I’ve been told that the best way to stay in the game of communicating is to dance around controversial subjects. That is probably true. Making any definitive comment has always drawn opposition that has throughout history (and probably prehistory) led to ad hominem responses. I have not found a segment of human society that is free from people who attack the messenger rather than the message, and that includes academia, a segment one might think extols reasonable discussion. Nevertheless, in the context of a species that takes pride in its self-proclaimed classification as “sapiens” but that responds to adverse ideas emotionally, I intend here to make a few comments on matters that engender ad hominems.
CLIMATE
It really isn’t a matter of climate anymore, is it? It’s become rabid politics. And the two sides on the subject are as divided as can be: Those on one side of the matter say there is no controversy because everyone agrees, that is, everyone save those goofy naysayers, those climate-change deniers, those unscientific dolts. And those dolts on the other side of the issue? Well, from their perspective the science is neither finally determined nor indicative of really bad consequences to come. Humanity, say the “deniers,” isn’t on the brink of extinction because the climates might be changing. They say, “Climates have always changed, sometimes even rapidly, as at the end of the Younger Dryas glacial epoch when climate changed radically in the course of little more than a single millennium (12,800-11,550 years ago), and sometimes in the course of little more than a few decades, as at the end of the Medieval Warm Period and as at the end of the Little Ice Age.”
A BIT OF A PRIMER for Those Who Slept through That Science Lecture
Cimate is the “average weather” over a multidecadal period—usually three decades for a region. The first among meteorologists to classify climates, Wladimer Köppen, used monthly temperatures and precipitation amounts to delineate climates. His system, modified several times by Köppen himself and also by Rudolf Geiger, recognizes subclasses of tropical, dry, temperate, continental, polar, and alpine climates, all designated by letters or combinations of letters (E.g., Dfa and Dfb, two humid continental climates identified by differences in temperatures in certain seasons). Other climatologists like C. W. Thornthwaite added types of vegetation into the classification scheme, and in 1966 Glenn Thomas Trewartha modified the system further. If you look at any climate map, you’ll note that the borders between climates are somewhat debatable. Should climatologists place the boundary between Dfa and Dfb in southern NY or northern PA?
The classification scheme includes not only temperatures and precipitation amounts, but it also includes when those temperatures reach their average highs and when the precipitation occurs. We know, for example, that the best time to vacation in Guatemala, the “Land of Eternal Spring,” lies between November and April, the country’s driest months. More frequent and heavier rains occur in the other months. This climate data is based on only a few centuries worth of observation, but no doubt the ancient Mayans knew when they didn’t need to wear their Wellingtons and carry an umbrella.
Unfortunately, except for proxy information, we have relatively reliable data on weather patterns going back only into the Industrial Age and only for isolated places until the nineteenth century. Even now, it is erroneous to think we have long-term data for every part of the planet, but meteorologists have ever more sophisticated means of acquiring weather information, including data from satellite-based instruments. But to determine past climates, paleoclimatologists have had to rely on proxy data, such as the ratio of O-18 to O-16 in the tests (shells) of foraminifera, the types and locations of fossilized terrestrial plants and animals, and types and compositions of sediments.
Chief among public environmental concerns since the 1970s, climate change has become an ever-more-popular raison d'etre for politicians and public figures. Back then, during the first Earth Days, Chicken Little cried, “The glaciers are coming; the glaciers are coming.” By the 1990s, the cry became “The glaciers are melting; the glaciers are melting.” Climate science entered the world of news media, film, public discussion, and doomsaying. Everyone, it seemed was getting involved. William K. Stevens wrote The Change in the Weather: People, Weather, and the Science of Climate in 1999. * If there is a book on the subject, it must be important, right? Stevens, by the way, was a science reporter for The New York Times. Could there be a more scientific document? What had been science for Wladimer Köppen became a business, a political matter, and an ideology both for people running scared that, as the stereotypical guy holding the sign warns, the end is near, and for people cashing in on government-funded research and science popularization leading to fame. The future, “warmists” declare, looks bleak, baked bleak. Wasn’t the catastrophic moment supposed to occur in 2012? And we’re past that, so, everybody, look out.
