Global Warming: A Matter of Scale

When Hurricane Sandy made landfall this week, climate change roared back into the public consciousness. It seems that suddenly, something had to be done, even though the issue was barely mentioned in the election. As surely as the flood waters will recede, though, so will global warming in people's minds. We will go back to thinking about our jobs, our families, and our Honey Boo Boo.

People's fickle attention to big issues is maddening, but understandable. We don't do well with problems that extend well beyond the scale of everyday human existence. For millions of years, the human brain has evolved to tackle problems of immediacy: hunting for food now, escaping the predator now, feeding the crying baby now. The human scale of time is about seconds and minutes, maybe hours. Even planning for drought or famine next year requires vision and foresight that doesn't come to us instinctively. When confronted with the size and age of the universe, many people become uncomfortable, and for some, the idea that humans evolved from fish is laughable. The tools that we call common sense are best equipped to deal with the plainly obvious in the here and now.

By contrast, no issue in our lives is grander in scale than global warming. We began burning massive amounts of fossil fuels some 150 years ago, and the effects of doing so may continue for centuries. The atmospheric CO2 levels are like a giant locomotive that has been accelerating for generations, and continues to accelerate as industry takes over Asia and much of the Third World. All of this has happened effortlessly, as developing societies need lots of energy, and fossil fuels make that easy.

Looking at the big picture, it's hard to imagine slowing down and eventually stopping that locomotive based on our good intentions alone. Knowing about species extinctions and the bleaching of corals will motivate us only to a point. An immediate experience, like seeing the images of Sandy, is needed even to get people to be more than just intellectually "concerned" about climate change — that is, until the waters recede and a more pressing issue takes our attention elsewhere.

Part of the difficulty is our discomfort with matters of scale. When we humans see a problem, we want to fix it, and we want to see direct results from these efforts. If a room is dark, we switch on a light because we know this will help us to see. So when a Hurricane Sandy occurs, and we know that global warming is part of the equation, we intuitively seek an easy fix. To help us believe that global warming is within our control, we appeal to human-scale terms of cause and effect ("Plant a tree, cool the globe," one bumper sticker reads). Except there is no switch that will stop the Frankenstorms from coming. The Earth doesn't operate on a human scale, and given the complexity of the system — interactions between the atmosphere, the oceans, the methane-rich permafrost, etc. — even heroic efforts now may not stave off the effects of climate change in our lifetimes. The more ideological voices on the left cringe at hearing such discouraging news, but reality, like the planet, doesn't necessarily operate according to human-scale desires.

The only way to deal with climate change is to approach it on the same grandeur of scale as the issue itself. Over generations, we must shift our global mindset regarding energy and consumption. Clean energy, sustainable farming, and recycling should not be seen merely as ways to end global warming; instead, they must be seen simply as the right things to do. The 20th-century slash-and-burn approach to civilization is unsustainable, and a return to sustainability, at some point, will allow the planet to settle back into a healthier equilibrium. It's inevitable and has happened many times in the Earth's history.

Just don't expect to see results before the next airing of Honey Boo Boo

Global Warming Did Not Cause That Tornado

I am not a global warming denier, although at times it can seem as if I am. I often refute claims made by global warming enthusiasts, for the mere fact that they are false. If you’ve followed my blog, by now you probably know that I value reality over bullshit, even in cases where it hurts — and I’m sorry my fellow liberals, but we tend to spout a lot of bullshit about global warming.

Any given week, tune into one of my favorite TV shows, Real Time With Bill Maher, and you may well see a celebrity like Tim Robbins or Janeane Garafolo or Ellen Page (or, most annoyingly, Maher himself) declaring that the latest monster tornado or hurricane was “caused by global warming.” It is presented not as opinion but as fact, citing the argument that because a warmer climate puts more water in the atmosphere, weather patterns are getting more extreme; therefore, all extreme events are the result of global warming.

Wrong! False! Complete, total, and utter bullshit!

Part of the argument is correct: Warmer air results in more evaporation and transpiration by plants, increasing the water-vapor content of the atmosphere. Water vapor and heat contribute to weather events like tornadoes and hurricanes. But that is where the facts end. To take the argument further and declare that climate change is therefore “the cause” of any individual event is, dare I say it, taking a leap of faith. The claim of direct causality is an unfalsifiable hypothesis, nearly as ridiculous as attributing a tornado to God’s wrath over gay marriage (with the obvious difference that there is evidence for global warming). A better analogy would be losing several thousand dollars on a one-day stock trade, and then blaming the loss on the fact that the Dow Jones Industrial Index had been generally declining for the past year.

