The National Interest
Summer 1990
A
War Against Fire
By
Russell Seitz
The
most savage controversies are those as to which there is no good
evidence either way. -Bertrand Russell
AT THE
TURN of the century, a Swedish Nobel Laureate, Svante Arrhenius, laid
the cornerstone of what is popularly called "the greenhouse
effect"-that one of the principal gaseous products of fire, carbon
dioxide, can absorb radiant warmth and trap it in the earth's
atmosphere. In the hothouse environment of the popular media, this
observation has blossomed into the most fiercely debated, and perhaps
most widely feared, scientific phenomenon of the day.
As
Science magazine observed in a March 30, 1990, editorial:
"Virtually everyone, children included,
is concerned about global climate change and especially about the
greenhouse effect. They have learned of increases in carbon dioxide.
They have been told repeatedly that temperatures will increase 9'F.
Political pressure is mounting to take action regardless of cost, and to
take action now."
This
much is familiar to any observer within reach of the popular media. But
what follows is not : "But how good is the evidence, and how likely is
substantial global warming? When might it happen? Applying the customary
standards of scientific inquiry, one must conclude that there has been
more hype than solid facts ... Modeling of global climate is largely
concentrated on examining effects of doubling the atmospheric content
of greenhouse gases. As might he expected, the answers they get are
functions of the models they employ. The spread is from 1. 5' to 5'C;
that is, there is great uncertainty. If one examines the subject, one
finds virtually unanimous agreement that the models are
deficient....What have been the warming effects, if any, of
anthropogenic gases? The typical answer is 0.5'C.
But
the answer depends on what time interval is chosen. There was
substantial increase in temperature from 1880 to 1940. However, from
1940 until the 1960s, temperatures dropped so much as to lead to
predictions of a coming ice age. New, precise satellite data raise
further questions about warming. From 1979 to 1988 large temperature
variability was recorded, but no obvious temperature trend was noted
during the 10-year period.' ...A fashionable estimate of the time when
doubling of atmospheric CO, will occur is the middle of the next
century. But past predictions of energy usage have been notoriously
inaccurate.. What should he the national response to the above
uncertainties? ... Whatever we do should he based on well-thought-out
long-range goals. It should not result from a half-baked political
response. '
--R.W. Spencer and J. R. Christy, "Precise Monitoring of
Global Temperature Trends from Satellites , "Science 247 (March 30,
1990): 1558
Almost everything about this statement sits oddly with representations
of the greenhouse effect in the popular media. Where Science speaks of
conflicting studies and ambiguous results, the popularizers of the
greenhouse effect deliver dire warnings with the utmost certitude. Where
the one counsels a cautious political response, the other urges instant,
even draconian intervention. In the name of the greenhouse effect, some
environmentalists are demanding a 30 percent rollback in C02 emissions
by the year 2000. They seem oblivious to the enormity of what they are
demanding: a war on that most elemental of human discoveries-fire
itself.
Why
this enormous gap between what is known and what is urged? Why do most
scientists lack conviction, where many laymen are full of passionate
intensity? To answer, we might begin by way of reviewing a most
important aspect of the greenhouse effect-the extent of our ignorance.
Why
It's Not So Simple
THE
ATMOSPHERE is among the earth's most complex dynamic systems: subtle in
its chemistry, chaotic in its flow. It interacts with everything from
the solar wind to the deep oceans. It is subject to insults great and
small, brief and enduring, from men and meteorites, volcanoes and
termites, wildfires and algal blooms-a list without end.
The
scale of all this dynamism is more daunting still. Despite the
burgeoning population of the earth, there's still a million tons of air
per capita. That's a lot of inertia to work against, at least down here
in the lower tier of the atmosphere, the troposphere (where it gets
colder as you go up). But further upstairs, far above Everest, in the
tenuous reaches of the stratosphere (where higher is hotter), lies only
a thousandth part of that atmosphere's mass. Our individual "share" of
the stratosphere weighs about as much as a ten-yard cube of water and is
laced with just a bathtub full of ozone. Hence the dichotomy between
concern for an ozone layer that, liquefied, would he no thicker than the
ink that you're reading, and the authentic scientific confusion about
our capacity rapidly to derange a lower ocean of air that's
comparatively as massive as a stack of bibles, the Apocrypha included.
