Warming to Efficiency

Readers of recent news reports may think it's news that U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global-warming gas, are at an all-time high. The real news would be if they dropped steeply, which could only occur with a very warm winter (less space heating), a very cold summer (less air conditioning) or a huge recession, because it takes energy to make things.

Carbon dioxide has been called breath of our civilization, and as we are technologically constituted, it most certainly is. We burn fossil fuels (which combust mainly to carbon dioxide and water) for manufacturing, to go places, and to produce electrical power. While we could certainly substitute in more nuclear fuels for power production, the same forces that are so exercised about global warming being caused by carbon dioxide, in general, won't permit the nuclear option. (That being the definition of environmental insincerity.)

So it is not news at all that our emissions are at a record high along with GDP. What is more newsworthy is how the emissions per unit of GDP -- the economic bang for the energy buck -- continue their steady decline. We now produce a constant dollar's worth of goods and services with only 78% of the energy we used in 1990. In 1990, we used about two-thirds of the energy we used in 1970 for the same dollar's worth. These are remarkable increases in efficiency in the last 35 years.

The New York Times recently reported that the 2004 change in overall emissions was nearly double the annual average, neglecting to report that single-year statistics are virtually meaningless. If one had taken the average of the last five years and compared that to figures generated back to the mid-'90s, percent changes in emissions of carbon dioxide turn out to be remarkably constant.

For 1999-2004 the increase averaged 0.8% per year. From 1996 through 2001 the change averaged 1.0%. Given year-to-year fluctuations, these numbers are indistinguishable from each other.

The same applies on a global scale. Our computer models for global warming have assumed, for decades, that carbon dioxide would increase at 1% per year in the atmosphere. For those decades the real rate of increase has been quite constant, and less than half of 1%. In the ten years ending in 2004, the average rate of increase was 0.49%. Ten years before it was 0.41%, and ten years before that, 0.42%. This is why climate models have generally predicted too much warming, too fast -- about twice as much, in fact.

Taken together, all of these facts mean that most of the assumptions about the growth of global warming gases in the atmosphere have to be thrown out. There's little, if any, exponential increase, and the vibrant economies continue to produce more and more things with fewer increments of carbon dioxide.

But, if carbon dioxide is the cost of economic growth, it would seem obvious that it will continue its upwards ascent for the foreseeable future. Will it? The answer lies in the well-established trends towards increasing efficiency in economies such as the United States' (despite the large number of SUV's panting in increasingly long traffic jams). This did not happen here because of concerns about global warming -- because no one really gave much of a care about it until New Orleans got smacked by a Category 3 (yes, it's been downgraded) hurricane.

Instead, the increases in efficiency resulted because businesses compete with each other to produce things that cost less to run and build. And, if they are built, people will come. And so do investors. As an example of this process, get on your Yahoo financial tracker and plot the stock performance of Honda, Toyota, GM and Ford for the last two years. You'll find the share price of the producers of the Accord and the Camry up an average of 40% while the American companies have dropped 50% in value. This creates a snowball effect in a warming world. People in vibrant economies have capital to invest in increasingly efficient companies, which rewards them with more capital, which is re-invested etc.

The prospering companies are efficient in many ways. They use less energy to produce cars in their newer plants. Their cars use less energy on the road. Their labor forces tend to be relatively young and they haven't been promised the moon in benefits and retirement with 40% of their time on earth left to run. As these companies accumulate capital, they have been reinvesting it in development of even more efficient vehicles, some of which may emit no carbon dioxide at all, which means that some day the pressures for efficiency may indeed drive carbon dioxide emissions down. But, without investment in those technologies -- made by private individuals in publicly traded corporations -- be assured that development of the clean machines of the future will be delayed until the planet gets warmer than some might want it.

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The Age of Corporate Environmentalism

Surprise--big business has learned that it's pretty easy being green. It's just a matter of finding inexpensive ways of accomodating Greenie nuttiness. Ya gotta keep the customers happy. To a businessman, a fad is just another market

Ask Bob Langert about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and he starts to chuckle. "When we meet the regulators, it's kind of nice," says the senior director for social responsibility at the McDonald's Corporation. "We just got an award from the EPA. When we see the regulators, we always hope it's because they're giving us an award."

