"0BN0Z" <0BN0Z@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote
> George Bush appears to have beaten Al Gore again.
>
> In the very same week that Gore launched a $300 million public relations
> campaign to convince Americans that "together we can solve the climate
> crisis," prominent climate alarmist Tom Wigley essentially endorsed
> President Bush's approach to global warming while criticizing that of
> Gore's co-Nobelist, the IPCC.
I wasn't aware that Bush had called for a manhatten scale program to
combat
Global Warming.
Interview of Wigley by Bruce Gellermen, Air Date April 4, 2008
GELLERMAN: "Dangerous Assumptions" is the ominous-sounding title of a
commentary in the latest edition of the British journal Nature. The
authors
of the commentary charge that the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization,
the IPCC, has been using incorrect assumptions about climate change and
seriously underestimates what it will take to save the Earth from
catastrophe. Tom Wigley is one of the authors of "Dangerous Assumptions."
He's a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in
Boulder Colorado. Professor, thanks for joining me.
WIGLEY: Thanks for having me. Good to talk to you, Bruce.
GELLERMAN: This is a pretty serious charge. What specifically are the
dangerous assumptions the IPCC has been making?
WIGLEY: The assumptions are more in the presentation of information
regarding what we might have to do to reduce the magnitude of global
warming
in the future. What IPCC has done is they haven't given the full picture
of
what those assumptions might be.
GELLERMAN: I was surprised to read in your article that the assumption
that
the IPCC makes is that about three-quarters of the carbon in the
atmosphere
is just going to simply, spontaneously, automatically disappear.
WIGLEY: Yes, that's right. In the absence of climate policy, they're
expecting large changes in progression towards using what are called
carbon
neutral sources of energy. IPCC essentially assumes that a lot of those
things are going to happen just spontaneously. That's the key word.
GELLERMAN: Well, how does carbon just spontaneously, automatically
disappear, anyhow?
WIGLEY: Well, in the past, energy efficiency has improved. If you look at
the records over the last number of decades, even over the last century,
in
terms of the emissions of carbon dioxide per unit of energy, we're
improving
the way we produce energy. But what is a little alarming is that if you
look
at just the last five to ten years, those changes have gone in the other
direction. Now, if you make assumptions that the changes that occurred up
to
say the year 2000 are going to continue in the future, and you look at
what's happened over the last five years or so, that change towards
greater
efficiency has not continued.
GELLERMAN: China and India, you know, their economies have been going
gangbusters. They're using lots of resources and lots of energy. How does
that factor into this?
WIGLEY: Essentially, China and India are using twentieth-century
technology
in the twenty-first century. Now, you can't blame China and India for
doing
this because that is the cost-effective way of doing things. But if you
just
project ahead what's going on now in China and India then the emissions
from
those countries are going to continue to increase for many decades.
GELLERMAN: Well, what about targeting limits on carbon dioxide for
example?
That's what governments have been doing. That's what the Kyoto Protocol
calls for. Will that clear up the problem?
WIGLEY: Well, the Kyoto Protocol assumes that there will be a succession
of
protocols that become increasingly stringent as the decades go by. Well,
we're having trouble even abiding by the Kyoto Protocol. So the prospects
for further and stronger protocols in the future look rather bleak at the
moment. Now, part of the problem is that the Kyoto Protocol deals with a
concept called targets and timetables. It essentially says, we want to
reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide by a certain amount globally by a
certain time. Now, that's all very well, except that it doesn't really
tell
us how we're going to do it. What we suggest is that there needs to be
more
emphasis on developing the appropriate technology, the appropriate
carbon-neutral technology to reduce emissions. So, don't just tell us
where
to go, tell us how to get there and legislate how to get there.
GELLERMAN: What form of legislation would you suggest?
WIGLEY: What we need is policies that put a large amount of money into
developing appropriate, carbon-neutral technologies, be it renewable
energy,
methods for storing carbon dioxide in the ground and so on. There is money
being used and put towards developing those sorts of technologies, but
it's
too small by orders of magnitude. We need to be putting, you know, ten to
100 times more money into developing appropriate technologies to reduce
the
magnitude of global warming.
GELLERMAN: So, you're talking about something the size and scale of the
Manhattan Project?
WIGLEY: Yes, indeed. That's exactly the term that's been used in a number
of
papers in the past.
GELLERMAN: Well, why not just leave it up to industry? I mean, if there's
gold or money to be made in them thar hills, you know, let them go out and
develop the technology.
WIGLEY: Yes, industry is very good at developing the technology, but if
you
look at the major innovations that have occurred over the twentieth
century,
the initiation, the innovation in almost all cases comes from government
research spending. Once the concepts are out there, then industry comes in
and makes a buck out of it. But they're not good at starting the ball
rolling.
GELLERMAN: But government money doesn't grow on trees -- it comes out of
my
pocket.
WIGLEY: Yes indeed, but then, in the long run, you, your children, your
grandchildren, will benefit by having a planet that's not upset by what
could be catastrophic changes in the climate or very large increases in
sea
level and so on.
GELLERMAN: Tom Wigley is a senior scientist at the National Center for
Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and co-author of the article
now
appearing in the British journal Nature: "Dangerous Assumptions." Thank
you
very much.
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