So, what about this global warming?

Balmy late-November, early December weather along the Eastern Seaboard prompted the jocular question, “So, how about this global warming?” The riposte throughout the northern Great Plains was, “So, where is the global warming?” as residents dug out from under early blizzards and endured sub-zero temperatures. Meanwhile, scores died in Europe as unseasonable cold gripped the Continent. That news merited less than an inch of copy in various newspapers-of-record which, two years before, trumpeted similar numbers of heat-related deaths in Chicago as harbingers of human-induced global warming.

It’s been ten years since NASA climatologist Jim Hansen appeared before a Senate subcommittee during a summer’s drought when Yellowstone National Park and other western forests were ablaze. He was certain, he said, that we were seeing the first signs of human-induced global warming.1 His testimony touched off a media frenzy culminating in Time magazine designating Planet Earth as “Man” Of The Year.

The issue had been gestating for a decade. Gus Speth was President Jimmy Carter’s Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality. In the teeth of the Reagan Revolution, CEQ published Global Energy Futures and the Carbon Dioxide Problem.2 Tear the cover off the report and you might think it contemporary. All the familiar rhetoric is there.

“Many scientists now believe,” Speth writes in the introduction, “that if global fossil fuels use grows rapidly in the decades ahead, the accompanying CO2 increase will lead to profound and long-term alteration of the earth’s climate. These climatic changes, in turn, could have far-reaching adverse consequences, affecting our ability to feed a hungry and increasingly crowded world.”

There’s the issue. It’s not really the environment, even though both Vice President Al Gore, in his book Earth In the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit,3 and former Secretary of State Warren Christopher, have declared the environment to be the “central organizing principle” of our post-Cold War era. Gore writes:

“[This] means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action — to use, in short, every means to halt the destruction of the environment and to preserve and nurture our ecological system. Minor shifts in policy, marginal adjustments in ongoing programs, moderate improvements in laws and regulations, rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change — these are all forms of appeasement, designed to satisfy the public’s desire to believe that sacrifice, struggle, and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary.”4

The evocation of World War II imagery — in this case a reference to Neville Chamberlain made more explicit in the next sentence — is notable. We are headed for an environmental Holocaust, he says. We’ve not heeded an “ecological Kristallnacht.”5

Similarly, Population Bomb author Dr. Paul Ehrlich writes “that environmental events will be the defining ones for our grandchildren’s generation — and those events could dwarf World War II in magnitude.”6 He claims humanity is now attempting a sort of slow-motion environmental Dunkirk and those who challenge his and the environmentalists perspective are erroneously defining “public interest organizations, in the eyes of many legislators, as ‘special interests’ — not different in kind from the American Tobacco Institute, the Western Fuels Association, or other organizations that represent business groups.”7

Since he brought it up, just what is the Western Fuels Association? Is our perspective on the climate change issue simply the pleading of venal corporate interest?

Western Fuels is a 25-year old cooperative business organized to operate on a not-for-profit basis in supplying coal for the generation of electricity by our member-owners, consumer-owned electric utilities serving farms, ranches, and small cities and towns in rural areas throughout the Great Plains, Rocky Mountain and Southwest states, and in Louisiana. Our consumers own us; their consumers own them. We work in the public interest from end-to-end.

Among fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas, and coal, environmentalists view coal as the worst “polluter” because of the volume of carbon dioxide emissions which result when coal is burned to make electricity. (The oxidation [combustion] of carbon [the primary constituent in any fossil fuel] chemically bonds two oxygen molecules with one of carbon. That’s carbon dioxide: CO2.)

Carbon dioxide is no pollutant; it is the foundation of life on earth. All plants (from microscopic organisms like plankton to towering redwoods) use the sun’s energy to strip the oxygen molecules from the one of carbon in carbon dioxide and manufacture the sugars they need to grow. They store the carbon in their cells and emit oxygen. You learned about this process in grade school. It’s called photosynthesis.

Other organisms consume plants, oxidize the stored carbon using the oxygen they’ve inhaled to manufacture what they need to live, emitting carbon dioxide. You are one of those organisms. So are earthworms, insects, whales, pandas, and cattle. Some organisms don’t eat plants and instead eat animals that eat plants.

Nevertheless, some folks have come to view CO, as the most onerous among many greenhouse gases contributing to global warming — or climate change, as it’s now called (or apocalyptic climate change, which describes its alleged potential for environmental disruption).

