Under the title, A New Dawn, Ian McEwan published an article in the Wall Street Journal on November 8, 2008 to which I here respond. My arguments are based essentially on scientific considerations but I must begin with something I witnessed as a child when I lived with my parents and siblings in Ethiopia some sixty years ago.
I knew then what radio was because I could see my parents listen to it all the time. What I did not know was that there were only a few local stations and that my parents were listening to short wave broadcast coming from afar. Also, I knew next to nothing about radio waves but I was not the only one in this boat. A few others were in it too, and there are some stories I could tell in this regard but no story is more interesting than what happened to a high official in the Ethiopian government.
The story I heard repeated over and over again, one that stuck in my memory for all these years, was that of the man who brought with him the newest of the new technologies upon his return from a tour abroad. What he brought was something we baptized in our household the "visual radio" but is now called a television set.
That official asked the chief electrician in the government to come to his mansion and set up the thing for him, having made the mistake of inviting his friends before trying the thing first. Most of the guests who responded to the invitation were from the foreign embassies, people he wanted to surprise and impress with his new acquisition.
When the moment came and the television set was turned on, all that he and the guests could see were a dark screen and the randomly distributed scintillating points we now know to be the echo of the Big Bang. The poor man could not get the channels that he enjoyed watching so much while stationed in America and, I believe, Britain too.
After a moment of embarrassment, a foreign diplomat who knew all about the new invention ended the agony of our hapless official by explaining what was supposed to happen but did not. He said that unlike the signal of short wave radio which is reflected back to earth by the ions in the upper atmosphere and is therefore capable of traveling far, the television signal goes in a straight line and, if not captured by a set in the line of sight, goes out into space and is lost for ever.
Not all signals have the same characteristics, the diplomat went on to say, as some will be reflected by a solid object and others by a field of some kind. Some will be absorbed by one sort of object and some absorbed by another sort. And I, the curious child that I was, became greatly impressed hearing these things repeated by several of my elders.
Those were the days when I began to develop an intense love for short wave radio. By the time the family had moved to Egypt I was old enough to be an avid listener of short wave broadcast from around the world. This state of my affair with radio lasted until 1961 when television came to the country and I switched my affection to the gorgeous new gal in town, not that I ever forgot my first love. In the meantime, I was learning a great deal about the electromagnetic waves that made all of this possible and the spectrum to which they belong.
Here now is the passage from the Ian McEwan article that I want to respond to: "A molecule of CO2 absorbs the longer wave length of light, trapping radiant heat from the Earth". The fact is that the longer the length of a wave, the more apt it is at going around an object without being absorbed or trapped by it. Unfortunately, the way that McEwan states it, that sentence represents a false statement.
But the fault does not rest on the shoulders of this novelist; it rests on the shoulders of the scientists who tarnished the honor of their profession in order to win favor with the organized mob of special interest they used to fight against. Or it may be that the scientists began to aspire winning an Oscar in Motivational Fiction or a Nobel prize in Destructive Quackery or both that the mob promised to organize for them if and when they join the cause.
What those scientists did was to construct a complicated model so as to utilize an insignificant natural phenomenon and make it sound like there is a greenhouse effect where there is none. They took the simple transfer of heat between bodies and gave it the fancy name of Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) to confuse the ordinary layman. And with that, the scientists fabricated a meaningless argument to then conclude that the CO2 molecule first absorbs the heat wave then gives it off to be absorbed by something else. The fact is that such transfers of heat happen all the time but they are not the greenhouse effect.
The simplest analogy I can make to show the difference between the phenomenon called greenhouse effect and the phenomenon that those scientists call Outgoing Longwave Radiation is that of a styrofoam cup filled with water at room temperature. Here, the system is at thermal equilibrium and nothing happens. You now add a spoonful of boiling water to the cup and the heat, which is made of long waves, goes out of the hot water and radiates its way throughout the cooler water. This radiation keeps on going back and forth and in every direction until all the water molecules have the same temperature upon which a new equilibrium is established.
What happened here is the same effect as OLR but is not the greenhouse effect. What resembles the greenhouse effect is what the wall of the cup did. Because the wall is made of an insulating material that does not conduct heat, the phenomenon created here replicates what the glass wall of the greenhouse does, it kept the heat inside the cup. In short, the greenhouse effect is not an interactive phenomenon, it lets the heat through and traps it there. By contrast, the OLR effect happens when there is a constant interaction between the molecules and/or atoms so as to establish a thermal equilibrium in the system.
Knowing this, now examine what those scientists are in effect saying. They are saying that when you use night vision goggles and you see someone in the night as the goggles capture the heat waves emitted by that someone, you are creating a greenhouse effect. They are also saying that when you dip your finger in hot water and feel the heat, it is because you have created a greenhouse effect. This is absurd beyond belief and it is disturbing to know that someone would say it. But there is something even more disturbing concerning the behavior of those scientists. To explain it, however, I must first discuss something else.
When you burn hydrocarbon, you release hydrogen which has a negligible atomic weight, and carbon which has an atomic weight of 12. Each atom of carbon combines with 2 atoms of oxygen taken from the atmosphere, and having an atomic weight of 16. This is a total atomic weight of twice 16 plus 12 which comes to 44. Thus, to dump 44 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, you need to burn 12 tons of hydrocarbon which will remove 32 tons of oxygen from the atmosphere and combine with them.
Now, if you reject the mumbo jumbo about OLR, you realize that when the world burns 6 million tons of oil products as it does every day, all that happens is that 16 million tons of oxygen are removed from the atmosphere and replaced with 22 million tons of CO2. Thus, the amount of extra heat retained by the atmosphere, whose weight is 5 million billion tons, is near zero. And when you realize that the Earth receives meteor showers from outer space and loses atmosphere to space in excess of that, you wonder what the fuss is about.
Thus, if we do what some of those scientists are recommending and stop burning fossil fuels, we shall not make a dent in the warming phenomenon of the Earth. But if we do what others are recommending and sequester the carbon dioxide, we shall remove from the atmosphere and sequester oxygen that is vital to life. Oxygen, you see, is what keeps the brain alive; without it the brain dies. But can we afford to be even more brain dead than we are now?
And this, dear reader, is a glaring example as to why it is dangerous for scientists to stoop this low. When you read McEwan’s article you see that the way he phrased that famous passage, he meant to say that a long wave is absorbed by objects more readily than a short wave. He believes this and so do all the kids who are being "educated" as to the perils of hydrocarbons by, among others, their own science teachers.
And now I ask you: Do you expect these kids, armed as they are with junk science, to compete with the kids in Asia? No, they will not. It is more likely that when they grow up they will end up looking like the Ethiopian diplomat who was confused about a new piece of technology that was familiar to someone else but not to him because his countrymen believed in superstition more than they practiced real science.
This is what I find so disturbing about those scientists. So why are they still on someone’s payroll being paid like scientists? Why are they not out there catching dogs instead?