, forest expansion, frosts, fungi invasion, Garden of Eden wilts, glacial retreat, glacial growth, global cooling, glowing clouds, Gore omnipresence, Great Lakes drop, greening of the North, Gulf Stream failure, Hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, harvest increase, harvest shrinkage, hay fever epidemic, heat waves, hibernation ends too soon, hibernation ends too late, human fertility reduced, human health improvement, hurricanes, hydropower problems, hyperthermia deaths, ice sheet growth, ice sheet shrinkage, inclement weather, Inuit displacement, insurance premium rises, invasion of midges, islands sinking, itchier poison ivy, jellyfish explosion, Kew Gardens taxed, krill decline, landslides, landslides of ice at 140 mph, lawsuits increase, lawyers' income increased, lightning related insurance claims, Lyme disease, Malaria, malnutrition, Maple syrup shortage, marine diseases, marine food chain decimated, Meaching (end of the world), megacryometeors, Melanoma, methane burps, melting permafrost, migration, microbes to decompose soil carbon more rapidly, more bad air days, more research needed, mountains break up, mudslides, next ice age, Nile delta damaged, no effect in India, nuclear plants bloom, ocean acidification, outdoor hockey threatened, oyster diseases, ozone loss, ozone repair slowed, ozone rise, pests increase, plankton blooms, plankton loss, plant viruses, polar tours scrapped, psychosocial disturbances, railroad tracks deformed, rainfall increase, rainfall reduction, refugees, release of ancient frozen viruses, resorts disappear, rift on Capitol Hill, rivers raised, rivers dry up, rockfalls, rocky peaks crack apart, Ross river disease, salinity reduction, Salmonella, sea level rise, sex change, ski resorts threatened, smog, snowfall increase, snowfall reduction, societal collapse, songbirds change eating habits, sour grapes, spiders invade Scotland, squid population explosion, spectacular orchids, tectonic plate movement, ticks move northward (Sweden), tides rise, tree beetle attacks, tree foliage increase (UK), tree growth slowed, trees could return to Antarctic, trees less colourful, trees more colourful, tropics expansion, tsunamis, Venice flooded, volcanic eruptions, walrus pups orphaned, wars over water, water bills double, water supply unreliability, water scarcity (20% of increase), weeds, Western aid cancelled out, West Nile fever, whales move north, wheat yields crushed in Australia, white Christmas dream ends, wildfires, wine - harm to Australian industry, wine industry damage (California), wine industry disaster (US), wine - more English, wine - no more French , wind shift, winters in Britain colder, wolves eat more moose, wolves eat less, workers laid off, World bankruptcy, World in crisis, Yellow fever.

Prologue: From the Edge of Reason

Q (Edge magazine): What is your most dangerous idea?
A (Oliver Morton, a staff writer for "Nature"): Our planet is not in mortal peril.

...The planet-in-peril idea persists through widespread ignorance of earth history. The current carbon/climate crisis is small beer. The change in mean global temperatures seems quite unlikely to be much greater than the regular cyclical change between glacial and interglacial climates. Land use change is immense, but it's not clear how long it will last... If fossil fuel use goes unchecked, CO2 levels may rise as high as they were in the Eocene, and do so at such a rate that they cause a transient spike in ocean acidity. But they will not stay at those high levels, and the Eocene was not such a terrible place.[Most of the land was covered by lush forests, where flyless predatory birds, eg Gastornis were hunting the ancestors of horses-S.]

...The earth doesn't need ice caps, or permafrost, or any particular sea level. Such things come and go and rise and fall as a matter of course. The planet's living systems adapt and flourish, sometimes in a way that provides negative feedback, occasionally with a positive feedback that amplifies the change. A planet that made it through the late Permian [one of the great mass extinctions-S.] is in little danger from a doubling, or even a quintupling, of the very low CO2 level that preceded the industrial revolution, or from the loss of a lot of forests and reefs, or from the demise of half its species, or from the thinning of its ozone layer at high latitudes.

...Since the 1970s the environmental movement has based much of its appeal on personifying the planet and making it seem like a single entity, then seeking to place it in some ways "in our care". The idea that the planet is not in peril could thus come to undermine the movement's power. This is one of the reasons people react against the idea so strongly. One respected and respectable climate scientist reacted to Andrew C. Revkin's [a NYT science reporter who published an article "Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax About New Warming," in December 27, 2005 issue - S.] recent use of the phrase "In fact, the planet has nothing to worry about from global warming" in the New York Times with near apoplectic fury. http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_11.html#morton

excerpt from the "controversial" article in question:

[Andrew C. Revkin is a science reporter on climate issues for NYT; his reports can be read here http://www.nytimes.com/pages/science/sciencereport]

[David G. Barber holds the Canada research chair in Arctic systems science at the U. Manitoba]

...Even for polar bears, there are reasons to think the end is not necessarily nigh. There was at least one significant period - the last gap between ice ages 120 kya - when the global climate was several degrees warmer than it is today and they clearly squeaked through. Dr. Barber said he was confident that biology would endure much of what humans throw at it. His concern is for the effects on people and the things they rely on or cherish."All of global warming has nothing to do with the planet," Dr Barber said. "The planet will go on through its normal cycles, and it will do its own thing. It only has to do with us - as people. Our economic side of things and our political side of things are really what are being affected by climate change. The planet could care less." [See also Update 1 below]

More thoughts about the decimation of coral reefs (another favorite of the doomsayers) from the evolutionary perspective, from Rachel Wood (Cambridge; In Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 29 (1998) 179):

...the fossil record of reef-building shows that both the acquisition of photosymbiosis and the appearance of modern predator, herbivore, and bioeroding groups are relatively recent occurrences: Many ancient reefs clearly grew under profoundly different ecological controls than those that govern the functioning of modern coral reefs. Moreover, the global distribution of reefs has varied considerably through geological time, determined largely by sea-level, geochemical, and climatic fluctuations. Present day sea level is relatively low compared to that in much of the geological record such that the area of shallow water tropical seas is small, resulting not only in a reduced volume of shallow-water carbonates being formed, but also in an absence of analogs for the very extensive shallow seas (known as epeiric or epicontinental seas) that were common when sea levels were high. The extensive carbonate platform reefs and atolls of today are also the product of an unusually prolonged period of stable sea level, which, together with relict topography, have exerted a strong influence over modern reef form and style of sedimentation. Present-day climate is also relatively cool, with well-developed polar ice caps. During significant periods of geological time, ice caps were not present, and at times such as the mid-Cretaceous, northern hemisphere mean annual surface temperatures may have been 15 to 25 C warmer than today. In addition, 60% of modern carbonate production is accounted for by calcareous plankton that produce pelagic ooze deposited on the deep ocean floor, but before the evolution of such plankton during the mid-Mesozoic, shallow marine carbonate deposits represented up to 90% of global production. Consequently, for much of geological time, marine carbonate distribution, and possibly carbonate saturation levels, were very different from those found in modern seas. http://web.macam98.ac.il/~biology/courses/aquat_biol/evolution%20of%20coral%20reefs.pdf

Yes, if anything, it is the present situation which is rare and "unhealthy."

We should worry about ourselves, rather than the mystical "health of the planet," polar bears, and reefs. They endured much more than we can offer as far as the climatic upheaval is concerned. Furthermore, one cannot have evolution without extinction. The planet will take care of itself.

Why is this self-obvious idea dangerous?

PS: There are more "dangerous ideas" on that site, from physics to psychology to biology, most of which are but speculative drivel. For some reason, string theory landscape and anthropic principle are discussed a lot. Susskind claims that this favorite idea of his "spreads like cancer." So far, the cancer is largely contained to the West Coast. The majority of these "dangerous ideas" have been articulated countless times before without doing much harm; I'd say, all in all I did not learn much new or "dangerous." In Pauli's words: "Harmless, harmless."

Update 1: 5/2/06 More thoughts on the demise of polar bears:

...Flannery says polar bears typically gave birth to triplets, but now they usually have just one cub. That is wrong. Triplets, though they do occur, are very infrequent and are by no means typical. Polar bears generally have two cubs — sometimes three and sometimes one. He says the bears' weaning time has risen to 18 months from 12. That is wrong. The weaning period has not changed. Polar bears worldwide have a 3-year reproduction cycle, except for one part of Hudson Bay for a period in the mid-1980s when the cycle was shorter. One polar bear population (western Hudson Bay) has declined since the 1980s and the reproductive success of females in that area seems to have decreased. We are not certain why, but it appears that ecological conditions in the mid-1980s were exceptionally good. Climate change is having an effect on the west Hudson population of polar bears. Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present. It is noteworthy that the neighbouring population of southern Hudson Bay does not appear to have declined, and another southern population (Davis Strait) may actually be over-abundant. Dr. Mitchell Taylor, Polar Bear Biologist, Department of the Environment, Government of Nunavut, Igloolik, Nunavut; from "Toronto Star."

1. Big talk, Little walk

(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)
e e cummings

It never fails to astonish me how authoritative PR-minded "climatologists" are. Quite a few of these folks make their living by delivering solemn revelations of the coming Armageddon: the dreaded global warming. They know beyond any doubt what will happen when, say, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase from this value to that one. It will be bad, very bad indeed; you cannot even imagine how bad it will be. There is no room left for second guessing, for hesitation, for introspection, for suspicion of any sort. They radiate this certitude despite the fact that at close examination their models are 'garbage in, garbage out,' lacking any predictive power, that these models depend upon hundreds of poorly known parameters and scarcely understood processes, etc. For all of their big talk about global warming, the typical odds (suggested by their own models) that the period-average global temperature will increase by > 0.1 C in the next 20 years (as compared to the past 20 years) are 3:2! Few of them will be around to collect their money, though, even if this increase will actually happen. Nevertheless, these politicized climate scientists (most of which belong to computer modelling community) have few scruples when it comes to frightening the public and demanding that "something is to be done about global warming," meaning that the governments are supposed to waste billions of dollars fighting an uncertain, remote threat. I have long discovered that sensible arguments do not work on this

... holy brotherhood of twilight model experts and the crowd of diluted citizens that believe the numbers predicted by their models. I have studied their climate models and know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics and do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields, farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models. There is no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. The warming happens in places and times where it is cold, in the arctic more than the tropics, in the winter more than the summer, at night more than the daytime. I am not saying the warming doesn't cause problems, obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it. I am saying that the problems are being grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are much more urgent and important. Poverty, infectious diseases, public education and public health. (Freeman Dyson, 2005 address http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?DysonWinCom05)

It is hard to disagree with Freeman Dyson, who is, after all, one of the titans of the 20th century physics. However, voicing such concerns does not seem to carry the day. These guys immediately start questioning your credentials and profess deep knowledge of abstruse points and fine details that you are too stupid to get. It does not matter if those fine points have no or little bearing on the problem; the end result is that the "experts" win the day, once more reiterating their unshakeable "confidence" in the "consensus." Indeed, anyone who disagrees is not an expert, is not part of the "scientific consensus," hence their opinion does not count. That such a consensus has been shown to be wrong time and again in the past is the argument that is promptly dismissed, as heresy. In the past, yes, but now when they have computers, they know. There is, however, a trick which I found very helpful for setting the discussion onto the right path, avoiding this problem altogether. Play their own game.

What you should do is to suggest these GW enthusiasts to mean business, act on what they preach, and prevent the catastrophe by implementing the simple solution worked out by Dyson in 1979. He suggested lowering the solar flux that reaches the ground by dispersing aerosol particles in the upper atmosphere. The haze reflects the sunlight and cools down the Earth; such a solution would cost < $1B annually, whereas our socially concerned climatologists demand spending that much on their own climate modeling research alone! Of course, the economic measures they suggest to fight the GW are orders of magnitude more expensive. This simple solution works: such an aerosol induced cooling routinely occurs after major volcanic eruptions. The most pessimistic scenarios of GW suggest that the effect of doubling the CO2 concentration (when all coal is burned in the next 300 years) would be fully negated by 0.2% decrease in the flux. The typical variation of solar luminosity over one solar cycle is 0.1%. In fact, the trend on the GW observed since 1860 closely tracks the current increase in the solar flux (see Friis-Christensen, E., and K. Lassen, "Length of the solar cycle: An indicator of solar activity closely associated with climate," Science, 254, 698-700, 1991; http://www.tmgnow.com/repository/solar/lassen1.html; see also Svensmark, H. & Friis-Christensen, E. "Variation of cosmic ray flux and global cloud coverage-a missing link in solar-climate relationships" J. Atmos. Solar-Terr. Phys. 59, 1225, 1997 on the effect of solar flux variations on cloud coverage). To put this 0.2% in perspective, Life was doing very well 2 Bya, when the solar flux was 25% lower than now. The composition of the atmosphere changed drastically, the Sun flux changed drastically, biology changed drastically, and yet this planet's climate has been amazingly stable, if you do not count two glaciation episodes that followed oxygenation of the atmosphere. We'll come to that in one of the subsequent posts. Most of the GW crowd do not know such things anyway; they are surprisingly uninformed and uninterested in palaeoclimate. It is not their agenda.

Dyson's solution has been re-evaluated by none other than Edward Teller, in 1997. Here is his conclusion:

...The "geoengineering" proposed by Dyson may cost as much as $1 billion a year. More technologically advanced options along the same lines might cost $100 million. That's between 0.1 and 1.0 percent of the $100b/yr it is estimated would be required to price-ration fossil fuel usage back down to 1990 levels in the US alone. As the National Academy of Sciences commented a few years ago in a landmark report, "Perhaps one of the surprises of this analysis is the relatively low costs at which some of the geoengineering options might be implemented." Indeed, the director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program's Coordination Office has been promoting such geoengineering for three decades. But for some reason, this option isn't as fashionable as all-out war on fossil fuels and the people who use them. http://p211.ezboard.com/fchemtrailsmeteorologyissues.showMessage?topicID=37.topic
the paper is on http://lookupabove.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/Teller.txt

In 2003, National Academy of Engineering had a meeting devoted to cost analysis of Dyson’s scheme. They concluded that
...technical management of radiative forcing of Earth’s fluid envelopes, not administrative management of gaseous inputs to the atmosphere, is the path mandated by the pertinent provisions of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Moreover, this appears to be true by a very large economic margin, almost $1 trillion dollars per year worldwide, because crops could be fertilized by greater concentrations of atmospheric CO2 without climatic regrets. http://www.nap.edu/books/0309089212/html/94.html (there are more links to the research down these lines on the NAE site; there is also an excellent review on geoengineering on http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/about_us/meet_us/roger_pielke/envs5000/week11/Keith_Geoengineering_the_Climate.pdf)

In short, geoengineering is possible, it will work, it can be done without developing unspecified, nonexistent "technologies of the future," and it will be cheap. It is the exact opposite to what the GW crowd is peddling, and that's their vulnerable spot. Their agenda is to show how confident they are in their models, so they can get the ear of the powerful. Tell them that it is time to act on their confidence; we cannot afford sitting and doing nothing, right? If you are so dead certain that the GW is real, that the doom is upon us, that untold sums of money should be spent on preventing the CO2 emissions, that we should either combat GW or all die, why not go ahead and stop it? The turnaround that follows is truly remarkable. The same people immediately start fidgeting and admitting that too little is known about this and that; all of a sudden hesitation sets in; the tone is lowered and the rhetorics are humbled; things begin to look complicated; the climate is declared to be enigmatic and unpredictable; fine points come from the back to the fore. Well, if the uncertainty and predictability of the current climate models are such indeed, perhaps one should not make definitive statements and scare people off their rockers.

This warm-up usually works very well; these guys are not used to such blunt tactics -- yet. Now the discussion is set in the proper context:

GW enthusiasm is not about delivering the humankind from the imminent peril. It is about something else. Prophesizing doom that will come or not come in the next 20-50-100-300 is deplorable and cheap. Countless doomsayers have done that countless times before. Nobody will be held accountable for such a prophecy, especially if the recommendation is as toothless and self-serving as spending more money on more "climate research" (aka computer modeling of imaginary Planet Earth) and wasting loads of dollars on dubious, protracted, inefficient, and expensive measures such as cutting the industrial CO2 emissions. Taking responsibility now and providing a solution that can be implemented now is a different matter. Fear mongers, blackmailers, and phonies do not do that and avoid doing that by all means possible. Besides, quite a few of these folks know that their political future is tied to the solar cycle. Between 1930 and 1965, the global temperatures were dropping. Soon they will be dropping again, following the same cycle. We are also overdue for the next Maunder minimum that will certainly lower the global temperature quite a bit. The short-term prospects for the GW look uncertain at best. It is now or never. The racket is to grab the money before it is too late, when there are still people around who believe their computer models and confident forecasts.

What would these GW enthusiasts do when the global temperature will start going down? Will they suggest us to fight the menace of global cooling too?

PS: Recently, Guardian reported about an official $10,000 (1:1) bet between two solar physicists from Russia and a self proclaimed "mainstream climatologist" who is involved in "probabilistic climate prediction" (actually, he is a young British scientist located in Japan, of little clout) who is willing to accept such bets. In his boastful text, he suggests 5:1 to 3:1 odds on warming in the next 20 years as "fair." Somehow, the odds of the actual bet were much lower. If you read the newspapers, you would think that GW in the next 20 years is a sure thing (with odds better than, say, 10,000:1). Here you get the idea, how sure these things actually are.

Update: Scafetta, N., and B. J. West, 2006. Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900-2000 global surface warming. GRL, doi: 1029/2005GL025539.  ...We estimate that the sun contributed as much as 45–50% of the 1900–2000 global warming, and 25–35% of the 1980–2000 global warming. These results, while confirming that anthropogenic-added climate forcing might have progressively played a dominant role in climate change during the last century, also suggest that the solar impact on climate change during the same period is significantly stronger than what some theoretical models have predicted. http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/2005GL025539.pdf
Another interesting take (by Shaviv) is the effect of sun activity on modifying cosmic ray flux that changes tropospherical ionization by 5-10% per cycle; the ionization correlates pretty well with low altitude cloud coverage. You can read about it in Shaviv's JGR paper.  Popular rendition of this paper can be read on http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V9/N29/EDIT.jsp 

Update 6/29/06:  Paul Crutzen (a Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry 1995) has announced a coming paper on aerosol geoengineering to appear in August. So far, very little detail (http://www.dispatch.co.za/2006/06/28/Features/f5.html) He estimates the annual cost of his proposal at $50b annually. Naturally, NYT adds that "there was a passionate outcry by several prominent scientists claiming that it is irresponsible." Demanding unrealistic cuts of CO2 emissions that may or may not work in the vague future and will cost us many times this amount is, of course, the responsible position.