THE CAUSE AND ITS EFFECTS
First, Climate Controls
Here’s a list of climate controls:
Second, Anthropogenic Activity as a Control
The determined cause of the predicted imminent demise by climate of just about everyone, as you know, is the burning of fossil fuels that releases carbon dioxide. Anthropogenic carbon emissions are, in fact, undeniable. Hey, I measured them for Pennsylvania and the USEPA back in the 1990s. Have those emissions not increased since then? Measurements on top of isolated Mauna Loa confirm a relatively steady increase over the recent past, with quantities of carbon dioxide now reaching over 400 parts per million in our mostly nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere.
Human activities other than burning fossil fuels activities can influence temperatures and precipitation. Stripping forests, paving square miles of cities, altering types of plants from endemic to invasive all change the albedo of Earth’s surface. Creating urban heat islands adds energy to local and regional air masses. Emitting small (2.5 microns) industrially produced particulate matter into the atmosphere can block sunlight. Impounding water in reservoirs, such as Lake Mead, and destroying natural water bodies, such as the five-million year-old Aral Sea, also play a role in climate.
Effects, Panic, and Hasty Conclusions
Now it has become common for people to support their claims that “the end is near” by pointing to droughts and floods, cold spells and heat waves, and hurricanes and tornadoes. Since most people live in the present with little regard to history, and since much of the history of droughts, floods, cold spells, heat waves, hurricanes, and tornadoes is locked in an unrecorded past, any current weather phenomena deemed severe are taken as signs that “things are bad and getting worse.” In August, 2021, at the time of this writing a fire is ravaging the woods of Oregon, and shortly before I put fingers to keyboard, floods killed people in Europe. What more evidence could the common citizen want?
Read this CNN headline: “Germany’s worst rainfall in a century leaves dozens dead and hundreds missing, authorities say.” ** Certainly, there are those who attribute the flooding to climate change. Why, even Germany’s Environment Minister Svenja Schulze tweeted “Climate change has arrived in Germany.” Am I missing something here? I assume that “worst rainfall in a century” implies that Germany had such flooding prior to this event. Indeed, 100-year, 500-year, and 1,000-year floods are called by those names because such floods can occur on average by the designated number. In fact, a location could be hit by two 500-year floods in consecutive years and then not hit again for 1,000 years on the same order of magnitude. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. In 1900 the Galveston Hurricane killed 8,000. The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 was a Category V storm. Don’t forget 1969’s Hurricane Camille, the second Cat 5 hurricane to hit the US in the twentieth century. Bangladesh lost 300,000 in the Great Bhola Cyclone of 1970. Floods? Well, consider that in 1932 the Yangtze River Flood killed more than three million people, at least a million more than the number killed by the 1887 Yellow River Flood. That recent flooding in Europe that killed dozens? Consider that in 1530 the St. Felix’s Flood killed 100,000 in Flanders and Zeeland, and forty years later about 20,000 died during the All Saints’ Flood in the Netherlands.
MOVERS, SHAKERS, AND SOLUTIONS
So, back to mobilized politicians and movers and shakers. They have determined that you, yes YOU, are at fault, you with your insatiable desire for energy. And since you are an addict without self-control, politicians, led by soothsayers from academia and the United Nations, have decided to impose a different way of life, to get you in energy rehab, so to speak. Ignoring that those who do the imposing find it necessary to burn fossil fuels to live comfortably. And ignoring their need to travel to pat-on-the-back friendly conferences, where good food and good times are as much a part of the conferences as policy-making that has yet to be universally turned into results, I’ll simply say that hypocrisy is a common human failing. If the future is really dire, shouldn’t the leaders lead by example?