The
atmospheric sciences presently lie in limbo between the Newtonian rigor
of classical physics and the realm of the un decidible. It is an
uncomfortable time. The range of sincere expert opinion broadens with
the complexity of the subject at issue. And at the interdisciplinary
extreme--global climate expertise itself dissolves in that most
universal of solvents, the theory of complexity.
Just
as mathematicians found Kurt Gödel's rigorous proof of the
undecidibility of some formal propositions dismaying, there is presently
no joy for atmospheric scientists in having to testify that the answers
policy-makers seek are beyond the scope of the available data or the
present limits of computational power. Nor is there consolation in the
grim realization that their computerized global circulation models have
but an ephemeral capacity to predict the future.
They
can jump forward to model the climate of the distant future on a "what
if" basis, but they can at best conjure up a coarsely realistic picture
of global weather that lasts for a few weeks before beginning to
disintegrate into gibberish. Even modeling the evolution of a single
thunderhead's birth and death is an absolute tour de force of today's
computer modeling.
By
contrast, in reckoning what the whole ensemble of greenhouse gases is up
to, we need to know about their transport and interaction with the
atmosphere, sunlight, and each other over a range of time scales from
microseconds to millennia. We need to measure reaction rates by the
score and to ponder the quantitative meaning of feedbacks both positive
and negative.
If
there were world enough and time, individual atmospheric scientists
might achieve a combination of physical and geometric intuition
approaching certain knowledge of how the earth will respond in the long
run to human intervention. But in practice such polymathy scarcely
exists- scientists are reeling in shock at the information explosion
they've touched off. Some causes are linked uncontroversially to
eventual effects, but many phenomena, like the ozone hole, still get
discovered, not predicted.
We
have as well another major problem. While we have indeed driven carbon
dioxide above the historical (hundred-thousand-year) range of its
recorded natural fluctuation by about 20 percent (70 parts per million),
we have a rather feeble understanding of the paramount greenhouse gas:
water vapor. Its clouds fill a tenth of the sky. ts atmospheric
concentration is so vastly greater than that of C02 as to obscure its
effect. And in turn the rest of our significant effluvia-methane,
chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's), and nitrogen oxides--are dwarfed by the
concentration of C02 itself.
It is
one thing to understand a "straight-forward" issue like the destruction
of stratospheric ozone by chlorine atoms that, being atoms, just don't
wear out. They can take decades to wander back to earth; and in the
course of its prolonged residence in the stratosphere, each chlorine
atom can slay a long succession of ozone molecules.
This
is a scientific commonplace--given a pageful of photochemical reactions,
and a few reams of hard data from the Antarctic, the conclusion that
emerged was an uncontroversial one. High-flying U-2 and balloon-borne
Instrumentation has already caught the culprit chlorine in flagrante
reacting with some ultracold aerosols to bleach a hole in the polar sky.
So out
of a growing scientific consensus, the 1987 Montreal Convention on the
Reduction of Chemical Emissions was convened, and from it came an
international protocol on reducing the release of chemicals that can
loft long-lived chlorine into the sky. Ameliorating the problem of CFCs
was relatively easy-the bill will come to only a few tens of billions of
dollars, and the uncertainty factor was resolved to the point of
sensible political engagement by" only' a decade of research. Had CFC
emissions continued unabated into he next century, they might have grown
into a global problem. The existing local one will likely last for
generations. But the Greenhouse Effect is a much rougher customer.
Tracking the Invisible Man
T0
BEGIN WITH, we're wrestling with not just a dilemma, but the Invisible
Man. The temperature records of the last century and a half are by no
means geographically uniform and meticulous in their accuracy. Even
today's dense grid of meteorological observations is generally biased
toward the land and troubled by the self-heating nature of urban areas.
Science cannot offer a firm consensus without uncontroversial data, and
the half-degree rise of the last century is neither continuous in its
course nor a subject of unquestioned belief.