2. Is it really warming now?

...And he opened the bottomless pit; and there
arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a
great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened
by reason of the smoke of the pit.
And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth:
and unto them was given power, as the scorpions
of the earth have power. And it was commanded them
that they should not hurt the grass of the earth,
neither any green thing, neither any tree;
but only those men which have not
the seal of God in their foreheads...
Rev. 9.2-4

Verily, nothing beats the Book of Revelations when it comes to an optimistic scenario... The first post of this series ended up in a rhetorical question: what would our GW enthusiasts do when the global temperature will begin to drop, as it surely will, as we pass over the peak of the solar/warming cycle? Would they choke upon their own hastily uttered words? Say, the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King [who announced in 2004 that the GW is so bad that Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century] -- what will he do? Would he still insist upon his assessment that the Earth is entering the first hot period for 60 Myr, when there is no ice on the planet and the rest of the globe could not sustain human life. 

You might think that mine is a hypothetical question, but there is nothing hypothetical about it. From the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, it follows that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase at all (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

...In response to these facts, a GW devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate. Does something not strike you as odd here? That industrial CO2 is not the primary cause of earth's recent decadal-scale temperature changes doesn't seem at all odd to many thousands of independent scientists. They have long appreciated that such short-term climate fluctuations are chiefly of natural origin. Yet the public appears to be largely convinced otherwise. How is this possible? (R. Carter [who is a well-known palaeoclimatologist-S.])
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/04/09/do0907.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/09/ixworld.html 
(a perfectly ridiculous "answer" to Carter's argument can be found on this web site advising environmental activists "how to speak to a GW skeptic" http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/04/warming-stopped-in-1998.html)

Some people believe that such a situation is possible due to the existence of "robust scientific consensus" that the fluctuations are artificial in origin. The truth, however, is that there is no universal consensus. As with many other complex scientific issues, there is a considerable divergence of opinion. Yet any public voicing of the dissent, no matter where it comes from, is met by the GW crowd with orchestrated campaigns of name calling, tight credentials scrutiny, remonstrations, and full-blast anafema. It does not matter who voices the dissent. It could be a team of Harvard astrophysicists (http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/136.pdf), it could be a Nobel class physicist (see the previous post), it could be a respected palaeoclimatologist, it could be a couple of statisticians double-checking flawed analyses (http://www.climate2003.com/pdfs/2004GL012750.pdf); it can even be a fellow computer modeller, one of the most influential in their own field, like MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen, who ridicules GW alarmists' overblown claims  - it could be anyone. All of these nonexperts do not know what they are talking about. The solar physicists fail to see that poorly understood solar flux variations are unimportant for modeling of GW. The statisticians do not understand that putting red noise into programs used by Mann et al in their celebrated 1998 paper and reproducing the hockey stick "principal component" out of pure garbage is bad science. Lindzen knows nothing about climate and how climatologists get funded (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=222 ). When Sir David King (who is a physical chemist from Cambridge never directly involved in any climate research and, frankly, rather undistinguished in his own field, as I am well qualified to tell) frightens the electorate with his apocalyptic visions, he is the authority; would he dare to tell that everythin' gonna be allright, he would immediately become an unqualified ignoramus. When anyone who disagrees and doubts is excluded from the list of persons allowed to have a qualified opinion, the consensus on GW will remain robust even if we'll all freeze to death. You might think that such a scenario is a remote possibility: warming is the problem. Well, in the long run cooling is much more probable than warming. Quoting Carter further,

...Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown. The temperature curve for the last 6 Myr shows a 3 Myr period when it was several degrees C warmer than today, followed by a 3 Myr long cooling trend which was accompanied by an increase in the magnitude of the pervasive, higher frequency, cold and warm climate cycles. During the last three such warm (interglacial) periods, temperatures at high latitudes were as much as 5 C warmer than today's. We are fortunate that our modern societies have developed during the last 10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than 90% of the last 2 Myr, the climate has been colder, and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate record is that a sudden natural cooling is far more to be feared, and will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th century phase of gentle warming.

It is my impression that even a substantial cooling over the next decade or two would not stop the most vocal of the GW enthusiasts from scaring the public with the imminent threat of the coming fiery Hell.

What will?

Update 1: On April 14, 2006 David King decided to tone down his message of the coming hekatomb: the Earth is likely to experience a temperature rise of at least 3 C...this would happen because world governments were failing to agree on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases, etc. Gone is the rhetorics of the last humans lost in the melting Antarctic. I think it is time to send this guy packing. This "science adviser" makes everything possible to discredit science and scientists in the UK and abroad. He should stick to his catalysis on metal surfaces, and stop b*ing about things he overheard on the telly.

3. What happened on planet Terra?

'By what do you want me to swear?' the unbound man asked, very animated.
'Well, let's say, by your life,' the procurator replied. 'It's high
time you swore by it, since it's hanging  by a hair, I can tell you.'
'You don't think it was you who hung it, Hegemon?' the prisoner asked.
'If so, you are very mistaken.'  Pilate gave a start and replied through his teeth:
'I can cut that hair.' 'In that, too, you are mistaken,'
the prisoner retorted, 'YOU must agree that surely only he who hung it can cut the hair?'
M Bulgakov The Master and Margarita

Once upon a time, millions of years ago, there was a young planet called Terra, and it was the third rock from the sun. Terra’s sun was still faint; its luminosity was only 70-75% of our Sun today. No oxygen was present in Terra’s atmosphere, which consisted of inert and reducing gases: CH4, CO2, N2, and some H2. The stratosphere was cold and dry, and the atmospheric oxidation state was controlled by the balance between volcanic emission of reduced gases, photo-stimulated oxidation of dissolved iron (II) in the oceans, escape of H2 to space, and rainout of H2O2 and H2CO. And yet Terra was a warm planet sustaining liquid water and harboring bacterial life. Then, about 3 Gya, a miracle happened on planet Terra. The cyanobacteria started to make oxygen and this oxygen changed the chemistry of Terra entirely. The atmosphere became mainly N2 and O2, with only a trace of CO2. The sky became blue. The oceans that were green due to iron (II) that was dissolved in the seawater cleared up. The unicels living in Terra’s clear, oxic waters needed to find a way to deal with all this extra oxygen. One of these unicels learned how to reduce the oxidative stress and speed up its metabolism by incorporating a symbiotic proteobacteria that became our mitochondrions. This endosymbiosis lead to the first nucleated cells, the eukaryotes, that begat all animals and all plants. Observe that all of these events happened when the Sun was still much fainter than it is now. And yet the terrible Terra became our hospitable planet, Earth. The temperature on Earth varied ever since, but this planet, Terra and Earth, had always been an Eden for life. Amen.

Terra

How do these ancient events relate to the menace of GW? Everyone knows that GW experts can make very accurate predictions as to what would happen to the climate when the concentration of CO2 increases (say, if it triples relative to its present 370 ppmv level). At the same time, as we discussed in Part 1, tiny variations of solar flux (0.1-0.2%) during the solar cycle easily overrun the effects of man-made CO2 emissions. And yet, over the last 600 Myr the changes in the flux were on the scale of tens of per cents and the changes in the CO2 level were orders of magnitude larger than anything we can do, even if we’ll burn all coal, oil, forests, and "Save the Planet" weeklies. And yet, despite these drastic changes, the planet has almost always been a paradise for its numerous inhabitants. Furthermore, even through the most momentous transition from a reducing to an oxidative atmosphere it kept remaining so. How is that possible if a change in trace amounts of CO2, as we are being persistently told by the GW scaremongers, would have catastrophic consequences incompatible with human life?

Incidentally, what happens if one uses these super-accurate, multiply checked, ingeniously implemented computer climate models and runs those to model the state of Terra following its oxygenation? What is the result of such calculations? I have to tell you sad news: according to ALL of these simulations, we (I mean the Life in general) should have been all dead, a long time ago. The same models that are capable of tracing the subtlest effects of CO2 pollution also predict that the Earth should have been frozen solid, no matter what input. The only question remaining is, was it completely frozen over, or just mostly frozen over. 

...Usually, climatic simulations going back to the period when the solar luminosity was 70% of the present value lead to a completely frozen planet contrasting with the geologic evidences of sedimentary rock formation and thus of the presence of liquid water at the surface of the continents during the Archean (4.6-2.5 Gya). Using the present-day continental configuration and taking the seasonal cycle into account, a steady state can be found in which glaciation is complete but snow covers only some oceanic coasts, leaving the continents essentially snow-free. As a result, the albedo of the continental area is strongly reduced compared to that of the frozen ocean. Some continental temperatures can almost reach the freezing point of water in summer (-1 C in the center of Eurasia). The jump to a completely frozen Earth occurs when the solar luminosity reaches 0.86 times its present value. http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/els/09218181/1997/00000014/00000003/art00006

There were indeed two brief complete glaciation ("Snowball Earth") episodes at 0.75 and 0.6 Gya, that happened well after the oxygenation of the atmosphere, but what these models tell is that such a worldwide glaciation should have been the rule rather than a rare exception. Either these models are completely wrong, or there was something on Terra that actively counter-balanced the decreased solar luminosity, constantly adjusting to the changing conditions, making the best of any opportunity, all in order to keep this planet hospitable. The first idea, which is presently rejected, was that – what else – a blanket of CO2 kept the Earth warm through the transition. The problem with this rationale is that there simply was not the sufficient amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to do the job.

...CO2 concentrations of the order of 100-1000 times the present level are required to compensate for the decreased solar luminosity, if CO2 and H2O were the only greenhouse gases present. http://www.springerlink.com/(5ja50giqodxnvj45tje20i45)/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,5,6;journal,157,160;linkingpublicationresults,1:100279,1

...The quantification of greenhouse gases present in the Archaean atmosphere is critical for understanding the evolution of atmospheric O2, surface temperatures, and the conditions for life on early Earth. Small changes in the balance between CO2 and CH4 may have dictated the feedback cycle involving organic haze production and global cooling. Climate models have focused on CO2 as the greenhouse gas responsible for maintaining above-freezing surface temperatures during a time of low solar luminosity (ca. 17% lower at 2.3 Gya). However, the analysis of 2.75 Gya soil samples have recently provided an upper constraint on atmospheric CO2 levels well below that required to prevent the Earth's surface from freezing. This finding points to CH4 as an additional greenhouse gas. Pavlov, A. A., Kasting, J. F., Brown, L. L., Rages, K. A. & Freedman, R. Greenhouse warming by CH4 in the atmosphere of early Earth. J. Geophys. Res. 105, 11981-11990 (2000); Sagan, C. & Chyba, C. The early faint sun paradox: Organic shielding of ultraviolet-labile greenhouse gases. Science 276, 1217-1221 (1997); Catling, D. C., Zahnle, K. J. & McKay, C. P. Biogenic methane, hydrogen escape, and the irreversible oxidation of the early Earth. Science 293, 839-843 (2001); Kasting, J. F. Earth's early atmosphere. Science 259, 920-926 (1993) http://scienceweek.com/2004/sb040702-5.htm

The latest thinking is that the oxygenation proceeded not in one but in two major stages and that biogenic CH4 rather than CO2 was what kept the planet warm. During the first stage of the oxygenation, only the upper ocean was oxic. The thing about the methane, though, is that it is rapidly oxidized in the oxic atmosphere, so you have to make it continuously, all the time. Basically, it is Life itself that transformed Terra into Earth and had actively maintained habitable conditions during this momentous transformation:

...Many lines of evidence document a large increase in the Earth's surface oxidation state 2.4 to 2.2 Bya [due to the rise of the phototrophy-S.] and a second biospheric oxygenation 0.58 - 0.8 Bya, just before large animals appear in the fossil record. For much of the Proterozoic eon, the ocean would have been neither completely anoxic and iron-rich as hypothesized for Archaean seas, nor fully oxic as it is now. The iron chemistry of shales deposited 1.5 Gya imply deep-water anoxia beneath oxidized surface water. The sulphur isotopic compositions of pyrites indicate low sulphate concentrations in mid-Proterozoic oceans. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v423/n6940/abs/nature01651.html
{more papers are on Canfield's site http://www.decanfield.biology.sdu.dk/gb/publikationer.htm}

...Prior to 2.2 Gyr ago, sulfate concentrations are inferred to have been < 1mM and possibly < 200 mM. By 0.8 Gya, O2 and thus sulfate levels risen significantly. Analysis of the sediments suggests sulfate levels 5-15% of modern values for more than 1 Gyr after initial oxygenation of the Earth’s biosphere. http://web.eps.utk.edu/Faculty/kah/pdf/Kahetal(2004).pdf

...100 to 300 ppm of CH4 in the Proterozoic atmosphere (0.75-2.3 Ga) would have been sufficient to offset the climatic effects of the faint early sun and maintain the warm climate. The major argument against this type of the atmosphere is the short atmospheric oxidation time of methane after the first oxygenation event ca. 2.3 Ga. http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/31/1/87

...In the anoxic Archean atmosphere CH4 was an important greenhouse gas because of the decreased levels of the primary amospheric oxidants - OH, O and H2O2. After the oxidation event 2.0-2.3 Gyr, the photochemical lifetimes of methane shortened dramatically. Therefore, a common view of the Proterozoic climate suggests that CO2 was the major greenhouse gas (along with H2O) and that atmospheric CH4 concentrations were low. However, substantial CH4 levels could have been present in the Proterozoic atmosphere if O2 levels were lower than today. A factor of 10 increase in the methane flux results in a 60-fold increase of the surface methane concentration that would keep the mean global surface temperature at 23 C, even if CO2 was present only at today's level. In the modern ecosystem, 99.9% of CH4, produced by methanogens, is being consumed by methanotrophic bacteria. These bacteria would presumably consume much less methane if O2 levels were lower. Moreover, in the present day sulfate-rich ocean methanogens living in sediments are outcompeted by sulfate reducers and forced to live in the nutrient-poor environments. Methane is also consumed in marine sediments by anaerobic methanotrophs living in consortium with sulfate reducing bacteria. In an anoxic, sulfate-poor Proterozoic ocean net production of methane could have been substantially higher. Towards, the end of the Proterozoic, oceanic sulfate abundances began to increase, as indicated by measurements of trace sulfate minerals in carbonates. The corresponding increase in the abundance of sulfate-reducing bacteria should have led to a decrease in methane production. The "Snowball Earth" episodes at 0.75 and 0.6 Gya may have been triggered by a rise in sulfate and/or O2 and a corresponding decrease in atmospheric CH4. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001AGUFMPP42B0522P

...The first oxidation event was probably driven by an increased input of O2 to the atmosphere arising from an increased sedimentary burial of organic matter between 2.3 and 2.0 Gyr. This episode was postdated by the final large precipitation of banded iron formations around 1.8 Gyr. It is generally believed that banded iron formations precipitated from an ocean whose bottom waters contained significant concentrations of dissolved ferrous iron, and that this sedimentation process terminated when aerobic bottom waters developed, oxidizing the iron and thus removing it from solution. However, anoxic bottom waters probably persisted until well after the deposition of banded iron formations ceased; sulfide, rather than oxygen, was responsible for removing iron from deep ocean water. The sulfur-isotope record supports this hypothesis as it indicates increasing concentrations of oceanic sulfate, starting around 2.3 Gyr, leading to increasing rates of sulfide production by sulfate reduction. The increase in sulfide production became sufficient, around 1.8 Gyr, to precipitate the total flux of iron into the oceans. Aerobic deep-ocean waters did not develop until 1.0 to 0.54 Gya, in association with a second large oxidation of the Earth's surface. These were chemical events leading to the evolution of animals.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v396/n6710/abs/396450a0_fs.html

...Most methanogenic bacteria are thermophilic, liking a warm environment. When CH4 first began to build up in the atmosphere and the Earth warmed, these bacteria grew and produced more CH4. The warmer it got, the happier the hyperthermophilic methanogens became, creating a positive feedback loop where warmer temperatures meant more CH4 and consequently still warmer temperatures. Warmer temperature also causes CO2 concentrations to decrease because they speed up the rate at which it reacts with surface rocks. Eventually the atmosphere should have contained as much CH4 as CO2. When this point was reached, sunlight began to polymerize the methane, forming small hydrocarbon particles creating hydrocarbon haze in the atmosphere, which mediated temperatures and lasted until oxygen produced by cyanobacteria began to accumulate in the atmosphere. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2002-12/ps-mga120402.php

The Earth is a habitable planet because its biosphere is actively controlling the atmosphere and the oceans through numerous, poorly understood feedbacks. The fate of our planet is entrusted to cyanobacteria, to methanogenes and methanotrophes, to sulfate reducers, to algae and plants. Together, these true chaperons of our climate have accomplished the impossible, that is 3 Byrs of continued habitability of this planet, despite the colossal variations in the solar flux and chemistry. In the face of these changes, the puny CO2 emissions that our GW enthusiasts rave about are unimportant, almost negligible. The computer models cannot model this global biospheric control because nobody knows how these feedbacks actually work. The models consistently fail the most important test: the reconstruction of the past. These are not bad models per se, but you cannot model what you do not understand. The stability of Earth’s climate and its cause – the effect of Life on the climate – are not understood, even to a first approximation. The current obsession with the idea that we are "in charge of the planet" and our activities are at the bottom of every observable change is anthropocentric nonsense. The palaeoclimatology gives a better perspective on what is going on and who is in charge.

Who do you think that might be?

4. The perils of overconfidence: computer climatology to the masses

One of the reasons why our experts are so successful at scaring millions of people across the globe is that the public has limited curiosity as to what sort of models are predicting the coming Armageddon. They hear "supercomputers," "state-of-the-art models," "scientific," "high fidelity," "expertise," -- and that's quite enough, it must be ok. Some of the GW experts are beginning to be hypnotized by their own words too. Rather than jealously guarding the access to their raw data so that only approved "experts" can examine the unfiltered output, a group of overzealous UK climatologists did something truly audacious and unwise: they decided to make the concerned citizenry part of the climate modelling community.