Such coziness between big business and big government might make readers nervous-but it's not what you think. McDonald's won this year's Climate Protection Award by cooperating with Greenpeace to build a prototype McDonald's restaurant with greener refrigerant technologies, which reduce problematic emissions from cooling units and cut energy costs by 17 percent. Cooperation between corporations and greens was done right, and everybody won.

Well, almost everyone won. It was a shame to lose a perfectly good bad guy. The idea of the rich corporate villain gleefully dirtying Mother Earth is powerful and appealing. Children of the 1980s encountered this supervillain in comics, movies, public awareness videos, and science textbooks. Times were good for mandatory recycling, for mandatory emissions reductions, for anything mandatory aimed at restraining corporate polluters.

But in the late '90s, something peculiar started happening. The men in suits were still middle-aged, round, and white. They were still just as concerned with profit and golf. Very few of them sported tie-dyed attire, aside from the occasional whimsical Jerry Garcia tie. But the men in suits started caring. Or at least acting like they cared. Which, if you ask a spotted owl, is the same thing. So environmental activists across the nation bought their own ties and started dealing with corporations as almost-equal partners in planet saving. Businesses in turn learned that it's pretty easy being green.

"What's hot right now are voluntary environmental programs," says Jorge Rivera, assistant professor at the George Washington University business school. Mandatory environmentalism is "effective, but expensive," Rivera says, and it often produces nothing but "greenwashing," where companies satisfy the letter of the law as quickly and as cheaply as they can rather than making a serous effort to innovate. (In some cases, this actually means an increase in environmental damage, as when harmful emissions are converted to less-regulated but more harmful forms.) And since "a lot of the big, obvious stuff has already been done," Rivera notes, it isn't really effective to mandate uniform change to bring about marginal gains. So to ward off excessive regulation, help the bottom line, and get brownie points at the same time, companies started playing nice with environmental groups.....

Oily P.R. Stunts

Environmental groups are (mostly) thrilled to have made so much progress-FedEx drivers in San Francisco use hybrid delivery trucks, Starbucks uses fewer disposable cups-but are still understandably wary of the corporations' motives. Perhaps you too suspect that companies are making nice with greens only for the good P.R. And perhaps you suspect that they only make changes when there's a profit to be made. If so, you are almost completely right.

But there are better and worse ways to strike the balance between the demands of shareholders and the demands of Greenpeace. For an example of a company apparently trying to single-handedly save the planet through expensive public relations alone, one needn't look farther than the corporate darling of serious environmentalists and greenish consumers alike: BP

BP is first among many companies that have opted to do their environmental penance in the glare of the spotlight. British Petroleum (recently rechristened BP, following KFC's model in removing unsavory words from its brand name) has been much ballyhooed for its commitment to the environment. Most of the ballyhooing is being done by BP itself.

A gas and oil company with $225 billion in revenue, BP is part of an industry that will keep environmental advocacy groups in business for as long at it exists. Yet these days BP is styling itself "Beyond Petroleum" and declaring that it's "thinking outside the barrel." BP's Environmental Team has crafted an elaborate advertising campaign and rebranding effort, recently expanded to the Web. Its goal: to convince the world that a company that sucks dead dinosaurs out of the earth, turns them into gasoline, and delivers that gas to SUVs can also be environmentally friendly enough to use a green and yellow sunburst (or is it a flower?) as its logo.

On the company's Web site, casual visitors can select from the following tabs: "About BP," "Environment and Society," and "Products and Services." In that order. Never mind that BP's spending on green projects constitutes less than half of 1 percent of its revenue. It publicly supports stricter pollution regulations and the Kyoto Protocols, the international agreement calling for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and gives money to groups that lobby for both. BP is selling itself as the anti-ExxonMobil.

Greening Home Depot

Home Depot offers another, perhaps more sustainable model of green-corporate cooperation. It decided to use its power in the lumber market to do some good-after a little gentle prodding from the Rainforest Action Network.

