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Democracy, the economy and corruption:
attempts to trace corruption back to its origins in the newly independent Indian nation, asking some of the more obvious questions which are not being asked today.
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Dabangg (Dir: Abinav Kashyap)
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Open Page
Global Warming: A Cause for Alarm?
Gopal Panicker |
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Until about a year ago I was a believer in global warming. Like most people, I did not pay it a whole lot of attention and assumed these scientists knew what they were talking about. One morning I was just lying in bed half asleep calculating the weight of the atmosphere and the amount of carbon dioxide. I realized something did not add up. I went to the library and checked out a bunch of books on global warming and related topics. I read them all and also the IPCC report and got a fair appreciation of the information out there. I then did some investigating of my own. Since I am a chemical engineer I have some background in the science involved. After a few false starts I realized that this stuff about "Greenhouse gases" is highly dubious science amplified by an intense propaganda campaign. Such campaigns can alter public perceptions in an unbelievable way.
Let us examine a couple of recent propaganda campaigns so that we may get to know what we are up against. During the run up to the war in Iraq, various things were put forward as reasons to get rid of Saddam Hussein. Yellowcake from Nigeria, aluminum tubes, secret meeting with Al Qaeda in Prague, mobile labs making nerve gas, WMD etc. Even after all these were shown to be false or based on unreliable information, people like Cheney and the neocons kept on repeating them. Even well after the invasion a majority of republican voters believed that Saddam had something to do with 9/11 and no one disabused the.
Another example is the local TV news in the US. If you watched the local news it was almost all about crime. These people would scare the heck out of the audience every day. You were given the impression that the crime rate was rising and reaching epidemic proportions. Actually the crime rates had been declining since the late eighties. Why TV stations play up crime ratings is uncertain but perhaps alarm – more than good news – pushes up ratings.
Let us look at the global warming propaganda for similarities. Earlier this year there was a scandal at the IPCC. Anyway what happened was that a Dr Murari Lal had put in a line in the report saying that the Himalayan glaciers would all melt by 2035. At first they said it was a mistake, and then it turned out that some people had objected to the line but they had put it in anyway. Finally, Dr Murari Lal admitted he put the line in there to put pressure on political leaders. Glaciers in the Karakoram area of the Himalayas have been growing although glaciers world wide have been retreating for two hundred years [with some exceptions] A question about Dr Pachauri. His doctorate is in economics, how does that make him an expert on climate?
Let us look at some other examples. They appear regularly in your daily newspaper. I saw one a few days ago. It was headlined "Arctic sea ice third lowest ever". It is true that the sea ice minimum was the third lowest since satellite observations have been available. It is also true that the sea ice has grown since the low in 2007. The headline could just as easily have been "Arctic sea ice cover up by 500,000 sq km since 2007".Do you think you will see something like that? I doubt it.
There are plenty of other examples. When the west larsen ice shelf collapsed last year it made headlines worldwide. The reality is that the west larsen ice shelf collapsed ten years ago, and ten years before that. Apparently it grows for about ten years and then collapses. This is normal. Did the newspapers or TV mention that? I don’t think so. Earlier this year a big iceberg broke off in Greenland. The alarmist hype was,"It’s the size of Manhattan!", "Greenland icecap melting!". The reality is that even larger bergs have broken off at the same place over the years. This is what is supposed to happen. An icecap is not static. It flows. Every now and then icebergs break off. This is normal. Did you know that the sea ice off Antarctica has been growing? This has the propagandists really flummoxed. They can’t tweak their models to produce this result. The funniest explanation I have come across is that the hole in the ozone layer is making it grow!
Recently there was a heat wave in Russia. It was hot and dry and forest fires were breaking out all over the place. This was touted as evidence of global warming. What they failed to mention was that at exactly the same time it was cooler than normal over Poland and Germany, and heavy rains were causing flooding. Weather is not climate.
These few examples should suffice to show how the news is slanted to spread alarm and despondency. Journalists are particularly susceptible. They are usually scientific illiterates. The very nature of the business gives it a bias towards the sensational. The next time you read something about global warming, examine it critically and see if you can detect the slant.