In
recent years, three separate and significantly different scientific
accounts of the same century-long record of "average" global
temperatures, each peer-reviewed and each with its own set of
statistical arguments in justification, have been published. They point
up, down, and sideways. This is not the dismissal of a century of data,
but rather a caution-the warming trend can only he proved by the data,
not by a show of hands. The C02 is there, but has the atmosphere begun
to notice?
Some
say they are 99 percent sure they can perceive it in the data; some say
those who say that are completely out of scientific bounds. Others say
they see nothing, and many more that they just can't tell-both nature's
static-ridden transmission and science's still-crude receivers make the
message far from plain. "What bothers a lot of us is, " one modeler
remarked, "telling Congress things we are reluctant to say ourselves."
Wittgenstein put it better: "Whereof we do not know, thereof we cannot
speak."
As a
window for laymen to peer through, Global Change and Our Common Future,
published in 1989 by National Academy Press, affords a startling
contrast. At one end of the spectrum lies the rhetoric of uncertainty
that dominates the hard sciences in the study of global change.
It is
exemplified by the admission that it will take decades for a clear
greenhouse signal to emerge from the noise of climatic variation-witness
the dust-bowl drought of the 1930s and the abnormally high Great Lakes
water levels of the 1980s-and by the confession that it will take 500
times more computer power to realistically model the course of the
quarter-century to come. As one participant in the forum, which produced
Global Change, J.D. Mahlman, noted, "Until such decadal-scale
fluctuations are understood or are predictable, it will remain difficult
to diagnose the specific signals of permanent climate change as they
evolve. "
At the
other end of the spectrum lies the rhetoric of
extinction- life scientists confidently predicting the climate-driven
disappearance of species over the next fifty years. But the objects of
their acute concern are the Norwegian mugwort, the Tibetan dung beetle
(Aphodius hoderi), and other struggling refugees from the last Ice Age.
By the volume's end, it is clear on which side Senator Albert Gore has
enlisted: "My purpose is to sound an alarm, loudly and clearly, of
imminent and grave danger, and to describe a strategy for confronting
this crisis ... the horrendous prospect of an ecological collapse. " He
delivered himself of this fine sermon on May Day 1989-the day before the
forum started. So much for uncertainty.
No one
doubts the existence of a dual trend-CO2 is surely rising. And so must
its effect on the trapping and transfer of solar warmth between earth
and sky. But global surface temperatures have not risen in lock-step
with that rise. Given the ubiquity of water vapor, deciding this issue
is rather like asking a panel of tasters to savor the difference between
two big urns full of cafe au lait. One urn contains five lumps of sugar,
the other six-not an easy matter, except to a diabetic.
Neither sugar's sweetness nor its palpable metabolic effect is at issue.
But it's not an easy call. So too, scientific perceptions of both where
the world is, and the timing of its rendezvous with climatic change, are
still in part very much a matter of taste . As is the question of
whether scientists from disciplines unrelated to the atmosphere should
lend their authority to the promotion of policies that might not prevail
on the objective strength-or empirical weakness--of the available
evidence. It is a prerogative of the manifesto-writing classes to
dragoon as many members as they can of the National Academy of Sciences
into signing them (a task too often easier than getting them read).
But
the resulting embarras de richesses can he a problem when the
signatories outnumber the real experts in the field. The Union of
Concerned Scientists got a majority of the membership to sign a
declaration calling for a substantial reduction in global C02 emissions
by the year 2000. Some members (notably MIT atmospheric physicist
Richard Lindzen) were appalled and said so, but they failed to make it
onto prime-time television.
Vexation and Videotape
THE
MOST important arbiters of the environmental policy debate have
accordingly become the public television producers whose products bear
the Academy's imprimatur when the credits roll. They have tools at their
disposal to amplify and mute at will the discordant voices within the
Academy. In a fair fight, a satellite or a supercomputer doesn't stand a
chance against the editing and special effects studios of New York and
Hollywood.
