Diary: I Do Like Autumn

[degringolade]

Overall, I am pretty much at peace with the change of seasons, but as I get older I am noticing that winter is less and less welcome. Living in a "warm-summer Mediterranean (Köppen Csb) type, characterized by mild, wet winters and warm, dry summers" has a lot to commend it as the winters have been getting milder in the nearly forty years I have been here.

I am convinced by the climatologist's argument that the climate is changing. I am certain that is happening, the only thing that I question is the degree that human activity will be able to make a correction to the current state of affairs. Truthfully, I am leery about the significance of the correlation between CO2 levels and temperature. But even that particular data set makes me ambivalent (a fancy word of leery).

While there is a 50% increase in my lifetime (from 300 ppm to 450 ppm), I tend to look at such a thing as correlative, not confirmatory. I think that a lot of the discussion over this kind of thing is a variant on William Randolph Hearst's great quote "You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war". Only in this case the word "pictures" need to be replaced with "powerpoint graph" as that appears to be the modern fuse for action.

Most of us are in buildings and rooms all the time. That being said, the data for a well-ventilated room shows CO2 level below 1,000 ppm as the touchstone. Now lets phrase that number differently. The current CO2 level here in Portland is 0.0428%. When you are inside in a well-ventilated room the number can go up to 0.100% with no serious effects on our peculiar species.

Why I am leery is the way that a single number in a complex and not particularly well understood phenomenon is bandied about, trumpet-like, in what I suspect is a more a advertising campaign for continued funding than a concrete touchstone for climate change (and I need to reiterate this again: I do believe that climate change is happening).

I do strongly believe that the problem is the energy being dumped into the environment by the burning of fossil fuels. We have gone from 23 billion barrels of oil burned in 1980 to around 35 billion barrels today. I find the correlation between percentage increase of atmospheric CO2 and percentage increase of fossil fuel use to be telling.

Like it or not, the problem is pretty simple. Energy use must decrease. Oil will go away, this will solve the CO2 problem which is strongly correlated to climate change. The incredibly profligate use of fossil fuels as an energy source will go away because Mother Hubbard's cupboard will become more and more sparse.

I think that my granddaughter gets to be my age, she will not think well of the persons living today and merrily burning through the "fun chips" that oil provides us.