Ron Jarvis, now Home Depot's vice president of merchandising for lumber products, enjoys recounting the tizzy his career trajectory caused in environmental circles. In 1999 Jarvis' bosses asked him to leave his position as a regional merchandise manager and come to their Atlanta headquarters to serve as the environmental global product manager. A "shock wave went through some of the environmental groups," he says. They were aghast that "Home Depot had just taken one of their lumber guys and put [him] over the environment."

Politically speaking, the late '90s had been rough years for the company. The Rainforest Action Network (RAN) had targeted it for selling wood from illegally cut rainforests and old-growth forests. And when RAN targets you, expect more than a letter writing campaign. On May 25, 1999, the group announced a day of "ethical shoplifting" and encouraged its members to "borrow" timber from Home Depots across the country, which they later handed over to the FBI. A guy in a black bear costume affixed himself to one store's rafters and hollered through a bullhorn about Home Depot's failings. It wasn't clear that Home Depot, a national chain frequented by suburban men primarily interested in low prices and the horsepower available in competing models of riding lawnmowers, would have the will or the energy to transform itself.

In 2005 Home Depot sold more than $400 million in wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. It does not buy old-growth timber or wood from recently cleared rainforests. Its Web site boasts that "typical Team Depot activities include conservation projects, beautification efforts, and cleanups." Every Home Depot employee is required to keep an animal from an endangered species as a pet. (Just kidding about that last one.)

Four-hundred million dollars seems like a lot of wood, and Home Depot is the largest lumber buyer in the world. But its purchases account for only about 1 percent of the trees cut down worldwide. Still, says Jarvis, who has the authority to sever logging contracts with any supplier whose practices harm endangered forests or otherwise injure the environment, "Does that mean that we turn our back and walk away and say that we do not have a social responsibility, that the impact's not great enough? No."

Actually, as Jarvis recently reminded an audience at the Companies for Corporate Responsibility investor conference, Home Depot has been buying certified wood since 1994. The problem, it discovered, was that the supply of certified wood wasn't adequate; people still bought the cheaper, uncertified stuff if given the choice. After RAN's campaign grew more intense, Home Depot decided to use its market power to reduce the price of certified wood by selling it exclusively. The will, Jarvis says, was there all along. The company just needed a little reassurance that customers who wouldn't pay extra from conscience alone would still buy at Home Depot when asked to fork over a few more cents per two-by-four.....

The Greenpeace-Big Mac Ceasefire

In the run-up to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Greenpeace threatened a campaign against companies (at the time sponsoring a "green" Olympic village) that failed to invest in new refrigerant technology. Greenpeace advocated propane as an alternative coolant, but "we didn't agree with their solution," says Langert, mostly because propane is "flammable, explosive. And we're not taking any safety risks." McDonald's partnered with Coca-Cola and other suppliers to develop a carbon dioxide-based cooling system. Then it built its prototype in Denmark.

As it turns out, the Denmark store uses a lot less energy-17 percent less-than a regular McDonald's. The hardware costs are higher, since McDonald's had to design many units from scratch, but the energy savings are incentive enough to keep working on the technology because of the long-term savings it provides. "We just had another refrigeration summit meeting," says Langert. He thinks it is important to encourage voluntary cooperation with other players, because "we need others demanding industry standards. We can't do it alone."

Even Greenpeace likes the results. "It's good," it announced in a press release about the EPA's Climate Protection Award, "to see Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Unilever stepping up with solutions. We look forward to continued work with these companies to reduce global warming emissions." Don't get too happy, though: "As always, Greenpeace approaches our relationships with these corporations very deliberately and seriously. While we are proud of our continuing work with Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Unilever on green refrigeration technology, it is obviously not a Greenpeace stamp of approval on the overall environmental and social footprints of these companies."......

