The Dennis Prager Show
2-23-07 at 8:51 PM

Dennis Prager: And a happy President's Day to you. This is Dennis Prager and thank you for being with me. [We] Talk about everything in life and regularly now I am having dissenting experts on, on the issue of global warming, and I welcome professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania, Robert Giegen.Giegengack-G-I-E-G-E-N-G-E-A-C-K-known affectionately at the university, according to this article from Philadelphia Magazine as "Gieg", but I'll call you Professor Giegenback, is that OK?

Robert Giegengack: You can call me "Gieg"; it's easier.

DP: [Laughs] I know it's easier, but I feel funny. I've only just met you. Be that as it may, I enjoyed this article in Philadelphia Magazine about you, and I think before you say anything it might be helpful for people to know, to the extent that you wish to relate them, your politics?

RG: My politics?

DP: Yes, only in so far as you make the point that anybody who suggests quote "that we're not going to hell in a hand basket because the rate of global warming is low compared to so many other environmental issues that we're enduring, then you're accused of being in the employ of the oil companies and you're labeled a Republican." So, if you'd like to label yourself...

RG: Well, when I moved to Philadelphia thirty-nine years ago, my wife and I decided we would like to get all of the literature that would be distributed by the various political parties prior to each election, because that way we hoped to maintain ourselves as well-informed as we could. So we flipped a coin, and she got to register as a Republican and I got to register as a Democrat. And as a consequence of that decision, we do get mailings from both parties. I have mostly voted Democratic in my life, including voting for Al Gore.

DP: Good. I think that's important so that people know and secondly: are you in the employ of oil companies?

RG: I'm not in the employ of oil companies. I have received a number of small grants from a coal company in which one of our alums is a principal to pay for the cost of sending students to international meetings and support them in the field. So that's the extent of my involvement with.[indistinguishable]

DP: Right. OK, because you're so right in what you said there, that instead of taking on dissenters.

RG: What do you mean by "right"?

DP: [Laughs] Correct.

RG: Thank you.

DP: Alright, we're both fast, so that's fine.

RG: Right.

DP: Now, because of that, the way in which people are dismissed rather than their arguments who dissent with the current dominant thesis as exemplified by Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth," it is important to establish your credentials as a non-conservative, non-Republican, non-employ of oil companies. It's sad, but that's the way it is. So why do you list for my listeners and me some of the areas with which you differ?

RG: Well, before I do that, I should point out: your listeners and you are aware of this most recent statement made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control issue.

DP: Yes, indeed. I've covered it a great deal, yes.

RG: Yeah. And they say they're now ninety percent confident that human activity is contributing to the present rate of global warming, and I would certainly tell you I share that confidence. The production of CO2 by human activity and delivery of that CO2 to the atmosphere seems, at least temporarily, to have overwhelmed the processes that normally would store it somewhere else, and I do think that we're adding to the total inventory of CO2 in the atmosphere. It's more difficult to determine the direct impact of that on the climate.

DP: So, your dissent is not over whether or not fossil fuel burning is having an affect on temperature, but how much the temperature is in fact increasing?

RG: That's one of the issues that I would like to know more about, and I would also like to be able to engage people in a discussion of the scientific information, the quality of the data, the level of uncertainty. I think it's unfortunate that this whole debate has become so politicized that we cannot talk about it except in a political framework. So, for example, the IPCC says that they are ninety percent confident that human-produced CO2 is contributing to the warming, I'm fascinated by that ten percent. What are the uncertainties that they acknowledge that ought to be considered? The other thing that I'm interested in is the models that the IPCC makes, and they project present trends into the future and draw conclusions about conditions that will prevail in the future, and they're not particularly forthcoming about the uncertainties which attach those particular models. But they ought to be free to discuss those uncertainties, and we all ought to have access to a better understanding of how confident those projections are.

DP: So is your primary concern the lack of allowance for debate, or the belief that the prevailing beliefs are in fact often in error?

