Religion and Global Warming: more in common than you might think

The Pope’s warnings of the effects of man-made global warming, and the now rather vaguer ‘climate change’, are rather appropriate. Both religion and man-made global warming are based on a belief system. The Catholic religion has original sin and redemption. In a similar way we’re told that our excessive consumption, in particular of fossil-fuelled energy, has wrought great climatic changes which can only be redeemed by green taxes, subsidised renewable energy and exceedingly ugly wind turbines.

The reason that man-made climate change has a large element of belief is that it’s difficult to separate man’s contribution to global temperatures, if any, from naturally occurring variations resulting from those two great nuclear furnaces, the radioactive earth itself and the sun.

The mechanism proposed for global warming is based on man’s production of carbon dioxide. Although a significant greenhouse gas, it’s occurrence in the earth’s atmosphere (0.04%) is generally agreed to be too small, on its own, to greatly affect global temperatures. However, proponents of man-made global warming suggest a small rise in temperature from an increase in carbon dioxide could invoke a feedback mechanism involving the most important greenhouse gas, water vapour (clouds). One of the proposed mechanisms is that a small rise in temperature could result in greater evaporation of the seas to add to the greenhouse effect and therefore affect global temperatures more significantly than from the increase in carbon dioxide alone. However, carbon dioxide is naturally occurring in substantial quantities. It originates from the earth’s magma and escapes from volcanos and fissures over many parts of the earth, as well as from oceanic spreading centres and major faults and rifts, for example the African Rift valley. Similar to the various contributions to global warming, the carbon dioxide from natural sources has to be separated from that resulting from man’s burning of fossil fuels.  Also, thus far from satellite and other accurate measurements of the last 20 or so years, the feedback mechanism has not been observed. In fact any small increases in carbon dioxide have resulted in a smaller temperature increase than predicted, indicating a negative rather than a positive feedback, suggesting a rather stable system.  Just as a small rise in temperature could result in more water vapour that could potentially increase the greenhouse effect and further heat the earth, then the extra cloud cover could prevent as much heat from actually reaching the earth. So feedback is a complex issue.with opposing influences.

The whole basis of science, and the scientific method, is scepticism. When observing something different about the world, a scientist won’t believe it. So a series of tests, or experiments, to confirm and perhaps explain these observations will be established. The scientist will need to be satisfied that firstly the initial observations are valid and not flukes or explained by some prevailing theory, before progressing to the next stage. This will involve writing up the observations and the experimental results, possibly suggesting an explanation for the observations. This is then submitted to a learned journal in the relevant field of science. The editor of the journal will require that the article, or paper as it’s generally referred to, is peer reviewed by scientists in the same field. On the recommendation of the reviewers, the journal editor may decide to accept or reject the paper outright for publication or accept it with certain modifications. The reviewers will be just as sceptical as the scientist submitting the paper.

There are profound differences between this respectfully sceptical view of science and the one proffered by international committees, such as the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change. Such organisations are based on a ‘scientific consensus’ from the position of an unwavering belief in man–made global warming and climate change. It’s a very entrenched standpoint, detached from any belief that future knowledge could ever overturn the paradigm.

But to have any hope of establishing man’s contribution to the temperature at the earth’s surface, as opposed to naturally-occurring changes, the rather ambitious aim was to establish – and solve – mathematical models of the complete system of everything that affects the temperature at the earth’s surface. It’s a sort of earth, atmosphere and everything question equivalent almost in magnitude to the mythical question of life, the universe and everything. The starting point is Newton’s second law of motion adapted for the fluid motion of the atmosphere, called the Navier-Stokes equations. These are themselves modified to allow computer modelling of the system. Subsequent modelling has seen a replacement of the term  ‘man-made global warming’ by ‘man-made global climate change’. Apparently some of the global warming models, rather perversely, resulted in global cooling.

So the belief in whether man has a significant influence on the world’s climate and temperature can be reformulated. It becomes a question of whether it’s possible to actually understand and estimate every relevant parameter, and predict the temperature from all forms of heat entering and being modified by the atmosphere.

The answer is, in all probability, no: and for two major reasons. Firstly, such modelling has been attempted since the 19th Century and our knowledge has constantly increased both in the modelling of the system and the system itself. To suggest that our current knowledge is anything like the final word on the subject is arrogance beyond belief. Indeed, there have been recent advances in the understanding of, for example, the jet stream that had to be incorporated into the modelling. It seems unthinkable that there wouldn’t be more.

Secondly, the computer modelling of the system, via the Navier-Stokes equations, is based on iterative equations. This is where an equation is used to predict how a particular parameter, for example temperature, changes over time. As time progresses, the value of the parameter – providing the input to the equation – is formed of the output of the parameter value from the previous calculation by the same equation. Each separate calculation of the equation is called an iteration. This is similar to the calculation of compound interest, where the capital and interest accrued after the first year provides the new capital for a greater amount of interest in the second year, and so on. However, there’s a problem with what’s termed the sensitivity to initial conditions, also called chaos or sometimes the butterfly effect. If there’s the smallest inaccuracy in the relevant parameters used in the iterations, then after a number of iterations the error will grow to have a larger value than the parameter itself. This will always happen. No matter how small the error, after enough iterations it will always grow large enough to render any predictions invalid. This is why accurate weather prediction, which is also based on the Navier – Stokes equations, is restricted to a few days. Clearly global warming is more concerned with climate than the mercurial weather, but the climate predictions are still subject to the constraints of chaos. With likely a scaling or fractal relationship to the weather, climate is probably just as mercurial but over a longer time scale. Furthermore, just because global warming models concentrate on the more general climatic trends, doesn’t mean they’re going to be any more accurate at future predictions than starting from more specific observations. Edward Lorenz, the man who first observed the effect, defined chaos thus: “When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future”.

There seems to be a prevailing attitude that even if man-made climate change isn’t proven, then the fact that there’s even a possibility means we need to act now to mitigate the effects. However it all depends what those actions entail. There are many reasons why energy conservation is a good thing and why renewables should form part of an overall energy strategy. However, this could extend to opposing any opportunity for the Third World to industrialise and raise their standard of living using cheap and easily accessible fossil fuels rather than renewables. On a seemingly unrelated subject, the Roman Catholic Church’s 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae” to this day enshrined their opposition to artificial birth control, which has likely had a deleterious economic effect on Catholic Third World countries. So that’s something else religion and global warming could have in common.

So the burning question of the day is, should we have a more measured and sceptical view over global warming/climate change?