Let’s sort out our terms. The Vice President is correct when he intones that “the greenhouse effect,” is real. Greenhouse gases in our atmosphere (primarily water vapor) make life on earth possible. They act as a thermal blanket, trapping heat radiated by the sun before it is re-radiated from earth’s surface back into space. “The greenhouse effect” is not the issue.

What about “global warming?” What matters is the degree and rate of change. There have been times on earth when it has been much warmer than today, and times when it’s been much colder. The latter are called ice ages. One of the former is called “The Climate Optimum.” It was a time of higher average global temperature and high CO2. Dr. Robert Balling, Director of the Climate Laboratory at Arizona State University, observes:

Some scientists believe that nine thousand or so years ago [during the Climate Optimum], agriculture sprung up all over the world. We saw people domesticate plants in Asia and South America and Europe and North America, all at about the same time. It also corresponded with when the carbon dioxide had increased from about 200 parts per million [during the Ice Age] to about 250 parts per million. It gave agricultural plants a competitive advantage over weeds. It may be that carbon dioxide is the reason we domesticated plants.8

Another period of high CO2 and high temperature (though less warm than the Climate Optimum and more warm than today) took place thirteen hundred years ago. As described by Dr. Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics “The Little Climatic Optimum:”

[L]ed to tremendous advances in city building, and university building because people were not victims to the cold climate so much. So they could go out and grow crops. They were healthier. They were longer-lived. And all this because the climate was a bit warmer.9

Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT’s Center for Meteorology and Physical Oceanography observes:

We’ve gone from ice ages to warm periods. We’ve had a warming since [the Little Ice Age in the late 19^th Century], but we’re not as warm as it was in the Medieval Period when you had grape growth in Scotland.10

During the Little Climatic Optimum, North America’s Anasazi civilization reached its peak because they were able to farm twice as much as before. This is when the Vikings colonized the then not-ironically-named Greenland. Because alpine mountain passes were no longer choked by snow year ‘round, trade routes opened between Italy and Germany.

But what about millennia when atmospheric CO2 was much higher? Dr. Thomas Gale Moore of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University reminds us:

The time when CO2 levels were approximately ten times current level was when the dinosaurs were running around, and that was when plant growth was so vigorous they created all the oil [coal] and [natural] gas that we now use. It was a very fertile period of time for the earth.11

Such are lessons we’ve learned from earth’s history through scientific observation. Then where do these climate change scenarios involving drought, flooding, heat waves, blizzards, more frequent and intense tropical storms, coastal flooding, rampant tropical disease come from? They have one source and one source only: computer models.

Computerized general circulation models were originally intended to help climatologists better understand the workings of earth’s exceedingly complex atmospheric physics and chemistry. Richard Kerr, writing in Science magazine, has this to say about climate models and the scientists who run them:

Climate modelers have been “cheating” for so long it’s almost become respectable. The problem has been that no computer model could reliably simulate the present climate. Even the best simulations of the behavior of the atmosphere, ocean, sea, ice, and land surface drift off into a climate quite unlike today’s as they run for centuries. So climate modelers have gotten in the habit of fiddling with fudge factors, so-called “flux adjustments,” until the models get it right.12

NASA’s Dr. Roy W, Spencer, a senior scientist for climate studies at the Marshall Space Flight Center, explains the problem this way:

It’s very difficult to create a realistic computer model because the atmosphere and the surface of the earth, and the oceans and vegetation systems are all so very complex. They interact in non-linear ways which we really can’t predict. One thing changes, which changes something else, which changes something else. There’s this cascade of processes.13

According to University of Virginia professor of environmental sciences Dr. Patrick J. Michaels:

People have to understand that the entire global climate-change hysteria is driven by computer models. It is not driven by reality. Reality is not warming up like those models said it would.14

In other words, a teaching tool is being used as a predictor of future climate. Dr. Lindzen observes, “It’s not as though I would believe the models if they only gave me that it would get colder. There’s no basis for believing them.”15

So, the global warming issue is not about the reality of the greenhouse effect, or CO, as a pollutant. It lacks a foundation in scientific observation or empiricism. It’s about people: those living now and generations to come. The Vice President’s and Dr. Ehrlich’s views on the need to control world population are well known and need no elaboration from me. What is less understood and under-appreciated is rising CO2, and its potential for helping feed a hungry world.

In the dramatic introduction to The Greening of Planet Earth, the narrator recites the all-too-familiar scenario: Low atmospheric CO, concentration at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, rising concentrations as factories and industrial towns grow around them, still higher concentrations by the 1950s, more and more industrialization, higher and higher concentrations until, “The year 2050. The atmospheric level of carbon dioxide has doubled to 540 parts per million. What kind of world have we created?” the narrator asks.