The consequence of movers and shakers meeting to decide how to get you into rehab, are real. They have convinced prime ministers and presidents, parliaments and congresses, CEOs and boards to take actions that directly affect your life. You, yes YOU, need to switch to renewable energy systems to save the planet from more climate changes, even though you probably owe your existence to climate change in eastern Africa a few millions of years ago when your ancestral hominins first stood upright, and even though climate change might be as good for some people as it is bad for others.
Is there something to this climate change obsession? Probably, but what are YOU going to do about it? Are you going to be happy with low albedo solar panels covering a former high albedo landscape and serving as a heat island? With bird-killing windmills that have fiberglass fan blades that can’t be recycled? With electric batteries galore whose heavy metals will infiltrate soils upon disposal, making ground and surface waters carcinogenic? With energy shortages that bring not only discomfort, but also higher prices for transported goods and services?
Are you listening to Greta, world-renowned teen who scolded the world for stealing her childhood? How, by the way, does the supposed theft of her childhood compare to the conditions imposed by a Syrian dictator, a brutal Caliphate, and an inner-city gang? Oh! Yeah. She got to ply the seas on a sailboat, something I didn’t get to do until I was an adult. Poor kid. And like Greta other kids have been told that the world’s future, their future, is bleak, baking bleak.
And all because you, yes YOU, won’t act to Spartanize your life, the movers and shakers—exempt from their own dictates—now have to impose restrictions that will force you into energy rehab. And not just you. They will attempt to force everyone on the planet into rehab, even those who just want to reach your current level of convenient and abundant energy supply. In the meantime, you will hear all the necessary admonitions for change, such as the mantra about the fictional 97% of scientists that agree that anthropogenic climate change is both real and dangerous.
THE CONSENSUS
If you ask for a list of names, will you see that those scientists aren’t universally climate scientists or paleoclimatologists? Will you see that the list doesn’t reveal the science of the scientists? Will you accept, then, that a medical researcher who is clearly a scientist has an opinion on climate? How about a chemical engineer who works in plastics? A theoretical physicist? Or maybe even a guy who plays a scientist on TV? What does it mean to say “97% of scientists”? I know some scientists—even pretended to be one myself by doing environmental research for the Commonwealth of PA and the Feds—but I don’t know of any survey they ever took. Are you one of the scientists that make up the 97%? If you are, have you examined the data supposedly available to all 97% of scientists, and if you have, do you conclude that the future is dire? That you live in a modern Ur that underwent, among political change, environmental change? Have you sold your house on the Florida coast in anticipation of rising seas, powerful storms, and unbearably hot weather?
And if you wish to logically examine the evidence for a dangerous set of climate changes, what will you, yes YOU, do with temperature data that might have been manipulated or misconstrued to shape public opinion? Changes? You know you have changed the very spot where you live. A thousand years ago there was no house or apartment there. Humans have always altered the planet, and the planet has always altered the way humans live. If you live in a city, you contribute to an urban heat island. What are you going to do about it? Express an opinion?
In 2021 the United States, Greenland, and countries too numerous to mention have leaders who are intent on quashing the use of fossil fuels. They see an urgency that many people agree with but refuse to act on. The U.S. President in 2021 wants to put charging stations across America so that everyone can drive an electric car. Are you going to buy one? Sorry, I didn’t realize you already drive one in your personal effort to save the planet. I’m sarcastic because I can’t envision where the charging stations will get the power for a highly mobile population that is used to being in a hurry, a population that has, by the way, 276 million vehicles.
