🚀 go-pugleaf

From: Tom Gray <tomgray@igc.org>

Date:         Wed, 31 Jul 1996 23:17:20 -0500
From: Marge Wood <woodm@NICANOR.ACU.EDU>

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 1996 17:15:21 -0800
From: New Bottom Line <gfriend@eco-ops.com>

The New Bottom Line
A biweekly column on business and environment
v 5 n 15 July 11, 1996
--------------------------------------------------------------
Weather or not: Risk and the physics of climate change

Hurricane Bertha's recent visit to the US eastern seaboard reminded me that
everybody talks about the weather, but hardly anybody talks about the
physics of global climate change.

Controversy over "global climate change" periodically rears its head in the
press, even though the scientific consensus is substantial and increasing.
The latest showed up in Tomorrow magazine, where William O'Keefe, Executive
Vice President of the American Petroleum Institute (API), charged that
"several lead authors of a key chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change's [IPCC] 'Second Assessment Report' altered the underlying
text after its acceptance and approval...by the full IPCC plenary....The
deliberate 'cleansing' of the latest IPCC report seriously jeopardizes the
scientific credibility of the organization."

I can't speak to the inner workings of international panels (and others
have refuted these charges). But to me the most remarkable thing about the
"debate" over climate change and global warming is not that people would
think that human industrial activity might affect the global climate, but
that anyone might think it wouldn't.

The sportscasters say "let's look at the videotape." I say "let's look at
the physics." Earth's atmosphere is a complex, dynamic and highly
interactive system, so complex that it is difficult to model accurately--or
at least so difficult to model that our computers can't predict the weather
as fast as weather actually unfolds. Climate--the longer wave patterns of
atmospheric variation--is more challenging still, because the historic
records are so short, and the fossil records so subject to interpretation.

Some things, though, can be said with certainty. In one sense the
atmosphere is a giant heat and friction engine, powered by both the sun and
the earth's rotation. Solar radiation enters the atmosphere, heats air and
surfaces which heat air, causing temperature and pressure differentials
which result in winds. Solar radiation heats and evaporates water which
falls back to earth as rain and snow. In turn, heat is radiated back out
into space, with a balance emerging between energy in and out as the
atmosphere stabilized over hundreds of millions of years.

Industrial activity has affected this balance in two key ways. Burning
fossil fuels both generates gases (carbon dioxide, methane and other
"greenhouse gases") that affect the transparency of the atmosphere to both
incoming and outgoing radiation, and adds "waste" heat energy to the
atmospheric system. Fossil fuels do represent energy that at its source was
solar, but we are releasing several hundred million years' accumulation in
a century or two--and somehow expecting no consequences.

Simply put, if we shift the amount or the nature of energy society adds to
the atmospheric engine, the engine--our climate and weather--will change
its behavior. It can't do anything but that. There may be dispute over how
it will change, in what patterns, how quickly, and who will benefit or
suffer. There can be no dispute over whether it will change. The laws of
physics take care of that one.

If that is so, where lies the prudent strategy? To not unnecessarily
perturb critical systems we don't understand. In practical terms, that
means that competitive advantage shifts to those who can learn to prosper
economically without depending on jiggering the global climate...for whom
tinkering with the climate is no longer an economic necessity.

This is no idle concern. According to Union of Concern Scientists' senior
scientist Donald Aitken, the size of the "hurricane breeding ground" of the
Atlantic Ocean has expanded 30%, which means that developing storms spend a
longer time over the breeding ground, building strength as they gather
energy from warmer ocean waters. In addition, Aitken notes, if Hurricane
Andrew's course had taken it just 15 miles further north a few years
ago--through Dade County and metro Miami--it would have bankrupted the US
insurance industry. The insurance industry can't wait for scientific
certainty about climate change. It simply can't afford the _risk_. And so,
as the Washington Post noted recently, "It's the insurance and finance
industry that may be some of the most important... drivers of serious
investment in alternative energy sources such as solar."

Ultimately, the choice is simple--"as if" or "get real". We can live our
lives as if economics somehow immunized us from physics. Or we can "get
real," and actually take fundamental universal principles of physics into
account.

As the bumper sticker said "Gravity--It's not just a good idea.  It's the
law." Surprise--thermodynamics is too.

                         #       #       #

      (c) 1996 Gil Friend and Associates. All rights reserved.
        Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate. [96/07/16]

    Archived on the World Wide Web at http://www.eco-ops.com/eco-ops
   For subscription information, send email to: nbl-info@eco-ops.com

         May be cross-posted intact--including this notice--
              via email as long as no fees are charged.
           Publishing--whether on a Web site or in print--
              and commercial distribution in any form
             require our advance permission. Thank you.

Gil Friend, systems ecologist and business strategist, is president of Gil
Friend and Associates, a consulting group specializing in strategic
environmental management, including Integrated EcoAuditing, Industrial
Ecology and ecological re-engineering.

*****************************************************************
*  Gil Friend                *  Tel: 1-510-548-7904             *
*  Gil Friend & Associates   *  Fax: 1-510-849-2341             *
*  48 Shattuck Square #103   *  Net: gfriend@eco-ops.com        *
*  Berkeley CA 94704         *  http://www.eco-ops.com/eco-ops  *
*****************************************************************
*  "Nature's ecosystems have 3.5 billion years experience       *
*   in evolving efficient,complex, adaptive, resilient systems. *
*   Why should companies reinvent the wheel, when the R&D has   *
*   already been done?"                                         *
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NBL 5.15: Weather or not: Risk and the physics of climate change (fwd) Message