Tossing Mullet

It came as no surprise Anderson Cooper and CNN were obsessing about a teen-age pregnancy club on the early news last week. I’m pretty sure Fox news was providing similar pressing and depressing stories.

I scarcely heard a word that morning about the testimony of Dr. James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences, although NBC early news did report his presentation to the Press Club. His statement is pretty graphic, but I don’t disagree after working outside for several days last week – toasty might be a bit of an understatement!

The largest problem with the issue of climate change is that we lost the ability to tell the future with Merlin’s demise sometime in the 6th century A.D. Most scientists are more than cautious when projecting the future, since they depend on some kind of model that is either based on existing data and some speculation of what data might be like in the unknown.

“Ay, there lies the rub” (from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”) because old data is obviously not future data and whatever used is, at best, speculation and that can seldom be without some bias. (Apparently there is an obscure definition of “rub” that refers to an obstacle or “snag” and that makes it the perfect noun describing the issues swirling around climate change and global warming.)

Furthermore it is the nature of science to be skeptical and contrary opinions are respected until proven false. This rather perverse policy is a major factor in the debate because everyone is entitled to an opinion. We usually hope that the more influential opinion comes from those who are relatively well informed. Of course personal opinion does have to be somewhat constrained by the knowledge base from which we are operating and so we must depend on those that have a better understanding of both existing facts and the models that the facts will be plugged into

Dr. Lewis Thomas, in “Late Night Thoughts on listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony,” said:

“There are some things about which it is not true to say that every man has a right to his own opinion. I do not have a right to an opinion on causality in the small world, or about black holes or other universes beyond black holes in the larger world, for I cannot do the mathematics. Physics, deep and beautiful physics, can be spoken only in pure, unaccented mathematics, and no other language exists for expressing its meaning, not yet anyway. Lacking the language, I concede that it is none of my business, and I am giving up on it.”

Unfortunately, the climate that we are going to be functioning in for the immediate future is a large part of our lives and everyone should, and does, have an opinion. Dr. Hansen “speaks the language,” has plausible data sets and with uncharacteristic personal humility, I will listen when he speaks! We tend to pick our heroes with our own biases hanging out, but we are also influenced by the sheer weight of numbers, both people and data. I heard people in Iowa complaining a few months ago about the near-record snowfall. They questioned the existence of global warming because of the heavy snowfall, which is not just a consequence of temperature but even more so – precipitation.

And now the snow has melted rather precipitously and we have experienced catastrophic flooding in the Midwest, soon to be followed by the delivery to the Gulf of Mexico of whatever nutrients and other even more objectionable chemicals don’t flow through broken levees and stay on flooded farmlands. Come to think of it, that’s what made the original farmland so fertile in the first place!

We have replaced the natural system of river-supplied nutrients to fertile floodplains with a man-made system of fertilizers and controlled irrigation that fuels our food supply. In order to protect that system from floods that have now been deemed more damaging than beneficial, we have constructed thousands of miles of levees to keep the river in its now artificial banks and make sure that the nasty topsoil and nutrients find their way to the Gulf of Mexico where they can be harmlessly dumped?

Of course those actions have contributed to the “dead zone” of the Gulf and dramatically reduced the protective barriers of the south Louisiana marshes contributing to the vulnerability of New Orleans and the petroleum industry. The fertilizers feed plankton blooms that consume way more oxygen than they generate and the fertile soil that may have enriched farmlands of bygone eras or built coastal wetlands is unceremoniously dumped into the depths of the Gulf of Mexico.

By the way, as an aside, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is always blamed for these projects and it is probably worth noting that the Corps is run by good soldiers that do exactly what Congress tells them to do. If they are to be faulted it should be for their inability or unwillingness to refuse to do some of the stupid things that Congressional engineers decide they want – Can you say Tennessee-Tombigbee waterway?

And of course, Congress and the poor Bush administration can’t seem to get a break. After pushing through the corn ethanol mandate in the wild-eyed effort to produce a renewable energy source, all of us have come to experience the potential land mines associated with this particular solution to our energy problem. It is true that something other than foodstuff (like switchgrass) might be more useful, but we also need to figure out ahead of time if the net energy gain is positive rather than negative. We can continue to import ethanol from Brazil and at least they aren’t part of the OPEC cartel (yet). American ethanol is produced from corn, which costs more and produces less energy per unit of input than sugar cane. Does Brazil make rum?

But the fundamental flaw of depending on biofuels for energy may be found in the current problem. What if there’s a bad year for sugar cane or switchgrass – in terms of weather, or climate, whichever perspective you might prefer? Energy independence may be unalterably linked to our dubious ability to predict climate change and regional weather conditions as part of that.

I like orange marmalade on my toast.

George Crozier is Lagniappe columnist. Contact him at george@lagniappemobile.com.

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