Slow down, people. Have a conversation at a charging station for the twenty minutes to a half hour it will take to get you another 100 or so miles, at the end of which you’ll need to take the next charging station break. You’ll have the time to talk, time you don’t have in the five minutes it now takes you to fill a gas tank. I can see it now: 50,000 new charging stations and relaxing coffee shops lining the roadways of America; people taking time to meet new people; no one in a hurry; life as slow as it was during the horse-and-buggy days but with fields of solar panels accumulating heat on their dark surfaces. By the way, it will take between 6 to 15 solar panels to charge an electric vehicle. Along I-95 in eastern USA, as many as 300,000 drivers use the highway. Go low here: Six panels times 300,000 vehicles equal 1.8 million solar panels. A 20-square-foot solar panel produces about 250 to 300 Watts. That field of solar panels for just one highway will be huge. Ah! The dream conditions of a carbon-free world. But what if an occluded or stationary front beclouds the sky?
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Should we be concerned about climate change? I’m up in the air, so to speak. A warmer world has existed before; a colder one, too. And both warmer and colder worlds have bookended the existence of all the various human species. What if, however, we, the last of the hominin species, pave the sunny Sahara with solar panels to supply North Africans with abundant energy? Almost every environmental solution generates its own set of problems. Square miles of solar panels will, as I noted above, absorb heat, make their own heat islands, and cause convection currents that will enhance sun-blocking cloud formation. That’s okay, you say. The result will be increased precipitation that returns the Sahara into its once green state—yes, the Sahara was once a land of greenery. The greenery will then alter the former albedo of the sands.
And what happens if the warming doesn’t happen as predicted? What happens if the warming occurs, but instead of dire consequences generates benefits for humanity that equal the losses? And what happens if regardless of temperature patterns, the politicians decide that cheap energy is bad for all?
DILEMMA
Protecting the environment is everyone’s ethical obligation, and that means using electricity prudently. But life is complex. Should we turn off city lights that help to prevent crime? Should we force people to accept the dictates of others? How do we get everyone to cooperate when abundant energy begets abundant wealth, comfort, and freedom?
We should discuss this sometime at a coffee shop by one of those charging stations as we wait our turn to plug in our electric vehicles for another hundred miles of travel.
Notes:
*Delacorte Press.
**July 16, 2021 at https://www.cbs58.com/news/germanys-worst-rainfall-in-a-century-leaves-dozens-dead-and-hundreds-missing-authorities-say
CLIMATE
It really isn’t a matter of climate anymore, is it? It’s become rabid politics. And the two sides on the subject are as divided as can be: Those on one side of the matter say there is no controversy because everyone agrees, that is, everyone save those goofy naysayers, those climate-change deniers, those unscientific dolts. And those dolts on the other side of the issue? Well, from their perspective the science is neither finally determined nor indicative of really bad consequences to come. Humanity, say the “deniers,” isn’t on the brink of extinction because the climates might be changing. They say, “Climates have always changed, sometimes even rapidly, as at the end of the Younger Dryas glacial epoch when climate changed radically in the course of little more than a single millennium (12,800-11,550 years ago), and sometimes in the course of little more than a few decades, as at the end of the Medieval Warm Period and as at the end of the Little Ice Age.”
A BIT OF A PRIMER for Those Who Slept through That Science Lecture
Cimate is the “average weather” over a multidecadal period—usually three decades for a region. The first among meteorologists to classify climates, Wladimer Köppen, used monthly temperatures and precipitation amounts to delineate climates. His system, modified several times by Köppen himself and also by Rudolf Geiger, recognizes subclasses of tropical, dry, temperate, continental, polar, and alpine climates, all designated by letters or combinations of letters (E.g., Dfa and Dfb, two humid continental climates identified by differences in temperatures in certain seasons). Other climatologists like C. W. Thornthwaite added types of vegetation into the classification scheme, and in 1966 Glenn Thomas Trewartha modified the system further. If you look at any climate map, you’ll note that the borders between climates are somewhat debatable. Should climatologists place the boundary between Dfa and Dfb in southern NY or northern PA?