While one is generally in agreement with the IPCC that there seems to be some warming, one’s disagreement is the extent and the mechanism. The IPCC and others tend to focus on the atmosphere, "Greenhouse gases" etc. While greenhouse gasses will require a separate piece it seems pertinent to deal with water. Together with carbon it is the basis of life as we know it. It is also a most peculiar substance. It really should be a gas at normal temperatures. Its homologue hydrogen sulfide is a gas, yet it has a molecular weight almost twice that of water. Ice is lighter than water and it floats. This is very unusual. Water also has a very high specific heat or heat capacity. All these properties are crucial to life on earth.
The oceans cover more than 70% of the surface of the earth. Most of the incoming sunlight falls on the oceans. The weight of the oceans is several hundred times that of the atmosphere. Because of the high specific heat of water the heat capacity of the oceans is over a thousand times that of the atmosphere. They transport far more heat than the atmosphere. Why then do we concentrate on the atmosphere? This reminds me of the story of the drunk who was looking for something under a street lamp. A passer by asks -"what are you looking for?" The drunk says -"I dropped my wallet ".Passer by "where did you drop it?". Drunk says "over there on the other side of the street". Passer by "then how come you are looking over here". Drunk says "the light is better over here". We are like that drunk. We are looking in the wrong place. The following is a brief extract from a book by Rachel Carson. It is called "The sea around us". It was published in 1951 and was a best seller in its day. It gave her the funds and leisure to write her more famous work "Silent Spring". She is considered the founder of the modern environmental movement.
"Without the ocean our world would be visited by unthinkably harsh extremes of temperature. For the water that covers three quarters of the earth is an excellent absorber and radiator of heat "a savings bank for solar energy". Through ocean currents heat and cold may be distributed over thousands of miles. It is possible to follow a mass of warm water that originates in the trade wind belt of the Southern Hemisphere and remains recognizable for a year and a half, through a course of more than seven thousand miles. Thus the ocean helps to make up for the uneven heating of the globe by the sun.
Whether any one place will enjoy the moderating effect of the sea depends less on its nearness to the ocean than on the pattern of currents and winds. Europe is wide open to the sea, and "Atlantic weather" carries hundreds of miles into the interior. Hence even seemingly slight changes in the volume and temperature of the Gulf Stream profoundly affect European climate. Some day, long range weather forecasts for Europe will probably be based on ocean temperatures. The North Atlantic has been compared to "a great bath with a hot tap and two cold taps". The hot tap is the Gulf Stream, the cold taps are the East Greenland Current and the Labrador Current .The cold taps vary in volume, the hot in both volume and temperature. The mixture from the three taps determines the surface temperatures in the eastern Atlantic. A very slight winter warming of these waters means that the snow of north Western Europe will melt earlier, spring ploughing will begin earlier, and the harvest will be better. So day by day and season by season, the ocean dominates the earths climate.
Can it also be an agent in bringing about the long period swings of climatic change that we know have occurred during the long history of the earth? The distinguished Swedish oceanographer, Otto Pettersson, has developed a fascinating theory that it can. He has shown that there are alternating periods of mild and severe climates in the world which correspond to long period cycles of the tides. About every eighteen centuries the sun and moon come into such a position that they exert the greatest possible attracting force on the sea. The time of maximum tides,which last occurred about 1453, and the centuries which preceded and followed it," was a period of startling and unusual occurrences".
Polar ice blocked much of the North Atlantic. The coasts of the North Sea and the Baltic were laid waste by violent storm floods, and winters of "unexampled severity". Old Icelandic records say that, in the winters of the early 1300's, wolves crossed over on the ice from Norway to Denmark. The entire Baltic froze over. In southern Europe there were unusual storms, crop failure, famine and distress.
By contrast the centuries about the time when the last minimum tidal effect prevailed, it was about AD 550 and will occur again around 2400, enjoyed a period of benevolent climate. Snow and ice were little known on the coast of Europe and in the sea around Iceland. the early sagas spoke of the abundant fruit growing in Greenland and of the number of cattle that could be pastured. The Norwegian settlements there were located in places that are now at the foot of glaciers, and excavations have indicated clearly that the colonists then lived in a climate definitely milder than the present one. But these bland climatic conditions began to deteriorate in the thirteenth century. By the early part of the fifteenth century the climatic rigours that had brought such extraordinary catastrophes to Europe had wiped out all the Greenland settlements.
