DECember 2009 issue
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Readers’ Forum
This Debate is Far From Over
Re: Contrarians’ Arguments Are Not About Science, by J. Edward Mathison, P.Geol., Readers’ Forum, The PEGG, November 2009.
Ratification of the Kyoto treaty by the Obama administration does not signify any final victory in any war. Before long, Obama or the next American president may want to revisit commitments when faced with the hard reality of a countrywide energy crisis, like the one currently happening in California.
The scientific debate has not ended in the final proof that the anthropogenic global warming is happening. The Kyoto proponents try to skip over this issue as quickly as possible, because they feel how hopelessly weak their “scientific evidence” is.
On the pages of The PEGG, pro-climate change writers repeatedly turn a deaf ear to all arguments bringing into equation the balance of water vapour, cloud cover, non-anthropogenic carbon dioxide, globe axis precession and anything else, other than the emissions from the oilsands.
The recent advent of a “global dimming” pattern reverses the observable effects of global warming, such that any pattern of weather can be explained one way or the other. It shows that the proponents of climate change are at no shortage of explanations for whatever pattern emerges, but in the same non-cooperative, war-on-industry way.
I also disagree that engineers have no business interfering into this scientific debate. Engineers, by their professional calling, bring the touch of reality to academic constructs that are often too abstract. They are the ones who have to put ideas to practical work. So, if something that is being fed to them does not seem right, they have the duty to voice their concerns. Or even resist the change if they believe that it is not in the best interest of the society.
Your Max Planck citation does not apply to the case at hand, simply because the anthropogenic global warming is not a “new scientific truth” but merely a hoax that, 20 years from now, no one will remember. Common sense will prevail, but it may cost us a fortune if we decide to obstruct it.
The “global warming” campaign meets such fierce resistance because it has nothing to do with sustainable economic development. It dismisses economic factors, societal needs and the real interests of real people in favour of something that for most of us matters very little.
The current climate science is no science at all. Rather, it purports to be our new religion, which is absorbed not by reason but by faith, and any deviation from it is heresy.
Konstantin Ashkinadze, P.Eng.
Edmonton
A Decade
Is Too Small
A Sample
The Friends of Science began a nationwide radio ad campaign in November. It claimed, among other things and without providing evidence, that the Earth has been cooling for the last 10 years — the implication being that global warming is not real or is insignificant.
What global temperature has been doing in recent years can be seen by checking the data on various reputable websites. Looking at the graphed data over the last 30 years, the same pattern is evident in all analyses: sawtooth variations of different frequencies and amplitudes about an overall rising trend.
Going back over 100 years, it can be seen that the pattern is similar. While there are short periods of cooling, the overall trend is sharply positive. This is reflected in recent absolute temperatures.
In saying there’s been cooling in the last 10 years, the Friends of Science ignore all this. Instead, the group cherry-picks its interval from the anomalously hot 1998 to 2008. If members instead compared 1997 to 2007, 1999 to 2009, or any other year after 1990 to its counterpart in the 2000s, they would conclude that the globe had warmed.
In the presence of the sawtooth variability evident in the records, however, such short-term analyses are meaningless. To determine a statistically significant trend, it is necessary to consider a data series sufficiently long that short-term positive and negative variations are cancelled.
To anyone without an agenda who inspects graphs of or performs statistics on global temperature data, it should be evident that on any timescale longer than about a decade and a half, the trend has been, and remains, a positive one. To claim, as the Friends of Science radio ads do, that the planet has cooled in the last 10 years is, in the words of independent statisticians who were recently blind tested on global temperature data, deceptive.
Short-term trends of both cooling and faster warming are superimposed on a much longer-term trend that has continued to increase global temperature for over 100 years. By ignoring the forest for the trees, the message of these ads is wrong. They mislead the public and they should be removed.
Dr. Jürgen Kraus, P.Geol.