Langert, who is 49, says he knows he predates Murray's generation, which takes corporate cooperation on environmental initiatives for granted. He's sanguine about the future of the alliance, even as he looks with a jaundiced eye at some of his greener colleagues. He notes that he has had a career trajectory that they could do worse than to imitate. He says he has "managed to do the right thing, somehow, fairly often." He pauses, then sums up corporate environmentalism in a single tidy sentence: "We were willing to invest money into something, but if is really going to be sustainable, it has to be economical as well." ....

McDonald's executive Mats Lederhausen puts it more colorfully. Lederhausen was instrumental in instituting green-friendly policies when he ran McDonald's Sweden. Swedish McDonald's, not to be outdone by its Danish neighbors and their fancy HFC-free prototype, buys all of its energy from renewable sources and serves organic food. Lederhausen has long argued that "doing good is good business" and apparently can get quite upset at the environmental movement's residual anti-corporatism. When he was asked, by author Marc Gunther, to respond to the criticism that McDonald's could be truly socially responsible only by shutting down, he fired out this reply: "That really pisses me off, quite frankly. You don't attract 46 million customers daily by happenstance. You do it because you fill a need that is pretty strong and because your products are pretty damn good. I'm not saying there aren't a lot of things we can do better. But, I mean, give us a break. We deserve a break today!"

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CO2-induced global warming: a skeptic's view of potential climate change

(Excerpt from a paper by Sherwood B. Idso in which he looks at what has actually been happening rather than at "models")

ABSTRACT:

Over the course of the past 2 decades, I have analyzed a number of natural phenomena that reveal how Earth's near surface air temperature responds to surface radiative perturbations. These studies all suggest that a 300 to 600 ppm doubling of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration could raise the planet's mean surface air temperature by only about 0.4øC. Even this modicum of warming may never be realized, however, for it could be negated by a number of planetary cooling forces that are intensified by warmer temperatures and by the strengthening of biological processes that are enhanced by the same rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration that drives the warming. Several of these cooling forces have individually been estimated to be of equivalent magnitude, but of opposite sign, to the typically predicted greenhouse effect of a doubling of the air's CO2 content, which suggests to me that little net temperature change will ultimately result from the ongoing buildup of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere. Consequently, I am skeptical of the predictions of significant CO2 induced global warming that are being made by state-of-the-art climate models and believe that much more work on a wide variety of research fronts will be required to properly resolve the issue.


1. INTRODUCTION

Twenty years ago I was heavily involved in the measurement of solar and thermal radiation fluxes at the surface of the Earth, concentrating on their responses to changes in atmospheric composition that were produced by unique local weather phenomena. About the same time I also became interested in carbon dioxide induced global warming; and I decided to see if I could learn something about the subject from the natural experiments provided by the special meteorological situations I was investigating.

My idea was to determine the magnitudes of radiative perturbations created by various climatic events and observe how the near surface air temperature responded to the resultant changes in the surface radiation balance. From this information I sought to develop a surface air temperature sensitivity factor, defined as the rise in surface air temperature divided by the increase in surface-absorbed radiation that prompted the temperature rise. Then, by multiplying this factor by the increase in downwelling thermal radiation expected to be received at the surface of the Earth as a result of a doubling of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration, I hoped to obtain a rough estimate of the likely magnitude of future CO2 induced global warming.

[.....]

3. RISING CO2 AND THE GLOBAL WARMING OF THE PAST CENTURY

As demonstrated by the results of the several natural experiments described above, a large body of real-world evidence points to the likelihood of a future CO2 -induced global warming of but a tenth to a third of what is currently predicted by theoretical numerical models of the Earth-ocean-atmosphere system. However, the observed global warming of the past century, which has occurred in concert with a 75 ppm rise in the air's CO2 content, has already exceeded the 0.4øC increase in temperature that my analyses suggest would require an atmospheric CO2 increase of fully 300 ppm; and it is only natural to wonder if this relatively large warming of the last hundred years was produced by the relatively small concurrent rise in the air's CO2 content. This question is of crucial importance, for if the global warming of the past century was wholly the result of the concurrent rise in atmospheric CO2 , it would imply that the primary conclusion derived from my natural experiments is incorrect.