The classification scheme includes not only temperatures and precipitation amounts, but it also includes when those temperatures reach their average highs and when the precipitation occurs. We know, for example, that the best time to vacation in Guatemala, the “Land of Eternal Spring,” lies between November and April, the country’s driest months. More frequent and heavier rains occur in the other months. This climate data is based on only a few centuries worth of observation, but no doubt the ancient Mayans knew when they didn’t need to wear their Wellingtons and carry an umbrella.
Unfortunately, except for proxy information, we have relatively reliable data on weather patterns going back only into the Industrial Age and only for isolated places until the nineteenth century. Even now, it is erroneous to think we have long-term data for every part of the planet, but meteorologists have ever more sophisticated means of acquiring weather information, including data from satellite-based instruments. But to determine past climates, paleoclimatologists have had to rely on proxy data, such as the ratio of O-18 to O-16 in the tests (shells) of foraminifera, the types and locations of fossilized terrestrial plants and animals, and types and compositions of sediments.
Chief among public environmental concerns since the 1970s, climate change has become an ever-more-popular raison d'etre for politicians and public figures. Back then, during the first Earth Days, Chicken Little cried, “The glaciers are coming; the glaciers are coming.” By the 1990s, the cry became “The glaciers are melting; the glaciers are melting.” Climate science entered the world of news media, film, public discussion, and doomsaying. Everyone, it seemed was getting involved. William K. Stevens wrote The Change in the Weather: People, Weather, and the Science of Climate in 1999. * If there is a book on the subject, it must be important, right? Stevens, by the way, was a science reporter for The New York Times. Could there be a more scientific document? What had been science for Wladimer Köppen became a business, a political matter, and an ideology both for people running scared that, as the stereotypical guy holding the sign warns, the end is near, and for people cashing in on government-funded research and science popularization leading to fame. The future, “warmists” declare, looks bleak, baked bleak. Wasn’t the catastrophic moment supposed to occur in 2012? And we’re past that, so, everybody, look out.
THE CAUSE AND ITS EFFECTS
First, Climate Controls
Here’s a list of climate controls:
- Solar activity
- Orbital shape and cycles
- Latitude
- Altitude
- Albedo of surfaces
- Continentality
- Marine air masses
- Ocean currents
- Greenhouse gas ratios
- Volcanic activity
Second, Anthropogenic Activity as a Control
The determined cause of the predicted imminent demise by climate of just about everyone, as you know, is the burning of fossil fuels that releases carbon dioxide. Anthropogenic carbon emissions are, in fact, undeniable. Hey, I measured them for Pennsylvania and the USEPA back in the 1990s. Have those emissions not increased since then? Measurements on top of isolated Mauna Loa confirm a relatively steady increase over the recent past, with quantities of carbon dioxide now reaching over 400 parts per million in our mostly nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere.
Human activities other than burning fossil fuels activities can influence temperatures and precipitation. Stripping forests, paving square miles of cities, altering types of plants from endemic to invasive all change the albedo of Earth’s surface. Creating urban heat islands adds energy to local and regional air masses. Emitting small (2.5 microns) industrially produced particulate matter into the atmosphere can block sunlight. Impounding water in reservoirs, such as Lake Mead, and destroying natural water bodies, such as the five-million year-old Aral Sea, also play a role in climate.
Effects, Panic, and Hasty Conclusions
Now it has become common for people to support their claims that “the end is near” by pointing to droughts and floods, cold spells and heat waves, and hurricanes and tornadoes. Since most people live in the present with little regard to history, and since much of the history of droughts, floods, cold spells, heat waves, hurricanes, and tornadoes is locked in an unrecorded past, any current weather phenomena deemed severe are taken as signs that “things are bad and getting worse.” In August, 2021, at the time of this writing a fire is ravaging the woods of Oregon, and shortly before I put fingers to keyboard, floods killed people in Europe. What more evidence could the common citizen want?
