Holiday Homework: Watch This Mini-Lecture by Obama's Science Advisor
by David Sassoon - Dec 24th, 2008
I wish President-elect Obama would assign the nation a bit of holiday homework: to watch this mini-lecture on global warming that was delivered by John Holdren, his science advisor-to-be.
Lord knows this country is in need of remedial education on the subject, and who better to provide it than an eminent professor from Harvard, one of the best in the field?
Follow this link and you can watch the lecture and read his powerpoint slides simultaneously.
This particular talk was delivered in June 2008 at the Wild Center at Tupper Lake in the Adirondacks. It was the opening presentation for a conference called The American Response to Climate Change. Holdren's job was to describe and frame the problem so that conference attendees could spend most of the rest of the time working on solutions.
The lecture gives a window into what Holdren will be telling President Obama and the nation, and it begins with a sobering point: "global warming" is a poor name for what is happening. A more accurate term would be "global climactic disruption," and it is almost entirely harmful. Holdren calls the climate the "envelope" within which everything on Earth happens, and he demonstrates how everything important to us will be disrupted unless we take action soon.
He also explains the causes -- and answers skeptics who blame the sun for the earth's warming. Indeed, the sun is contributing to the warming that scientists have measured, but it's influence is miniscule -- 1/30th of the contribution of greenhouse gases and black soot. How do scientists know? He explains it, and says,
Anybody who tells you the sun is dominating this is smoking dope.
There is something exhilarating in watching this true man of science speak, dispel ignorance, and tell the truth.
It's the best homework anybody could ever hope to have after eight years when science was barely on the curriculum.
See Also
Thomas Lovejoy's presentation from the same conference. He is the President of the H John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.
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I would have liked to attend Mr. Holdren's talk, but I would obviously not have been admitted, since I cannot understand how (to paraphrase his words) anyone who cannot see that a small change in the sun would result in a large change in climate. Mr. Hodren lists a pot pourri of "greenhouse" gases but leaves out the most important, -water. His list is also somewhat misleading since it does not take into account the relative ability of different molecular responses to certain heat-producing wavelengths. For example methane molecules are more potent heat producers than carbon dioxide -as is water.
But even if man is the main culprit, Mr. Holgen omits the major problem. If population is the problem, which it is, then popoulation control is what is needed, not some efforts to change the way people live -which has chances ranging from slim to none. Since 1850 (when the industrial revelution took full sway) the world population has increased from 1 billion to almost 7 billion, The rate of change is breath-taking as Malthus predicted. If we look at populations of all other species, when carrying limits of habitat are exceeded, disease, starvation and other responses become the means of population control. This is also true for humans, even though humans can control these to some extent at this time. (China has made some stupid laws relating to family size, which resulted in the abandonment of female infants.) The countries of the world must EDUCATE their populations about family size -and this country included. While there are religions and customs that promote large families, the increased access to information over most of the world will overcome this in a much shorter time than some of the incidental changes that we can make in controlling climate. This last is taking an indefensible position and Mr. Holgren is defending it to the death.
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