Overpopulation in the US has ceased to be a credible bogey, just as the US birth rate has at long last taken a slight upturn from its record low. But there is no shortage of other doomsday mechanisms, of which two old acquaintances were in the news again last month: acid rain and the greenhouse effect, both from the same fiendish source: coal-fired power plants.
That makes it easy for the panic mongers to show the depth of their concern: ask them whether they want to kill two birds with one stone by going nuclear.
For acid rain, Ruckelshaus proposes to get even more sulfur out of the coal without knowing whether it is a significant culprit. The multi-billion dollar bill is to be sent to the utilities and footed by the electric rate payers. For legislators itching to legislate on scientific problems, we suggest the following draft of the ATARA (Acid Test of Acid Rain Act): anyone unable to explain why there were no problems with acid rain in the 1950s when as much coal was burned in the US (and more in Europe) as today, but without contemporary pollution controls, shall not be paid a cent of taxpayers' or ratepayers' money for research, consultation, legislation or meditation on acid rain.
As for the greenhouse effect, the news comes not so much from the National Research Council, which last month mainly concluded (surprise!) that more research and further funds are needed, but from physicist B. Idso in the Dept. of Agricultures Research Service in Phoenix.
The greenhouse effect (a misnomer, for a greenhouse is warmed by simple lack of ventilation, not by this effect) comes about as follows. "White sunlight is composed of all colors, but if it hits, say, a meadow, all is absorbed except the green, which is reflected. The absorbed energy is turned into heat, some of which is re-radiated as infrared into space
¾if there is no obstacle. (Clouds, for example, will trap the heat, but only temporarily: as everyone knows, a clear sky means a chilly night.)This is where the CO
2 comes in. Nitrogen and oxygen are transparent to infrared radiation, but CO2 is not. At its present concentration of about 340 parts per million it has no appreciable effect for keeping the heat in, but if it reached 600 ppm or more, it could act as a blanket to trap the heat and raise the average temperature at the earth's surface by something like 1 degree F.That is the old theory, which is as good as the programs and data fed into computer simulations. And that is not very good: Not enough is known about the full CO
2 cycle to understand how its budget balances; and what fraction of the now (undoubtedly) increasing CO2 level is due to fossil fuel burning is mostly speculation.So the old theory was pretty shaky as it stood, and now Idso has taken a kick at its very foundations: CO
2 has several absorption bands besides the infrared one, as does water vapor (and all gases), and while the long-wave thermal radiation may be kept in by one (infrared) CO2 band, the shorter wavelengths of the incoming solar radiation will be kept out, apparently by the combined effects of both CO2 and water vapor, so that less heat becomes available to be trapped in the first place. Once again, nature appears to be self-healing.Anyone in the lucrative CO
2 business who fails to take account of this compensating effect...[More: Idso's original papers, given at scientific meetings last August were not available to us, but a brief report appears in Laser Focus/Electro-Optics, Oct. 83, p. 74.]
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Vol. 11, No. 4
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 11, No. 4 Date: November 29, 2004 11:17 AM Title: From pseudoscience to war
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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