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Does the Weather Really Matter? The Social Implications of Climate Change by William James Burroughs. Cambridge University Press: New York (1997). $24.95 pbk. 236 pages According to some of the world's most renowned climatologists, the tide is about to change in favor of those scientists who support the view that there is no global warming. For the past 20 years, although temperatures at ground level have risen steadily, allegedly due to a century-long increase in greenhouse gases brought on by industrial activity, the warming has failed to penetrate the atmosphere. In fact, in an area about three kilometers above the surface of the earth the temperatures have actually been cooling. All of the computerized climate models depend on the warming spreading through the troposphere, the lower 10 kilometers of the earth's atmosphere. Apparently increased greenhouse emissions of the past century have actually had no effect on climate. Mainstream climate modelers who have had the greatest influence in the political arena, especially the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have been tinkering with computer models for two decades in an attempt to have their models fit reality. However, the latest findings based on microwave analysis of the atmosphere from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) point to a cooling in the troposphere over the past 20 years -- a fact that would seriously compromise all computer models which need ground temperature warming spreading through to the troposphere to demonstrate global warming and climate change. The modelers' rebuttal is that the microwave instrument readings must be wrong. Instead of adhering to the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the best -- in this case that climate change is just not as sensitive to the greenhouse effect as their models predict -- modelers simply ignore the facts and continue to tinker with their models. Another problem with global warming-climate change scenarios is the modeling itself. In William James Burroughs' Does the Weather Really Matter?, there is an excellent discussion of exactly what modelers are attempting to do when predicting climate change. With advances in parallel computing, modelers hope to feed more precise details about the state of the atmosphere into models and therefore produce ever more accurate forecasts. However, insights into the unpredictable natures of non-linear systems provided by Chaos Theory paint a different picture. We have all heard of how the butterfly flapping its wings will affect the weather on the East Coast of the U.S. When it comes, however, to predicting climate change, one needs to know what is happening and what has happened on the sun, because of the 11-year solar sunspot cycle. During this cycle, solar output may vary by as much as 0.1 percent and, therefore, modelers would need to know not only what, to quote Burroughs, "the butterflies on Earth are up to, but also what is going on throughout the rest of the Universe," if they are to achieve complete accuracy. Thus, the thinking that greenhouse gases cause temperatures to rise by trapping heat and therefore causing global warming, which in turn will affect climate changes in the future, is not correct as stated simply because there are too many other variables in weather prediction. This does not mean, however, that human activities will play no role in climate change sometime in the future. Consider the contradiction in the following data: between 1960 and the late 1970s, the troposphere actually warmed while there was a slight cooling on the surface of the earth, a pattern which has completely reversed in the 1980s and 1990s. There is no scientific explanation for this -- something which leads greenhouse skeptics to conclude that there might be other natural factors that affect weather and climate much more than human activity. Rather than dwell on implicating human activity as the cause of global warming and weather change, Burroughs does an excellent job of documenting the social implications of weather using a fairly wide range of historical examples. He answers the questions concerning the real impact of weather extremes on historic events and whether frequency and impact of weather extremes is increasing. He also discusses the ability to predict these changes and the possible consequences of these changes, as well as the possibility of there being more less predictable changes in our future. In a balanced and accessible way, Burroughs has expertly combined an historical perspective with political and economic analysis and has explained the impact of extreme weather events on all aspects of society from a meteorological and climatological perspective. Finally, he has interpreted what is known about climate change and our ability to forecast future changes and its implications on economic and political arenas. In Global Warming: The Complete Briefing, John Houghton explores the scientific basis of global warming and the likely impacts of climate change on human society. He describes the actions governments, industry and individuals should take to mitigate the effects of climate change. As a world authority in meteorology and co-chair of the Scientific Assessment Working Group of the IPCC his views on the impact of human activity on climate change are widely accepted. According to Houghton, global warming and the resulting climate change is one of the most serious environmental problems facing the world community. Throughout the book this argument is well developed and explained in a way that the average reader could understand -- especially because there are many diagrams, tables, graphs and maps which are easy to interpret. Houghton concludes that global warming and climate change are real and human activity is to blame. Therefore, individuals, industry and government must reform and make the changes that are necessary to reduce greenhouse emissions. Both Houghton and Burroughs argue that greenhouse gases cause global warming and therefore climate change. However, as mentioned earlier, many scientists just do not agree. While the debate between the climate modelers and the greenhouse skeptics will undoubtedly continue into the next century, we would all benefit now and in the future by decreased greenhouse emissions in a different way. Most human activities which produce greenhouse gases also produce air and water pollution. Energy conservation and increased energy efficiency (both in its generation and usage) provided by the development of new technologies, would pay immediate dividends by making our air and water cleaner and improving the quality of life for those in the industrialized nations of the world. Anthony Barricelli is Science
Chair at Saint Francis Preparatory in Fresh Meadows, New York. His environmental
science students have preserved 80 acres of rainforest over the past
three years.
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