So in
terms of political clout, the real centers of power have moved from the
locales of computer climate modeling, to the public television stations
of Pittsburgh and Boston. We are being shown the planet's future by
design, in color and in stereo. Yet the production designers seldom
condescend to listen to scientists arguing, calculating, and changing
their minds. Intelligibility, not content, is the criterion the
producers value most. Their goal is to fossilize a script on videotape,
not to question the agenda it may compel, when it is reiterated like a
commercial on good gray public television.
I have
yet to see a computer climate model whose screen is framed by a
proscenium, with a data display set to Vivaldi's Four Seasons and an
explanatory voice-over worthy of a network anchor. Yet in watching some
of the most bizarre examples of video hype on climate change (e.g., "The
Atmosphere in Crisis" episode of PBS' The Infinite Voyage), even as my mind
is repelled by what is being said, the hair on my head rises together
with the rest of the audience's when the clouds part and the music
blares. This is semantic aggression run riot-sucking the audience into
an hallucinatory Charybdis of swirling images of Gaia profaned.
Mere
facts cannot prevail over the raw semiotic power of so excellent a
medium, even when its masters may be leading us into a future that may
be beyond economic repair-a future in which facts don't count and
perceptions of scientific authority can take precedence over mere
evidence. I often find myself exhorting atmospheric scientists to
concern themselves with this phenomenal mastery, horn of nature
television of National Geographic caliber mated with prose worthy of
Jonathan Schell. But they just smile ruefully-once was enough-they've
seen the genre. In it, computer animated conceptions of Venus's infernal
surface vie with stark visions of all-but-airless Mars as alien
stand-ins for earthly greenhouse warming and ozone depiction.
Television has little room for doubting scientists. They accordingly
know the score. Who, for the sake of skepticism or the honor of the
scientific profession, wants to go down in flames like Ceaucescu-locked
in the sights of a hostile videocam? The TV crew has got the Maxim gun,
and we do not.
So,
riding on a wave of videotape, the usage "global warming" is entering
the vernacular in the present tense as a mock synonym for "climate
change." If only the public read and knew more, and heard and saw less;
if only more scientists (and fewer organizations purporting to represent
them) endeavored to inform the electorate's considerable curiosity-then
we might face better odds in protecting objectivity from the heat of the
greenhouse debate.
A DISTURBING reality confronts us: A the deliberate creation of a double
standard, with one set of facts for internal scientific discourse and
another for public consumption. Many who have contributed to it justify
their actions by referring to their past diffidence which may have
delayed action on ozone depiction. And agonized by the possibility of
history repeating itself On C02, some have cast objectivity aside and
openly made common cause with the eco-politicians. But this pathology of
the sociology of science is not without a remedy. For the power of
television to project unchallengeable images of environmental quality,
real or imagined, is utterly undone when the public achieves even a
minimal level of quantitative understanding; numeracy and skepticism go
hand in hand.
In the
absence of numbers candidly conveyed, it is all too easy to transmute
supposedly quantitative scientific "facts" about the present into a
qualitative legal fiction about the future. Popular coverage of the
atmospheric sciences tends to neglect the enormous range of
concentration (or dilution) of the various gases involved. That
concentration ranges from almost 1 percent by volume in the case of
water vapor, to hundreds of parts per million carbon dioxide, to 1 part
per million methane, to parts per billion-total chlorine. And, finally,
down to hundreds of parts per trillion-the individual CFCs.
This
eight-order-of-magnitude range lends itself to rhetorical abuse on both
sides of the debate. So beware equally of headlines proclaiming a
fourfold increase in stratospheric chlorine (it has-from 1 part per
billion in 1960 to nearly 4 parts per billion in 1990) or dismissing
carbon dioxide with a blasé "Greenhouse a Humbug-C02 up by less than
1/100th of 1 percent!"
This,
like "Stratosphere in Crisis--Chlorine Quadruples," may respectively
amuse energy lobbyists and substitute refrigerant salesmen, but it
profoundly misrepresents the central problem posed by the interaction of
climate and technical civilization.
That
problem is deep time--deep not on a geological scale, but relative to
the time-scale of politics. It has taken humanity ten generations to
push C02 up by a bare 70 parts per million. The previous million years
of using fire failed to budge it from its ambient range of fluctuation.
