Science, climate change and realization

Oil companies who sponsored research aimed at alternative views of climate change that were skeptical about anthropogenic climate change, especially about the effect of human-activity-generated CO2 on global temperatures, are often cast as the villains by climate change progressives in the entire climate change debate. Analysts will debate this issue for quite some time to come. However, there is a bigger picture that has implications for the human race. And that is the amount of time the experts had to determine the level of seriousness of the issue and the limited options they have for mitigating and controlling some of the serious fallouts of climate change caused by human activity.

A longer historical perspective is revealing in many ways. The science of radiation absorption by molecules was the subject of intensive study by a number of leading research groups around the world about sixty years ago. That carbon dioxide absorbed in the infrared was well-known. That carbon dioxide caused a greenhouse effect was also well-known. That factories emitted carbon-dioxide, especially in developed countries, was also well-known. Since economic growth is exponential in nature and carbon-dioxide emission in a conventional non-green economy is expected to closely track economic growth, it was in principle possible to predict back then that serious global warming could occur by the year 2000. The growth of countries like China may or may not have been predictable. However, a case can be made that had there been sufficient cross-fertilization of ideas among the fields of molecular radiation, atmospheric sciences and economics, the possible catastrophic nature of global warming could have been predicted. Of course, as recent experience has shown, the effect of global warming on polar ice and other such effects are more difficult to quantify and predict. However, the alarm bells could have started ringing way back then. I have not come across any studies that made such predictions. May be there are some such studies. May be they are in obscure journals or obscure books. I don’t know if Keeling of Keeling curve fame had an idea about how the curve would look like when he started measuring CO2 concentrations decades ago. For example, did he anticipate the exponential growth ?

Coming back to the last twenty years and the furor about the delay caused by scientists who took a skeptical position on global warming, it is interesting that just fifteen years of delay could tip the balance of the earth in certain dangerous directions in some key areas. Solar power, wind power and other green alternatives for energy, for example, still have a long way to go before they can fully replace technologies that emit CO2. Research into efficiency improvements of energy generators like solar cells still continues and new ideas are still being discovered. Would a fifteen years head-start have helped the human community or particular nations to reduce CO2 emissions in time to lessen the severity of global warming ? It is very difficult to tell. Fifteen years seems like too small a time span for the human community to deal with civilization-changing trend shifts.

There is now talk of what is called geo-engineering, which involves things like spraying sunlight-reflecting sulfur aerosol layers, to reverse the effects of global warming. These are early days to know if these technologies can be made workable. It is a sobering thought that human arrogance in the field of science and technology has received a walloping from the global warming nightmare.