“A better world. A more productive world,” responds Dr. Herman Mayeux USDA Agriculture Research Service scientist who advises the Clinton Administration on climate-change policy. “Plants are the basis for all productivity on earth. They’re the only organisms that can utilize the sun’s energy and create matter, food. And they’re going to do that much more effectively, more efficiently.”16

“The Greening of Planet Earth” is a theory borne out by literally thousands of experiments worldwide. What kind of world does high CO2 create?

• For citrus it would be a very, very positive thing.17

• In terms of plant growth, it’s nothing but beneficial.18

• We would expect a world in which crop plants would produce about 30 to 40 percent more than they currently are producing.19

• We have found that soybeans respond favorably to elevated CO2 concentration. The net benefit in grain yield is similar to that for what we’re seeing for rice. With rice, elevated CO2 levels stimulate growth and ultimately this translates into increase grain yield.20

• We grew a wheat crop — two varieties of wheat — across a CO2 gradient from well below what it was in pre-industrial times up to what it is now. And we found that both of those varieties increased their yield by a factor of 3.21

• Earlier, we did an experiment with oats. [What we measured] was on the same order of increase as we found with the wheat.22

• Looking at rising levels of CO2 form the viewpoint of the plant, there’s no problem at all. We will have a higher production.23

• Rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide do not frighten farmers. They do not frighten foresters. Forestry output is increased. Agriculture output is increased. And this applies to all food crops. Food is the most important renewable resource we have.24

• Probably the single most important food crop globally is rice. From my experience working with tropical rice in the Philippines, certainly CO2 is able to increase yields of rice — most of the traditional semi-dwarf varieties of rice that are utilized. So, hopefully, that will increase rice yields as CO2 increases in the atmosphere.25

• We have found that increasing the CO2 level from the current level to two times what we have today would basically increase plant yields. We have worked with corn. We have worked with soybeans. We have worked with wheat. For corn, our yield is about 17 to 18 percent. For soybeans, it would be more — about 25 percent. And for the wheat, it would be probably between 20 and 25 percent.26

Dr. Balling reports that agricultural plants do very well when the carbon dioxide is increased. “We see soybeans in Iowa that have a much higher yield for higher CO2. We see strawberries in China and grapes in Italy. You can go around the world and sec evidence that increased CO2, yields more productivity for our most important agricultural crops.”27

And what holds true for food crops also is true for forests, rangelands, and wetlands. But what if we accept the notion that higher CO, results in dramatically higher global temperatures? Wouldn’t even more productive plants suffer?

Of course; but they would suffer much less than without higher CO2. According to Dr. Sylvan Wittwer, “[H]igher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere enable the plants to deal more effectively with the stresses encountered in the plant world. [They are] more resistant to low moisture levels, more resistant to air pollution and deficiencies in nutrients. The stress, as far as the plant world is concerned, is certainly alleviated by higher levels of atmospheric CO2.”28

So, what is this climate change issue about? Not observed reality. Not the existence of a greenhouse effect. Not carbon dioxide “pollution.” Not the adverse effects on food crops and plant life. It’s about people — our numbers and the impact we have on the environment. In this, we leave climate and botanical science behind. It becomes part of a two centuries-old debate about the validity of Thomas Malthus’s hypothesis concerning the “carrying capacity” of Earth. The atmospheres CO, concentration is very highly correlated with population, According to Dr. Michaels and others the correlation is so phenomenal that there’s hardly any error [statistically speaking] between CO2 and population levels.29

The individuals and governments involved in world climate negotiations in Rio de Janeiro, Bonn, Kyoto, Geneva, and Buenos Aires might better focus upon food for people. In the United States we have a capacity to make food on a low-cost basis. We have abundant food. We have more than enough food and, as Dr. Wittwer observes, CO2, is a “universally free premium” already enhancing food production.

It seems to me our focus might shift to food and poverty questions for the billions of people on earth who live in squalor and who only aspire to something akin to the bounty we enjoy. Who are we to deny them the ability to lift themselves up by effective harnessing of God’s creation in fossil fuels, as we have been able to do, or to arbitrarily and artificially constrain their numbers? This question, fundamentally, is the substance of climate change issue before the United Nations.

Fred Palmer is general manager and chief executive officer of Western Fuels Association, Inc. He also serves as President of the Board of Directors of Greening Earth Society a new source of public information and education on the benefits of fossil fuels to the world’s economy and the beneficial effects for the biosphere of increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.