Midlands Voices: Let’s include uncertainties in global-warming lessons

The writer is a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics.

I was pleased to see that the Millard school district pulled Laurie David’s book, “The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming,” due to “a major factual error” in a chart that shows rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels dating back 650,000 years. The chart claims to show that global warming is caused by increases in carbon dioxide levels, but the facts show that this is not the case.

In May, I attended an international conference on global warming in Chicago, with 73 speakers from 23 countries. The book and its erroneous chart were discussed there. (Go online to http://www.heartland.org/events/2010Chicago/index.html and click on “proceedings” to see most of the talks and PowerPoint presentations.)

When the error is corrected, the chart will show that in every single case over this time span the Earth warmed up first, followed by a later increase in carbon dioxide. This is clear proof that in the past global warming was not caused by an increase in CO2. If anything, it is the other way around. In each instance, something other than CO2 caused the temperature increase, which then might have made the CO2 rise. This chart shows that past history actually contradicts David’s main assumption in her book — namely that man-made carbon dioxide is causing global warming.

In a May 15 article about Millard Public Schools and the book, The World-Herald quotes Robyn Terry’s comments about global warming. (Her 12-year-old son attends Beadle Middle School.) “It’s a theory; it’s not fact,” she said.

Dr. Robert Heaney, in his May 21 Midlands Voices article, claims that Ms. Terry misunderstands what “theory” means in science.

Dr. Heaney correctly points out that current global warming is a fact, not a theory. Actually, the Earth has been warming through purely natural causes since about 1850, when we started coming out of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from roughly 1300-1850.

What is not fact and still theory is what the future will bring. Our projections depend on various computer models, which differ widely in their predictions of future temperature increases. Moreover, these models are defective, because they do not incorporate water vapor and cloud cover into their calculations. So future global warming is at best only a theory and at worst very unreliable and unpredictable.

If we wish to educate our children correctly about global warming, these uncertainties must be taught as part of the total picture. Ms. Terry and the Millard review committee are to be commended for their concerns that the children in the Millard school district would be misled by the book.

Finally, Dr. Heaney need not worry about the consequences of a rise in sea level. Bangladesh and other island countries simply will not disappear due to global warming and a resulting sea level rise — it just isn’t going to happen.

Even the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts an increase of only 7 to 23 inches over the next century. This averages out to about 12 or 13 inches when the studies leading to these figures are weighted. That’s an increase of about an eighth of an inch a year — hardly enough to cover an island nation.

The real bottom line in this global warming issue, shared both by those for and against man as the main cause, is that we need to do a better job of conserving our resources, developing alternative sources of clean energy such as solar power, wind power and nuclear energy, and weaning ourselves from our dependency on foreign oil.

There is no need to blame man and bring global warming into the picture, along with its cap-and-trade and false bias against CO2. It is just the right thing to do for our planet.

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