That's overconfidence for you. Perhaps the intent was to drive the GW message deeper into the cortex of the body politic, but the result was predictably the opposite. The lay people are not "experts," and you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. They do get curious and suspicious when they see for themselves what kind of results the state-of-the-art models outpour. In February 2006, BBC has sponsored a distributed computing megaproject that involved 200,000+ PCs to run just such a state-of the art probabilistic climate model. The developers of the program and overseers of the project are highly respected Oxford climatologists (technically, they are geophysicists) with sterling credentials in the GW community (Stainforth, Frame). In fact, the project does sound like a worthy idea: putting error bars on the predicted trends:

...The aim of climateprediction.net is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models. By running the model thousands of times (a 'large ensemble') we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations - slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic. This will allow us to improve our understanding of how sensitive our models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle. This will allow us to explore how climate may change in the next century under a wide range of different scenarios. In the past estimates of climate change have had to be made using one or, at best, a very small ensemble (tens rather than thousands!) of model runs. By using your computers, we will be able to improve our understanding of, and confidence in, climate change predictions more than would ever be possible using the supercomputers currently available to scientists. http://www.climateprediction.net/project.php

The publically underplayed purpose of the project, therefore, was to explore, precisely, the well known problems of climate modelling (vulnerability to the uncertainties in the input, sparse sampling, etc.) It seems that few of the laymen directly involved in the project have realized that. The poor souls took seriously the hype in the media that the output of this state-of-the-art program is not pure garbage but a weather forecast for the future. That point was brutally driven onto them. The initial result, many months into the number crunching, is that the Earth will warm up by 11 C in just 40 years!!!

...Results published in Nature suggest previous Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predictions will need to be revised upwards. Climateprediction.net has released it's first results, indicating that global temperatures could rise by up to 11° C, even if global CO2 levels are limited to twice those found before the Industrial Revolution; levels that high are expected to be reached in the middle of this century. The results indicate that carbon dioxide emissions will have an even bigger affect on the global climate than previously thought. The Climateprediction.net is a distributed computing project. More than 95,000 people around the world have downloaded the software which runs calculations, releasing computer power greater than that of even the largest supercomputers [January 26, 2005] http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Distributed_computing_climate_change_model_gives_bleak_results
the full text of the paper is here http://www.climateprediction.net/science/pubs/nature_first_results.pdf

...A doubling of CO2 levels could eventually lead to an increase in worldwide temperature of anything between 1.9 C and 11.5 C, the project's researchers report in this week's Nature. That is a far greater level of uncertainty than the 2-5 C rise predicted by the IPCC. http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050124/full/050124-10.html

This remarkable discovery was hyped through the roof in the mainstream UK and US press and in first-rate science journals (and, as you see, even got into the Wikipedia) and the bleak news instantly became exhibit A in the hard core GW circles. That happened despite the fact that the "predictions" were so off the wall that the programs began to crash in year 2013. As, untypically, a lot of people were involved in these calculations (the results of individual runs are accessible to the computer owners), doubt began to creep in (it is year 2006, after all, and we are doing just fine). Lay people began to notice that the largest scale state-of-the-art climate model grossly overestimates the temperatures for the entire 20th century and streams the data that have no bearing on reality. The concerned citizenry rushed to make inquiries. Finally, on April 15, 2006 sustaining the joke became untenable, and the official announcement was made

...As many of you will have gathered already, we found a problem with one of the input files to the BBC Climate Change Experiment, and after much heart-ache have decided the only option is to restart simulations from 1920 with a corrected file...This isn’t a problem with the model, just with one of the specified drivers of climate change, the "global dimming" effect...In essence, what your models have done is show how much the world would have warmed up over the 20th century if it weren’t for the masking effect of global dimming... The problem, once identified, was very simple to fix, and our simulation of the 20th century has now been tested about as thoroughly as it can be, so I believe you can be confident that your new simulations will be doing what we think they are doing. Now that some of you have simulations that have reached 2000, we will use your uploaded files to start a few simulations from 2000-2080. These won’t provide valid predictions but they will mean that by the time you all reach 2000 the next time, there will be extra security against any problems like this in the second half of your simulation... For those of you who are interested, the problem was a single entry in a file header, which meant that the model started reading from the wrong point in the file... I’m sorry this will mean a couple of months’ delay in announcing the result. Although this may seem like a long time to some of you, in the progress of science, believe me, it is the blink of an eye. (Myles Allen, PI) http://www.climateprediction.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=4759

Strangely, nowhere in this statement does one find that the team is going to retract the "11 C warmup" paper published in Nature on January 26, 2005 that made such a splash. I did not see this sober announcement being discussed in the news either. It was made in a very humble manner and went unnoticed. So it is not 11 C increase, so what... GW is very bad, right?

Of course, to the computer climatologists such a flop is business as usual; the low fidelity of their models is common knowledge -- to them. The bug will be fixed, and a new garbage-in garbage-out teraflop computation will resume. The public, however, is not used to such treatment: they've trusted these fellows with predicting ("scientifically!") the not-so-distant future which is very much our immediate concern. If I were these climatologists, I would stop the project right now. The greater is the number of people that are exposed to the realities of the state-of-the-art climate modeling, the more difficult it might be to present the results of such computations as the unquestionable truth on which we must act. On the other hand, what a terrific opportunity: to use the very tool of the GW scaremongers (large-scale computer modeling) against themselves. However, the latest climateprediction.net scandal will probably be an eye-opener to the enthusiastic GW crowd: some things are better left unexposed. Repeat this scenario 3-5 times, and who knows what might happen.

Would they try to carry out such a PR experiment in the US? Or one time is enough?

Update 1: Tonight Nature published an announcement of a "glitch" on its news site http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060417/full/060417-4.html
Inter alia, it reports that the results [were] due to be presented as part of the BBC's "Climate Chaos" television season. Apparently, the anticipated result of the computation was climate chaos. The forerunner of this project, thermohaline circulation slowdown experiment was launched in May 2004 to co-incide with the film "The Day After Tomorrow."

Nature reports that users found that the program was mysteriously crashing at 2013. The release of aerosols climbed steadily in the twentieth century, but it is predicted to level off or fall in the future...When computers reached 2013, they found they had run out of aerosol data. Alas, the "prediction" of future aerosol levels is one of the key parameters of the climate model that are introduced by "expert opinion:" dozens of "experts" are polled on what a future trend might be, and then the average is introduced as the input in the program. I've been approached by such pollsters in the past, and precisely such practices made me into a hardened skepticist of the insane enterprise.

Once again, there is not a word in Nature's comments about retracting the 2005 paper.

Update 2. April 24, 2006 A discussion broke on Russian LJ that indirectly involves this post. See comments on http://rezoner.livejournal.com/98426.html
I stress that nowhere in this post was it stated that the bug announced last week related to the data published in Nature. All that was stated was that no retraction has followed the announcement. An unidentified individual claims that he had corresponded to the authors and was assured that the 2005 data presented in the paper are not corrupt.
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Talk:Distributed_computing_climate_change_model_gives_bleak_results
The source of this information has not been disclosed. The sulfur cycle models have been run by climateprediction.net from August 2005. Only the authors can answer what data are/were corrupt and how far in time the error goes. As I stated above, I would stop the public part of the project right now.

I do hope that the bug is fixed and the calculations will be completed just in time for the next season of "Climate Chaos" series and "The Day After Tomorrow II." (see Update 1).

The readers may learn the reaction of professional climatologists on this site, which I recommend to all interested parties [rather than the media hype and the opinions of phony "experts"] on
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/04/how-not-to-write-a-press-release/#more-296
the criticism of Stainforth's paper by the peers is nothing new
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/climatepredictionnet-climate-challenges-and-climate-sensitivity/

The recent paper by Hegerl et al. suggesting low sensitivity to CO2 level has been almost ignored by the press.
http://dukenews.duke.edu/2006/04/climsensitiv.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0419_060419_global_warming_2.html

Update 3: 4/24/06
Following my request, an e-mail reply from Oxford received by the person mention in Update 2 above is posted below as a comment. The reply is from Dr Stainforth, the lead author of the 2005 paper that is at the center of the unfolding scandal. He is also the coordinator of "Casino 21" project. As can be gleaned from this e-mail, Dr Stainforth sees no grounds for retracting the 2005 paper. The comment is frozen. I will unfreeze it when the paper is retracted.

The last week was hard on Dr Stainforth. In the space of three days, (i) Hegerl's paper appeared in Nature on April 21, 2006 putting his team's widely hyped claims of superwarming into grave doubt (according to rumors, that is only the first such paper in a series), (ii) a BBC radio program A load of hot air? Overselling Climate Change was aired on April 20, 2006 that called the publicity tactics employed by Dr Stainforth's team "attention grabbing," {being fair, I would call the BBC tactics treachery-S.} and (iii) on April 19, 2006 his chief collaborator at climateprediction.net announced a bug in the computer program. Speak about coincidences...

5. Good is bad, bad is good; warm is cold, cold is warm.

The recent scandal examined in the last post of this series broke over the effect of aerosol particles. The widely advertised, BBC sponsored program purports, among other things, to predict the aerosol emissions and their effect on the climate in year 2080. Would people try to predict the current aerosol levels back in the early 1970s, even if they had our supercomputers and full pre-1970 data, they would utterly fail in this task, for reasons obvious from what follows (you cannot predict the industrial development with any degree of fidelity). Climatologists have limited grasp of the effects of the aerosol particles and their origin and distribution in the atmosphere (a typical debate is here). Why is that so important?

The aerosols reflect and block the sunlight and also help the formation of clouds that do more of the same. Between the 1950s and 1980s, the amount of solar energy penetrating through the atmosphere has declined by about 2% per decade ("global dimming"). It turns out that industrial pollution (man-made aerosol particles) was "good for the planet." It was bad for us, but it counteracted the effects of the GW. Who cares about acid rains and a few cancers when it is the future of the mankind we are talking about? After all, the Victorians lived in smog filled London and ruled the seas, whereas we enjoy clean air and face certain death by the end of the century. What's better?

Why was the dimming trend reversed around 1980?

...The decline in Soviet industry and clean air laws in western countries apparently reduced concentrations of aerosols in the atmosphere. The reversal of "global dimming" has been proposed...as an alternative explanation for climatic change, removing the need to invoke human emissions of greenhouse gases. There is always this argument that maybe the whole temperature rise wasn't due to greenhouse warming but due to solar variations... During the solar dimming we had really no temperature rise. And only when the solar dimming disappeared could we really see what is going on in terms of the greenhouse effect, and that is only starting in the 1980s. [Indeed] analyses of global temperature indicate that a sharp upward trend commenced in the early 1980s. (Interview with Martin Wild in Nature, after source 1 and source 2) [see also Wild et al. Science. 308, 847 (2006); also, Andreae, MO et al. Strong present-day aerosol cooling implies hot future Nature 435, 1187(2005); Schiermeier, Q. Cleaner skies leave global warming forecasts uncertain Nature 435, 135 (2005), Clear skies raise global-warming estimates Nature 435, 1142 (2005)]

No! Never! It cannot be that activist demanded, expert suggested, government enacted environmental laws are contributing to the dreaded menace of GW by reversing the historical trends. Yet the ground and satellite observations suggest the opposite:

...there are strong regional variations in the "solar brightening" trend. In Eastern Europe, we see a very strong recovery, but India continues with the dimming...due to increasing air pollution. The general position is that air pollution is still increasing in the tropics, but decreasing outside the tropics; so probably that will amplify warming a little bit outside the tropics but not inside. (from the same interview)

So the industrious Indians are helping the planet whereas the lazy Slavs are killing it by not spewing as much soot as they did before. The industrial pollution was good in the GW speak; it was counterbalancing the warming trend before 1980. Despite the best effort of India and China, the decreased air pollution is speeding the GW up. Ergo: a way of preventing the Armageddon would be going ahead with uncontrolled industrial development and repealing all environmental laws, especially the clean air acts -- if we are serious about "expert's" warnings. That would be something that will help the planet and be economic and efficient. You might think I am going a bit too far. Not really, if the situation is as desperate as we are being constantly told. After all, the 1950s and 1960s were not exactly the worst time in the human history. All that you need is to go back to the same level of aerosol pollution. Why are our experts not suggesting such a measure? Why do they want to see our children and grand-children dead?

Incidentally, where were our all knowing climatology experts when these clean air laws were passed? Did they object to those on the grounds of the GW menace? No, they did not. You see, THEY are exactly those who recommended all these laws. Back then, their main concern was the fight against the mortal peril of global cooling. Yes, you got it right. The global cooling.

The GW craze has originated, for those who have short memory, as global COOLING craze over the effect of industrial/aircraft aerosol pollution. Those who are unsure or doubtful may jog their memory and peruse Spencer Weart's excellent review on the early history of GW studies available on the official site on the history of climate research maintained by the American Institute of Physics. When the global temperatures were dropping, the scare was not the man-caused GW, but the man-made ice age. When the temperatures began to increase, the very same people who predicted the coming deep freeze, have reversed by 180 degrees without missing a beat, and began predicting the fiery hell. I am confident that the story will repeat itself again at the onset of another cycle. It is amusing to read Weart's review. For example, do you know that the event leading to the very first round of climate change fear mongering was the following curious episode?

...In the early 1960s, Walter Orr Roberts, a prominent astrophysicist at the University of Colorado, noticed that something was changing in the skies above Boulder. Roberts had a long-standing interest in climate. One of the things that had driven his career in astrophysics was a hope of connecting climate with sunspot cycles. He had been especially impressed by the terrible drought of the 1930s, which he had seen firsthand when he drove through the Dust Bowl on his way to Colorado. One morning as he was talking with a reporter from the New York Times, Roberts pointed out the jet airplane contrails overhead. He predicted that by mid afternoon they would spread and thin, until you couldn't tell the contrails from cirrus clouds. They did, and you couldn't. The Times made it a front-page story (Sept. 23, 1963). "Until recently, Dr. Roberts explained, cirrus clouds were thought to be more of an effect than a cause of weather conditions. But data from balloon and satellite experiments now suggest... [clouds] may trap enough heat beneath them to affect the weather." Since jets evidently made cirrus clouds, they "might be altering the climate subtly along major air routes."

It is like seeing the first unsteady steps of a baby. That was the very first publicly hyped climate scare: the jet contrails that seed the cirrus clouds reflecting the sunlight and kill everyone via the sudden global cooling. Of course, the concerned public (fuelled by the revelations of "experts") demanded immediate action by the US government (it is always the government, never us), just like it does now:

...A 1970 review by a panel of experts warned that aircraft were already polluting the stratosphere with hydrocarbons and sulfur and nitrogen compounds, all of which might interfere with radiation directly as well as increasing cloudiness. They reported that high cirrus clouds had in fact increased in the US since the 1940s. The effects of aircraft on climate might be significant, they concluded — indeed particles emitted by a fleet of supersonic transports might alter the stratosphere as much as a volcanic eruption.

Do you remember these doom saying reports? I do. I also remember that back then the global cooling, just like the GW these days, was widely viewed as a man-made effect -- by the "experts." Quite a few of these "experts" had "robust consensus" about the imminent threat:

...McCormick and Ludwig suggested that the cooling trend itself might be due to human activities...[They] told a New York Times reporter (June 9, 1970, p. 60) that their experiments proved that fine particles could noticeably reduce the sunlight reaching the surface of the Earth. Their main message was a call for better monitoring of turbidity. "What we are trying to do," Ludwig added, "is get scientists' curiosity and concern aroused." The air over the North Atlantic was twice as dirty in the late 1960s as it had been in the 1910s, suggesting that the natural processes that washed aerosols out of the atmosphere could not keep up with human emissions. As a back-page New York Times item (Oct. 18, 1970, p. 92) reported, "This is disturbing news for those weather experts who fear that air pollution, if it continues unchecked, will seriously affect the climate and perhaps bring a new ice age."

...Weren't the deadly 1973 droughts in Africa and South Asia a sign that we were destroying our climate with pollution? In 1974, Bryson noted that humans emitted aerosols mostly in northern mid-latitudes, just where the recent cooling trend was most evident. He suggested that the pattern of pollution would change the gradient of temperature from equator to pole. A change of only a few tenths of a degree in this gradient, he calculated, could shift the entire general pattern of atmospheric circulation. That might alter, for example, the annual monsoon that was crucial for the peoples of India and the African Sahel. "Our climatic pattern is fragile rather than robust," he warned. Bryson took his concerns to the public. The entire balance of climate could be tipped, he said, by aerosols pouring from what he called "the human volcano."

Do not rub your eyes, you got it right. It does sound very familiar, with the opposite sign. Back then, the climate "experts" were concerned about the global cooling and advised the politicians on the immediate reduction in the aircraft and industrial pollution, in order to save the planet. And they've got what they wanted. What they wanted, in the retrospect, was speeding up of the GW about which they are so articulate novadays.

Reading these old reports is instructive. Nothing has changed over the last 40 years. The confident tone is the same. The arrogance is the same. The will to patronize the powerful and ward off the remote apocalyptic danger is the same. The fear mongering is the same. The unceasing seeking of publicity by persistent sensationalist claims is the same. The low standards of science are the same. The litany on the lack of ground observations is the same. The blunt demands to increase funding twice, better trice (otherwise, ...) are the same. The assurances that the methods are sound and robust, and the models are the cutting edge are the same. Even some names are the same. The doomsday scenarios, however, are exactly opposite.

What does it really mean, to be a climate "expert"?

PS: The "global cooling" scare: Some of the most notorious examples are given
on http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/misc-non-science.html
See also http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth
Alas, it is not a myth: some climatologists of the 1970s have been repeatedly seeking publicity to "predict" significant  global cooling via aerosol effects (RealClimate.org does have a point that these folks did not predict the Ice Age, but that is a minoir technical point).

Update 8/4/06. 'Science' published today a perspective on aerosol effects. The tentative conclusion is
...The analysis confirms a positive and robust correlation between aerosol load and cloud cover, with a mean slope that gets smaller as aerosol absorption increases. On the basis of these results, the authors estimate that anthropogenic aerosols increase the global cloud cover by 5%. Assuming a typical cloud albedo of 0.5, this corresponds to an increase of the reflected solar flux by 5 W m^-2 -- a forcing on climate that is larger than, and of opposite sign to, that of greenhouse gases...  a reduction of particle emissions may increase global warming. We may have to choose between an aerosol-loaded air, with its adverse effects on human health, and a rapid and strong climate change.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5787/623
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5787/655

6. The Day Before Yesterday

Global warming is "bad for the planet."

Interestingly, it is only this latest one which is "bad." You seldom hear lamentations about the bygone Ice Age and the loss of the soulful Neanderthal man and the megafauna that was snacking on him. The dozens of interglacial warm-ups (during which the global temperatures increased by 10-12 C) were "good" for the planet. It is undeniable that for some of its bipedal inhabitants the current interglacial period was indeed beneficial. Without these warm-up periods there would not be anyone around making judgments on the morality of climate change. However, that's distant past; this particular warming, of puny 0.6 C, is different: it is "bad." It is also apocalyptic, catastrophic, unprecedented, unnatural, suicidal.