RG: I think that there is not much room for discussion, but I also think that the solutions which are presently being pursued, and the suggestions that are coming out of efforts like Al Gore's, are not moving us in an appropriate direction.

DP: Specifically.

RG: Well, for example, Al Gore in his film says that we should change our light bulbs and write to Congress. And if you look at his book, which is better than his film because it's more detailed, he has at the end of his book an appendix of things the average citizen can do to reduce the impact of our energy use on the natural environment, and they're all good ideas, ways in which we would conserve energy. But they're much much too little. If the CO2 we're pushing into the atmosphere is responsible for the global warming, the things that the American consuming public has to go through to make any difference are just enormous. And what's missing from Al Gore's account, and I think it's most unfortunate this didn't find it into his book or into his film; the 2.4 billion people of India and China are embarked on an industrial development scheme, a little bit different in each country, which will vastly increase the amount of CO2 delivered into the atmosphere. So, I like to think that what we're doing in the west, we're conducting an unplanned, uncontrolled experiment on the chemistry of the atmosphere, and we don't know for sure the outcome of that experiment's going to be, but we're in luck because the contributions of China and India will make it very, very clear what that contribution's going to be because their efforts will vastly increase the rate of delivery of CO2 into the atmosphere, and we're not doing anything about that. So whatever we undertake in the west to change our energy mix away from CO2-producing fossil fuels toward alternatives and renewables is not going to have a measurable effect on either the inventory of CO2 in the atmosphere or the rate of delivery of CO2 into the atmosphere unless we're able to do something to get China and India off of their present trajectory. You should realize that in this recent economic summit in Switzerland- I have it here someplace, I could read it to you- but the.let's see: this column by Fareed Zachariah in Newsweek on February fifth, he says: India's brilliant planning czar Montek Singh Alluwalliah said that 'every country should have the same per capita rights to pollution.'" Now today, we in the United States, we use twice as much energy per person as the Brits, two and a half times as much as the Japanese, seven times as much as the Chinese, and fifteen times as much as the Indians. So the prospect of India and China fueling their economic expansion by the combustion of the coal they have access to and dumping CO2 into the atmosphere will swamp, will overwhelm anything that we're proposing to do to reduce our own outputs. And unless we come up with some kind of a plan that's going to deal with the projection of India's and China's future development, nothing we do to control CO2 going into the atmosphere will have any measurable effect.

DP: Are you familiar with Buern Lambourg?

RG: I am.

DP: Well I've had him on the show a number of times.from Denmark. And essentially, although I don't know if he's as quite as convinced about the.and I just don't know, I don't recall if he's quite as convinced of the certitude of our CO2 emissions causing global warming.

RG: I think he probably isn't.

DP: Oh OK, fine. But his primary argument is even if it's true, it's in line with your argument: the steps that would be necessary to be taken are so astronomic that it would shatter the ability to do any other good on planet earth.

RG: I don't think that I would agree with that. I think that the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere and its probable affect on our climate is just one of many environmental consequences of a growing human population using increasing amounts of energy. So any strategy we come up with to reduce the amounts of energy we use, and they're unpardonably high, any strategy we come up with to reduce those amounts of energy will give us all kinds of environmental benefits, and at the same time might eventually lead to the reduction of the amount of CO2 we pour into the atmosphere.

DP: Alright, when we come back, I'll ask you if you would advocate, then, the use of nuclear power. I'm speaking to Robert Giegengack, in the ongoing series of interviews with experts on global warming, and he is professor of earth and environmental science, University of Pennsylvania, I'm Dennis Prager.

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DP: In the Philadelphia magazine article, Professor, it says as follows, quoting you: “Sea level is rising, Giegengack agrees, switching off the sound, but he explains that you were watching the Oprah show, apparently, with your interviewer. It’s been rising ever since warming set in 18,000 years ago. The rate of rise has been pretty slow, only about four hundred feet so far, and recently, meaning in the thousands of years, the rate has slowed even more. The Earth’s global ocean level is only going up 1.8 millimeters per year. That’s less than the thickness of one nickel. For the catastrophe of flooded cities and millions of refugees that Gore envisions, sea levels would have to rise about twenty feet. At the present rate of sea level rise, Gieg says, that’s you, it’s going to take 3,500 years to get up there. So if for some reason this warming process that melts ice is cutting loose and accelerating, sea level doesn’t know it, and sea level, we think, is the best indicator of global warming.” Did they quote you correctly?