Read this CNN headline: “Germany’s worst rainfall in a century leaves dozens dead and hundreds missing, authorities say.” ** Certainly, there are those who attribute the flooding to climate change. Why, even Germany’s Environment Minister Svenja Schulze tweeted “Climate change has arrived in Germany.” Am I missing something here? I assume that “worst rainfall in a century” implies that Germany had such flooding prior to this event. Indeed, 100-year, 500-year, and 1,000-year floods are called by those names because such floods can occur on average by the designated number. In fact, a location could be hit by two 500-year floods in consecutive years and then not hit again for 1,000 years on the same order of magnitude. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. In 1900 the Galveston Hurricane killed 8,000. The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 was a Category V storm. Don’t forget 1969’s Hurricane Camille, the second Cat 5 hurricane to hit the US in the twentieth century. Bangladesh lost 300,000 in the Great Bhola Cyclone of 1970. Floods? Well, consider that in 1932 the Yangtze River Flood killed more than three million people, at least a million more than the number killed by the 1887 Yellow River Flood. That recent flooding in Europe that killed dozens? Consider that in 1530 the St. Felix’s Flood killed 100,000 in Flanders and Zeeland, and forty years later about 20,000 died during the All Saints’ Flood in the Netherlands.
MOVERS, SHAKERS, AND SOLUTIONS
So, back to mobilized politicians and movers and shakers. They have determined that you, yes YOU, are at fault, you with your insatiable desire for energy. And since you are an addict without self-control, politicians, led by soothsayers from academia and the United Nations, have decided to impose a different way of life, to get you in energy rehab, so to speak. Ignoring that those who do the imposing find it necessary to burn fossil fuels to live comfortably. And ignoring their need to travel to pat-on-the-back friendly conferences, where good food and good times are as much a part of the conferences as policy-making that has yet to be universally turned into results, I’ll simply say that hypocrisy is a common human failing. If the future is really dire, shouldn’t the leaders lead by example?
The consequence of movers and shakers meeting to decide how to get you into rehab, are real. They have convinced prime ministers and presidents, parliaments and congresses, CEOs and boards to take actions that directly affect your life. You, yes YOU, need to switch to renewable energy systems to save the planet from more climate changes, even though you probably owe your existence to climate change in eastern Africa a few millions of years ago when your ancestral hominins first stood upright, and even though climate change might be as good for some people as it is bad for others.
Is there something to this climate change obsession? Probably, but what are YOU going to do about it? Are you going to be happy with low albedo solar panels covering a former high albedo landscape and serving as a heat island? With bird-killing windmills that have fiberglass fan blades that can’t be recycled? With electric batteries galore whose heavy metals will infiltrate soils upon disposal, making ground and surface waters carcinogenic? With energy shortages that bring not only discomfort, but also higher prices for transported goods and services?
Are you listening to Greta, world-renowned teen who scolded the world for stealing her childhood? How, by the way, does the supposed theft of her childhood compare to the conditions imposed by a Syrian dictator, a brutal Caliphate, and an inner-city gang? Oh! Yeah. She got to ply the seas on a sailboat, something I didn’t get to do until I was an adult. Poor kid. And like Greta other kids have been told that the world’s future, their future, is bleak, baking bleak.
And all because you, yes YOU, won’t act to Spartanize your life, the movers and shakers—exempt from their own dictates—now have to impose restrictions that will force you into energy rehab. And not just you. They will attempt to force everyone on the planet into rehab, even those who just want to reach your current level of convenient and abundant energy supply. In the meantime, you will hear all the necessary admonitions for change, such as the mantra about the fictional 97% of scientists that agree that anthropogenic climate change is both real and dangerous.