What does it actually mean that such and such climate trend is "bad for the planet"? I wish I knew. Say, the Permian extinction during which ca. 90% of all species became extinct, was it "good" or "bad" for the planet? I daresay it was neither. Life as we know it was informed by the climate change. Without these "bad" extinctions there would not be us around. Actually, global warming periods have never been much of a problem for Life in the past. Historically, the warming led to its flowering, due to the increased plant productivity and rainfall (e.g., a recent example here). By contrast, global cooling repeatedly devastated Life.

I constantly hear the environmentalists making absurd claims that GW threatens biodiversity. The latter is viewed by them as the self-evident "good." Let's assume, for the sake of the argument, that that is indeed the case. What do we make of the fact that the cherished biodiversity is the result, inter alia, of drastic climate and geological changes? The best understood speciation mechanism, geographical (allopatric & dichopartic) speciation requires isolation. The latter is often caused by abrupt climate change. You need barriers preventing the interbreeding between the species. You need new niches for the explosive radiation to occur. Without this speciation, you cannot have the diversity. Consequently, the places that exhibit the highest diversity are precisely those that are repeatedly affected by the most dramatic climate swings. If the mystical "health of the planet" is gauged by the biological diversity, the environmentalists should rejoice every time the forest is cut (logging creates a new barrier and a new niche) or a highway paved (preventing the crossbreeding of populations). The short-term results might be detrimental, but the opportunity for the speciation has been provided, helping to achieve biodiversity. For some reason, this simple corollary of the evolutionary theory is not received well by nature-worship public. They want their biodiversity without the process that leads to it.

A good example of this curious attitude is Amazonian rainforest. Rhapsodizing about the Amazonian ecosystem (that is claimed to be the most biologically diverse place on the planet) is commonplace in some circles. Try to ask the same people, what made Amazonia such a wonderful place? The ad hoc, improvised answers would be that it is due to the stability of warm, humid climate. This answer is incorrect. Stability provides abundance rather than diversity. The natural history of Amazonia is the history of cataclysmic events: the uplift of the Andes in the Miocene, colossal climate swings, and repeated sea inundations. These "bad" forces combined to create, many times over, isolated patches of the rain forest (refugia) that provided high rate of speciation. If you think otherwise, read this paper by M. C. Hoorn in May 2006 issue of the "Scientific American" (p. 66-73) discussing the probable scenario of Amazonian diversity. The most important factors were the sea inundations and built up of the mountains. Have you ever thought how these dolphins, manatees, and stingrays ended up living in the freshwater Amazon? That's how. The peaks of the two major floods occurred 10 and 15 Mya; these floods lasted for thousands of years. Another factor was the onset of glacial cycles that made the climate in the north of the continent more arid and cut the wetlands into small, disconnected habitats. THAT is what needed for biodiversity. [The map of such refugia can be found in Fig 3.8, Chapter 3.1.4 Paleoclimatology by TJ Crowley & GR North, Oxford U Press 1991]

Actually, if one focuses on plant diversity alone, it has been steadily declining in the Amazon as the global cooling set in. The trees want global warming for diversification:

...The neotropical Amazonian and Andean plant diversity developed mainly during the Tertiary. In Amazonia, Miocene floral diversity seems considerably higher [sic!] than today. During the Neogene, tropical taxa entered newly created montane area, and montane taxa entered the tropical lowlands. The general decrease of temperature during the upper Neogene and especially during the Quaternary glacial periods may have caused considerable extinctions in the lowlands...The present-day centers of higher rainfall (>2500 mm) surrounded by areas of lower rainfall, are refuge areas of the very wet rain forest and of the very high plant diversity (300 plant species per 0.1 ha), and they should have been that equally, or more, during the dry climate intervals (plant diversity of drier forests is in the order of 100–150 species per 0.1 ha). Both extinction and speciation in isolation under precipitation and temperature stress may have taken place in these refugia. Neogene and Quaternary history of vegetation, climate, and plant diversity in Amazonia T. van der Hammen & H. Hooghiemstra

The causes for animal and floral biodiversity were rapid, dramatic climate swings and geological upheavals. Those were followed by extinctions that were, in turn, crucial for the subsequent bursts of speciation in the refugia. The overall result was steady diversification, in spite of the stifling effect of global cooling:

...Historical patterns of connection and isolation of the impressive biological diversity of the Amazon Basin have been the subject of extensive debate...Forest species' distributions during LGM [last glacial maximum, 21 kya] showed fragmentation and these fragments were coincident spatially... Our results suggest that past climate changes fragmented forest species' ranges within a matrix of uncertain composition. http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1366-9516.2005.00212.x;jsessionid=aow2-3SEoIf7ioth7R?cookieSet=1&journalCode=ddi

...During the entire Tertiary, but since the beginning of the Miocene in particular, the environmental setting in northern South America changed frequently which may have led to extinctions. But it may have been also one of the factors favoring the strong evolution and speciation that has led to the very high diversity of the neotropical flora. The upheaval of the Andean mountain chain stimulated the evolution and adaptation of the montane flora, and permitted the entrance of species belonging to new genera. Such species arrived from the south (austral–antarctic flora elements) and later, after the closure of the Panamanian Isthmus around 4 Mya, also from the north (holarctic flora elements). This enriched the floras of the temperate areas (montane forest belt) and cold areas ('tropicalpine' vegetation above the upper forest line) of the neotropics, where new neotropical taxa were formed, adapted to the new circumstances.

...The impact of dryness and temperature lowering on the vegetation and flora, repeated every glacial interval of the Quaternary, may have led to considerable extinctions instead of to extensive speciation. The fact that biodiversity of the Miocene seems to have been greater than the Holocene supports this view. The decrease in rainfall may result in a loss of species, especially if migration is difficult or impossible. The specific composition of these relatively wet and dry forests is moreover partly different. Another conclusion is that the present-day centers of high rainfall are relatively isolated from the areas of lower rainfall and might be considered a type of present-day 'refugia' for a number of wet forest species. These areas may have become still more isolated during the dry glacial intervals and may have had a still more pronounced function as 'refugia'. http://www.botany.wisc.edu/courses/botany_430/Hooghiemstra.pdf

You can find any number of papers that account for rapid diversification of this or that plant or animal species in the Amazon through such climate changes, e.g. plants. It would typically read like "We propose a scenario for the diversification of blah-blah-blah, in which rapid adaptation in geographic isolation and range shifts in response to environmental changes contribute to reproductive isolation among close relatives." That's right. The climate changes created the refugia in which the explosive speciation that gave us the present magnificent rainforests has occurred. There are, of course, alternative views to this predominant Refugial Hypothesis, but those scenarios too are based on the notion that rapid climate change was causal for the biodiversity.

In short, what drives the biodiversity is abrupt change, including the climate change. Global warming is fine; global cooling is also fine. When the global temperatures oscillate every few thousand years, that's just perfect. You would have extinctions, of course, but the overall biodiversity increases. Whether such a condition is "bad" or "good," I cannot tell. Global warming had (almost) always resulted in greater plant diversity; whereas animal diversity was helped by rapid climate cycling. By this logic, human activities resulting in the formation of refugia help to achieve greater diversity thereby being "good." So is the GW. If the worst dreams of GW fear mongers come through, there is nothing to worry about, as far as the biodiversity is concerned. Another inundation of Amazonia is exactly what's needed to reach even higher biological diversity in the tropics. It will be a first-rate disaster for the humanity, but it will be "good." It might even spur the major burst of zoological creativity.

We should worry about ourselves rather than bilogical diversity. Life will take care of itself. "Good" and "bad" have no other repository than our own minds. "The Day After Tomorrow" is no better and no worse than The Day Before Yesterday. Without the chaotic past, there would not be today in which we live.

Why such a fixation on the largely imaginary threat to global biodiversity? Is that simply because the latter is difficult to quantify, so it is easy to make silly, sensationalist claims and scare more people? Who decides what is "good" and "bad" for this planet in the first place?

Bonus Material: As you may guess, there is no lack of GW modelers predicting speedy demise of the Amazon ecosystem. It does not bother them that this ecosystem had survived through 23 Mys of continuous calamity. The previous climate change was "good." Now, it is "bad." The end of the 23 Mya old rainforest that survived unimaginable disasters only to become more diverse comes in 2100:

...One computer model of future climate change due to CO2 emissions shows that the Amazon rainforest could become unsustainable under conditions of severely reduced rainfall and increased temperatures, leading to an almost complete loss of rainforest cover in the basin by 2100. However, simulations of Amazon basin climate change across many different models are not consistent in their estimation of any rainfall response, ranging from weak increases to strong decreases. (Wiki) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Rainforest

...[20 years of hysterics, not enough people scared still:] When I first met Lovejoy nearly 20 years ago, he was trying to get journalists like me to pay attention to the changes in the climate and biological diversity of the Amazon. He is still trying, but he's beginning to wonder if it's too late. Lovejoy fears that changes in the Amazon's ecosystem may be irreversible [as if these were ever reversible-S.] Scientists reported last month that there is an Amazonian drought apparently caused by new patterns in Atlantic currents that, in turn, are similar to projected climate change. With less rainfall, the tropical forests are beginning to dry out [just like it happened before the major speciation events-S]. When the forest trees are deprived of rain, their mortality can increase by a factor of six, and similar devastation affects other species, too [which is called niche emergence-S]. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/17/AR2006011700895.html
{Lovejoy is a coeditor of the 1992 GW bible, "Global Warming and Biological Diversity," which is the favorite source for GW fear mongers.}

...The study expands on a much-debated [computer modeling, totally bogus] 2004 paper published in the Nature that suggested 1/4 of the world's species would be committed to extinction by 2050 as a result of GW. The results reinforce the massive species extinction risks identified in the 2004 study. "It isn't just polar bears and penguins that we must worry about anymore," said Lee Hannah, co-author of the study and senior fellow for climate change at Conservation International. "The hotspots studied in this paper are essentially refugee camps for many of our planet's most unique plant and animal species. If those areas are no longer habitable due to GW then we will quite literally be destroying the last sanctuaries many of these species have left." http://www.conservation.org/xp/frontlines/species/04100601.xml

The horror movie goes on...

The Day After Tomorrow

Addendum 5/7/06 Various science news sites have reported last week on the research of Gillman et al. on the rate of molecular evolution in tropical plants. Apparently, and quite unexpectedly [for me], this rate increases with temperature [the so-called Rohde's climate-speciation hypothesis]. They suggest this dependence as the cause for high biodiversity in the tropics. It sounds too good to be true.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1625917.htm
http://www.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/about/news/articles/2006/05/evolution.cfm
The road from Santa Rosalia: A faster tempo of evolution in tropical climates by S. Wright, J. Keeling, L Gillman PNAS online; 10.1073/pnas.0510383103
...{Our results} suggest that greater rates of speciation in the tropics do not cause higher rates of molecular evolution. {Another alternative} explanation is that more rapid genetic drift might have occurred in smaller tropical species populations [i.e., the refugia]...we targeted common species to limit the influence of genetic drift, and many of the tropical species we used, despite occurring in abundant populations, had much higher rates of molecular evolution.
The connection of this questionable result to GW is self-obvious" higher temperatures => higher plant diversity.

7. The ozone hole: how international protocols solve all problems

One of the favorite myths of GW enthusiasts is the heroic story of atmospheric scientists delivering the humanity from the dreaded threat of ozone depletion, by insisting on cutting CFC pollution (the Montreal Protocol, 1989). This example supposedly demonstrates the great potential of international treaties and environmental activism. Skulduggery of international bureaucracies and global conglomerates, meek support of terrorized population bombarded by apocalyptic images, blunt demands for worldwide changes in the industrial practices and, most importantly, listening to hysterical warnings of politicized scientists - it all helped back then and it will help again.

In some sense, they are right. The problem has been solved. You do not see the ozone hole in the news any more, except for a few professional journals and bulletins. Apart from that, there is nothing to show in the way of results.

The peak of ozone depletion was in the mid-1990s. Most of this depletion was in the polar regions; there was almost no depletion at the equator. Since circa 1995, not too much field work has been done on the observation of "ozone recovery." That is because the problem has been solved, so the money were diverted towards more worthy projects, such as GW computer studies. Only now the first studies that reexamine the evolution of entire ozone columns over the past two decades are appearing. These studies suggest that cutting of the CFC's had no perceptible effect on ozone concentrations. You may surmise as much by yourself looking at, for instance, these 2005 data for the Southern Hemisphere Ozone Hole.



Then as now: the ozone hole (NASA). http://toms.gsfc.nasa.gov/eptoms/dataqual/ozone.html

To be sure, cutting CFC's curbed the increase in the atmospheric chlorine that stabilized at 3 ppb around year 2000 and shows every sign of dropping. However, we were not threatened by the chlorine. We were threatened by the ozone. Did the cutting of CFC’s help to restore the ozone? No, it did not:

...Evidence of mid-latitude ozone depletion and proof that the Antarctic ozone hole was caused by humans spurred policy makers from the late 1980s onwards to ratify the Montreal Protocol and subsequent treaties, legislating for reduced production of ozone-depleting substances. The case of anthropogenic ozone loss has often been cited since as a success story of international agreements in the regulation of environmental pollution. Although recent data suggest that total column ozone abundances have at least not decreased over the past eight years for most of the world, it is still uncertain whether this improvement is actually attributable to the observed decline in the amount of ozone-depleting substances in the Earth's atmosphere. The high natural variability in ozone abundances, due in part to the solar cycle as well as changes in transport and temperature, could override the relatively small changes expected from the recent decrease in ozone-depleting substances. Whatever the benefits of the Montreal agreement, recovery of ozone is likely to occur in a different atmospheric environment, with changes expected in atmospheric transport, temperature and important trace gases. EC Weatherhead, SB Andersen The search for signs of recovery of the ozone layer Nature 441 (2006) 39.

...Some reports in the media suggest that the ozone layer over Antarctica is now recovering. This message is a little confused [that is to say it is wrong-S.] …Satellite measurements show that the rate of decline in ozone amount in the upper stratosphere is slowing, however the total ozone amount is still declining. The small size of the 2002 ozone hole was nothing to do with any reduction in ozone depleting chemicals and it will be a decade or more before we can unambiguously say that the ozone hole is recovering. This assumes that the decline in ozone depleting chemicals continues and that there are no other perturbations to the ozone layer, such as might be caused by a massive volcanic eruption or Tunguska like event. It will be the middle of this century or beyond before the ozone hole ceases to appear over Antarctica. What we saw in 2002 is just one extreme in the natural range of variation in the polar stratosphere and is the equivalent of an extreme in 'stratospheric weather'. By contrast the 'weather' in 2003 moved to the opposite extreme and we saw one of the largest ozone holes on record.
http://www.theozonehole.com/fact.htm (J. Shankin, British Antarctic Survey; he is the discoverer of the ozone hole)

Increased solar activity means more UV light making the ozone. Since the latter is constantly changing in an unpredictable way the UV flux variations easily override the puny effects of CFC elimination. The largest documented depletion of Arctic ozone (60%), in 2004, was caused by a very strong solar storm that caused mass production of NOx in the upper atmosphere.

How come the models -- the state-of-the-art computer models of the 1990s -- that showed that cutting CFC's would have dramatic impact on the ozone levels (full recovery by 2045) -- were so grossly incorrect? That's because these models had little bearing on reality, just like the present climate models:

...Although much of the chemistry affecting ozone is understood, uncertainties in chemical reaction rates, along with the difficulty in estimating future levels of trace gases in the atmosphere, limit our ability to predict recovery of ozone concentrations. For example, uncertainties in bromine chemistry limit our ability to predict recovery of ozone concentrations, and the rates of ozone loss by two key catalytic cycles involving anthropogenic halogens are at present uncertain by about a factor of two. Changes in stratospheric water and methane are difficult to predict yet will affect total ozone levels. Atmospheric dynamics, especially transport of ozone-rich air pole ward and strong polar vortices, have direct influences on ozone levels in the short term. Climate change could have long-term effects on atmospheric dynamics throughout the atmosphere. Neither dynamical processes nor dynamical effects on ozone levels are fully understood. For example, recent dynamical activity could be due to natural variability, climate change, or radiative feedbacks resulting from changing concentrations of ozone (Nature) --

-- or anything else for that matter. The complexity of the atmosphere is such and the uncertainties and lack of knowledge are such that no "prediction" is possible or will be possible any time soon. The confident assurances that the models are able to predict the dynamics of the ozone hole were sheer rubbish. Nobody can do that and nobody understands why the ozone concentrations are what they are. There are some ideas, of course, as to what might have caused the “delay lag,” as it is generously called in order to save one's face. As usual, the “experts” are radiating confidence:

…The concept that stratospheric cooling due to ozone loss may lead to a delay in recovery of the ozone layer has fallen on fertile ground. Scientists running different kinds of global models are finding similar results. “That gives us confidence,” says Dr. Venkatachalam Ramaswamy, at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamic Laboratory. “We’re confident in our assessment, because the models can help us to understand the observed ozone and temperature changes on a global scale.”

...Ozone generates heat in the stratosphere, both by absorbing the sun’s ultraviolet radiation and by absorbing upwelling infrared radiation from the lower atmosphere. Consequently, decreased ozone in the stratosphere results in lower temperatures... Stratospheric cooling may have been taking place over recent decades for a number of reasons. One reason may be that the presence of ozone itself generates heat, and ozone depletion cools the stratosphere. Another contributing factor to the cooling may be that rising amounts of greenhouse gases in the lower atmosphere (troposphere) are retaining heat that would normally warm the stratosphere. However, scientists hold varying degrees of conviction about the nature of the link between tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling. “The warming of the troposphere and its potential influence upon the stratospheric circulation is an important consideration,” points out Ramaswamy, “though the quantitative linkages are uncertain. It is possible that they may be interdependent only in a tenuous manner. The problem is that we haven’t had adequate data. Observations have been primarily limited to only a very few locations in the stratosphere. We have only 20 years of full global coverage from satellites. Of course radiosonde goes back 40 years but that is not global coverage.” http://www.theozonehole.com/climate.htm

Yes, the familiar litany about the inadequate data and "more research is needed." The data were adequate and no more research was needed, though, to recommend drastic public policies back in the late 1980s. So, what is the latest forecast?