Although the question cannot be unequivocally resolved at the present time, it is possible that the warming of the Earth over the last hundred years may well have been wholly unrelated to the concurrent rise in atmospheric CO2 ; for the observed temperature increase may have been produced by changes in a number of other climatically-important factors, such as the energy output of the sun, for example, which is looking more and more like a major determinant of Earth's climate each year (Baliunas & Jastrow 1990, Foukal & Lean 1990, Friis-Christensen & Lassen 1991, Lockwood et al. 1992, Scuderi 1993, Charvatova & Strestik 1995, Lean et al. 1995, Baliunas & Soon 1996, 1998, Soon et al. 1996, Hoyt & Schatten 1997). Indeed, it is even possible that the global warming of the past century may have been nothing more than a random climatic fluctuation.

That some alternative explanation of the observed warming is, in fact, quite plausible is readily evident when the temperature increase of the past century is viewed from the broader perspective of the past millennium. From this improved vantage point, the warming of the last hundred years is seen to be basically a recovery (Idso 1988b, Reid 1993) from the global chill of the Little Ice Age, which was a several-hundred-year period of significantly cooler temperatures than those of the present that persisted until the end of the nineteenth century (Grove 1988, Whyte 1995). And as ice-core data give no indication of any drop in atmospheric CO2 over the period of the Little Ice Age's induction (Friedli et al. 1984, 1986), something other than CO2 had to have initiated it, implying that the inverse of that something-or even something else (or nothing at all, in the case of a random climatic fluctuation) -is likely to have been the cause of its demise.

But what if temperatures were to rise even higher in the future? Here, again, the long historical perspective proves invaluable; for it reveals that the Little Ice Age was preceded by a several-centuries-long period of significantly warmer temperatures than those of the present (Le Roy Ladurie 1971, Lamb 1977, 1984, 1988, Keigwin 1996). And while the Earth was traversing the entire temperature range from the maximum warmth of this Little Climatic Optimum (Dean 1994, Petersen 1994, Serre-Bachet 1994, Villalba 1994) to the coolest point of the Little Ice Age, the CO2 content of the atmosphere, as inferred from ice-core data, varied not at all (Idso 1988b). Consequently, the Earth can clearly warm even more than it has already warmed over the last century without any change in atmospheric CO2 , suggesting that even continued global warming- which appears to have peaked (Hurrell & Trenberth 1997, Spencer 1997)-would imply very little (and possibly nothing at all) about the potential for future CO2 -induced climatic change.

4. COOLING THE GLOBAL GREENHOUSE

Although the evidence I have presented suggests that a doubling of the air's CO2 content could raise Earth's mean surface air temperature by only about 0.4øC, there are a number of reasons to question whether even this minor warming will ever occur. There are, for example, a variety of ways by which rising temperatures may strengthen the cooling properties of clouds and thereby retard global warming. In addition, several biological processes that are enhanced by the aerial fertilization effect of atmospheric CO2 enrichment can directly intensify these climate-cooling forces.

With respect to the first of these subjects, it has long been recognized that the presence of clouds has a strong cooling effect on Earth's climate (Barkstrom 1984, ERBE Science Team 1986, Nullet 1987, Nullet & Ekern 1988, Ramanathan et al. 1989). In fact, it has been calculated that a mere 1% increase in planetary albedo would be sufficient to totally counter the entire greenhouse warming that is typically predicted to result from a doubling of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration (Ramanathan 1988). And as the typically predicted warming may be 3 to 10 times larger than what could actually occur, according to my interpretation of the real-world evidence I have presented herein, it is possible that but a tenth to a third of a 1% increase in planetary albedo may be sufficient to accomplish this feat.

