TECH CENTRAL STATION:
the governors of the states in New England have vowed to commit their citizens to drastic reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Their Climate Change Action Plan proposes to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2010 and to 10% below 1990 levels by 2020 with an eventual cut to 75-85% below current levels "to eliminate any dangerous threat to the climate" (page 7 of their Climate Change Action Plan report).
Following this lead, David Cohen and Timothy P. Murray, Mayors of Newton and Worcester, MA, respectively, co-authored an op-ed piece for the Boston Globe where they argued "the scientific community has come to a consensus that a 75-85 percent reduction in greenhouse gases is necessary."
A response by Dr. Dick Lindzen, Professor at MIT and resident of Newton, MA, correctly points out the fallacy of these misguided statements -- namely, that such a drastic reduction literally means a return to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide that accompanied the ice age some 21,000 years ago when New England was layered under mile-thick ice! This, of course, raises another important question: "Do these politicians really understand the problem well enough to lead policy formulation?"
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A Mayor Mistake
By Dr. Richard Lindzen Published 09/17/2003
Editor's note: After Newton, Mass., Mayor David Cohen and Worcester, Mass., Mayor Timothy P. Murray published an op-ed boston.com
in the Sept. 1 Boston Globe calling upon the Bay State to put in place a climate action plan to combat global warming, Mayor Cohen received the following letter from a resident of his community.
Dear Mayor Cohen:
As a resident of Newton, a Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, a contributor to climate science for almost 40 years, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a lead author of the second IPCC Climate Assessment, I was amused to see your article (co-written with Mayor Murray of Worcester).
Although I am currently on sabbatical in Paris, a friend was kind enough to e-mail me your article, knowing that I like to collect such pieces. There has been nothing quite like putative global warming to provoke politicians and journalists (and even some scientists) into expressing incoherent hysteria and alarm. Your article is a fine example. The use of the word "could" can of course be used with anything you choose to be alarming about, since rigorously disproving such a claim is logically impossible (or at least difficult).
However, rest assured that whoever is advising you on this matter, has misinformed you when he or she stated that the scientific consensus is that a 75-85 percent reduction in greenhouse gases is necessary. Such a reduction in CO2 would end life as we know it, since most (if not all) plants would not survive at such low levels of CO2 which would be unprecedented in the Earth's history. Moreover, the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor, and the greenhouse effect of clouds also greatly exceed that of CO2.
However, thank goodness, I can't think of any policy that would reduce these essential substances by 75-85%. What you perhaps meant was that a reduction of 60% in emissions of CO2 might be necessary to stabilize levels of CO2. However, the carbon cycle is only poorly understood, and one can't be sure of this. Nor is there any basis for expecting this to eliminate climate change, which occurs all the time -- especially regionally -- without any external forcing at all.
There is nothing controversial about these facts. Neither is there any controversy over the fact that the Kyoto Protocol, itself, will do almost nothing to stabilize CO2. Capping CO2 emissions per unit of electricity generated will have a negligible impact on CO2 levels, but it certainly will (barring, perhaps, the use of nuclear energy) increase the cost of electricity, and place those states pursuing such a path at a distinct competitive disadvantage. Why anyone would want this (even at the admittedly severe risk of appearing politically incorrect), baffles me.
I realize from your article that you and Mayor Murray are hardly interested in the technical fundamentals of this issue, but it still seems worth pointing out that the impact of CO2 on the Earth's heat budget is nonlinear. What this means is that although CO2 has only increased about 30% over its pre-industrial level, the impact on the heat budget of the Earth due to the increases in CO2 and other man influenced greenhouse substances has already reached about 75% of what one expects from a doubling of CO2, and that the temperature rise seen so far is much less (by a factor of 2-3) than models predict (assuming that all of the very irregular change in temperature over the past 120 years or so -- about 1 degree F -- is due to added greenhouse gases-- a very implausible assumption).
If we are, nonetheless, to believe the model predictions, then the argument goes roughly as follows: namely, the models are correct, but some unknown process has cancelled the impact of increasing greenhouse gases, and that process will henceforth cease.
Do you really want to put the welfare of the Commonwealth at risk for such an argument? Judging from your article, your answer is a resounding "yes." I, for one, would hope for greater prudence from my elected officials.
Best wishes,
Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, MIT.
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