Did Kyoto kill Uncle John?


pollution vs climate change



It's tax time and this year I've got an extra return to make. My Uncle John died last November at the age of 68. That's him on the right above with yours truly. We miss him.

I'm wrapping up his estate, cursing the fact that he never got around to signing the will he drafted a few years ago. If you don't have a will, get one. Otherwise its makes for a lot of extra work for whoever ends up taking care of your final affairs.

John returned to Essex County a couple of years ago after living in Winnipeg for several decades. He wasn't in good health. A heavy smoker for most of his life he did double damage to his lungs by working in a limestone quarry that observed few safety precautions. John thought he was the last surviving member of that workforce. Like him most suffered from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

In the last year John never went anywhere without his own portable oxygen supply. Going over his records I discovered the bills for half a dozen ambulance trips to the hospital that he never told us about. Although he was short tempered and impatient, knowing his time was limited, it amazed me how active he remained and how good humoured I often found him. He couldn't walk more than a dozen steps without stopping to catch his breath but he would think nothing of hopping on his scooter and traveling several miles to the beer store or to get groceries. He had a girl friend, organized shuffleboard tournaments in his apartment building, and roamed the internet on his computer.

He died of a heart attack, probably brought on by a lung infection. It was inevitable, but I think it came sooner because of where he lived. And because air quality is no longer the urgent concern it used to be.

John lived in a public housing building for seniors. Located in the west end of Windsor, a stone's throw away from my old high school, his home was only three small blocks away from the Ambassador Bridge, the busiest border crossing in North America. Transport trucks are often backed up there for hours, their idling engines spewing fumes and diesel soot into the surrounding neighbourhood. This is in addition to the nearby factories and foundries on Detroit's own west side and the coal fired power plants scattered throughout the midwestern states and Ontario. I think it's safe to say John was living in some of the worst air pollution on the continent.

I tried to talk John into living somewhere else. But his building was the first available vacancy and the other geared to income residences all had long waiting lists. And John was skeptical that a move of just several miles would make a big difference.

A few weeks ago in the Windsor Star there was a story by reporter Doug Williamson about a meeting at the University of Windsor, which is itself right beside the bridge. The headline read "Alarm sounds on air quality: Unhealthy level of ultrafine particles on west-end roads."

"Researchers are finding high levels of dangerous ultrafine particles and black carbon spewing from vehicle exhausts on west-end Windsor roads, an air quality symposium was told Wednesday."

......

"On Oct. 22 last year, for example, Brook's equipment recorded that the level of ultrafine particles -- one micron or smaller in size -- ranged from 300,000 and 400,000 parts per cubic centimetre along the west end riverfront to more than 500,000 at the Ambassador Bridge.

"The ambient level for Windsor is less than 100,000, he said.

"Driving back the same day toward Toronto, the machine began picking up levels of 1.5 million, he said."

......

"And a University of Windsor engineering professor said levels of black carbon from vehicle exhausts near the Wyandotte Street entrance to the bridge were higher than normal. This is dangerous to health, said Iris Xu, because the microscopic carbon particles become coated with other chemicals in vehicle exhaust, and are breathed in.

"Xu's year-long study, which ended in January, showed the black carbon levels were at their highest in the bridge area between 8 and 9 a.m. each weekday, peaking on Tuesdays and dropping off on the weekend.

"While the typical black carbon level would be 0.5 to one micron per cubic centimetre, she found levels as high as 13. "The higher numbers are caused by traffic volumes," she said, and laid the blame on diesel trucks.

"Other chemicals like benzene, from gasoline engines, and industrial pollutants sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxide are also present, but researchers are continuing to study them."

- The Windsor Star, March 3, 2005


 

Until recently a lot of progress was being made in attacking air pollution. By some accounts the air all across North America is 30 to 50 percent cleaner than it was a few decades ago. It seems to me though, that two countervailing developments threaten to stall or even turn back that progress.

First, the auto manufacturers and the trucking industry have pulled a couple of fast ones on us. General Motors et al have evaded the fuel efficiency regulations by promoting the sale of sport trucks and utility vehicles. At the same time the just-in-time inventory revolution has turned the highways over to herds of giant transport trucks owned by cost cutting companies that scrimp on maintenance. The trucks have become rolling warehouses, replacing the older system that depended much more on the less polluting and energy efficient railways. That changeover was made possible by deregulation, lowering drivers' wages and prolonging the work day, which now includes hours of unpaid waiting time.

These days everyone thinks they are pro-environment. Even SUV addicts hope to eventually find time to go off road in some nature preserve. So why did we let the gas and diesel guzzlers get the upper hand?

The answer is, the environmental movement changed its priorities. Rather than following up on previous victories it has moved on. The chief concern is no longer bad air but hot air. The threat of global warming is now the dominant message coming from environmental activists, aided and abetted by a large number of climatologists. Their primary target is carbon dioxide, a non-toxic gas that is essential for vegetation and also plays a role, like water vapour, in keeping the earth's heat from escaping. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has been increasing since the start of the industrial revolution.

This new strategy assumed that by reducing CO2 emissions we will automatically take care of the other more deadly man made additives in the air.

Last year I wrote that I was beginning to question the thesis that man made global warming was a catastrophe in the making. My doubts and skepticism have grown since then. But I still think the doom sayers might be right and I'm trying to keep an open mind as I watch the debate continue to unfold.

