THE CARBON DIOXIDE HYPOTHESIS

It may not altogether have escaped the observant reader that this newsletter is in favor of nuclear power. But our support is based on reason, not political prejudice, and we will not buy shaky arguments even if they tend to support nuclear power - we find the strong arguments good enough.

One such shaky argument is the "greenhouse effect" (itself genuine), which is supposed to change the earth's climate with the carbon dioxide formed by burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide (C0²), like the glass of a greenhouse, is opaque to infrared (heat) radiation; and according to the greenhouse theory, the solar energy re-radiated by the earth into space as infrared will be trapped by the CO² in the atmosphere, the climate will get hotter, the polar ice caps will melt, the oceans will rise, there will be global disaster, and the basement of the San Francisco Sierra Club will get flooded.(No kidding: A Sierra scare ad showed Golden Gate Bridge under water.)

First, a greenhouse does not heat up that way, as was demonstrated as early as 1909, when physicist R.W. Wood covered one greenhouse with glass, and another with rocksalt (which is transparent to infrared); what warmed up both to almost the same temperature was not the greenhouse effect, but the lack of ventilation. (Or compare the temperature in a car in the sun with a window slightly open, [a] standing, [b] driving. The greenhouse effect is the same - is the temperature the same?) What the outcome of the multitude of factors in the free atmosphere containing slightly more CO² ould be, nobody knows. Computer simulations are an accurate reflection of the model chosen by the programmer, not necessarily of reality.

Second, there is only one long series of direct measurements available from the Mauna Loa observeratory in Hawaii. It shows the CO² content of the atmosphere increasing, and shorter series (e.g., at the South Pole) confirm the trend. But there is little evidence that the increase is man-caused, and at least one strong indication that it isn't: The history of the chemical constitution of the atmosphere can be indirectly traced by radiological methods, for it is partly recorded in the layers of Greenland's ice sheets And the CO² content of the atmosphere has been fluctuating up and down for millenia. A grandiose theory based on the Mauna Loa data over the last 117 years is not very grandiose. Says Coal Mining and Processing's Eugene Guccione (August 77): "My puppy dog, at his present growth rate, would be 15 ft long and weigh 900 lb at age five."