The Chemistry of Climate Change
Sunday, January 3, 2010
The day after Christmas I traveled to Sacramento with my family to see the Kings lose to Kobe and the Lakers in double overtime. It was an exciting game and while they lost, I remain enthused about this young Kings team and its future prospects.
The day of the game we went down early to the Arden Fair Mall and of course I found my way to Barnes and Noble where I bought a book and magazine. The book is called On Being Certain, Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, by Robert Burton, M.D.
Dr. Burton tells us,
Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of "knowing what we know" arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason."
Burton states, "A stance of absolute certainty that precludes consideration of alternative opinions has always struck me as fundamentally wrong. But such accusations are meaningless without the backing of hard science."
Burton relates the interesting findings from the Challenger Study in which the day after the space shuttle Challenger exploded in space, 106 psychology students were asked "to write down exactly how they'd heard about the explosion, where they were, what they'd been doing, and how they felt."
Approximately thirty-three months later one out of four of these students recalled something "strikingly different than their original journal entries" and most had "lesser degrees of error." Only about 10 percent had perfect recall.
When confronted with the discrepancy between what they remembered and what they wrote, many claimed their false recollections were correct. One student insisted, "That's my handwriting, but that's not what happened."
Can we trust ourselves? How do we know what we know is true? The answer, I believe lies with the scientific method. We either believe in science or we do not. If we believe in science we are willing to change our views as the data demands. When it comes to climate change, many rely not on science but on ideology. A good scientist, on the other hand, is not wedded to any particular outcome but conducts scientific investigations that remove all bias and ensure valid and reliable results.
Thousands of studies over several decades have led many major scientific organizations to develop consensus statements on climate change. In my last blog I described how the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society released statements acknowledging the essential facts of anthropogenic climate change.
Physics, Chemistry, Geology and Biology represent the main branches of science. We know what the physicists think. What about the chemists?
According to Hazen and Trefil in Science Matters, chemists are "pragmatists...maintain close ties to industry" and "hold more patents than any other kind of scientist."
The American Chemical Society (ACS) "represents both research chemists and chemical engineers."
With 160,000 members, including environmentalists and major chemical corporations, it is the largest science society in America.
The ACS "is the leading publisher of peer-reviewed research journals in the chemical and related sciences, serving scientific communities worldwide through an unparalleled commitment to quality, reliability, and innovation."
The most recent ACS Statement on Global Climate Change released in 2007 once again acknowledged human activity as the primary cause of changes to "Earth's climate system."
Careful and comprehensive scientific assessments have clearly demonstrated that the Earth's climate system is changing rapidly in response to growing atmospheric burdens of greenhouse gases and absorbing aerosol particles (IPCC, 2007)."
"There is very little room for doubt that observed climate trends are due to human activities. The threats are serious and action is urgently needed to mitigate the risks of climate change."
The reality of global warming, its current serious and potentially disastrous impacts on Earth system properties, and the key role emissions from human activities play in driving these phenomena have been recognized by earlier versions of this ACS policy statement (ACS, 2004), by other major scientific societies, including the American Geophysical Union (AGU, 2003), the American Meteorological Society (AMS, 2007) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 2007), and by the U. S. National Academies and ten other leading national academies of science (NA, 2005)."
This statement also reviews specific "global climate change impacts" that are expected as we continue business as usual.
The ACS states "the effects of...climate change...over the next fifty years will be profound and, quite possibly, irreversible."
Science predicts:
• Higher surface temperatures will severely impact many land-based life forms, damaging vulnerable ecosystems and endangering key plant and animal species.
• Sea level is rising and the ocean is acidifying; the first threatens coastal habitations and ecosystems, the second will have profound effects on marine ecosystems.
• Snowfall and snowmelt patterns are changing and rainfall patterns may also be unstable, threatening fresh water supplies in vulnerable regions.
• Increases in severe weather events are very likely, with increasing damage due to floods, drought, and heat waves.
• We are, in effect, in the midst of a vast experiment with the Earth's climate--with uncertain, but likely quite unpleasant, outcomes.
• The costs of unchecked climate change in economic loss, human misery, and loss of ecosystem services are likely to be enormous.
What do we learn from this? Once again, like the battle between creationism and evolution, this is an argument between those who believe in science and those who only pretend to believe.
We can open our minds to the possibility that our certainty may be unfounded and that it is within the realm of reason that these scientists know more than we do about scientific concerns. Or not. Either way, it is an interesting process to study how we come to "know" what we think we know.
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