The fossil record speaks plainly; as deep as we can drill into ancient
ice, there is a clear (but how causal?) linkage of C02 and global
climate. What wildfires failed to accomplish in the eons before human
evolution, the Industrial Revolution has delivered-the acceleration of
the history of our interaction with the very air-a bona fide change in
the second most important greenhouse gas. And equally disturbing, it has
delivered that fearsome engine of change, the chainsaw.
The
drying effect of not-so-rapid deforestation on the climate of islands
was noted by Columbus half a millennium ago. So there is nothing subtle
or uncertain about regional climate change in Brazil-strip the land of a
rainforest that literally makes rain, and suffer sunstroke in the dust
.I wish C02-induced climate change were as simple. Clearly, a
sharp-toothed carnivore is on the prowl. But we've yet to see a
full-grown specimen. Are we dealing with Snoopy or Cerberus?
It's
hard to tell- it's only just a foundling pup, and the question of its
diet remains to he wrestled with-it might grow into either. But grow it
will-slowly, and for a long while undetectably. One of these centuries,
we're going to have a real dog in our front yard. But what kind? And
when? An interdisciplinary consensus on the magnitude of the "greenhouse
effect" and its impact on sea levels in the next century won't come
cheap-or soon.
Nobody
knows if the synergy of all the ill-defined feedbacks will coincide with
high-side outcomes of the many inputs that global systems models
require. So some will invoke the presumed prudence of assuming the
worst. For others, there is Murphy's Second Law: if everything must go
wrong, don't bet on it.
Changing the weather on a local scale is categorically a different
matter than transforming the climate of the globe. The vast reservoir of
CO, locked up in limestone dwarfs the atmosphere's burden by many, many
thousandfold. The geological unleashing of a fraction of it in the days
of the dinosaurs created an atmosphere far richer in C02 (and some 5 C
warmer) than that of today. The tricky question-how much fossil fuel
must be burned to do likewise--has a brief answer: all of it.
The
immensity of the world's reservoirs of coal (like limestone) teaches the
disparity of scale between what humanity can do in a single generation
and what goes on in the course of geological time. We are but builders
of pyramids and hewers of wood, not architects of mountains or
choreographers of continental drift. For all the leverage our technology
affords us, we are a species that fits into a single cubic kilometer,
with room to spare. In light of the minimalism its editors advocate, the
motto of the Whole Earth Catalogue-
"We are as gods, so we'd better get
good at it!"-
is stunningly hubristic. But what of the lamentations of
those who decry what mischief we can and do see?
Turning Up the Heat
THEREIN LIES the political paradox: what we can perceive, we can
endeavor to put right. That scar on the Soviet landscape, the vanishing
Aral Sea, bears witness to the deranged power of central planning like
the mark of Cain. Yet, the diverted rivers that caused it can he swiftly
returned to their courses. But the action of the invisible hand of
energy economics upon the world is imperceptibly slow.
Bear in mind the
beaver. Without benefit of godhood, its mindless industry acting over eons has transformed the Canadian landscape into a wilderness of lakes.
Likewise ,creating a brave new world with an atmosphere transformed by
the total depiction of fossil fuel is a labor of generations yet unborn.
We
cannot govern the actions of posterity, but we can teach by our example.
We can plant trees and stay the hand of mindless deforestation. We can
value the richness of biological diversity and recognize the
intellectual poverty of sullen indifference to the majesty of nature.
But any pretension to oracular foreknowledge of how, over the next
quarter century, the earth will respond to our presence lies in the
realm not of science but of intuition.
And just as surely, any denial
that unrestrained C02 injection can transform the world within five
generations lies beyond the pale of both-especially if China's vast coal
reserves are exploited at a per capita rate approaching that of the U.
S. today.
Politically, I counsel constant vigilance. The salvation of the world
affords an enchanting pretext for those predisposed to societal
intervention . They have already raised the abolitionist banner,
pointing to the prospect of Bangladesh awash and water skiing down the
Mall to the Capitol-a prospect no more likely in my lifetime than
nothing happening.
