10.4 Degrees, Why Not 15 Or 20 Degrees After All!

Even if I don’t watch TV anymore, I am sure that the BBC mentioned either on friday or yesterday that a UN summit was held in to order to debate about a report, that states the responsibility of humanity in the recent global warming as very likely. As usual with this kind of reports, trends and model are discussed, the most extreme of them, being a possible rise of the earth mean temperature by 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit, which is equal to 5.8 degrees Celsius. And as always the medias and groups like Greenpeace are prompt in taking the most extreme scenario as the shape of things to come.

Such an increase of the average mean temperature on earth is in my opinion impossible considering carbon dioxide only and for very simple reasons. The first one being that carbon dioxide only accounts for approximately ten percent of the total greenhouse effect, as water vapour has and will always have a higher effect in terms of proportion. The second one is that the effects of carbon dioxide, as a greenhouse case follows a logarithmic curve, not an exponential one thus the more you had the less important the effects becomes. By consequence, a doubling of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, would not necessarily be translated by a doubling of the greenhouse effect caused by the same gas.

Models are what they are, models, and although they are becoming more and more accurate, thanks in improvements in computing power and the like they will not necessarily reflect in every details the climate of tomorrow. Moreover as usual if the potential effects of carbon dioxide are known, a lot of others factors like the precise influence of clouds on climate are still unknown. For example it is sometimes said, that aerosols “prevented” a rise in temperatures between the forties and the seventies, yet scientists are doubtful about whether aerosols have a positive or a negative impact towards temperature but, the most important point to bear in mind is that measuring the global mean temperature is not that easy and estimates about its value varied up to the eighties. Climate science is therefore, far from being an exact science. Then best thing to do in order to have the best picture possible on the subject would be to let the scientists do their work without any pressure from one of the sides.

In the meantime, when the not so well known effects of different parameters on the climate are still questioned, acid rain still exists and attacks towards the biosphere are becoming more and more frequents in areas of the world like South America. Moreover the left should always remember that the worst country in that respect, was the USSR certainly not “nasty Americans capitalists” or “corporations which only thinks about profits”. Finally why not talk about diseases like malaria whose impact on economy, people’s lives in a large part of the world and environment; eradicating it like in the same manner as the smallpox back in 1977, would surely help “sustainable development” in the long run.