Within this context, it has been shown that a 10% increase in the amount of low-level clouds could completely cancel the typically-predicted warming of a doubling of the air's CO2 content by reflecting more solar radiation back to space (Webster & Stephens 1984). In addition, Ramanathan & Collins (1991), by the use of their own natural experiments, have shown how the warming-induced production of high-level clouds over the equatorial oceans totally nullifies the green-house effect of water vapor there, with high clouds dramatically increasing from close to 0% coverage at sea surface temperatures of 26øC to fully 30% coverage at 29øC (Kiehl 1994). And in describing the implications of this strong negative feedback mechanism, Ramanathan & Collins state that `it would take more than an order-of-magnitude increase in atmospheric CO2 to increase the maximum sea surface temperature by a few degrees,' which they acknowledge is a considerable departure from the predictions of most general circulation models of the atmosphere.

In addition to increasing their coverage of the planet, as they appear to do in response to an increase in temperature (Henderson-Sellers 1986a, b, McGuffie & Henderson-Sellers 1988, Dai et al. 1997), clouds in a warmer world would also have greater liquid water contents than they do now (Paltridge 1980, Charlock 1981, 1982, Roeckner 1988). And as the heat-conserving greenhouse properties of low to mid level clouds are already close to the maximum they can attain (Betts & Harshvardhan 1987), while their reflectances for solar radiation may yet rise substantially (Roeckner et al. 1987), an increase in cloud liquid water content would tend to counteract an initial impetus for warming even in the absence of an increase in cloud cover. By incorporating just this one negative feedback mechanism into a radiative-convective climate model, for example, the warming predicted to result from a doubling of the air's CO2 content has been shown to fall by fully 50% (Somerville & Remer 1984); while a 20 to 25% increase in cloud liquid water path has been shown to totally negate the typically-predicted warming of a doubling of the air's CO2 content in a 3-dimensional general circulation model of the atmosphere Slingo 1990).

Another negative feedback mechanism involving clouds, which is estimated to be of the same strength as the typically-predicted greenhouse effect of CO2 (Lovelock 1988, Turner et al. 1996), has been described by Charlson et al. (1987). They suggest that the productivity of oceanic phytoplankton will increase in response to an initial impetus for warming, with the result that one of the ultimate by-products of the enhanced algal metabolism-dimethyl sulfide, or DMS-will be produced in more copious quantities. Diffusing into the atmosphere where it is oxidized and converted into particles that function as cloud condensation nuclei, this augmented flux of DMS is projected to create additional and/or higher-albedo clouds, which will thus reflect more solar radiation back to space, thereby cooling the Earth and countering the initial impetus for warming (Shaw 1983, 1987).

There is much evidence-700 papers in the past 10 yr (Andreae & Crutzen 1997)-to support the validity of each link in this conceptual chain of events. First, there is the demonstrated propensity for oceanic phytoplankton to increase their productivity in response to an increase in temperature (Eppley 1972, Goldman & Carpenter 1974, Rhea & Gotham 1981), which fact is clearly evident in latitudinal distributions of marine productivity (Platt & Sathyendranath 1988, Sakshaug 1988). Second, as oceanic phytoplankton photosynthesize, they are known to produce a substance called dimethylsulfonio propionate (Vairava-murthy et al. 1985), which disperses throughout the surface waters of the oceans when the phytoplankton either die or are eaten by zooplankton (Dacey & Wakeham 1988, Nguyen et al. 1988) and which decomposes to produce DMS (Turner et al. 1988). Third, it has been shown that part of the DMS thus released to the Earth's oceans diffuses into the atmosphere, where it is oxidized and converted into sulfuric and methanesulfonic acid particles (Bonsang et al. 1980, Hatakeyama et al. 1982, Saltzman et al. 1983, Andreae et al. 1988, Kreidenweis & Seinfeld 1988) that function as cloud condensation nuclei or CCN (Saxena 1983, Bates et al. 1987). And more CCN can clearly stimulate the production of new clouds and dramatically increase the albedos of pre-existent clouds by decreasing the sizes of the clouds' component droplets (Twomey & Warner 1967, Warner & Twomey 1967, Hudson 1983, Coakley et al. 1987, Charlson & Bates 1988, Durkee 1988), which phenomenon tends to cool the planet by enabling clouds to reflect more solar radiation back to space (Idso 1992b, Saxena et al. 1996). In fact, it has been calculated that a 15 to 20% reduction in the mean droplet radius of Earth's boundary-layer clouds would produce a cooling influence that could completely cancel the typically-predicted warming influence of a doubling of the air's CO2 content (Slingo 1990).