RG: Yeah, I think so, pretty much.

DP: Well, why is that not devastating to the Al Gore scenario?

RG: Well, the Al Gore scenario, and if you look at…the film showed a whole bunch of scenarios of water creeping over Florida, into Manhattan, into the Netherlands. I think one of the film’s, one of the clips was into London. And I don’t recall how carefully in the film that was attributed to the sea level rise that he describes in his book, but that would be the consequence of an 18-20 foot sea level rise, which you would get if you melted Greenland, or as Al Gore said, if you melted half of Greenland, and half of Antarctica. Now we suspect at various times in the past, much of Greenland has, the ice cap on Greenland, has melted. We don’t think the ice cap on the Antarctic has gone away in the recent past. If you melted the entire Antarctic ice sheet, you get about 95 meters of sea level rise. If you melted all the ice presently on Greenland, people calculate you get about 6 meters of sea level rise. And I think the scenarios in Al Gore’s film, and certainly the scenarios that he develops in his book, are based on the assumption of a 6 meter sea level rise. And the number I quoted, 1.8 millimeters a year, is the number which most students of sea level have been using up until the present for the present rate of global sea level change. The IPCC report quotes some recent studies which suggest that that rate of sea level rise has recently increased in the last 15 years or so. Some people are seeing an increase of sea level rise as much as 3.6 millimeters a year. The problem that students of this technology acknowledge is that the measurements of recent sea level rise are based on very careful satellite measurements of the ocean surface. And the history of sea level rise over the last 18,000 years are based on measurements made of the ages of organic materials known to have a certain relationship to sea level at times in the past. So these two chronologies are combining apples and oranges, and it’s very, very interesting, and it deserves close attention. But even if the sea level change today is at 3.6 millimeters per year, you’re not going to see the scenarios that Al Gore showed in his film, or dictated in his book, for another 1,700 years. It depends upon, his scenarios depend on the sudden loss of stability of the Greenland ice sheet, and its prompt, abrupt delivery into the northern ocean, and the consequence of that would be a global sea level rise of 6 meters. There’s no indication that that is happening. It could happen. I mean, but to me, that’s speculation. And I think that that was another example in that film of appeal to public fear, because realistically speaking, that’s not something…the range of things we have to worry about are 6 meter sea level rise on a time schedule that would flood the cities of Amsterdam and London and New York, is just…is not a significant risk.

DP: I’m quiet, because…

RG: Now I don’t know if I answered that particular question…

DP: You did, and my silence is sitting here, and frankly, it angers me what is being told to the world public, and what is being told to the American people. And here is somebody, I mean, your credentials are impeccable, aside from your scholarship in forty years at the University of Pennsylvania. Aside from that, you even hold that carbon dioxide emissions by humans does have an effect on global temperature. So you hold two things that are part of the global warming scare, and they are that temperatures are rising, correct? You believe that?

RG: I think everybody believes that.

DP: Okay, fine, and that it is primarily caused by human action?

RG: Oh, primarily is your word. I think human action is making a contribution.

DP: Oh…

RG: I don’t think we know the magnitude of that contribution.

DP: Okay, fair enough. Okay, so you’re agnostic on that matter, but you’re certainly not opposed to the notion. But even you are saying that even if that were all true, and I’m only repeating what you’re saying so that it is totally clear to me and to my audience, even if it is true, number one, the primary polluters in this regard will be China and India…

RG: The future…

DP: Yes, the…

RG: I don’t think of the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere as pollution. It’s convenient for some people to call it that, but CO2 is the necessary consequence of the oxidation of carbon. And we oxidize carbon, we add oxygen to make CO2 to give us the energy we need to drive all the things that we do with that energy. So CO2 is a necessary consequence of the combustion of C, which is different from the kinds of pollutants which at least to me are the byproducts of one of those processes, and can be more or less conveniently eliminated from the…

DP: Fair enough. I am happy to be corrected on that. I was trying to use the word that is used by the critics.