Here’s what can be truthfully said in these situations: Global warming is associated with a statistical increase in the gross number of (arbitrarily “extreme”) weather events, which are influenced by heat and water vapor. Similarly, a declining Dow is associated with a statistical increase in the number of declines of individual stocks over the period in which the Dow declines. That is the extent to which we can ascribe causality in these cases. To go further and attempt to single out “the cause” is a reductionist oversimplification — and if there’s one thing human brains like to do, it’s reducing and oversimplifying complex issues to the point that they’re so easy to understand, it’s downright stupid.

When someone is advancing their progressive policy agenda, it seems effective to declare, “The tornado was caused by global warming!” It is not particularly effective to say what’s actually true: “Although the atmosphere is a complex system and we cannot attribute causality of a single event to any one factor, global warming increased the likelihood of that particular tornado in the broadest statistical sense.” But the problem is, oversimplified bullshit begets even more oversimplified bullshit. A false reductionist argument makes it all the easier for the opposing side to say, “It’s cold today! Where’s your global warming now?” Or, more subtly, “If there’s more water in the atmosphere, then why is Texas experiencing a drought? Checkmate!” In other words, no debate will get closer to the truth if one or both sides are citing falsehoods and fallacies. Just because one side thinks/knows that they are right, that doesn’t give them license to leave logic and basic truths at the door when arguing their position.

Of course, this extends to other controversies besides the effects of global warming. For example, there’s the debate over whether the Stimulus Program “saved” the U.S. economy. Liberals: “It kept us out of a second Great Depression!” Conservatives: “It was a waste of money and didn’t create the jobs it was supposed to!” Hey, guess what? Both of these positions are completely unfalsifiable. They are made-up opinions, not arguments supportable by clear evidence, and certainly not facts. Without an alternate universe that we can observe as an experimental control, it’s anyone’s guess how an alternate scenario would have actually played out. It’s like in sports, when the TV announcer says, “If the double play hadn’t cleared the bases, three would have scored on that home run, and this team would be ahead right now.” Really? And you know this how?

Albert Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible. But not one bit simpler.” Remember, people are idiots, and idiots like to simplify the world and make it easier to grasp. Then, when they think they’ve grasped it, they start spouting reductionist bullshit — and in doing so, their idiocy becomes all the more apparent.

Don’t be an idiot.

Something You May Not Know About Carbon (6/5/2009)

This was originally posted on a horrible site called Myspace. When Myspace underwent a redesign in Fall 2010, hundreds of insightful reader comments that had been left over the years were lost. I have since deleted my account there.

Pop quiz: Let's say you have a pile of dry leaves that you raked and want to dispose of. You could burn them in a big fire, or you could compost them and put the compost on your organic vegetable garden. Which method would release more carbon into the atmosphere?

Or, you have a pile of firewood. You could burn the wood in your fireplace, or you could let it decay naturally with the help of fungus and termites. Which choice is more carbon-friendly?

The answer is that in each case, both methods put exactly the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere: all of it. The cellulose and other carbon-containing molecules are broken down and oxidized, whether by fire or by living organisms, and the eventual waste product is carbon dioxide. Burning merely accomplishes this very quickly. Burning leaves and wood also releases other pollutants, which makes burning environmentally less desirable -- but in terms of carbon alone, the carbon in the plant matter will reach the air either way. It's just a question of whether it will take minutes, or months/years.

When people talk about "carbon footprint," they're really referring to how much new carbon a person is responsible for bringing into the environment. Coal, gasoline, and natural gas represent sequestered carbon (in the form of hydrocarbons), having been taken from the atmosphere by plants and animals millions of years ago and stored underground. Burning this material releases carbon that hasn't been in the environment since the age of the dinosaurs, or earlier.

Conversely, with your pile of leaves or firewood, the only way to prevent that carbon from going back into the air would be to bury it far underground, or otherwise sequester it in some way (something that green industries are trying to accomplish with carbon dioxide). If you don't do that, at least in terms of carbon, it doesn't matter how you get rid of it. The carbon is already in the environment, and there it'll stay.