Calgary
The Anti Side
Is Well Argued
By Australian
Anyone seriously interested in the important but complex issue of climate change should read Heaven and Earth — Global Warming: The Missing Science. The author is Ian Plimer, an Australian academic and businessman. Dr. Plimer writes on climate change as scientific and historical fact, and not from a special interest point of view.
If you have not read Dr. Plimer’s book then you cannot speak with authority on the subject of climate change or global warming. There are two sides to this debate and in this book I have read an intelligent account of the other side.
W.D. Watson, P.Eng.
Queensland, Australia
How Trees
Help Cool
The Climate
Temperatures are rising. Although both sides are adamant in their interpretations of the cause, there may be something else to blame that is both measurable and beyond speculation. Desertification, deforestation and overpopulation — all are interconnected and all are part of global warming.
My own epiphany came from a story told to me by a wonderful old friend, Ernst Klaszus. Ernst is an expert wangler, and a few years ago, a sponsor offered a tour around Japan for the young members of the Alberta Junior Forest Wardens.
As part of the tour, everybody got off the bus at a small nursery. A Japanese guide told the youths they were lucky, because on this sunny day, with a slight breeze, they would learn something special. He handed each person a stethoscope and directed each one to find a suitable tree in a grove of a native deciduous species. Place your stethoscope on the trunk, he said, and listen.
Ernst said. “It sounded like water running — like a brook — with water coursing over stones.”
As the breeze blew, this water was transpiring from each leaf. Everyone heard the sound, but normally you would not even be cognizant of this process, just as you seldom notice your own heartbeat. Water was moving through the trees, from root, by sap, to leaves, where as part of the photosynthesis it transpired to the atmosphere.
I knew that trees used carbon dioxide, but to do it, they need nutrients, sunshine, chlorophyll and ethylene. In the process of bringing nutrients to their leaves or needles and making cellulose to build plant cells, trees transpire tremendous quantities of water.
This is what Klaus heard, when he and the others held stethoscopes to the tree trunks.
Trees breathe in carbon dioxide, but they also breathe out water vapour and oxygen — and thereby cool the Earth. Fewer trees, less cooling.
Dr. A. K. Hellum, professor emeritus of forestry at the University of Alberta, tells me that after a clear-cut, because the trees are no longer there to transpire water, the forest floor temperature will rise dramatically. Flooding often results. The trees act not only as a positive evaporative cooling system, but insulate the Earth from the sun.
Through careless harvesting and slash-and-burn farming, reforestation efforts are doomed to failure. And if we take away trees and eliminate their cooling effect, the temperature of the stripped ground rises. Simple as that. Trees help to control global warming. And the world will need billions of trees to make a difference.
Forty years ago, my boss, Dr. Nat Grace, the then director of the Alberta Research Council, used to say when there was a problem, “Call in the engineers!” Engineers are probably best suited to solving problems that concern building, transportation, communication and energy supply.
In a shrinking world, where ingenuity in all these fields will be needed, let’s look up from the page and see where we are going. Let’s use our ability to make the world operate less wastefully. We would perform this function better if we looked at the problem, not the symptoms.
Henry A. Spencer, P.Eng.
Edmonton
Shorter Letters
Needed In
New PEGG
The next edition of The PEGG, coming out in early February, will be our first in the new magazine format. Long letters do not fit the format, so out of necessity we will be strictly adhering to a 300-word limit.
Longer letters — ones that can’t be reasonably reduced to 300 words through editing — will be published on the APEGGA website only. Writers who want to ensure their arguments appear on paper, in the hardcopy PEGG, will need to make their points within the word limit.
Online, readers will be able to link directly to writers’ source material and respond in a moderated comment area, under each letter.
Send your letters to me at glee@apegga.org, whether intended for online or hardcopy publication.
George Lee
Managing Editor
The PEGG
CORRECTION NOTICE
Re: Value of Professional Services 2009
The overall average salary was listed in the summary published in the September 2009 PEGG as $117,208.57, an increase over 2008 of 10 per cent. This is an error. In fact, the average overall salary was $109,487.93, an increase of 1.43 per cent
This error does not extend into the long form of the report.