The New Hampshire

Issue date: 11/20/07 Section: Commentary

To the Editor;

I'm going to begin this rebuttal to Ben Carder's editorial on global
warming with the admission that I am an environmental conservation studies major. You can interpret that fact any way you wish, but the facts that were printed do not have that freedom of ambiguity. I will try to explain those facts in the order in which they were presented. "The earth has only warmed one degree": To those of you who have ever boiled water, you know that water absorbs a great deal of heat, and it takes a long time. To warm all of the oceans, all of the land and the atmosphere even a tiny amount takes an immense amount of energy. This is a huge change that makes a great deal of difference to climatologists. "Medieval warming period": Ice core samples show that during the Medieval Period, the earth was nowhere near as warm as it is today. To say that this period was warmer than it is today is an unscientific urban myth. "The South Pole is getting colder": Global warming is just that. Global. A better term that you no doubt have heard is Global Climate Change. Increasing greenhouse gas emissions are making the planet overall warmer but more importantly changing the distribution of that heat. Some places are expected to get colder and Antarctic glacial growth is actually predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN scientific group that recently won the Nobel Prize. "Greenhouse gases are natural": Rotting vegetation and respiration produce a huge amount of CO2but most of it is balanced by photosynthesis and storage in the soil or dissolved in the ocean. Those are all natural processes, but now human emissions of CO2 are now estimated to be 26.4 Gt per year. Deforestation, agriculture and other land damages add roughly 5.9 Gt per year. In case you were wondering, a gigaton is a metric unit of mass equal to 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) metric tons. And that's just CO2. There are plenty of other organic compounds that humans release that are even more powerful. "Sun-Climate Research": I couldn't help but notice the gutsy move of quoting this particular research group, an organization that formed in 2004 to make the connection of cosmic rays and global warming. The problem for them is that in order to study the sun, you must get measurements above the atmosphere to reduce interference. Satellite data only goes back to 1978 when satellite observations began and, for the last thirty years while the temperature has been rising fastest, the sun has not changed. "Global Cooling scare": It's true, there were plenty of folks out there worried about a new Ice Age. The difference is that in the seventies, there was a book published, a few studies linking particulates in the atmosphere to global dimming and an idea that the earth could be clouded out by dust in the sky. The popular media ran off with surprisingly little data. Now we have a similar media blitz, but this is because virtually every legitimate scientific organization on the planet agrees that: "the climate is undergoing a pronounced warming trend beyond the range of natural variability; the major cause of most of the observed warming is rising levels of the greenhouse gas CO2; the rise in CO2 is the result of burning fossil fuels; if CO2 continues to rise over the next century, the warming will continue; and a climate change of the projected magnitude over this time frame represents potential danger to human welfare and the environment." (IPCC)

These are the points on which every scientist not paid for by an energy company agrees on. When we talk about debate amongst the scientific community, the debate is not about whether it is happening, the debate centers around minute points like infrared data from satellites at higher latitudes. Fighting global warming is a battle to end fossil fuel use that gives our children asthma, our elders cancer, our dictators funding and our wildlife mercury poisoning. It is driving less and maybe reducing auto fatalities (42,815 in 2002) or reducing expensive waste. Even if all of the scientists are wrong, the byproducts of global warming prevention are worthy endeavors in themselves. Global warming is not the greatest crisis we have ever faced. It is the greatest opportunity, and the sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we can reap the benefits.

Andrew Middleton

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