RG: Yeah, I think it is people…why they use that, yes.

DP: So even if that is true, you’re saying, and this was point one, China and India will argue that all of this should be measured per capita. And you’re saying per capita or not per capita, the bulk of this carbon dioxide emission will come from China and Indian in any event?

RG: In the near future.

DP: In the near future.

RG: Right.

DP: And secondly, at the rate of the rise of the oceans…at the worst rate with the latest satellite tracking, we’re talking about something that will happen in 1,700 years.

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DP: This is…I consider this dialogue with you, Professor, extremely significant, and I thank you for your time.

RG: You’re welcome.

DP: Again, this is a gentleman who votes generally Democrat, voted for Al Gore, believes that we are in a gradual warming process on Earth, though you do believe that this started recently? Or 18,000 years ago?

RG: The most recent warming trend, which is the most recent of many, started 18,000 years ago. It’s interesting to frame this discussion to point out that the present climate on Earth is unusual, not because it’s so warm, but because it’s so cold. And my perspective comes from studying the whole sweep of the history of Earth’s climate. We have very good information, or at least pretty good information for about the last billion years. And of that billion years, only about 5% of that time has been characterized by conditions on Earth that were so cold that the poles could support masses of permanent ice. So the Earth, the climate of Earth has gone through a series of short-term oscillations based on changes in the geometry of the Earth-Sun system. We’ve known about that for quite some time. But normally, the disparities in energy reaching the Earth’s surface are absorbed by the ocean, and redistributed by ocean circulation. So for most of its history, the Earth has stayed much more uniform in its distribution of temperatures than it is today. But at various times in its history, the poles became isolated, either because a continent drifted over the poles as the continents move around, or because a polar ocean became so restricted by surrounding continents that the circulation into that ocean was inhibited. And under those circumstances, the poles got very cold, because they didn’t receive solar radiation directly, and eventually got cold enough to be covered by floating ice, for example today in the Arctic, or by sheets of permanent glacier ice on land. And then that had the effect of reflecting more incoming solar radiation. So the Earth was plunged into what we recognize as an ice age. And once the Earth was in an ice age, then these normal oscillations of climate driven by the solar cycles, led to advance and retreat of the glaciers. So we’ve been in an ice age for three and a half million years anyway, maybe somewhat longer. The last time the Earth was in an ice age was 300 million years ago. And before that, it was about 450 million years ago. So only about 5% of the period of Earth’s history that we are able to reconstruct has been characterized by polar ice, and ice age. Most of Earth’s history has been warmer. Now that’s not much of a consolation, necessarily, to people who see the present warming trend as a departure from what’s happened over the last few hundreds of thousands of years. But the norm for the Earth is to be warmer.

DP: So then back to the question of CO2 emissions causing this warming, is…you are again, I repeat, you’re agnostic on that issue? You’re just not prepared to say yea or nay?

RG: No, I think the present CO2 emissions are impacting the present climate, and have been, probably, for the last several decades as a minimum, maybe a little bit longer. This is not new. We knew this, Savante Arrhenius suggested in 1895 that the growth, or the continued escalation of what he then recognized as the industrial revolution, would put more CO2 in the atmosphere, which he said would lead to an increase in global temperature. And he was only picking up on what Tyndall had suggested in the 1860’s. We’ve known for a long time that the climate of Earth would be way below freezing, given its distance from the Sun, if it were not for the fact that these greenhouse gasses exist in the atmosphere.

DP: Right. So it’s a good thing, but not good if it’s overdone. But so…

RG: Well, we don’t know about that, either. We know that for periods in the past, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has probably been much higher than it is today. And the biosphere survived.

DP: When was that?

RG: Well, we know that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has been close to its present concentrations through the 650,000 years in the information that’s in the ice cores.