...In the Antarctic, where conditions are generally conducive to rapid, heterogeneous ozone depletion, ozone at some altitudes can be nearly entirely depleted during the spring. In recent years, total column ozone values have been observed to reach comparably low levels during the Antarctic spring. This apparent leveling off is not attributable to a decline in chlorine loading, but rather is a sign of near-complete depletion at critical layers in the atmosphere. Little improvement is expected for total column ozone in the Antarctic for the next several decades. In contrast, increases in total column ozone in the Arctic will partially depend on possible dynamical and temperature changes in the coming decades, which could result in either an expedited or delayed ozone increase. Changes in ozone concentrations at specific altitudes in both the Arctic and Antarctic will be highly dependent on temperature and resulting polar stratospheric cloud formation, as well as on the amounts of ozone-depleting substances...Some of the increase of total column ozone during the past eight years may be due to the recent solar cycle maximum, but the magnitude of this influence is somewhat uncertain. (Nature)

That is to say that there is no forecast. The authors nevertheless conclude optimistically that

...In the future, ozone levels will depend on continued compliance with the Montreal Protocol and its amendments and on climate change policies that influence atmospheric changes. (Nature)

Here you have the example of the real efficiency of "expert" advocated global policies for solving a particular “health of the planet” problem. By reading the newspapers and watching the TV, you would think that the Montréal Protocol was great success that saved the planet, or at least made some difference, by "improving" the situation. Neither it made much difference, as long as the ozone levels are concerned, nor there is any clear sign that it will make much difference in the nearest future.

By the way, higher global temperatures might increase the concentration of ozone in polar regions: colder temperatures result in more polar stratospheric clouds which decrease the O3 production. (Some climatologists claim that heat trapping in the troposphere due to the greenhouse gases will assist ozone depletion by cooling the stratosphere. [The stratosphere is presently cooling, while the troposphere is heating]. The IPCC ozone review suggests that shifting patterns of atmospheric circulation will negate this effect). This might not be the only beneficial effect of the GW:

... Certain kinds of plants such as oak, citrus, cottonwood, and almost all fast-growing agriforest species emit significant quantities of VOCs. Higher temperatures of a warming climate encourage more plant growth, and therefore higher levels of VOCs in areas where VOC-emitting plants grow abundantly. Soil microbes also produce NOx. Soil microbial activity may also increase with warmer temperatures, leading to an increase in NOx emissions and a consequent increase in ozone amounts. A warming climate can lead to more water vapor in the lower atmosphere, which would tend to produce more ozone. http://www.theozonehole.com/climate.htm

There were, actually, concerns that GW might drive the ozone from the stratosphere into the upper troposphere leading to more GW (ozone is a greenhouse gas; its depletion counteracts GW). In short, the GW might be helping to restore the ozone levels and ozone might be assisting the GW.

Have you read about that in the newspapers? Why didn’t you?

Update: I assumed that the reader is familiar with the history of the ozone hole scare. It occured to me that I might be wrong; after all, it happened almost 20 years ago. A very brief, succint account of the events is given in PS Chasek, DL Downie, JW Brown Global Environmental Problems Westview Press, 2006, p. 107. It may surprise those who did not pay close attention to the events that the bargains began in 1982 prior to any solid field research connecting CFC and ozone depletion. The Vienna Convention (1985) happened before the discovery of the ozone hole and reliable satellite observations. The most pivotal event was 1988 Du Pont's decision to stop lobbying against the CFC accords (they figured out how to profit from the mandatory CFC replacement). By the time the Montreal Protocol was signed, totally unrealistic estimate of 50% global depletion by 2035 was made. The first ozone scare was that jet planes destroy O3(1970/71) The CFC spray ban in the US (1978) followed computer model preditictions that continuing use of CFCs will cause 5% depletion of O3 layer in 100 years [!]. The first credible evidence suggesting any connection between O3 depletion and CFC's (ClO) appeared only in 1987 (latitudinal profiling). To this day there are skeptics questioning the link between O3 depletion and CFC. Nobody denies that CFC's are harmful for O3; the point of contention is whether it is indeed the cause of observed depletion. I am agnostic about that. Various other factors than CFC's are briefly discussed on this NASA site.

8. C 'n' N

...Gaia is one tough bitch (Lynn Margulis)

...Before this century is over, billions of us will die,
and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will
be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable...
her ex-coauthor, James Lovelock, "The Revenge of Gaia"

I've already mentioned the faint sun paradox (essay 3) and the puzzle of long-term stability of Earth's climate. The only tenable solution of this paradox is the Gaian hypothesis: the biosphere actively controls the terrestrial climate, the geochemistry, and the atmospheric composition. There is another equally vexing puzzle that also points in the same direction: the nitrogen. Our atmosphere is 77% nitrogen. Why is that?

This question may sound silly: N2 is a chemically inert gas, like argon (of which we have 1% in the air), so the composition is just what it is. However, compare this fraction to Mars and Venus, where N2 is < 3-4%. Venus's atmosphere is very dense (there is 3.3 bar of N2 on Venus vs. 0.79 bar of N2 on Earth), so there is more N2 there, but it is still a minor component. By contrast, on Earth it is the major component. Many geochemistry textbooks offer the opinion that this N2 is primordial. Some say it is of cometary origin, others suggest that it is volcanic. In the solar system, only Saturn's moon Titan has as much N2 in its atmosphere, and there the N2 probably originates through the UV photolysis of primordial NH3 (see also here); the rest of Titan's "air" is methane. N2 slowly dissociates in the upper atmosphere bombarded by the UV light and solar wind, but the outgassing of N2 via this mechanism is very slow. On the other hand, N fixation (into NOx and eventually the nitrate, NO3-) by thunderstorms in the troposphere is quite efficient (1% of N is contained in the biosphere and nitrates at any given moment). Nitrate (is the most stable form of N in the oxidizing atmosphere. Once N2 is converted into NO3- there are very few geochemical processes that can convert it back to N2. The question, therefore, can be formulated in the following way: why do we still have N2 in the atmosphere despite having the oxygenic atmosphere (in which N2 can be readily fixed abiogenically) for 1.8 Gyr. I first read about this N2 problem in Lovelock's "Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth" (1979), which is one of the most imaginative books I've ever read.

...With the chemical mixture present in the Earth's atmosphere, nitrogen is expected to form its most [thermodynamically] stable compound, which is not N2 but the nitrate ion (NO3-). One would expect NO3- to be present either on the surface or in the seas as a potassium or sodium salt. Conversion of NO3- to N2 is an "uphill" process which requires the presence of Life. The expected chemical conversion of NO3- makes the presence of nearly 80% N2 in Earth's atmosphere an indication of this presence.
http://www.dhushara.com/book/diversit/extra/lovelock/gaia.htm

Lovelock's answer is Gaia: the biosphere "forces" N2 back into the atmosphere counteracting the abiogenic fixation, via the activity of denitrification eubacteria (the generic term for anaerobic nitrate reducers that are completing the N fixation cycle by reduction of NO3- to NO2- to N2O to N2) [Quite a few of these can both nitrify and denitrify]. Lovelock gives three "reasons" as to why the N2 remains in the atmosphere (why Gaia "wants" it to be this way):
(1) it needs certain gas pressure (it simply cannot control or stabilize climate at low gas pressure),
(2) however, it cannot tolerate too much O2 in the atmosphere (flammability concerns), while other gases like CO2 and NH3 would trap heat, hence it needs N2;
(3) too much nitrate in the ocean would lead to prohibitively high salinity for maintaining Life.

The last point is not too convincing. Some nitrate respiring halophile bacteria accumulate stupendous amounts of NO3- inside their cells:

...Beggiatoa and Thioploca accumulate NO3- in internal vacuoles until they contain several thousand times the external concentration. The organisms then use this accumulated nitrate as an oxidant and sulfide in the surrounding environment as a reductant. They also make sheaths in which they move between the nitrate-rich waters and sulfide-rich sediments, allowing them to commute from one environment to another. Thiomargarita accumulates high concentrations of nitrate in a central vacuole. This very large vacuole is the reason Thiomargarita is the largest known bacterium. http://141.150.157.117:8080/prokPUB/chaphtm/248/02_02.htm

That is to say that Life is perfectly capable of dealing with high nitrate concentrations when needed. Apart from this sketchy, holistic explanation, I do not recall any discussion of the persistence of N2 in the atmosphere. I cannot find any discussion of this problem in the literature. Are there any other ideas? Why do we have N2 in the air?

The usual line of reasoning about the N fixation cycle is exactly opposite: it has always been very difficult for Life to get sufficient amount of fixed N to make proteins and DNA. It is often stated in the literature (though there is not much in the way of proof) that the productivity of the ocean is limited by the availability of NO3-. The latter is produced by diazotroph (N2-fixing) cyanobacteria. Historically, denitrifiers often outpaced the diazotrophs, precipitating endless starvation crises. One of the Archaean mysteries is how these diazotrophs (on which the rest of Life critically depends) made it through the oxygenation event 1.8 Gya, because nitrogenases are inhibited by O2 (as we discussed in the essay on the origin of blood), and cells need all kinds of ingenious tricks to keep O2 away. The origin of these nitrogenases is very ancient (going all the way to the last common ancestor of all Life) and their early evolution is mysterious and replete with recruitment and horizontal transfers that involved methanogenic Achaea and bacteria (who were the dominant life form of preoxygenic atmosphere). The methane and other reducing gases prevent the formation and accumulation of NO in the electric discharges, so there was a veritable abiogenic N crisis in the preoxic Archaean to which N2-fixation was a probable solution. Characteristically, there are very few archaea denitrifiers, and all of these are halophile aerobes, suggesting their late origin after the oxygenation. First came oxygen, only then denitrification became the way of life to a group of microorganisms.

...Archean atmosphere had very low concentrations of O2 and therefore NO3- may not have been stable nor abundant in the Archean. This may indicate that the Archean N cycle may not have included denitrification, but may have been dominated by N-fixing and/or NH3-assimilating microorganisms. Beaumont and Robert (1999)

In the open ocean, a lot of N2 is fixed by a single species of filamentous cyanobacteria. How it manages to make O2 and fix N2 at the same time, without the compartmentalization of the nitrogenases, remains a biochemical mystery. Other common N2 fixators are cyanobacterial symbionts with diatoms. The majority of N2 is fixed by yet unidentified bacteria. The same goes for the removal of N back into the atmosphere. There were recent claims (2005) that most of the N2 (70%) in the oceans is not recovered by the denitrifiers, as has been believed for a century, but by anammox bacteria that reduce NH3 to N2. The status of this claim is presently uncertain. The ideas about the N cycle change so rapidly that even this 2002 review is already hopelessly dated.

While the global N cycle remains poorly understood, it is clear that the N2 in the atmosphere has been processed and reprocessed by the bacteria for millions of years. If they would have chosen so, the bacteria could have been able to reduce the pressure of N2 significantly. The stability of the N2 thus appears to be the result of a stalemate between the nitrifiers and the abiogenic fixation on one hand and the denitrifiers and the ammonia reducers on the other hand. How or why the level of N2 have been maintained at 70-80% for 1.8 billion years remains to be answered. Amazingly, even the seemingly "inert" component of our atmosphere is the result of a compromise between the two groups of bacteria. This planet is all about Life. The degree to which it controls Earth is unimaginable. We often think that this planet harbors Life. It is actually other way round. Life has remolded and maintained this planet in a condition suitable for its survival and blossoming.

Now, back to the global warming. As we all heard, the anthropogenic GW is due to the emission of evil greenhouse gases, CO2 and CH4. These are regulated by the C cycle. I always felt sorry for hardworking scientists studying the N cycle, which is every bit as important as the C cycle. The C cycle gets all of the media attention, most of the funding, the hype in the movies and BBC teleserials, whereas the N cycle is largely forgotten. The O cycle has its ozone hole scare. But nitrogen? I naively assumed that this deplorable situation is due to the inherent inability of N cycle scientists to imagine a good, nasty, scary vision with which one can terrorize the public and demand attention and money.

I am glad to report that I was wrong. It turns out that there have emerged a new, brave generation of N cycle "experts" that have been championing, albeit with little success, their own dooms day scenario. Their version of the Armageddon (let's call it N-hell) is the following: the denitrifiers can no longer cope with the tempo of the industrial N fixation (fertilizer production)!!! The N fixation cycle is disrupted! Ohmygawd what will happen in the wake of this disruption! Immediate international accord on the N fixation is needed! You can figure out the rest. The horrors are endless: e.g., there could be a global algal bloom that will destroy the marine life. Or something else, even worse. With some inspiration, you can blame nearly everything on it:

...All this reactive N cycles from one polluting form to another: nitric acid, which causes acid rain; nitrates and other compounds in waterways, blamed for oxygen-depleted coastal waters; urban ozone and soot particles, which endanger respiratory health; and N2O, a potent greenhouse gas. Extra nitrogen is also likely lowering biodiversity by shifting the composition of plant ecosystems. "Once you break that triple bond in N2, that N atom stays reactive for a very long time and then cascades through the environment" before microbes finally convert the nitrogen back to N2. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/294/5545/1268

Not too scary? Give them some time. The N folks have a long way to go with their scary story; they have barely started; the C crowd had the 40 year headway to put their C-hell together. And yet the potential to terrorize the public is all there. Here are the first uneven, shaky steps of this fledgling scare:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/96/11/6001
http://www.lsc.psu.edu/nas/Speakers/Socolow%20man.html
http://www.law.nyu.edu/JOURNALS/ENVTLLAW/issues/vol4/2/4nyuelj339.html
http://abstracts.co.allenpress.com/pweb/esa2000/abstracts/AMY-3-59-70.html
http://www.brandeis.edu/departments/environmental/enotes/20051103.shtml

That's too much fixation. Other N "experts," in the apparent contradiction to the cause championed by their peers, rave that pesticides disrupt N fixation by symbiotic bacteria (not enough N fixation):
http://www.ourstolenfuture.org/NewScience/wildlife/2001-0913foxonrhizobium.htm
There are, of course, environmental activists crying at the top of their lungs about the danger of genetically modified crops incorporating nitrogenases
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/permaculture/1998-January/004676.html
The Green Alliance (UK) promises to gather the "experts" and start sounding the major N disruption alarm in 2006 http://www.green-alliance.org.uk/ourwork/NutrientCycle

They have not learned yet how to keep their story straight, and try it several ways at once, but that will pass. They have excellent teachers in their C cycle colleagues. They will develop "robust consensus" allright, because without standing shoulder to shoulder as one man they have no chance of getting their slice of the pie. They are already making the connection between their scare and the GW scare, to make sure that it would work.

Alas, so far the N scare has not succeeded in grabbing much public attention, but these "experts" are as persistent as their C peers; I am confident that one day they'll score and you'll enjoy another version of the day after tomorrow. I can already see the front pages: "Scientists predict that disruption of N cycle will lead to the total crop failure in year 2100!" or "All marine animals will perish by 2150!" My advice to them is to use more state-of-the-art computer modeling, so far they mainly rely on hand waving which is not nearly as visually arresting.

How soon will the nitrogen join the carbon and the oxygen in the-end-is-near chorus?

Say your NO to hydrodynamics!

PS: Recently J. Lovelock, who is a great visionary of our time, became involved in the most ridiculous sort of doom saying ("Revenge of Gaia"). A review of that book, by David Archer of U of C, can be found on RealClimate.org. He also became the passionate advocate of nuclear power, without any understanding of the issues involved.

9. Crooks of the matter.

Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity,
it appears, is essential to maintaining funding.
And only the most senior scientists today can stand
up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle
of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.
R. Lindzen (Atmospheric Science, MIT).

One of the readers of this blog has asked me a tough question: Do I believe that GW enthusiasts are crooks? I have to answer this question right now, because I do not want this series to become fodder for anti-science sentiments.

The short answer is no. The long answer is that it does not matter. 

I am not a crook!

For some reason, perhaps due to the fact that Watergate was the background to my childhood, I associate the word "crook" with the swollen face of Richard Nixon as he shouted his famous I'm not a crook! To himself, he was not a crook. He was saving the country; he wanted the greater public good. Yes, he did not do things by the book, but that was not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. He was not a crook. He earned everything he got. Nixon was genuinely hurt and surprised that others did not see it his way. In the end it did not matter whether Mr. Nixon considered himself a crook. It did not matter whether the others considered him a crook. What mattered was that he was sent packing.

The same goes for the GW enthusiasts. I have no doubt that they sincerely believe that their alarmism is justified: the planet is in peril; it has to be saved. The capitalist CO2-spewing industry must be shut down, the earth must freeze as much as it can, and iceberg lettuce grown on human manure is to be enjoyed  in perpetuity. All these carefree, brainwashed people should be saved from themselves, against their will if needed; the evil people who ask silly questions, insist on answers, and want to see the actual data are the agents of Satan that are bought out by the Big Oil. If they are scientists, they are bad scientists. If they are not scientists, they should immediately shut up, because they are not scientists. The inventor of the Internet, the great intellectual of our age, Sen. Al Gore, is the expert on global climate, because he is saying inconvenient truth. By contrast, MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen is not, though he is one of the leading specialist on climate modeling. He is a bad scientist and an awful human being. Why is that? Because he dares to say in public what he thinks about GW alarmism. Observe that Lindzen does not deny GW or the fact that emission of CO2 is warming the planet (by at most 1 C if the CO2 concentration doubles). He considers this warming as a minor issue; there is warming, but there is no cause for the alarm. He regards the alarmism and the GW as two completely disconnected issues. For this stance he has been officially blacklisted by Center for Media & Democracy as "industry-friendly expert." For these nice people, anyone who disagrees that the doom and gloom are coming has been bought by the industry. 