The fact that there is still a debate is one of the things that makes me suspicious of the pro side. When, for example, I asked questions at my local environmental organization, I was abruptly told that there was no debate anymore, that there was a consensus and that everything I needed to know was in the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I read the reports of the ICPP and other statements from various sources and found that most scientists do agree that the surface of the earth has warmed up about .6 of a degree Celsius over the last century and that part of that warming is anthropogenic, ie the result of human activity. A few were not even willing to go that far. There is much less agreement about whether this warming trend will have disastrous effects over the next century and still more argument as to whether we can or should roll back the warming by cutting back on fossil fuel consumption.

There is even a case being made that as a species we have been in the global warming business for millennia, ever since we took up agriculture. That theory made the cover of last month's Scientific American and is offered as an explanation as to why the next ice age appears to be behind schedule.

Unfortunately for the clean air campaign, the global warming scare has been ineffective in mobilizing the masses. Even though the polls show most people believe the consensus doctrine, that widespread support is quite shallow.

Beneath the public relations success there are substantial fissures of doubt. The Kyoto accord calls for massive economic adjustments but even its strongest supporters admit it is basically just symbolic, and will do little to lower average global temperatures.

The accord only became law because Russia used it as a bargaining chip to negotiate membership in the World Trade Organization. As an added incentive, Russia's industrial output has declined so much they can use the treaty to sell excess emissions quotas to other countries. Their current emissions are well below the 1990 benchmark.

Then there are the exemptions for China, India and the rest of the developing world, the refusal of Australia and the United States to participate and the impossibility of meeting the first set of goals set forth in the treaty. All these factors combine to undermine the message that global warming requires an immediate sacrifice and commitment.

Besides Kyoto this past year has seen some additional setbacks to the cause.

By endorsing the silly and improbable disaster flick The Day after Tomorrow some prominent environmentalist organizations gave up the appearance of being scientific and cheapened their own reputations. Novelist Michael Crichton struck back with his own work of fiction, State of Fear, that much more plausibly presented global warming as a hoax. The best seller's numerous footnotes, charts and appendices, which Crichton says are factual, successfully raised a lot of doubts in his readers' minds. In particular he is quite good at questioning the accuracy of computer simulations that attempt to predict the future one hundred years from now. For a concise summary of his views on the politicization of science see his lecture: Aliens Cause Global Warming.

When a series of hurricanes struck the state of Florida, and a tsunami crossed the Indian Ocean, advocates tried to link these events in the public mind to global warming. Once again they were caught speaking without any supporting science and they were called on it.

The suggestion that global warming would affect plate tectonics beneath the ocean was obviously specious.

Chris Landsea, a member of the IPCC who specializes on the subject of hurricanes, resigned from the panel because his colleagues were making a link to last year's bad weather that he knew was unfounded.

I was stunned to discover that it's only been in the last three years that climate modeling programs running on the world's largest supercomputer have even acknowledged that hurricanes exist. Before then they didn't have the power to simulate the regional superstorms. This raises the question of why should we trust the more primitive computer generated scenarios of the 2001 IPCC report.

Another element of the report has recently been thrown into doubt. Perhaps the most persuasive image associated with the IPCC is the famous hockey stick graph that showed a relatively stable temperature range over the past 1000 years until the sudden increase of the last century. This is what allowed advocates to say that the late 1990s were the hottest years of the millennium. What was surprising about the hockey stick was that the medieval warm period and the more recent little ice age were not represented on the graph. Two Canadian researchers have published reviews of the data and calculations behind the graph that demonstrate the science is flawed by several errors. When corrected, the more dramatic ups and downs of the historical temperature record are restored. Other scientists have come forward and agreed with them.

Many in the environmental movement know that they have lost their way. In an essay reeking of despair, The Death of Environmentalism, the authors lament:

Over the last 15 years environmental foundations and organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into combating global warming.

We have strikingly little to show for it.


Why so many governments are willing to go along with Kyoto is a mystery to me. The most believable explanation I've seen is that Kyoto provides cover for reestablishing the nuclear power industry. That will be necessary if hydrogen fuel cells are going to replace hydrocarbon fuels in motor vehicles. To get large quantities of pure hydrogen requires huge amounts of electricity. There is only one non-fossil fuel technology currently in use that could generate that additional power.

Maybe vast more quantities of nuclear waste are a justifiable expense in preventing a warmer world.

Or it could be that Bjorn Lomborg may have a point in saying that it's more effective to adapt to climate change than fight it. Some coastal populations might have to emigrate or learn to live under sea level like the Dutch. Maybe the Inuit will have to give up their snow mobiles and switch to all-terrain vehicles.

Regardless, there is still today the problem of bad air, at least in some cities and along major highways. The environmental movement could reclaim its past influence by putting that issue back on the front burner.

Smog is real. Sometimes you can see and smell and taste it. The yellow clouds I've witnessed hovering over Detroit, Toronto, Los Angeles and even Vancouver cannot be denied. Vulnerable people like Uncle John are dying all the time. Healthier people have to put up with asthma, sinusitis, sore throats and and other sometimes not so minor breathing ailments.

Why not make some outrageous proposals to refocus attention on the problem? Call for the evacuation of people who live or work near heavy traffic or demand the enclosure of the roads within air conditioned tunnels. Those may seem impossible demands but who would of thought a few years ago that smoking would ever be banned in public.

On a less rabble-rousing note, there are many scientists and activists that have made clean air their life's work. Some were at that meeting at the University of Windsor. They could use some backup.

It's time to return to the war against pollution.



Posted: Sun - April 3, 2005 at 12:07 PM          

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