Another way in which the enhanced production of CCN may retard warming via a decrease in cloud droplet size is by reducing drizzle from low-level marine clouds, which lengthens their life-span and thereby expands their coverage of the planet (Albrecht 1988). In addition, since drizzle from stratus clouds tends to stabilize the atmospheric boundary layer by cooling the sub-cloud layer as a portion of the drizzle evaporates (Brost et al. 1982, Nicholls 1984), a CCN-induced reduction in drizzle tends to weaken the stable stratification of the boundary layer, enhancing the transport of water vapor from ocean to cloud. As a result, clouds containing extra CCN tend to persist longer and perform their cooling function for a longer period of time.

The greater numbers of CCN needed to enhance these several cooling phenomena are also produced by biological processes on land (Went 1966, Duce et al. 1983, Roosen & Angione 1984, Meszaros 1988); and in the terrestrial environment the volatilization of reduced sulfur gases from soils is particularly important in this regard (Idso 1990). Here, too, one of the ways in which the ultimate cooling effect is set in motion is by an initial impetus for warming. It has been reported, for example, that soil DMS emissions rise by a factor of 2 for each 5øC increase in temperature between 10 and 25øC (Staubes et al. 1989); and as a result of the enhanced microbial activity produced by increasing warmth (Hill et al. 1978, MacTaggart et al. 1987), there is a 25-fold increase in soil-to-air sulfur flux between 25øN and the equator (Adams et al. 1981). Of even greater importance, however, is the fact that atmospheric CO2 enrichment alone can initiate the chain of events that leads to cooling.

Consider the fact, impressively supported by literally hundreds of laboratory and field experiments (Lemon 1983, Cure & Acock 1986, Mortensen 1987, Lawlor & Mitchell 1991, Drake 1992, Poorter 1993, Idso & Idso 1994, Strain & Cure 1994), that nearly all plants are better adapted to higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations than those of the present, and that the productivity of most herbaceous plants rises by 30 to 50% for a 300 to 600 ppm doubling of the air's CO2 content (Kimball 1983, Idso 1992a), while the growth of many woody plants rises even more dramatically (Idso & Kimball 1993, Ceulemans & Mousseau 1994, Wull-schleger et al. 1995, 1997). Because of this stimulatory effect of elevated carbon dioxide on plant growth and development, the productivity of the biosphere has been rising hand-in-hand with the recent historical rise in the air's CO2 content (Idso 1995), as is evident in:

(1) the ever-increasing amplitude of the seasonal cycle of the air's CO2 concentration (Pearman & Hyson 1981, Cleveland et al. 1983, Bacastow et al. 1985, Keeling et al. 1985, 1995, 1996, Myneni et al. 1997),

(2) the upward trends in a number of long tree-ring records that mirror the progression of the Industrial Revolution (LaMarche et al. 1984, Graybill & Idso 1993), and

(3) the accelerating growth rates of numerous forests on nearly every continent of the globe over the past several decades (Kauppi et al. 1992, Phillips & Gentry 1994, Pimm & Sugden 1994, Idso 1995).

In consequence of this CO2 -induced increase in plant productivity, more organic matter is returned to the soil (Leavitt et al. 1994, Jongen et al. 1995, Batjes & Sombroek 1997), where it stimulates biological activity (Curtis et al. 1990, Zak et al. 1993, O'Neill 1994, Rogers et al. 1994, Godbold & Berntson 1997, Ineichen et al. 1997, Ringelberg et al. 1997) that results in the enhanced emission of various sulfur gases to the atmosphere (Staubes et al. 1989), whereupon more CCN are created (as described above), which tend to cool the planet by altering cloud properties in ways that result in the reflection of more solar radiation back to space. In addition, many non-sulfur biogenic materials of the terrestrial environment play major roles as both water and ice-nucleating aerosols (Schnell & Vali 1976, Vali et al. 1976, Bigg 1990, Novakov & Penner 1993, Saxena et al. 1995, Baker 1997); and the airborne presence of these materials should also be enhanced by atmospheric CO2 enrichment.

