In A Nutshell


DANGER! Potential common sense outbreak...

In an study published in Environmental Geology (Volume 50, Number 6 / August, 2006), L. F. Khilyuk and G. V. Chilingar two researchers from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at USC, suggest that:

"identification and understanding of global forces of nature driving the Earth's climate is crucial for developing [an] adequate relationship between people and nature, and for developing and implementing a sound course of action aimed at survival and welfare of the human race.."

Khiluk and Chilingar have a couple of other interesting things to say in their peer-reviewed article...

"[We] identify and describe the following global forces of nature driving the Earth's climate: (1) solar radiation as a dominant external energy supplier to the Earth, (2) outgassing as a major supplier of gases to the World Ocean and the atmosphere, and, possibly, (3) microbial activities generating and consuming atmospheric gases at the interface of lithosphere and atmosphere."

The website CO2 Science (http://www.co2science.org) has as concise a summation as you can get so we'll go with it:

The take-home message of Khilyuk and Chilingar's analysis, as they describe it, is that "any attempts to mitigate undesirable climatic changes using restrictive regulations are condemned to failure, because the global natural forces are at least 4-5 orders of magnitude greater than available human controls." What is more, they indicate that "application of these controls will lead to catastrophic economic consequences," noting that "since its inception in February 2005, the Kyoto Protocol has cost about $50 billion supposedly averting about 0.0005°C of warming by the year 2050," and that "the Kyoto Protocol is a good example of how to achieve the minimum results with the maximum efforts (and sacrifices)." This being the case, they conclude that "attempts to alter the occurring global climatic changes have to be abandoned as meaningless and harmful," and that in their place the "moral and professional obligation of all responsible scientists and politicians is to minimize potential human misery resulting from oncoming global climatic change," hopefully by more immediate, rational and cost-effective means.
-from the CO2 Science website

[MJ note: It's easy to miss the implication of the term "order of magnitude" as a scientific estimation. To say that natural forces are "4-5 orders of magnitude greater than human controls" is to say that they are 10,000 to 100,000 times greater. Or a really lot. Thanks, Wikipedia.]

We're not sure this is what Al Gore was referring to when he said, "The debate on global warming is over" but maybe it should have been.

Just as important as the quantitative research in this article is the identification of the real moral issue involved in global warming: the efficacy of human life on Earth. Most of the time, the global warming debate elevates "nature" to the status of that-which-is-to-be-worshiped. Far too often, we're told conditions must be right for mosquitoes, polar bears and frogs or we are somehow being "immoral."

Identifying "man" as the rightful object of any drive to improve conditions for living on Earth is a major step forward.