I am pleased that in response to the concerns that I raised in a letter to The Eagle (2/9) Kelly Nolin of the Center for Teaching Excellence admits (letter, 2/12) that it is "provocative" for CTE to encourage AU professors to "require students to undertake actions to reduce their ecological footprint [and] encourage students to pressure their congressional representatives to enact environmental protection measures." Even better, Dr. Nolin reports that the wording will be made changed so students are told that such actions are "voluntary." I can now look forward to applying for my Green Teaching Certificate!
Dr. Nolin complains that I wrote The Eagle rather than contact CTE. But we are a university, not a corporation, and the primary purpose of all we do should be to engage members of our community in transparent discussion, particularly about controversial and unsettled issues like the causes, effects and proposed cures for "climate change." Rose Davis, a senior in Arts and Sciences, took up that discussion in her letter (2/12). Ms. Davis argues "climate change has been significantly linked to human-induced greenhouse gas emissions by an international panel of Nobel Prize-winning scientists (www.ipcc.ch)." Her appeal to authority is a classic example of ad hominem reasoning. It may go over well in politics and the courtroom, but in the academy we don't care who said something. What matters is whether the proof they bring to the table is convincing.
Causation is proved, as all AU students learn in their statistics classes, by three steps: finding a correlation between changes in two variables, showing that one change precedes the other in time, and accounting for all possible alternative explanations. Let's look at how they Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change fares on these big three.
On the first step, the IPCC reports that for millions of years the concentration in the atmosphere of the primary heat-trapping gas, carbon dioxide, has moved in close correlation with global mean temperature. It also estimates that since 1860 this concentration has increased from 280 to 380 parts per million as global mean temperature has risen by one degree. Fine so far. However, since we have only one earth to experiment on, which is not much of a sample size for testing climate hypotheses, the IPCC must use computer models to address the second and third steps - timing and alternative hypotheses. Here things get sticky. The models cited by the IPCC are still primarily statistical curve -fitting exercises rather than mathematical reenactments of the effects of the laws of physics on the interaction of molecules in the hurly-burly of a global system. I describe these models in some detail on academic3.american.edu/~rossiter/Convenient%20Fibs.html.
The timing step is unresolved, because retention rates of carbon dioxide in sea and land sinks are clearly affected by temperature, just as temperature is clearly affected by carbon dioxide concentrations. It is noteworthy that all paleo-climatologists agree that at the high and low end of the recurring 100,000 year cycles in which global mean temperature moves as much as 20 degrees, it is temperature that changes direction first, followed in a few hundred years by carbon dioxide concentration. These cycles of temperature are perfectly correlated with the oscillation of the earth's orbit around the sun from a circle to a 5 percent ellipse, although no convincing mechanism has been identified for how the change in the orbit could significantly change the solar power that gets to earth. The lack of understanding of a powerful physical mechanism that has generated a 20-degree rise in temperature over the past 20,000 years makes it difficult to accept the IPCC's claim - on the third step - that the lack of other identifiable mechanisms for the much more modest rise in temperature in the past 150 years means that the sole culprit is human production of heat-trapping gases.
For me there is not enough proof to justify what I fear will be the outcome of the post-Kyoto emissions negotiations: the developed countries will stampede developing countries into reducing the carbon output they need to keep economies growing and life expectancy increasing. The Kyoto protocol was stacked to permit developed countries to fake their five percent cuts with carbon credits and offsets in developing nations, and it has had no effect on emissions. This findings comes from a thorough tracking of emissions, available on www.stabilisation2005.com/posters/Hohne_Niklas.pdf, which concludes that under Kyoto, "(t)here has been little deliberately accepted pain in the name of climate change policy." Let's go green, indeed, but be cautious about it.
Caleb Stewart Rossiter Adjunct professor, School of International Service