My personal expectation-and I reserve the right to
change my mind if the evidence does-runs more to centimeter-per-year
rises in sea level and a lot more climatic variability than actual
temperature rise in that lifetime.
There
is a precedent of sorts, at the periphery of human history, of a
temperature change fully as large (5 to 6'C) as even the most
pessimistic estimates for the century to come. It happened an eon ago,
and its onset was so sudden as to raise the contemporary question of
climate responding in an abruptly nonlinear way to humanity's growth.
Yet mankind muddled through the last Ice Age's death throes and has done
rather well since, despite a 100-meter rise in sea levels!
But
unlike the regression of the glaciers, a reversal of the course of the
Industrial Revolution is not to be meekly borne. An examination of the
history of energy policy over the last two decades reveals some
unexpected and paradoxical trends in the relationship between
environmental awareness and actual emissions of the greenhouse gases.
In the
aftermath of the Arab oil shock of the early 1970s, computer models not
of climate, but of resource depiction and energy costs, played a major
role in determining energy policies. The most egregious projections,
immortalized in textbooks by neo-Malthusians like Paul Ehrlich, had the
United States running out of natural gas in 1989. Yet they inspired the
National Academy of Sciences to commission a massive study with
conclusions (promote energy efficiencies and develop coal and oil shale
resources) reflecting a belief in continuous energy cost inflation.
At the
turn of the century, a coal-fired electrical station that was 8 percent
efficient was a state-of-the-art wonder. A solid half-century of
progress followed, at a rate of better than a half-percent a year. By
the 1960s, such facilities had achieved new-plant efficiencies of over
40 percent. Back then, coal was literally dirt-cheap. But with the
coming of the 1974 oil shock, it was assumed that as energy costs soared
into the 1980s, market forces would compel heroic efforts to raise the
thermodynamic efficiency of such plants to the limits of high
technology-a process fuel cost savings would amply justify.
But the cost projections were wrong, and we got the Oil Glut instead. And, courtesy of Earth Day and its aftermath, a draconian regime of
sulfur emission control. The enforcement of that regime did two things
quite unrelated to acid rain. Installing the control systems reduced the
efficiency of existing plants by five whole percentage points, and
defunded the development of the next generation of more efficient
combustion technology and power-generation systems.
So we
are entering the 1990s about 15 % worse off in terms of C02
emission per kilowatt-hour than we were a generation ago. This is pretty
close to a worst-case scenario whatever one's view on the near-term
effect of greenhouse emissions: the largest single term in America's
fuel equation-coal-fired electricity-has been running retrograde to
progress in materials science and combustion technology for twenty
years. Yet both here and in Japan, science has lately begun to deliver
the Right Stuff for raising its efficiency-materials able to withstand
higher temperatures and stresses for longer times. But they are being
applied more to aircraft engines than to power stations.
Together with the realization that energy costs do show a shallow but
steady inflationary trend, this suggests that we need not he idle while
awaiting newer and more elegant generations of climate models and
nuclear technology-or that Holy Grail of applied physics, hot fusion
that truly emulates the power of the sun.
So
there may indeed be a solution to the profound uncertainty that
engenders reluctance when we are offered insurance against C02 bracket
creep-at a trillion-dollar premium. Consider a double Scots Verdict:
even if the verdict on global warming is not proven, we could still save
a bundle of hard cash if a canny enough energy policy can be found.
Rather
than mandating reduced consumption of fuel and its Luddite consequences
here and in the growing industrial sector of the Third World, let us
consider getting more Kilowatt-hours by literally turning up the heat. A
policy that promotes raising the minimum thermodynamic efficiency of
hotter-running fuel-burning power stations by say 8 percent (to around
44 percent) by the year 2000 might be paid for by the very fuel it
saves. Neither we nor our posterity can object to saving ourselves some
cash-thrift has as few enemies as prodigality in fuel consumption has
friends outside OPEC. And should the presently hung scientific jury
reach a Scots Verdict in the interminable trial of Earth v. The
Greenhouse Gases, little macro-economic mischief will have been done.