DP: And where did that come from?

RG: That came from the data we’ve extracted from the ice cores…

DP: No, no, where did that CO2 come from, since we weren’t around to make it?

RG: Well no, that’s a very interesting question.

DP: All right, give me the answer when we come back.

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DP: I had asked, when you said it was an interesting question, you had said that in fact, that there have been times when we had more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, more greenhouse grasses, and I asked you well, since we were not around to make them, what caused them.

RG: Well, I tell the students at Penn that’s because the…then as now, the Neanderthals were driving Hummers, but that’s just a…

DP: But that’s not scientifically verifiable.

RG: So did you, Dennis, did you see the Al Gore film?

DP: I have not seen the Al Gore film yet. I’m going to see it this week prior to the Academy Awards.

RG: Well, yeah, it’s hard to talk about it if you haven’t seen it, but I’ve seen it, and I have his book in front of me, and I can only assume that some of your listeners have also seen the film.

DP: That’s all right. I’m very familiar with a lot about it, and even if one, even if listeners didn’t, go ahead and make reference to it.

RG: Well, there is a chart that he showed in the film, he showed these two curves following each other very, very closely. One of them was the temperature of the Earth’s climate, or the temperature at the Earth’s surface as indicated from the Antarctic ice core. And the other curve was the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere as determined by measuring the concentration of CO2 in the bubbles of air trapped in the ice. And now, this record goes back 650,000 years. And when you put these two records side by side, you see an astonishingly close correlation between the temperature as reconstructed from the ice, and the amount of CO2 in the air bubbles in the ice. And then Al Gore went out to the very recent end of this curve, and he showed a red spot where the CO2 is today, and then he got on his little industrial truck lift, and had it crank him up so he could show with his pointer where the CO2 was going to go in the next 45 years. And then I’m reading from what he said. He said it’s a complicated relationship, but the most important part of it is this. When there is more CO2 in the atmosphere, the temperature increases because more heat from the Sun is trapped inside. What Al Gore did not ask, and did not point out either to his audience who watched the film, or to those who read the book, he didn’t ask the question what’s responsible for the lock-step correlation between these two curves for the last 650,000 years of Earth’s history? And we know from many other sources of information that the temperature of the Earth is controlled by these variations in the geometry of the Earth-Sun system, so we’re driven to the conclusion that the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is the consequence of temperature, not the cause of it. And the most astonishing thing about this curve is that it shows that long before humans started modifying the chemistry of the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, the temperature and the CO2 concentration, and the methane, which he doesn’t show on his curve, varied in absolute lock-step. So there are processes out there that move carbon around from reservoir to reservoir on the Earth’s surface, that did that long before we started burning fossil fuels. So I fault him for not drawing attention to the real meaning of this curve, that says that the fundamental control of CO2 in the atmosphere is the temperature. It’s not the opposite. But then…

DP: Wait. Then is it fair to say that if he acknowledged that, he’d have no case?

RG: No, that’s not fair to say, because the amount of CO2 that we’re now putting in the atmosphere is higher than is shown in this 650,000 year record from the Antarctic ice core, and he makes a big fuss about this is the highest concentration of CO2 we’ve seen in the last 650,000 years.

DP: Is that true, by the way?

RG: Yeah, it’s true. If you look at the curve, you know when the globe is warming, then the CO2 goes up. And we know the CO2 goes up, it has to go up, because it’s being driven out of the ocean, it’s being driven out of soils, it’s being driven out of permafrost. We think those are probably the sources of the CO2 increase at various times in the past. But today, we know, and listen to me while I give you these numbers, we’re probably putting 6.5 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year by burning fossil fuels. We’re adding another 2 billion tons, maybe 2.5, by tropical deforestation, something between 8.5 and 9 billion tons a year of carbon is going in the atmosphere. But only 3.5 billion tons stays there. And the rest of it, we know are looking, we know that 2, 2.5 tons are going back in the ocean. The rest of it is being driven back into some Earth surface reservoir, the soils, the permafrost, the forest, we don’t know exactly where it’s going, but many people have good ideas. So the one thing that’s different in the present warming trend, we have reversed the flow of carbon. Now it’s going from the atmosphere into the Earth’s surface reservoirs. And to the best of our knowledge, in each previous warming trend, it was coming out of those Earth surface reservoirs and into the atmosphere. And I think that’s a significant change in the way in which these cycles operate at the Earth’s surface.