That analogous CO2 -induced cooling processes operate at sea is implied by the facts that:

(1) atmospheric CO2 enrichment stimulates the growth of both macro- (Titus et al. 1990, Sand-Jensen et al. 1992, Titus 1992, Madsen 1993, Madsen & Sand-Jensen 1994) and micro- (Raven 1991, 1993, Riebesell 1993, Shapiro 1997) aquatic plants, and

(2) experimental iron-induced (Coale et al. 1996) increases (acting as surrogates for CO2 -induced increases) in the productivity of oceanic phytoplankton in high-nitrate low-chlorophyll waters of the equatorial Pacific (Behrenfeld et al. 1996) have been observed to greatly increase surface-water DMS concentrations (Turner et al. 1996). There is also evidence to suggest that a significant fraction of the ice-forming nuclei of maritime origin are composed of organic matter (Rosinski et al. 1986, 1987); and the distribution of these nuclei over the oceans (Bigg 1973) has been shown to be strongly correlated with surface patterns of biological productivity (Bigg 1996, Szyrmer & Zawadzki 1997). Hence, there may well exist an entire suite of powerful planetary cooling forces that can respond directly to the rising carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere over both land and sea. And in view of the relative weakness of the CO2 greenhouse effect at current atmospheric CO2 partial pressures, as revealed by the natural experiments I have described herein-a likely warming of only 0.4øC for a 300 to 600 ppm doubling of the air's CO2 content-these CO2 -induced cooling forces could potentially negate a large portion (or even all) of the primary warming effect of a rise in atmospheric CO2 , leading to little net change in mean global air temperature.


5. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

There is no controversy surrounding the claim that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are on the rise; direct measurements demonstrate that fact. The basic concept of the greenhouse effect is also not in question; rising carbon dioxide concentrations, in and of themselves, clearly enhance the thermal blanketing properties of the atmosphere. What is debatable, however, is the magnitude of any warming that might result from a rise in the air's CO2 concentration. While admittedly incomplete and highly approximate general circulation models of the atmosphere predict that a 300 to 600 ppm doubling of the air's CO2 content will raise mean global air temperature a few degrees Celsius, natural experiments based upon real-world observations suggest that a global warming of no more than a few tenths of a degree could result from such a CO2 increase. Which conclusion is correct?

Several complexities of Earth's climate system make accurate predictions of global climate change very difficult for general circulation models of the atmosphere and probably account for the deviations of their predictions from those of the natural experiments I have described herein.

First, there are a number of planetary cooling forces that are intensified by increases in temperature and which therefore tend to dampen any impetus for warming; and many of these phenomena are only now beginning to be fully appreciated, much less adequately incorporated into the models.

Second, nearly all of these cooling forces can be amplified by increases in biological processes that are directly enhanced by the aerial fertilization effect of atmospheric CO2 enrichment; and most of these phenomena are also not included in general circulation model studies of potential CO2 -induced climate change.

Third, many of these cooling forces have individually been estimated to have the capacity to totally thwart the typically-predicted (and likely overestimated) warming of a doubling of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration.

Fourth, real-world measurements have revealed that contemporary climate models have long significantly underestimated the cooling power of clouds (Cess et al. 1995, Pilewskie & Valero 1995, Ramanathan et al. 1995, Heymsfield & McFarquhar 1996), even when demonstrating their ability to completely negate the likely overestimated global warming that is typically predicted to result from a doubling of the air's CO2 content.

In light of these observations, it is my belief that it will still be a very long time before any general circulation model of the atmosphere will be able to accurately determine the ultimate consequences of the many opposing climatic forces that are both directly and indirectly affected by the rising CO2 content of Earth's atmosphere. Consequently, although many equally sincere and thoughtful scientists may feel otherwise, I believe that these models do not yet constitute an adequate basis for developing rational real-world policies related to potential climate change

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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