But
should nature follow art, and oblige the environmental televangelists
with an unambiguously toasty third millennium -- when I have spoken of
uncertainty in this essay, I have meant what I said-- the retrospective
imposition of such a policy regime will he a source of some satisfaction
to all, save hardened libertarians. But how will stewardship be
redefined in the longer term-the century or so it would take to double
C02 at the present pace?
OPTIONS DO exist. Given alternatives to power derived from fossil fuels,
the whole fuel cycle can he redefined, with hydrogen replacing carbon.
There is another major (and revolutionary) technical fix: we can liquefy
air and burn fuels in pure oxygen, and condense the resulting C02 with
the frigid liquid nitrogen that is the by-product of that liquefaction.
But both hydrogen fuels and systems that recaptureCO2 are (like solar
and wind power) dauntingly expensive.
So
even today, in the midst of climatic ambiguity, even the most
chlorophyllic environmentalists are having stirrings of conscience about
their adamant refusal to acknowledge an unambiguous fact of physics.
As
surely as C02 can absorb the warming infrared, the strong nuclear force
is millions of times stronger than the chemical bonds that are burst in
unleashing heat from coal. Rather than embarking down the soft energy
path that leads back beyond the Industrial Revolution's roots into a
future dark age, the Greens should pause to consider the effect on the
environment of renewing and perfecting our mastery of the atom's pale
fire.
The prospect of nuclear power's second coming presents environmental
millenarians with a real source of cognitive dissonance: it is they who
are the problem. It is their delaying tactics that wasted years and
squandered billions at Seabrook and elsewhere. And it is their past
indifference to the environmental consequences of the fossil fuel that
the reactor might have saved that makes a mockery of their present
rhetoric.
The
sooner their paranoia about nuclear waste disposal is laid to rest
alongside that waste itself-deep in the and badlands, well secured, and
as soon as the criminal mischief of Chernobyl is buried under the
foundations of a reactor both safe and sanely contained, the sooner will
civilization cease to he obliged to make a chemical waste repository of
the sky.
So let
all summon the courage to be kind to our environment. For if the bulk of
the arsenals of Armageddon are indeed fading into historical
irrelevancy, what better fate for them than to disappear as smokeless
fuel into newer and more tractable nuclear furnaces? Better they light
the world for a generation than heat it for a baleful instant.
And
better too that cooler heads than those that dominate the hot media
prevail in informing the Congress and the electorate. For this much is
certain: science needs to see the illumination of today's hot-tempered
environmental policy debates. If light is to prevail over heat, many
will have to simmer down and reflect they have lately been doing or
counseling.
If
candor prevails, climate professionals will realize once again that
laymen too can recognize cant when they hear it and cartoons when they
see them. Scientists would do well to recall that insight's inevitable
corollary-the neutrality of scientific institutions must first exist if
it is to he respected.
For
as the thaw continues in the Eastern bloc, we see emerging from
beneath the glacial recent facade of science in the Soviet Union grim
evidence of what happened when science was last subordinated to the
true believer's agendas for changing the world.
Whether the trial of
Galileo or the tyranny of Lysenko, at all times and in all polities,
science politicized is science betrayed.
Russell Seitz, from 1985 to 1989, was a visiting scholar and associate
of Harvard University's Center for International Affairs. His writings
have appeared in Science, Nature, and Technology Review as well as the
Economist, Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, and The National
Interest
FOOTNOTES
'Professor Alan Robock, University of Maryland, quoted in Science 244
June 2, 1989): 1041-43.]
'To
add to the confusion, the CFCs are roughly 1000 times more efficient
than carbon dioxide as absorbers of infrared, making them significant
greenhouse gases and major agents of stratospheric cooling: some
scientists fear the Invisible Man might he hiding in his Doppelganger's
shadow! While stratospheric cooling is perhaps the least controversial
of the effects at issue, it is conspicuously unpublicized.
'I am
indebted for both Columbus's observation about Caribbean deforestation
and the opening quote to a speech delivered by Presidential Science
Adviser D. Allan Bromley before the National Press Club in April 1990.