DP: Yeah, but significant in terms of human catastrophe? Or just significant for scientists?

RG: Significant in terms of how these processes operate, significant in terms of the role we are playing in the present climate. I don’t see it as a catastrophe.

DP: So when you see this film, and you see the proposals from the U.N., and the Kyoto protocols, how do you react?

RG: Well, before the Kyoto protocol began, I think anybody who looked closely at what it proposed to do, it proposed to lower the emissions of these selected gasses, I think an average of 7% below 1990 levels by the year 2012. And if you just looked at 1990 levels, at how high they were, a 7% reduction below that level was not going to have a measurable impact on either the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, or the rate that is going to be emitted. We knew in 1997, when the Kyoto protocol was promulgated, that if you wanted to have an effect on the chemistry of the atmosphere, it would probably require 10 Kyotos. But we also know that the countries that signed on, and are making efforts to meet the terms of the Kyoto protocol, have failed.

DP: All right, we’ll be back in a moment.

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DP: Dennis Prager here, final segment with Professor Robert Giegengack, professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences—Science —at the University of Pennsylvania. I wish I could have more time for calls but let's go to, at least, a few here. In Saint Paul, Minnesota, Tom. Hello Tom.

Caller: "Hi, gentlemen. Uh, professor, I'm a meteorologist—twenty years in the field here now—uh, study this issue quite extensively, um, and from what I've read, that in the ice core data, the Vostok ice core data from Antarctica, that the CO2, uh, is in lockstep with temperature, as you noted, but that the CO2 change, uh, is in response to temperature change and lags the change in temperature by as much as 400 to over 1,000 years. Uh, are you familiar with that study?

RG: I think that's—I haven't heard 1,000 but there's, um, seven full deglacian—deglacial chronologies preserved in the Antarctic ice core and some of them show that the temperature rise began before the CO2 began. The real problem with making that correlation is the simple fact that, as the ice accumulates on the Antarctic ice sheet, it takes it about 100 years to be compressed into glacier ice. So, the bubbles of air that are trapped in the ice are hundred-year averages of atmospheric temperature, whereas the temperature reconstruction from the ice itself can have a resolution of about a decade. So, the two curves—the CO2 curve probably for most of that record doesn't have enough resolution to enable you to see sidealong the curve and decide which one came first. For a couple of them, people see that there was a temperature increase before there was a CO2 increase but I'm driven to that conclusion, not by directly examining the fine structure of the curve, but simply because we know what's responsible for the temperature change; it's the cycles of the geometry of the earth's sun system. So it makes much more sense to suggest that changes in received solar radiation change the earth temperature and those temperature changes change the CO2, than it is to suggest that somehow this geometry changes the CO2 which then changes the temperature.

DP: Right, let me just repeat that for my listeners. Professor Giegengack and the meteorologist calling in as well assert that—and please tell me again if I have this absolutely accurately—temperature affects carbon dioxide levels more than carbon dioxide levels affect temperature.

RG: Well, I don't know if I would say more than; I would say that in the Antarctic ice core, which is so widely sighted by so many different people, the driving mechanism is exactly the opposite of what Al Gore claims, both in his film and in that book. It's the temperature that, through those 650,000 years, controlled the CO2; not the CO2 that controlled the temperature.

DP: Then why wouldn't you say more than?

RG: Well, more than is a—you'd have to put a number on that.

DP: Alrighty.

RG: Uh—

DP: Alright, I have to thank you and hope that we'll have a further dialogue. Robert Giegengack, professor, University of Pennsylvania. Thank you so much.

RG: You're welcome.

DP: Very good, sir. We continue on the Dennis Prager Show.