How about those who agree? Are there any stakes involved? Lindzen thinks so, which is his cardinal sin:

...the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7b today...Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis... there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming--not whether it would actually happen. (Lindzen)
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220&mod=RSS_Opinion_Journal&ojrss=frontpage 

Lindzen lists several examples involving dissenting climatologists in the US and Europe and the notorious example of Mann's (who comes pretty close to the definition of "crook" in my book) and concludes with the phrase which I put as the epigraph to this essay. In other recent addressws, he discussed the "robust consensus" on the day after tomorrow: 

...The public is being confused by not being permitted to distinguish between changing temperature, which always occurs, and about which there is agreement, and man’s role in it, which is extremely uncertain and which there is very little agreement on, and the predictions of catastrophes, which there is almost no agreement on –they’re all lumped together in a kind of amorphous statement which they’re told all scientists agree on. And rather than having to disentangle each of these, they’re being provoked into a hysterical response which they’re told science demands, and science is doing nothing of the sort. http://www.open2.net/truthwillout/globalwarming/global_lindzen.htm

...if whatever you are told is alleged to be supported by 'all scientists,' you don't have to understand [the issue] anymore. You simply go back to treating it as a matter of religious belief. Once a person becomes a believer of GW, you never have to defend this belief except to claim that you are supported by all scientists -- except for a handful of corrupted heretics. Climate alarmists have been trying to push the idea that there is scientific consensus on dire climate change. With respect to science, the assumption behind the alarmist consensus is science is the source of authority and that authority increases with the number of scientists who agree. But science is not primarily a source of authority. It is a particularly effective approach of inquiry and analysis. Skepticism is essential to science -- consensus is foreign. Alarmist predictions of more hurricanes, the catastrophic rise in sea levels, the melting of the global poles and even the plunge into another ice age are not scientifically supported. It leads to a situation where advocates want us to be afraid, when there is no basis for alarm. In response to the fear, they want us to do what they want

...Recent reports of a melting polar ice cap [should be] dismissed as an example of the media taking advantage of the public's scientific illiteracy. The thing you have to remember about the Arctic is that it is an extremely variable part of the world. Although there is melting going on now, there has been a lot of melting that went on in the 1930s and then there was freezing. So by isolating a section ... they are essentially taking people's ignorance of the past. [The same double speak is used for receding glaciers: even now the glaciers in Norway are growing rather than shrinking, and Antarctic central icecup is growing, which is rarely mentioned in the press-S.] The language used to convey alarm has been sloppy at best. There is little question that repetition makes people believe things for which there may be no basis. Alarm is the aim.
http://www.cnsnews.com/Culture/Archive/200412/CUL20041202a.html

Whose aim is that? Is that the aim of the climatologists? I can state with utter confidence that this is not the case, for the absolute majority of US and UK climatologists (there is an occasional black sheep, of course). They are not alarmists, privately or publicly; they are hard working scientists. On the contrary, the great majority of vocal GW enthusiasts know next to nothing about climate, natural history, science, or even arithmetic. A great number of our climate "experts" suggesting the public their visions of the coming hell, like Sir David King, have no background in geosciences whatsoever. So does Australian ecologist Tim Flannery (2) whose ridiculous, error-ridden bestseller, The Weather Makers (containing false claims that polar bears are dying of the GW, a fact unknown to Canadian zoologists) can be found in every US bookstore, along with other journalistic trash. These are your typical GW alarmists, holier than IPCC, ever eager to save us from ourselves. Either they are outright ignorant of climate science and its history or, at best, they selectively read literature looking for sensationalist, dubious publications, and then make scares out of nothing.

To me, the question boils down to the following one: why do good scientists that try their best to understand how climate works, many of which are field scientists who know better than trusting blindly the latest output of the  "state-of-the-art" computer models, let these people to be the front end of their science?

The problem is much larger than the climatology itself; nowadays, such alarmism is becoming endemic to other fields (we'll discuss that separately). This trend is not accidental. Alarmism is the desperate reaction of the scientific community to compensate for the ever dwindling support of nonmedical research. The choice is between the death of a thousand cuts and tolerating the lobbyists. For climate science the only lobby that is capable of increasing the funding are the environmental activists. The climatologists, basically, believe that it is not a big deal that nonsensical claims are made in their name or that sensationalist papers of little import are being hyped. This is all right as long as some money are directed towards real - their own - research advancing their beloved science. Furthermore, the GW is quite real and who knows, there might be some substance to these claims. Also, it would not hurt to develop better energy technologies, and the funding for such developments will be useful to their cash-starved colleagues in the fundamental sciences. They cannot scare the funding agencies into increasing the budgets, so live and let live. The alarmism might be morally questionable, but it is a small price to pay for the greater good. Climate change skepticism, on the contrary, is not timely, because it gives the edge to bad people who oppose science, industry lobbyist, and anti-GW fanatics (1). Voicing the dissent may result in the budget cuts for all, and then we will never learn anything about the GW. Stopping the alarmist message right now is especially dangerous, because it will shatter the public confidence in the climatology research forever. We are not the crooks.

...The research and support for research depends on the alarm. The research itself often is very good, but by the time it gets through the filter of environmental advocates and the press innocent things begin to sound just as though they are the end of the world. The argument is no longer what models are correct -- they are not -- but rather whether their results are at all possible. One can rarely prove something to be impossible...Scientists must be allowed to conclude that 'we don't have a problem." And if the answer turns out to be 'we don't have a problem,' we have to figure out a better reward than cutting off people's funding. It's as simple as that. (Lindzen) 

Of course, for this deviation from the party line, Lindzen was torn to pieces by Mann & Co.  Only inconvenient truth of certain kind is welcome there. Characteristically, they gave word to anyone who asked, including all kinds of nuts, except for Lindzen himself. To see the "robust consensus" in action, see
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/02/richard-lindzens-hol-testimony/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/04/open-thread-on-lindzen-op-ed-in-wsj/
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/06/the-wall-street-journal-vs-the-consensus-of-the-scientific-community)
You will learn there that all of the above is wrong and baseless. Lindzen knows nothing of climatology and funding.

Much as I respect Lindzen's principled position, it is not constructive. He does not spell out how the funding should be organized to stop the dependency on the alarmist message. When the premier science journals select for publication sensationalist crap predicting all sorts of catastrophies, because they believe that that will increase their impact ratings, when international panels realize that such reports add to their political clout and the ability to attract funding, there will be supply to this demand. There will be people that will outdo each other trying to show that their version of the catastrophe is more deserving to be put in the spot.  Pretty soon it becomes a competition between marginal studies vying for the most public exposure. The ante has to be raised up with every cycle because the old stuff does not work anymore. If yesterday it was published in Nature that there would be a 50 C increase in 10 years, you have to provide 70 C increase in 5 years to get your suff treated as newsworthy.

As was the case with Nixon, I do not care whether the GW enthusiasts are crooks. I can take their word that they are not crooks. To me this does not change anything. The problem is not the label one uses to call their ranks, but how to stop their terrorizing of people and extorting government money. My own position is simple. The "science support" of the GW scare is all about funding. Make funding long term and reliable and you remove the incentive for supporting the alarmism, conscious or unconscious. The sums in question are peanuts from the government perspective, as compared with what the GW enthusiasts want us to spend on their plans. I would double or triple the climatology budget for the next 10 years without any delay, on the condition of total disengagement of the grant recipients from public policy making. This may cost us dear, but it is orders of magnitude cheaper than implementing alarmists' proposals. I would also enforce total embargo on all public statements by the grant recipients. I would also have the computer modeling part of the community that insists on the fidelity of their models as the basis for public policy to make 10-20 years predictions of the climate in the next 2 years. I would grade the subsequent funding on the success of these predictions. I would also reserve 4/5 of the increased funding to field studies. I think that following these policies will do wonders to climatology and GW studies. This may look like a strange solution, but it is not. If one wants unbiased science, one has to pay for that. Paying for it is better and, in the end, much cheaper than having the crooks and the cranks running the show. Unfortunately, many people who oppose GW scare-mongering take the opposite stand out of some perverted feeling of revenge and righteousness. Two wrongs would not make right. There always were and always will be sensationalists dreaming of grabbing the media attention. Only in special circumstances such behavior assumes the character of the norm for a minority; the problem is not that there is such a minority, the problem is  that it is tolerated by the majority that perceives such behavior as permissible for the greater good of all. Moral preaching would not help, it is too late for that. Counting on occasional heroism of principled scientists is also unproductive; not too many are willing to get the same treatment as Lindzen. Removing the root cause for this toleration is the best way out.

Are there better solutions?

Addenda:

(1) Last weekend I spent a few hours leafing through some of the "skeptics" popular books in the U of C bookstore. Most of these were garbage, in no way better than the GW scare books. The better one was "Meltdown" by Michaels, but it is poorly written and 1/2 of it argues with the obvious. His other books suffer from the same deficiency. The two climate books I liked most were Weart's "Global Warming" http://www.aip.org/history/climate/ (the web version is longer and much better) and the like named Houghton's book http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521629322/103-1239545-0629404?v=glance&n=283155 Neither of these two are "skeptics;" Houghton is a co-chair of the IPCC, group I. He does a good job of presenting facts and he generally dissociates himself from the outlandish claims of some of his colleagues. In the past, he repeatedly criticised environmental groups for GW myth making, e.g., here http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199900/cmselect/cmsctech/285/0031505.htm
Lately (around 2003) he joined in the chorus of ardent Kyoto supporters. His most recent assessment is that GW is a weapon of mass destruction. I would not say it was a good comparison. This weapon is of the same character that the one that was recently discovered in Iraq. 
I can see how confusing it may be for the public. This kind of "skepticism" is obstinacy and contrarianism.  Lindzen's "skepticism" is the right position. The target is alarmism rather than the GW studies. The remarks like those made by Michaels  are the wrong position. 
...The money politicize the scientific process and consume billions of dollars of your money. The more money you throw at climate science, the less certainty you get. If you shut off all the money, the scientists would probably all agree. http://www.cnsnews.com/Culture/Archive/200307/CUL20030714c.html
The scientists will never agree to that. Such policies, if implemented, would drive the US climatology community, which is still largely robust, towards the bittermost alarmism of those who have no tomorrow. The cause for toleration of the alarmism is the belief that without it and the public support it fosters, the money for climatology and geosciences will disappear. Michaels and the likes only reinforce this belief. Aiming at this core belief is the shortest way to restore sanity to the circus. 

(2) Flannery's fame largely rests on his Science 292 (2001) 1888 paper that blames humans on the destruction of Pleistocene megafauna in Australia. This observation led him into believing that Man is the ultimate cause for ecological disruption. Recent studies of Guthrie (2006) indicate that Flannery's anthropocentric views are manifestly incorrect, like most of his other man-as-the-cause-for-everything-bad claims: in America, the megafauna die-off started well before the humans migrated and lasted over 1000 years. For Australia, there is simply no connection between the climate and the survival of the megafauna, see http://www.gsajournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1130%2FG23070A.1


Update 6/26/'06. More thoughts from Lindzen about "robust consensus".

10. Me too, me too!

Of course, climatologists are not the only group of scientists that actively pursue alarmism to attract media attention and increase funding. They are just the most visible part of a community thus engaged. In essays 7 and 8, we have seen how O and N cycle geoscientists push forward their own favorite doomsday scenarios ("growing ozone hole," "nitrogen disruption catastrophe"). Of course, they are not alone. Such tactics are commonplace.

Planetary physicists and astronomers caution us about the danger of loose asteroids bombarding our planet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs. That was some time ago, of course, but so what. It may happen again, and then we will all die. The danger is real and we should spend millions on looking at the sky. What good is all this looking for remains unclear: nothing can be done to avert the last day of the mankind anyway. Interestingly, we are told to be scared of these asteroids despite the fact that supervolcano eruptions (like Yellowstone) that occurred every few 100 kyr and routinely blanketed 1/2 of the US territory by a thick layer of hot ash, are far more real and cyclic danger than any asteroids (there are three such supervolcano zones in the US alone). Each such eruption had put 750 km^3 of ash in the air; Mt St Helen, for comparison, was less than 0.5 km^3. It beats me that we should worry about the rocks from the space when we are sitting on the volcano anyway. Of course, stellar astrophysicists have their own star-crossed doom. Hence the scary stories about gamma-blasts sterilizing all planets in the path of their jets and exploding nearby supernovas; of the Sun superblasts; of the Nemesis; of the orbit instability. Geophysicists too have their favorites. I recently came across a particularly bizarre claim along these lines. The magnetic field periodically reverses, becoming quadrupolar for a few hundred years. The claim is that the solar wind unshielded by the dipolar field of the Earth will destroy all life on land in 4000 AD when the next such reversal is due. Good luck, fellas. It sounds like a very promising scare, though the physics sucks (see the link supplied and http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0404580).

You would think that something more esoteric, like particle physics, is not scary. And you will be wrong! There are people doing their best to make it sound very scary indeed. The accelerators might produce microscopic black holes that will consume the Earth in a matter of seconds! The variation of the theme is the so-called strangelet catastrophe. BTW, HEP community have recently provided an excellent lesson as to the significance of "robust consensus" in science, by the "discovery" of a pentaquark. This particle was first predicted theoretically, then "observed" retroactively by a Japanese group which used rather questionable statistics analyses (in full analogy with Mann's "hockey stick" in GW studies). The study was lauded as the major discovery that is going to revolutionize HEP. In the next 5 years fifteen more labs found the pentaquark in their data. More than 200 theoretical papers were published explaining the observed behavior of the pentaquark. In total, 2-3 thousand physicists were involved in such research across the globe. Then in 2005, Jefferson Lab's much improved new experiment specifically designed to observe the 5-quark showed no evidence for this particle whatsoever (again, the analogy with the "hockey stick" is coming to one's mind). In the wake of their announcement, several other labs also reported not seeing it (to HEP community credit, there were such labs from the beginning). That is to say that physicists can fool themselves as much as anyone. If you are told that something is there and many others have seen it there, you'll see it too, even if it is not there. Mercifully, such mass hallucinations do not last long, but you can easily have the "robust consensus" for a decade or more. If HEP funding were predicated on the discovery of 5-quark, there will be people who would see this nonparticle even now, no matter what, especially if they would have hastily concocted a story that the cloud of 5-quarks from outer space is going to destroy our planet the day after tomorrow.

This, of course, is barely the beginning. "Chemicals" are turning us into impotents; Ebola, resistant bacteria, AIDS, avian flu is going to kill us all, the oil is no more, global pollution strangles us alive; overpopulation, nuclear waste, genetically modified crops, nanogoo coming to life - the list of the scares is endless. By now, almost all branches of science have supplied blood curdling visions of the future that are being peddled as the major scare. The success at grabbing the public attention and getting funding through such tactics varies from scare to scare, but the intent is certainly there. A new type of scientist has emerged: the alarmist, politicized scientist that seeks media attention pushing forward scary yet not entirely baseless scenarios aiming at extracting cash from the government agencies following the public outcry. The height of the barrier has to be constantly raised as the old stories cease to frighten people any more. The scares have to be increasingly scarier.

In other walks of life, such tactics are called blackmail and, generally, not looked upon lightly. For some reason, in science, it is becoming the acceptable mode of operation. The onset of this mass phenomenon coincides with the end of the Cold War when science budgets began to go flat (in real dollars) or declining, whereas the cost of the research markedly increased. The underlying cause of the alarmism might be cash starvation. The alarmist scientists are viewed by their colleagues as people who may be wrong, but still helpful for raising money supporting their field. Such an attitude begets tolerance, then acceptance, then dependence. Meanwhile, the public gets tired of these endless scary stories and gradually assumes anti-science attitudes. The alarmism is a particularly hideous reaction to chronic underfunding of science. I cannot imagine it happening in the 1950s and the 1960s, on such a grand scale; scientists had more important matters on their minds. Generation X and Y already considers this situation a norm. When the baby boomers (who are the largest block of US scientists) retire, the last reservations will be abandoned.

I've seen many scientists in their 50s and 60s objecting to fear mongering, alarmism, and cheap sensationalism as a way to fund scientific research. I know very few such scientists in their 40s and late 30s. I've never seen such scientists in their 20s or early 30s. My postdocs like to explain, patiently, as if talking to a sick child, that there is no problem, it is all in my head. This is how science is and ever was. You cannot get funded without fanning the fire. Then they wink at me.

Why?

11. How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Climate Change

The moral aspect of the problem aside: GW alarmism: is it "good" or "bad?"

I often hear the argument that GW alarmism might be morally questionable, scientifically unsound, and yet it might be a force for good. Not the fear itself, of course, but its effects on the industry and R&D priorities. What is wrong with looking for alternative sources of energy? What is wrong with massive investment in the energy sciences? in the fuel economy? in the solar power? in the H2 economy? Isn't it what we want anyway? If scare mongering, deplorable as it might be, can force the governments to see the light, what's wrong with that? It serves its purpose, and that purpose is common good.

At some level, this argument makes sense. And then the reality sets in. The result of fear mongering is not common good. The result is government programs that look nearly as scary as the worst predicted aspects of GW.

In this post, I would like to discuss one of such programs. This program is called Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) and it is taking momentum at the US Department of Energy (DOE), a branch of the US government. This program, (currently at $250m/yr), has been announced by President GW Bush in February 2006 as the US response to the GW challenge (its aim is to "provide abundant energy without generating carbon emissions or greenhouse gases"). The program is closely associated with another initiative that is called AFCI. I forewarn the reader that you will not find much about this program both in the press or on the DOE sites. I have learned about this program not from the paper trail, but from an oral presentation given by a GNEP official. None of this information is classified, and yet it is not easily obtainable. GNEP makes no secrets of its aims, but those are not advertised either. My only goal is to show what kind of programs is brought upon us by the activity of GW enthusiasts. They may have one goal as their aim (saving the planet, reduction of CO2 emissions, obtaining funds, getting their names in the news), but they do not explain how to implement the economy that is not based upon fossil fuels. Look for yourself what kind of exertion would achieving that goal entail. 

The logic behind the GNEP is the following. The only presently existing alternative to coal is nuclear power. The renewable sources are peanuts and even these minor sources are too costly. Even if we can go solar at some point (and that would not happen tomorrow, because the technology for mass production of solar power does not exist) that may not be the solution we seek. The projected demand for power indicates that 2/3 of it will come from the developing nations that can afford only the cheapest solution, which is coal. Even if the G-7 introduce, at a great coast to themselves, "clean power" at home -- that is not going to help the planet anyway, but would only somewhat slow down CO2 emission. Hence one has to go nuclear, make the nuclear power very cheap, and make it global. That, however, is difficult. Currently, we produce 13 TW (globally). In 2050, we will need 30 TW, in 2100 - 46 TW.  Problem 1 is that to satisfy the projected demand one has to build a lot of nuclear power plants:

...Producing 10 TW [=10,000 GW ] of nuclear power would require construction of a new 1 GW-electric plant every other day for the next 50 years. Once that level of deployment was reached, the terrestrial U resource base would be exhausted in 10 years. The required fuel would then have to be mined from seawater (requiring processing seawater at a rate equivalent to more than 1,000 Niagara Falls), or else breeder reactor technology would have to be developed and disseminated to countries wishing to meet their additional energy demand in this way. http://www.sc.doe.gov/bes/reports/files/SEU_rpt.pdf

Problem 2 is that having nuclear power plants everywhere is the proliferation nightmare. Problem 3 is that though we have plenty of U now, in the long run, with such tempo of consumption, we are going to run out of it before the last plant is built with the presently favored once-through fuel cycle.

