Those Quirky Gases

Fire of Liberty
Robert Matthews a visiting reader(I'd say he's a research fellow who teaches) of Aston University in Birmingham, England has a wonderful piece in today's Financial Times that reveals current research in the journal Nature that shows that earth's living trees and plants are producing some 10 to 30 percent of this gas in our atmosphere which probably has a greater impact on global warming than the villainous "Carbon Dioxide" is presented by the Kyoto Protocol folks. What I find interesting is that the Matthews is acting like a real scientist who uses his ability to reason and seek out the full cause of global warming instead of screeching like a fanatic and scaring off the regular folks that the green lobby seems to do on an occasion. I care for the environment as much as anyone else does but find it refreshing to find folks like Matthews:

There is no longer any serious debate about the reality of global warming. Some may still quibble about its causes, but the focus is on what nations should do to ameliorate the effects of climate change. And this is precisely what makes the new research so disturbing. For how could so basic a source of global warming have gone undetected until now?

In fact, evidence pointing to huge holes in the science of atmospheric methane has been circulating for years. In 1998, Nature carried a study showing global increases in methane were mysteriously levelling off. Now it seems that deforestation - that bête noire of the environmentalist movement - may have helped combat the rise of this greenhouse gas. While no one is suggesting chopping down the world's trees to save the planet, the new research highlights the astonishing complexity of environmental science. Measures to combat climate change that once seemed simple common sense are turning out to be anything but.

Everyone knows fossil fuel power stations are hefty producers of CO2 and need urgently to be replaced. Yet they are now also recognised as hefty producers of aerosols - tiny particles in the atmosphere that play a key role in reflecting the sun's heat back into space. The scientific consensus was that this is a minor benefit of fossil fuel burning. But last month Nature published new research showing aerosols may be twice as effective at keeping the earth cool as was thought. Suddenly, wholesale closure of power stations no longer seems such a good idea.

Even so, it surely makes sense to use renewable sources of energy whenever possible. Well, up to a point: new research suggests hydroelectric schemes can be worse than useless in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A study by the National Institute for Research in the Amazon in the current issue of the journal Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change shows that the vast lakes used to feed hydroelectric turbines are a rich source of rotting vegetation - and thus methane. One such scheme in Brazil is now believed to have emitted more than three times as much greenhouse gas as would have been produced by generating electricity by burning oil.

Climate scientists would have us believe there is no doubt about the basics of global warming and the time for action is now. The recent spate of large revisions of the facts tells a different story. Yet politicians are still being pressed to do the impossible: modify the huge, chaotic system that is the earth's climate in ways guaranteed to be beneficial for all.

I'd say that maybe the folks in our government and in the other industrialized nations should seek scientists like Matthews, Bjorn Lomborg, and Michael Fumento with regards to combating global warming instead of jumping into the hot frying pan like Europe and parts of Asia did by signing up on Kyoto. Aside from fighting war, keeping order in the streets and printing money, politicians and government don't seem to create good solutions to our problems. (If your a cynic you'd say they do a darn good job in spending lots of our money). So let's get back to basics and let the scientists study the problem more before we do something stupid that will cost us more in the long run. So thank you Robert Matthews for laying this before the dinner table.