THE CONSENSUS
If you ask for a list of names, will you see that those scientists aren’t universally climate scientists or paleoclimatologists? Will you see that the list doesn’t reveal the science of the scientists? Will you accept, then, that a medical researcher who is clearly a scientist has an opinion on climate? How about a chemical engineer who works in plastics? A theoretical physicist? Or maybe even a guy who plays a scientist on TV? What does it mean to say “97% of scientists”? I know some scientists—even pretended to be one myself by doing environmental research for the Commonwealth of PA and the Feds—but I don’t know of any survey they ever took. Are you one of the scientists that make up the 97%? If you are, have you examined the data supposedly available to all 97% of scientists, and if you have, do you conclude that the future is dire? That you live in a modern Ur that underwent, among political change, environmental change? Have you sold your house on the Florida coast in anticipation of rising seas, powerful storms, and unbearably hot weather?
And if you wish to logically examine the evidence for a dangerous set of climate changes, what will you, yes YOU, do with temperature data that might have been manipulated or misconstrued to shape public opinion? Changes? You know you have changed the very spot where you live. A thousand years ago there was no house or apartment there. Humans have always altered the planet, and the planet has always altered the way humans live. If you live in a city, you contribute to an urban heat island. What are you going to do about it? Express an opinion?
In 2021 the United States, Greenland, and countries too numerous to mention have leaders who are intent on quashing the use of fossil fuels. They see an urgency that many people agree with but refuse to act on. The U.S. President in 2021 wants to put charging stations across America so that everyone can drive an electric car. Are you going to buy one? Sorry, I didn’t realize you already drive one in your personal effort to save the planet. I’m sarcastic because I can’t envision where the charging stations will get the power for a highly mobile population that is used to being in a hurry, a population that has, by the way, 276 million vehicles.
Slow down, people. Have a conversation at a charging station for the twenty minutes to a half hour it will take to get you another 100 or so miles, at the end of which you’ll need to take the next charging station break. You’ll have the time to talk, time you don’t have in the five minutes it now takes you to fill a gas tank. I can see it now: 50,000 new charging stations and relaxing coffee shops lining the roadways of America; people taking time to meet new people; no one in a hurry; life as slow as it was during the horse-and-buggy days but with fields of solar panels accumulating heat on their dark surfaces. By the way, it will take between 6 to 15 solar panels to charge an electric vehicle. Along I-95 in eastern USA, as many as 300,000 drivers use the highway. Go low here: Six panels times 300,000 vehicles equal 1.8 million solar panels. A 20-square-foot solar panel produces about 250 to 300 Watts. That field of solar panels for just one highway will be huge. Ah! The dream conditions of a carbon-free world. But what if an occluded or stationary front beclouds the sky?
BRAVE NEW WORLD
Should we be concerned about climate change? I’m up in the air, so to speak. A warmer world has existed before; a colder one, too. And both warmer and colder worlds have bookended the existence of all the various human species. What if, however, we, the last of the hominin species, pave the sunny Sahara with solar panels to supply North Africans with abundant energy? Almost every environmental solution generates its own set of problems. Square miles of solar panels will, as I noted above, absorb heat, make their own heat islands, and cause convection currents that will enhance sun-blocking cloud formation. That’s okay, you say. The result will be increased precipitation that returns the Sahara into its once green state—yes, the Sahara was once a land of greenery. The greenery will then alter the former albedo of the sands.
And what happens if the warming doesn’t happen as predicted? What happens if the warming occurs, but instead of dire consequences generates benefits for humanity that equal the losses? And what happens if regardless of temperature patterns, the politicians decide that cheap energy is bad for all?
DILEMMA
Protecting the environment is everyone’s ethical obligation, and that means using electricity prudently. But life is complex. Should we turn off city lights that help to prevent crime? Should we force people to accept the dictates of others? How do we get everyone to cooperate when abundant energy begets abundant wealth, comfort, and freedom?
We should discuss this sometime at a coffee shop by one of those charging stations as we wait our turn to plug in our electric vehicles for another hundred miles of travel.
Notes:
*Delacorte Press.
**July 16, 2021 at https://www.cbs58.com/news/germanys-worst-rainfall-in-a-century-leaves-dozens-dead-and-hundreds-missing-authorities-say
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