GNEP addresses all of these concerns at once. It suggests a barter. The US builds and operates nuclear power plants for developing countries. For that they return all of their spent nuclear fuel to the US where it is reprocessed [only 2% of the energy is used in a once-through cycle]. Reprocessing means that plutonium (Pu), transuranics, cesium (Cs), technetium (Tc), and other nasties are removed, and purified U is used to make new fuel. The extracted Pu is burned in fast-neutron reactors. The U fuel is returned to the customer countries. Since they do not process their fuel, they cannot make weapons as long as they stick to the agreement. The US takes on itself the commitment to reprocess MOST of the world's spent fuel thereby guaranteeing nonproliferation (that is in addition to 55,000 tons of our own spent fuel that we have).

Perhaps most of the readers are unfamiliar with nuclear cycle technologies and the current situation. The only country that is reprocessing its commercial spent fuel is France (it wants access to Pu), and it is doing it at a huge loss. In the US, reprocessing has been pursued only for military use. In the past, the US built a reprocessing plant in NY but it was closed due to safety concerns and inefficiency. The UK used its reprocessing plant until there was a massive release of radioactive material.

...the preponderant emphasis of GNEP is on restarting Pu reprocessing in the US after a three decade hiatus. Pu reprocessing was tried and abandoned in the US because it was uneconomic and increased the global availability of Pu, which can be used in nuclear bombs. It has been US government policy [since 1977-S.] to set an example against reprocessing because of the nuclear weapon proliferation danger...The US has attempted reprocessing and recycling in the past. The one commercial plant, in West Valley, NY, took 6 years to reprocess one year’s worth of reactor waste and was shut down in 1973 as uneconomic, leaving behind a multi-billion dollar environmental cleanup bill. Japan is about to open a new reprocessing facility in Rokkasho that, at $20b, is about three times more expensive than originally budgeted. The British THORP plant was recently closed after a broken pipe leaked twenty tons [!] of reactor fuel waste. The plant will most likely never reopen. A study requested by the French government estimated that their program cost approximately $25b more than a simple, once-through fuel cycle. Yet, the state subsidized French program continues to produce separated Pu faster than commercial reactor operators are willing to accept it, resulting in ever-increasing stockpiles of Pu. (FAS report)

...The only US commercial reprocessing plant was riddled with regulatory problems and sky-rocketing operation costs...More than three decades later the waste this plant produced as the result of reprocessing is still being dealt with. US DOE estimates that cleaning up the mess from this reprocessing plant will cost $5b+ when all is said and done.
http://www.taxpayer.net/TCS/wastebasket/nationalsecurity/2006-04-20-05foolsgold.htm

...Since announcing GNEP in February, the US DOE has yet to provide Congress with a lifecycle cost, or indeed any cost, analysis for the program. No reprocessing and transmutation program in the world has been commercially successful, and such a program in the US would likely be paid for in full by US taxpayers. According to a 1996 estimate by the National Academy of Sciences, reprocessing and transmutation in the US will “easily” cost taxpayers $100b. This estimate, however, is only for existing US irradiated fuel, and does not include waste produced as a result of 20-year license extensions, waste from new domestic reactors, or the importation of foreign waste to the United States for reprocessing, as proposed under the GNEP program.

...Reprocessing would not eliminate the need for a geologic repository and would actually increase the number of radioactive waste streams to be managed. In fact, reprocessing is the most polluting part of the nuclear fuel cycle. US taxpayers are still paying several billion dollars each year to clean up contamination from reprocessing programs in the 1960s and 1970s for nuclear weapons at the Hanford and the Savannah River sites, as well as the reprocessing of naval irradiated fuel at the Idaho National Laboratory and commercial reprocessing at West Valley.
http://www.citact.org/newsite/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=141

No country has ever reprocessed fuel on the monumental scale suggested by the GNEP planners. In the US, no commercial nuclear reactor was built in 30 years. Reprocessing generates humongous quantities of low-level waste. The DOE still has prodigious stock of Cold War liquid waste inventory at Hanford and Savannah River left after Pu extraction. It has hard time dealing with it (in 1993 the expense was estimated at a trillion dollars). There were numerous safety problems and massive radioactive contamination of soil, air, water tables, etc. Now we are talking about dealing with vastly greater quantities. This low-level waste has to go somewhere. GNEP is trying to interest several countries, such as Russia, to be the recipient of this waste. The worst stuff (Cs, transuranics) in a concentrated form will go into the deep geological repository in the US (presumably, Yucca Mountain, NV).

...With a fuel cycle state enriching the fuel, leasing it to a user nation, the user nation can send it back to the fuel cycle state where it would be recycled, burned down in fast reactors and then you have a much more benign waste product that has to be ultimately disposed of, either in the originating country or to be sent back possibly to a third ultimate disposition location elsewhere. http://fpc.state.gov/fpc/61808.htm

GNEP planners observe that if this repository (that has cost us close to $60b) accepts all legacy waste and unprocessed commercial spent fuel, there is no place left for anything else which is required for the development of nuclear power on the suggested scale. Building and certifying another such repository is out of question. Reprocessing removes the small amount of the worst nukes potentially decreasing the load on the repository, as only those go there. Reprocessing also makes it possible to have advanced fuel cycles in which the transuranics and Pu are burned in fast-neutron reactors, resulting in much greater efficiency. That is good, but the price for that is unprecedented traffic in radioactive material and fuel reprocessing effort. Small as this effort was heretofore, there is no country in the world that did not have accidents and occasional release of radionuclides either at the reprocessing facilities or during waste storage. One of the reasons the majority of countries use once-through cycle without reprocessing is to avoid such accidents. Only the strong incentive to make weapons can overwhelm such concerns. It has been estimated that only 100 years from now, if ever, would the reprocessing make economic sense.

...A recent study from Harvard University looked at the economic problem in terms of the price of U. They concluded that reprocessing and recycling starts to make sense when the price of uranium reaches $360/kg. Currently, uranium is approximately $80/kg (and that is considered analysts to be a short term spike). No one expects uranium price to reach that break even point for several decades. In fact, the OECD has developed estimates of global sources of uranium recoverable at different costs and these suggest that reprocessing will not be economically justified until the end of the 21st Century. (FAS report)

The incentive to reprocess is not economics but proliferation concerns. These concerns must be addressed to go global; without going global one cannot cut global CO2 emissions (we are not talking about Kyoto-type protocols whose only goal is to pacify the inflamed public opinion). Pu has to be extracted and burned. Only fast-neutron reactors can do that, but this is a relatively untried technology. Yet there is no way to go global without taking various risks, each one worse than the other (these are not the only proliferation concerns associated with GNEP, see the FAS report). To put it in a nutshell, solving the GW problem by going nuclear means facing colossal risks of radioactive contamination associated with massive fuel reprocessing, building a completely new generation of fast-neutron reactors, and storage of large amounts of low- and high- level waste. The reprocessing has to be done in the countries that already have nuclear weapons; the bulk of it will be done in the US. To minimize land transportation of radioactive material coming from the overseas the plants will be built near the coast, where most of Americans live.

Apart from FAS, there were other voices of concern from nuclear technology experts about the goals and the methods suggested by GNEP, e.g. here 
http://www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publications/pdf/HouseBriefing10March06rev2.pdf 

GNEP can count on the support of US industries, such as GE and Bechtel, because it calls for massive federal investment in power plant building and nuclear technologies. NEI is actively lobbying Congress for expansion of the GNEP already. It is presently engaged in its latest "clear air campaign." Such is the nature of lobbying: environmental agendas can be used for industrial lobbying as much as any other agendas. "Clean air," to a lobbyist, equals nuclear revival. Then they are all for more "clean air," saving the planet, and GW fear mongering.

For those who might be interested, Greenpeace and other environmental organizations are dead set against GNEP and lobby the Congress against it. They want to cut global GW emissions but they do not want global nuclear power. How are we going to satisfy the increasing energy demands of the world, especially its developing part, according to these organizations, remains unclear. They do not tell us how. Bush's plan somewhat resembles Nixon's "Operation Independence" (1974) that came to naught in 1979 (the year Three Mile Island disaster). Most of the ideas behind GNEP were originally proposed around 1996 at Sandia. The fanned GW concerns provided justification and scale for this program that originated as an anti-proliferation plan. I emphasize that GNEP planners are not "evil:" the global use of nuclear power does lead one to a solution that is resembling GNEP in its essential parts.

It is this kind of programs that are going to be the response of the US government  to the insistent demands of GW enthusiasts. They have one agenda (fame, influence, funding, political power) but they push us towards a completely different one. This is how the law of unintended consequences works. GW enthusiasts focus only on their apocalyptic, overblown message. What to do with this message is left for others to decide.

Forget about picaresque windmills and vague dreams of unspecified "energy technologies of the future" that are going to solve all of our problems. GNEP is the future. It is a spent fuel reprocessing plant in your backyard. Not burning coal does not mean that your alternative energy technology has no ecological impact. That impact can easily be commensurate with that of the GW. It just would not be CO2 emission, and that is all.  

How many people would prefer GNEP to GW?

Personally (and this is only my personal opinion), I prefer to take my chances with the GW. With GNEP, no "risk assessment" or long-term forecasts are needed; there is dead certainty where it leads.

 Update 5/28/06: GNEP news ...The House Appropriations Committee reduced spending on GNEP to $120 million for the 2007 fiscal year...Committee leaders said the US DoE failed to provide enough details about the costs, schedules and development plans for GNEP, as well as what kinds of waste that reprocessing would produce. http://www.pwmag.com/industry-news.asp?sectionID=760&articleID=305616 see also FAS update on http://www.fas.org/main/content.jsp?formAction=297&contentId=525

12. Busy old fool

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
John Donne, The Sun Rising

In essay 11 of this series we have briefly discussed what capping the CO2 emissions through global scale nuclear power generation would mean in practice. A solution like GNEP might've delighted Dr. Strangelove, but to others it does not sound too appealing. Even diehard GW enthusiasts are beginning to see the problem with their tactics: one cannot run forever on a negative message. One cannot demand cutting CO2 emissions and suggest nothing instead. Of course, little can be done in practice to seriously cut the CO2 emissions thereby stopping GW. As is generally the case, scare mongering does not lead to anything constructive. Since going nuclear globally is anafema to precisely those activists that are most vocal about the coming GW catastrophe, they have recently reinvented themselves as ardent proponents of solar power. The government has responded to these demands by increasing R&D budget for solar energy studies. The message sounds so easy, so convincing:

...Our primary source of clean, abundant energy is the sun. The sun deposits 120,000 TW of radiation on the surface of the Earth. Covering 0.16% of the land on Earth with 10% efficient solar conversion systems would provide 20 TW of power, nearly twice the world’s consumption rate of fossil energy and the equivalent 20,000 1-GW nuclear fission plants. http://www.sc.doe.gov/bes/reports/files/SEU_rpt.pdf

That's it! That's our solution! A typical estimate is then given that the US demand can be satisfied if one paves a territory equal in area to (here the story begins to vary) (a) the state of Arizona and (b) the total surface area of US highways. I've never been able to locate the source of either one of these estimates. I am afraid it is urban lore. Then the story gets more interesting (abridged version):

Imagine: solar energy (even the name sings: sol! la! re!); the clean, inexhaustible source of power; the ray of sunshine for ailing, greedy, depraved mankind; unlimited energy for our children and their children’s children; electricity with a smile; the path to peace and serenity; sustainable future in total harmony with mother Nature... Imagine: Here comes the Sun! You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. We have joy, we have fun, we are children of the Sun! The Sun is our hope, our dream; the fire of our loins. And - by contrast - dirty, ugly lump of black coal created in the beastly past of the planet, unearthed from its rip belly by the callused hand of sullen, oppressed miner, the concentrated evil burning in the eternal fire of CO2-polluting power plant and slowly putting the entire world to the brink of extinction. It is not solar against coal: It is heavenly light against primeval darkness; it is Good against Evil. No hell below us; above us only sky.

Yes, that's what solar power is. It does not matter that the coal is the fossilized product of photosynthesis, which is a form of solar power conversion, and that burning coal is but the final leg of solar power operation that spanned 350 Myr. This type of solar power is bad, unclean. We do not want it. We want the new type of solar power, that is good, clean, harmless, the one which is joy, which is fun. 

Is that possible? Could it be that the new solar power is in no way better than the old solar power?

I am not sure at all that mass production of solar energy on the global scale is such a grand idea. The evils of burning coal are familiar. The environmental effects of solar energy production on the global scale are unknown. The usual folly is to assume that the new must be better than the old simply because it is new and unfamiliar -- only to discover in a short while that one has traded one set of problems for another. Ever since I've started hearing about this limitless solar future about 10 years ago, I've tried to locate studies and reports dealing with the environmental impact of solar power production on the global scale. I have not found anything worth notice. My conclusion is that no such assessment has ever been made. At the same time I can offer several arguments suggesting that the rosy picture of "clean" solar power is a myth. On purpose, I ignore the question of cost. The cost is prohibitively high; nobody will be able to afford commercial solar energy in the near future. My point is that even if the cost problem were solved, it is doubtful that solar energy would be "environmentally friendly energy solution." Solar power has obvious disadvantages:

-It is only practical in certain areas with a favorable climate and latitude (areas near the tropics) and which are relatively cloud free.
-The best placed locations for solar power arrays tend to be remote from the places of highest energy demand
-It is not available at night and is reduced when there is cloud cover, decreasing the reliability of peak output performance.
-It must be converted into some other form of energy to be stored for times when conditions are prohibitive or to drive transport.
-Solar cell technologies produce DC power which must be converted to the AC power when used in distribution grids. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power

Let us begin from the beginning. There is no sunlight during the night, yet we still need power. We also need it when it snows and rains. Where would it come from? I've heard three answers which are typically improvised on the spot by the solar power dreamer. Answer 1 is that it will come from a non-solar source. In such a case, one needs to duplicate the entire grid with unspecified alternative energy sources; this is clearly not the solution. Answer 2 is that the power will be stored in a chemical form (batteries? fuels?). Answer 3 is that power will be stored in gigantic superconducting loops (for which no technology exists, so one can claim nearly anything). A variation of answer 2 is that the solar power will be used for water splitting to make H2 for hydrogen economy. Here is the problem then: once you move away from photovoltaics and start converting the energy into other forms, the overall efficiency drops to 1-2% at the very most. Furthermore, there are transportation and delivery problems. One has to collect the DC voltages over huge areas, convert those to AC, or transport H2 over long distance. This cuts the efficiency still lower. The value of 10% is totally unrealistic. What it means is that the area has to be much, much larger.

A common argument against such concerns is that "the progress of science" will overcome the inherent inefficiency of photosynthesis (which is needed, however you call it, to store the energy in the intermediate chemical form). I am doubtful. Life has been around for 3.5 Gyr to perfect the art of the photosynthesis, and what do we have? Even the theoretical energy efficiency of the photosynthesis is meagerly 4.5%; 4/5 of the energy absorbed is dissipated as heat. Typical measurements on land plants yield the efficiency < 1% (most frequently cited values cluster around 0.4%). This is due to the multiple conversion losses, photorespiration, and what not. You can find the claims of much higher efficiency (up to 3.5%) but those are based on imaginative accounting, like Enron’s books. [A quick energy calculation can be found on http://patzek.berkeley.edu/E11/Photosynthesis.pdf or http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-60563?tocId=60563; you can also check any textbook on photosynthesis]. The bottom line is that the energy efficiency of the photosynthesis is quite low, and it has remained low over billions of years despite the fact that most of Life critically depends on this process for energy, and Life had more than enough time to find a better way of doing the job were it existed. To me this suggests that 1-2-4% is as good as one will ever get. Photovoltaic efficiency can surely be higher, that’s true, but the very nature of large scale solar power requires temporary storage and scheduled delivery of the energy which entails huge conversion/transportation losses. It will be very tough to beat the plants at their game. There is a lot of misleading statements and overhyped claims in the scientific literature about the efficiency of artificial/biomimetic photosynthesis, which is sometimes stated to be 40-50%. This is the efficiency of primary charge separation rather than overall photosynthesis. On these terms, natural photosynthesis is super efficient. That, however, is neither here nor there. It is the whole thing that matters, rather than the initial charge separation. The dreams of super efficient hydrogen evolving photocells and other "technologies of the future" are likely to remain dreams.

Greatly overestimated efficiency (aka greatly underestimated area) is only the beginning of our problem. If the photovoltaic efficiency is 10%, this means that 90% of the solar energy absorbed goes into heat. Thereby the solar panel is a very efficient device that converts sunlight into heat which is radiated back into the atmosphere. Have you noticed that solar panels are black? That's because they absorb across the entire spectrum and convert nearly everything to heat. Basically, they are a close approximation to a radiating black body. It is impossible to pave large areas of land by solar panels (which is required if the solar energy is going to be the global source of power) without (a) changing the albedo of the earth thereby perturbing the heat balance of the entire planet and (b) doing that in a very nonuniform way. It is hard to give  estimates [since no economically acceptable solar panel devices currently exist], but 10 TW of electric energy means 90 TW going into heat in the process of power generation (in fact, much more, as the real efficiency would be much smaller than 10%). Thus, it appears that the total heat flux can easily be changed by a fraction of 0.1%. That is the difference between the highs and the lows of the solar activity; such oscillations easily override the effects of CO2 emission. We are concerned with CO2 emissions changing the heat budget of the planet. The solar energy production will be doing exactly the same, on a similar scale.

Furthermore, once you have a solar panel somewhere, this means that it absorbs sunlight destined for something else. You cannot pave an area the size of Arizona and have no detrimental environmental effects. The desert may look barren to us, but it is a productive ecosystem. The same people that rave about highways, pipelines, etc. appear to be blind to the prospect of huge areas deprived of their share of sunlight by solar energy farms. Curiously, the two countries that invest the largest fraction of their GDP's into solar energy research, Germany and Japan, have no room on land for the solar panel arrays capable of satisfying their voracious energy demands. The Japanese are quite frank about their plans: they want to put their solar panels on rafts floating in the open ocean. The ocean is not land: there are waves, etc. Thus we are talking about paving the ocean surface by humongous rafts thus depriving it of light on which the marine ecosystems depend. Talk about "clean" and "environment friendly."