These ancient records convinced Pettersson that climatic changes were brought about as great submarine waves, induced by the tide, disturbed the deep waters of the polar seas. In the centuries of strong tidal forces, unusual quantities of warm pressed into the Arctic sea at deep levels, moving in under the ice. Then thousands of square miles of ice that normally remained frozen underwent partial thawing and broke up. Drift ice, in extraordinary volume, was carried southward into the Atlantic. This changed the pattern of surface circulation which is so intimately related to the winds, the rainfall and the air temperatures. For the drift ice then attacked the Gulf Stream south of Newfoundland and sent it on a more easterly course, deflecting the streams of warm surface water that soften the climate of Greenland, Iceland, Spitzbergen and northern Europe.
Although the really catastrophic disturbances of the polar regime come only every eighteen centuries, according to Pettersson, there are also rhythmically occurring periods that fall at varying intervals, for example, every nine, eighteen or thirty six years. These correspond to other tidal cycles and produce briefer and less drastic climatic variations. The year 1903 for instance, when the earth, moon and sun were in a position which gives a secondary maximum of tidal attraction, was memorable for its outbursts of polar ice in the Arctic. Scandinavian fisheries took a big hit. Most of the Barents sea was covered with pack ice up to May. The similar constellation of 1912 was another great ice year, a year that brought the disaster of the Titanic.
In our own lifetime we are witnessing a startling alteration of climate and it is intriguing to apply Petterssons ideas as a possible explanation. A change in the Arctic climate set in about 1900, became astonishingly marked about 1930, and is now spreading into sub-arctic and temperate regions. The frigid top of the world is warming up. In 1940 the whole northern coast of Europe and Asia was remarkably free from ice during the summer months. During the forties the season for shipping coal from West Spitzbergen ports lengthened to seven months, compared to three at the beginning of the century. Drift ice in the Russian sector of the Arctic Sea decreased by a million square kilometers between the years 1924 and 1944.
Many new birds are appearing in the far northern lands for the first time on record. The long list of southern visitors to Greenland includes the cliff swallow, Baltimore oriole and Canada warbler. Iceland too, has been visited by skylarks, scarlet grosbeaks, thrushes and many other species formerly unknown there. When the cod first appeared off Greenland it was a strange fish to the Eskimos and Danes. By the 1930's they had become dependent on it for food and were using its oil for fuel.
The milder arctic and sub-arctic climate means longer growing seasons and better crops. In Norway good seed years are now the rule rather than the exception, and even in northern Scandinavia the trees have rapidly spread above their former timber lines. It is interesting to calculate where our present situation fits into the cosmic cycle of the tides. The great tides at the close of the middle ages, with their accompanying snow and ice, furious winds and inundating floods, are more than five centuries behind us. The era of weakest tidal movements, with a climate as benign as that of the early middle ages, is about four centuries ahead. We have therefore begun to move strongly into a period of warmer, milder weather. There will be fluctuations as the tidal power waxes and wanes, but the long trend is toward a warmer earth".
These are Rachel Carson's words. This little bit is the conclusion of her book. That is an indication of the importance she attached to this idea. Are these words prophetic or aren’t they? Notice the words she uses: ‘milder’, ‘benign.’ The person who coined the phrase 'greenhouse gas', Arrhenius, also thought that a slightly milder climate would be a Good Thing. There is no cause for alarm. The icecaps are not going to melt anytime soon. Just relax and enjoy the balmy weather!
The 'Sea around us' was published in 1951.Dr Pettersson died in 1941. The present generation of global warming activists wasn't even born then. These ideas have been buried for too long. It is time to disinter them and examine them more closely. Checking out stuff under the oceans is hard. We must not be like the drunk and look only where visibility is high. This is the most elegant and beautiful explanation of global warming that I have come across.
Gopal Panicker, is a graduate from Madras university (1977) in chemical engineering. He is now with America University of India, Kodaikanal.
In this remarkably persuasive essay on global warming, the author takes on global warming activists and alarmists. An issue of interest here is what is at stake when the alarm button is being pushed as global warming activists are doing today. It is a fact that apart from distributing a few Nobel Prizes, the world has done precious little about global warming. Moreover, it is the developed world which is unwilling to negotiate on environmental issues. If global warming was really as alarming as it is made out to be, would not the developed world have taken more concrete steps than producing films like Avatar and honoring Dr Pachauri? A possible explanation for the campaign of alarm is that the industrial development of the developing countries could upset the world trade balance and a cheap solution might be to spread alarm worldwide and ‘morally’ equip global warming activists to spread the good message and lobby hard at the governmental level to stall this development.
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