Global warming education

Official Europe has not glittered with scientific sophistication in its treatment of the global warming issue. For that reason, any official effort to educate Europeans about the matter is cause for alarm.

The European Consultative Forum on the Environment and Sustainable Development will recommend such an effort to the European Commission, part of the European Union, this month (OGJ, May 3, 1999, p. 54). "An initiative," the forum says, "is necessary to foster changed attitudes and behavior."

Europeans should hide their wallets.

The simple view

They also should pay close attention to what emerges from the EU in the name of education. The temptation will be strong to resort to a simple view of global warming that receives too few questions in Europe and that girds too many policy lurches, most of them involving tax increases.

In the simple view, global warming science is straightforward: Greenhouse gases, most importantly carbon dioxide from combustion of fossil fuels, accumulate in the atmosphere, trap solar heat, and warm the planet, perhaps catastrophically. The simple view scuttles doubt by appealing to prudence: Global warming might be so dreadful that humankind can't afford to delay remedies while seeking answers to questions about the basic theory.

Both the simple view and the appeal to prudence have many weaknesses, which true education would not hesitate to confront. The simple view, for example, asserts CO₂ accumulation as warming's main cause. Proponents of the view have had trouble explaining why most of the past century's observed warming occurred before most of the CO₂ build-up attributed to industrialization. Their problem worsens after a recent Scripps Institution of Oceanography study suggesting that, contrary to common assumption, atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ varied widely before industrialization and that they did so through periods of temperature stability. Another Scripps study concludes that past warming periods preceded CO₂ build-ups by 400-1,000 years.

True education on the subject of global warming would point out that factors besides CO₂ influence temperatures and may well overwhelm greenhouse effects. Education would further point out that the more scientists learn about the climate, the more complex the system turns out to be. It is possible, in fact, that greenhouse warming generates its own offsets, that the system stabilizes itself.

Last year James E. Hansen, a climate modeler and early voice of global warming alarm, wrote that scientists don't yet know enough about how the climate works to define future climate change. Uncertainty about what influences the climate, he said, is a more important issue than climate sensitivity. Education on the subject of global warming would certainly mention Hansen's bold retreat from alarmism. It also would report that the amount of warming predicted by alarmist computer models has steadily declined as the models themselves have improved.

What's prudent?

And proper education would put the prudence argument in context by contrasting the certainty of cost associated with spurning fossil energy against the lack of certainty about benefit. As the National Research Council of the U.S. reported recently, "significant progress" in understanding and predicting major variability in climate, "including the role of human activities in forcing variability," remains elusive. What's prudent about altering human activity when no one yet knows with reasonable precision how the activity affects the climate?

It is not difficult to tell what does and what does not constitute education on the subject of global warming. If the EU, in its zeal to change attitudes and behavior, intends only to promote the simple view of global warming and to ignore the growing list of questions about it, the process will not be education. It will be propaganda.