I can voice many other concerns (toxicity issues, differential heating effects, etc.), but perhaps the gist of the argument is already clear. It is not obvious that switching from "unclean" coal to "clean" solar power is going to "help the planet." The estimates of efficiency and land use tend to be unrealistic: those ignore the problems of energy conversion, storage, and transportation inherent to solar power production on the required scale. The solar power is very costly; the only reason to pursue it at all is to reduce GW. [We are stocked with coal for the next 300 years] Yet this global solar power production inevitably changes the heat balance of the planet. The scale of this disruption might be comparable to the effects of CO2-induced GW. Unlike CO2 that is absorbed by the ocean there is no inertia associated with solar power; it is like suddenly turning the heater on. Most of the extra heat will be produced in the tropics that are relatively unaffected by CO2-induced GW. I wish I could produce a report putting my worries to rest, but there seem to be no such studies. The all-out push towards the solar power occurs in the absence of any serious effort of understanding the climate effects of such a shift.

Once you give it some thought, what begins as the noble quest for "clean" energy rapidly morphs into an excercise in geoengineering. The effect of large scale solar power production will probably be comparable to that of forestation (the albedo of plants is 5%, of sandy ground - 35%) which is one of the most important climate controlling factors. If it is going to be geoengineering one way or the other, I would prefer Dyson’s approach: dimming the atmosphere (essay 1) and continuing to burn coal. This solution is orders of magnitude easier to implement and cheaper than inventing improbably efficient solar cells, combating the huge losses in collecting/storing the energy, battling the heat, and assessing heretofore unknown environmental effects. It seems like a very long way to get to the square one.

To conclude, cutting CO2 emissions by using nuclear or solar power - the dream of our GW alarmists - might be possible, but this does not mean that such solutions are "clean," "sustainable," or "environment friendly." Going nuclear means facing colossal risks to which catastrophic GW is commensurate. With the solar power, there is a great potential to introduce a new type of industrially caused climate change. The only place where one can put plenty of solar panels without disrupting the planet is space. That I can see as the ultimate long-term solution to our energy needs, but it is not an economical solution for the foreseeable future. The economical one is to keep on burning coal and find a good way to reduce the solar flux. Meanwhile, we'll have 200-300 years to pursue the real solutions [that are presently beyond the reach]: controlled fusion and space based solar power. Running around shouting inconvenient truths about the end of the world would not result in faster progress towards these long-term goals. The insistence on "finding affordable energy solutions right now" will only result in programs like GNEP.

We are not under any immediate threat. Mild GW that we currently witness is quite real but the prophecies of the imminent global catastrophe are rubbish. We are not doing anything "bad." There is no such thing as good or bad climate variation. The planet does not need to be saved; it is doing just fine. It is taken care of, and we are not those who take care of it. It is not even clear that the current GW will continue or that it will necessarily lead to detrimental effects of lasting importance. If it does, we can stop it, right now. The "models" should be regarded as what they are, viz. models, rather than the Holy Writ. These models have failed time and again. These are "what if" scenarios rather than models. One cannot model what one does not understand. Nobody understands climate. Nor can anyone see the future. People who demand immediate action in the name of this uncertain future are blind guiding the blind. Most of them have no idea what they are arguing for. They only know what they are arguing against. The "clean," "good" energy suggested as the alternative to coal burning is neither "good" nor "clean;" it is little more than unknown evil. We have enough time and enough coal to find the solution to our long term energy needs; there is no great hurry. Fist pounding and scare mongering only lead to bad, hasty solutions. Keeping cool head, open mind, and advocating large investment in science like that after 1957 would do much more for addressing long term climate change than media hype and activists' histrionics. Our prophets of gloom are in no way different from the previous hordes of such doomsayers.

That's all I wanted to say. I began writing this series because I became nauseated by all these meaningless prophecies, inconvenient truths, convenient lies, endless visages of forthcoming horrors, by all these meltdowns and the days after tomorrow. So  I decided to try my own hand at prophecy.  I feel that I can give new twist to this ancient profession.

Hear my prophecy, O Brothers and Sisters. The prophecy is coming; no one will escape their fate. Repent your sins! Repent! Do not wait! It is getting closer. Still closer. It is coming! It is upon you! Renounce evil, the brethren! Save your souls, before it is too late! IT! IS! TOO! LATE! Oh, despicable horror: 

EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT

The End

Is it possible
That so high debate,
So sharp, so sore, and of such rate,
Should end so soon and was begun so late?
Is it possible?

Is it possible
That any may find
Within one heart so diverse mind,
To change or turn as weather and wind?
Is it possible?

It is possible...

Sir Thomas Wyatt

...I beg your pardon, but to rule one
must have a precise plan worked out
for some reasonable period ahead. Allow
me to enquire how man can control
his own affairs when he is not only
incapable of compiling a plan for some
laughably short term, such as, say, a
thousand years, but cannot even predict
what will happen to him tomorrow?
M. Bulgakov, Master and Maragarita

...More than half of the world's coral reefs
will be damaged beyond repair by the year 2100
unless action is taken to halt the many
threats they now face....Reefs are being assaulted
by high temperatures, pollution, overfishing,
disease, and soil run-off from land.
Action needed to save corals (BBC)

I've picked this text at random. It does sound very familiar, doesn't it? The dreaded global warming (GW) is killing the corals. GW is very bad. The corals are good. We should sacrifice everything and save the corals. Immediate action is needed!

Periodic die-offs of corals have been so frequent in the past that only 60% of the time since their first appearance in the record the corals were building reefs; naturally, such die-offs resulted in progressively increasing coral diversity and were the principal means of achieving such diversity in the long run. Of course, such an argument is totally lost on our environmentalists; their plans of saving the planet are a bit myopic. However, what interests me more in this post is the following naive question: Let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that the GW is bad, that it is the ultimate man-made evil. Is it good or bad that the corals are dying, in the context of this 'bad' GW? What if the die-off of the corals is one of the negative feedbacks preventing the dreaded runaway GW scenarios?

To answer this question we first revisit another familiar exhibit in the apocalyptic visions of GW enthusiasts: the sinister looking plot showing a correlation between the partial pressure of CO2 in the atmosphere (pCO2 from trapped bubbles in ice) and the mean air temperature (from oxygen-18 abundances in ice) that go step in step as the 'ice house' climate cycles from a long glacial period to a brief interglacial period. For some reason, a lot of 'save the planet' people shove this plot into one's face without bothering to learn what this plot means. It supposedly demonstrates that increasing pCO2 equals increasing mean temperature, or the other way round - who knows?

I confess that I have no idea what to make of this plot. Certainly, there is excellent correlation; no argument about that. Why is there a correlation? One is left with vague impression that unnamed geoscientists know what this correlation actually means, that there are state-of-the-art computer models that "explain" these variations quite nicely, that there is 'robust consensus' about cause and effect. The real situation, of course, is the opposite. Not only there is no consensus; there are no good ideas on which such a consensus might be built. I know of no less than 8 theories proposed to explain this correlation, none of which find much support in the palaeorecord. There are no universally accepted computer 'models' explaining this correlation. Furthermore, ALL of the worthy ideas suggested so far revolve about the response of marine life to various stimuli, and those are very difficult to model. It is so bad that it is not even known what comes first: the change in the temperature or the change in pCO2. For some glacial cycles it was pCO2, for other cycles it was the temperature. A good point of departure in learning the actual status of this problem, which is one of the deepest mysteries in climate science, is the review article of David Archer (U Chicago), who is the leading authority on the subject.

...Interglacial CO2 content was about 270 ppm, whereas glacial CO2 content was about 195 ppm. Most scientists agree the cause must lie in the ocean, as the ocean contains 60 times as much carbon as the atmosphere. Solubility of CO2 in seawater iS lower at low temperature, so pCO2 decreases by 9 ppm per C. On average the temperature of the ocean was lower by 2.5 C. Hence temperature can only account for 22 ppm decrease in glacial atmosphere. CO2 dissolves more in seawater with a lower salinity. Glacial ocean water had a higher salinity because fresh water was locked up in ice sheets. The average increase of salinity during glacial time was 1.2‰ which would cause the CO2 to increase by 11 ppm. Carbon can be transferred from the surface ocean to the deep ocean by higher rates of photosynthesis; when the organisms die, the organic tissue sinks to the deep ocean and is oxidized. What could cause the rate of photosynthesis to be HIGHER during glacial time? Organic matter rich in nutrient elements are deposited on shelf during high sea level stand. At low sea level, organic matter is eroded and transferred to the ocean. Perhaps stronger wind increased upwelling of nutrient-rich deeper water and transported nutrient elements (i. e. iron) in dust from the continent ('iron fertilization hypothesis').
http://www.geol.lsu.edu/Faculty/Chan/7900/Materials/Lec9.ppt

...Fifteen years after the discovery of major glacial/interglacial cycles in the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere, it seems that all of the simple mechanisms for lowering pCO2 have been eliminated...We are still unsure whether CO2 is a primary driver or a secondary amplifier of the glacial cycles. The Milankovitch orbital theory would seem to imply the latter, because there is a clear physical link between Northern Hemisphere summer heating and ice sheets but no easy link from orbital variations to pCO2. However, in the last two glacial terminations, the pCO2 rise precedes the 18-O [isotope] of the atmosphere (an indicator of melted ice sheets) by several thousand years, implying that pCO2 is a primary driver. Alternatively, pCO2 could be driven by changes in meteorological forcing, such as dust delivery of trace metals to the ocean surface, resulting in an acausal correlation between summer insolation and ice volume. (Archer)

The explanations typically involve the effect of climate on photosynthesis and calcification. These are "biological pump," "iron/nitrate fertilization," and "CaCO3 compensation" hypotheses.

...The first proposed mechanisms to lower glacial pCO2 were to increase the rate of biological productivity in surface waters of the ocean, exporting carbon from the surface ocean to the deep sea in the form of sinking particles. Either an increase in the ocean inventory of nutrients (phosphate, nitrate), or a change in the ratio of nutrient to C in phytoplankton, could have stimulated the ocean’s “biological pump." The observation that iron availability limits phytoplankton growth in remote parts of the ocean such as the Southern Ocean provided a mechanism by which the high-latitude biological pump could have intensified in a dustier, more iron-rich glacial climate. A current form of this idea is for glacial dust to stimulate the rate of nitrogen fixation, increasing the ocean pool of nitrate.

...A second class of mechanisms to lower glacial pCO2 is to change the pH of the whole ocean, converting seawater CO2 into HCO3- and CO3=, which are unable to evaporate into the atmosphere. The pH of the ocean is controlled by a mechanism known as CaCO3 compensation; any imbalance between the influx of dissolved CaCO3 from chemical weathering on land and the removal of CaCO3 by burial in the deep sea will act to change ocean pH until the flux balance is restored...The timescale for ocean pH adjustment is 5–10 kyr, similar to the timescale of the recorded pCO2 change. If (1) the glacial rate of weathering were higher, (2) CaCO3 deposition currently occurring in shallow waters were shifted to the deep sea, or (3) the rate of CaCO3 production decreased, CaCO3 burial efficiency would increase and the ocean would become more basic. If organic carbon production increased, its degradation in sediments would also promote calcite dissolution, further increasing ocean pH. CaCO3 compensation may also affect the pCO2 response to the biological pump scenarios. (Archer)

Archers's idea (organic shower hypothesis) has been harshly criticised by the others. There is no evidence of the increase in planktonic forams or carbonate shells in the sediment; nor there was any 'rain' associated with increased diatom production. In fact, there seems to be no significant change in the accumulation rate of CaCO3 in the deep sediment between glacial and interglacial time. There are other suggestions, though:

Nutrient deepening hypothesis
...At glacial time, the deep water is dominated by Antarctic water mass during glacial time. Labile nutrients and metabolic CO2 are concentrated in deep waters. Deep water becomes corrosive because CO2 – rich water is more acidic and can dissolve carbonate sediments on the seafloor: CaCO3 -> Ca++ + CO3= Carbonate ions draw CO2 from the atmosphere when deep water is returned to the surface CO2 + CO3= + H2O -> 2 HCO3-.

Southern ocean version of Fe fertilization hypothesis
...Today, most of the surface water is depleted in nutrients. Only high latitude surface water has unused nutrients. If marine plants utilize all the nutrients available, then the low glacial CO2 can be explained. Iron can enable organism to more completely utilize the nutrients.If during glacial time the nutrients in the cold surface waters was drawn down, the CO2 content could be reduced. Iron fertilization has been proven by fertilizing P-rich Pacific and Southern ocean surface water with Fe. P and pCO2 were drawn down, and chlorophyll concentration increased.
http://www.geol.lsu.edu/Faculty/Chan/7900/Materials/Lec9.ppt

One of the more popular hypotheses is the so-called "coral reef hypothesis" suggested by Berger. I remind some basics about the corals and ocean chemistry. Corals are symbionts that build reefs made of CaCO3 by combining Ca++ and bicarbonate from water. They rely on symbiotic algae for carbohydrates: the corals are the "animal, vegetable, and mineral" rolled into one. From the standpoint of CO2 chemistry, the death of a coral is the best it can do. Contrary to the popular belief, live corals do not bind carbon; rather, they release it. Normally, once CO2 is in the seawater in the form of bicarbonate (HCO3-), it is not going anywhere. The corals, however, release it when they make CaCO3 via Ca2+ + 2HCO3 –> CaCO3 + H2O + CO2. On the positive side, their symbiotic algae (zooxanthellae) consume some of this CO2 via photosynthesis.

...The released CO2/precipitated carbonate ratio was estimated to be 0.6. Global net organic production and CaCO3 production of coral reefs were estimated to be 0.02-0.1 GtC/y. Our current understanding is that coral reefs act as sources of atmospheric CO2, but their contribution to the global carbon cycle is relatively small.
http://www.terrapub.co.jp/journals/JO/pdf/5506/55060731.pdf

The only good the corals do for the pCO2 budget is when they die and mineralize, being buried by the sediment. The corals do not release much CO2 presently, but that is simply for lack of opportunity. Berger's insight is that melting ice increased the extention of shallow continental shelves, which resulted in massive reef built-up and massive release of CO2:

...The "coral reef hypothesis" asserts that carbonate production on newly flooded shelves contributes importantly to the rise of pCO2 during deglaciation. The pattern of reef growth that emerges suggests that emission of CO2 resulting from carbonate production was important particularly during the late stages of deglaciation. The effect peaked during the early Holocene and presumably contributed to the warming in the climatic optimum.
http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~esci555/Vecksei_Berger.pdf

...there was an abrupt increase in pCO2 during deglaciation 13 kya. Berger (1982) was the first to explain this increase in pCO2 as the contribution of shelf carbonate build up by coral reefs. Reef production represents the shoreward movement of carbonate deposition (from pelagic zones to the shelf) due to a marine transgression from the input of glacier meltwater into oceans. In other words, CO2 was released by an increase in production of coral reefs, which are better sources than sinks of CO2. Berger (1982) further explains that the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere later mixes into the ocean again and balances the new shelfward production of carbonate with the dissolution of carbonate on the deep-sea floor. Berger tested his hypothesis by designing a model to simulate the global changes as a result of the glacial retreat. Ten years later, a similar but more complex model of “basin to shelf partitioning of CaCO3 and its effect on atmospheric CO2 was created by Opdyke and Walker. The new model adds the effects of changing alkalinity due to migration of the locus of carbonate precipitation, but generally upholds Berger’s conjecture that coral reefs caused the sudden increase in atmospheric CO2.
http://www.earth.rochester.edu/ees207/Larson/larsona1.htm

...Strong production of CO2 [by coral reefs] and resulting CO2 release started during the mid-deglaciation (14 kya), and peaked during the early Holocene (9-6 kya) before Indopacific sealevel stabilized. The carbonate production by corals resulted in a strong positive feedback on the CO2 rise and warming during the late deglaciation. The estimated total production resulted in the release of 220 GtC, corresponding to 105 ppm CO2. http://www.cosis.net/abstracts/EGS02/03175/EGS02-A-03175.pdf

...Differences in the rate of coral reef carbonate deposition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene may account for the Quaternary variation of atmospheric CO2...sea-level change shifts the locus of carbonate deposition from the deep sea to the shelves as the normal glacial-interglacial pattern of deposition for Quaternary global carbonates. To assess the impact of these changes on atmospheric CO2, a simple numerical simulation of the global carbon cycle was developed. Atmospheric CO2 as well as calcite saturation depth and sediment responses to these carbonate deposition changes are examined. Atmospheric CO2 changes close to those observed in the Vostok ice core, 80 ppm CO2, for the Quaternary are observed as well as the approximate depth changes in percent carbonate of sediments measured in the Pacific Ocean over the same time interval. http://www.gsajournals.org/gsaonline/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1130%2F0091-7613(1992)020%3C0733:ROTCRH%3E2.3.CO%3B2

Et cetera. In short, it is quite possible (as possible as anything in climatology) that it is precisely the hyperactivity of our beloved corals that provided the missing link between the increasing temperatures, raising sea levels, increased pCO2, and resulted in runaway warming. What the corals need (and have been patiently waiting for millenia) in order to make more CaCO3 -- and release more CO2 -- is more shelves. Rather than railing over their speedy demise we should thank Heavens and ourselves from delivering us from their menace. It is bad enough that we are emitting CO2. It would be even worse when the corals embark on their next expansionist adventure. The corals are not interested in saving the planet. They are interested in expansion, by any cost. So what if they die? That's excellent. Everything is for the best in this best of the worlds. If we are serious about saving the planet, we should start dynamiting the corals right now, before it is too late. Yes, a few fishes will be lost, but the entire planet will be 'saved' from the dreaded disaster of runaway GW. GW is bad, it is the worst thing ever, correct? Then it would be the right and the moral thing to do.

Why are we being persistently told by the GW alarmists that the greatest public good is in careful preservation of what is, as suggested by climate research, one of the major causes for runaway warming?

PS: One can ask, following Bulgakov's Woland, a more general question along the same lines, in a less provocative form. What stabilizes the climate in the long run is a system of negative feedbacks, most of which involve the biosphere. In such a feedback, there are always losers and winners. For the feedback to work, someone has to die and someone has to be given the opportunity to expand (often as a result of the massive die-off). We may or may not realize how these complex feedbacks work, and our misguided conservation efforts might well interfere with these feedbacks. The 'planet' does not need our 'protection,' and our stubborn, ignorant attempt to maintain a fleeting moment (that is wimsically regarded as status quo) we may interfere with the very means by which the 'planet' achieves long-term stability, diversity, etc. -- if these are indeed the aims of the Gaia (= the biosphere).