Sounds strange right? It did to me, when I first read about it. And I really shouldn’t be writing about global cooling at this point considering the fact that global ‘warming’ and not ‘cooling’ has been in the spotlight for the past few decades; but it unravelled some less obvious ways through which humans affect the climate.
The average ground temperature in the Northern Hemisphere had fallen by 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit from 1945 to 1968. Furthermore, there had been a large increase in the snow cover and between, 1964 and 1972, a decrease of 1.3 percent in the amount of sunshine in the United States.
The big fear was a collapse of the agricultural system. In Britain, cooling had already shortened the growing season by 2 weeks. Some scientists proposed radical solutions such as “melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot.”
These days, of course, the threat is the opposite. And black soot, rather than saving us, is seen as the chief villain. We have cast endless streams of carbon emissions skyward, the residue of all the fossil fuels we burn to heat and cool and feed and transport and entertain ourselves.
It is generally believed that cars and trucks and airplanes contribute an ungodly share of greenhouse gases. This has recently led many right-minded people to buy a Prius or other hybrid car. But every time a Prius owner drives to the grocery store , she may be canceling out its emission-reducing benefit, at least if she shops in the meat section. How so? Because cows—as well as sheep and other cud-chewing animals called ruminants —are wicked polluters. Their exhalation and flatulence and belching and manure emit methane, which by one common measure is about twenty times more potent as a greenhouse gas than the carbon-dioxide released by cars. The world’s ruminants are responsible for about 50 percent more greenhouse gas than the entire transportation sector.
Also, the greenhouse gases thought to be responsible for global warming are primarily externalities. What’s an externality? It’s basically what happens when someone takes an action, and someone else, without agreeing pays some or all the costs of that action. When you have a bonfire in your backyard, you’re not just toasting marshmallows. You’re also emitting gases that, in a tiny way, help to heat the whole planet. Some raise concerns about taxing people to solving climate change externalities, but when it comes to actually doing it, all we can say is good luck. Besides the obvious obstacles—like determining the right size of the tax and getting someone to collect it—there’s the fact that greenhouse gases do not adhere to national boundaries. The earth’s atmosphere is in constant, complex motion, which means that your emissions become mine, and mine yours. Thus, global warming.
So no country or continent can enjoy the benefits of its costly and painful behaviour to stop emissions unless everyone else joined in. And if let’s say, the United States does take initiative, it can hardly blame China or India for saying, “Hey, you got to free ride your way to industrial superpowerdom so why shouldn’t we?
When people aren’t compelled to pay the full cost of their actions, they have little incentive to change their behaviour. Back when the world’s big cities were choked with horse manure, people didn’t switch to the car because it was good for society, they switched because it was in their economic interest to do so. Today, people are being asked to change their behaviour not out of self-interest but rather out of selflessness. This might make global warming seem like a hopeless problem unless—people are willing to put aside their self-interest and do the right thing even if it’s personally costly. Gore(former vice president and recent Nobel laureate) is appealing to our altruistic selves, our externality-hating better angels.
Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer at Microsoft, cites a paper asserting that carbon dioxide may have had little to do with recent warming. Instead, all the heavy particulate pollution we generated in earlier decades seems to have cooled the atmosphere by dimming the sun.
Today, we are most likely to think of carbon dioxide as a poison. That’s because the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased substantially over the past one hundred years, from about 280 parts per million to 380. But what people don’t know, the IV scientists say, is that the carbon dioxide level some 80 million years ago—back when our mammalian ancestors were evolving—was at least 1000 parts per million. So not only is carbon dioxide plainly not poisonous, but changes in carbon-dioxide don’t necessarily mirror human activity. Nor does atmospheric carbon dioxide necessarily warm the earth: ice-cap evidence shows that over the past several hundred thousand years, carbon dioxide levels have risen after a rise in temperature, not the other way around. There’s nothing special about today’s carbon dioxide level, or today’s sea level, or today’s temperature. What damages us are rapid rates of change. Overall, more carbon dioxide is probably a good thing for the biosphere, its just that its increasing too fast.
In the darkened conference room, Myhrvold cues up an overhead slide that summarizes IV’s views of the current slate of proposed global-warming solutions. The slide says:
Too little
Too late
Too optimistic
Too little means that typical conservation efforts simply won’t make much of a difference. “If you believe there’s a problem worth solving,” Myhrvold says, “then these solutions won’t be enough to solve it. Wind power and most other alternative energy things are cute, but they don’t scale to a sufficient degree. At this point, wind farms are a government subsidy scheme, fundamentally.” What about the beloved Prius and other low-emission vehicles? “They’re great,” he says, “except that transportation is just not that big of a sector.”
Also, coal is so cheap that trying to generate electricity without it would be economic suicide, especially for developing countries. Myhrvold argues that cap-and-trade agreements, whereby coal emissions are limited by quota and cost, can’t help much, in part because it is already…
Too late. The half-life of atmospheric carbon dioxide is roughly one hundred years, and some of it remains in the atmosphere for thousands of years. So even if humankind immediately stopped burning all fossil fuel, the existing carbon dioxide would remain in the atmosphere for several generations. Pretend the United States (and perhaps Europe) miraculously converted overnight and became zero-carbon societies. Then pretend they persuaded China (and perhaps India) to demolish every coal-burning power plant and diesel truck. As far as atmospheric carbon dioxide is concerned, it might not matter all that much. And by the way, that zero-carbon society you were dreamily thinking about is way…
Too optimistic. “A lot of the things that people say would be a good thing probably aren’t,” Myhrvold says. As an example he points to solar power. “The problem with solar cells is that they’re black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12 percent gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat—which contributes to global warming.
This hardly means that the energy problem should be dismissed. That’s why IV—along with inventors all over the world—are working towards the holy grail: cheaper and cleaner forms of energy.
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