As this year’s Maine island summer continues to unfold its timeless magic, we all interpret the pulse of daily life depending on our nature and habits. Some of us pray for the return of fish or lobsters, while others run experiments with their gear to determine what the season augurs. The torrents of rain that plagued us in June have subsided, but delayed the onset of the tourist season with bookings down all along the coast and islands. The beginning of the shedder season for lobsters, which was much delayed in recent years from unusually cold bottom temperatures, appears this year to be on a more typical schedule, arriving shortly after the 4th of July.
Currently a massive heat wave has settled in across the entire country and has even gripped the Maine coast. Electricity use has peaked in both California and New England. The heat has spawned many violent weather events, including hailstorms with projectiles the size of baseballs pelting a swath of inland Maine. Are weather patterns changing in some systematic way, or is there just a lot of “noise” in the system — variations that contribute to the spice of life?
Al Gore, the star and author of his own movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth, presents his conclusion that global warming is already upon us as both a scientific certainty and as a moral imperative to act (see the book and movie review). In effect, Gore appeals to both the scientific and religious instincts in his audiences as if to hedge his bet as to which of the twin poles of our consciousness will effectively move us to action.
Meanwhile, the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal have recently provided extensive space for the most distinguished scientific critic of global warming, Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT’s Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Physics, to joust with Gore. Lindzen has many complaints with what is rapidly becoming conventional wisdom in scientific circles that the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing air and ocean temperatures to rise inexorably.
Lindzen’s essential concern is with the “attribution problem” — that is, what is causing global warming? Lindzen vociferously maintains that there is no scientific proof that the observed warming of the ocean and all the attending climatic events from Arctic Ocean ice shrinkage to alpine glacier and Greenland ice cap melting and the increased violence of storms and hurricanes can be attributed to an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. From a narrow scientific point of view, Lindzen is correct; there is no proof of cause and effect because the physical mechanisms that control the global climate system are mind-numbingly complex and thus not completely understood. Instead, scientists rely on information from previous climate change events derived from ice cores, tree rings and other climate proxies — or intricate computer models that try to predict the rate and magnitude of future climate change. These are regrettably slender reeds on which to base enormous policy choices that will affect us and our children for better or worse for decades (and centuries) to come.
If you want to read more than you ever wanted to know about this debate, there is one really good website, www.realclimate.org which bills itself as “Climate science from climate scientists.” There Lindzen’s testimony and scientific papers are discussed in great technical detail. But one item from my search is worth noting. In 2004 an online version of Reason magazine reported that Lindzen is “willing to take bets that global average temperatures in 20 years will in fact be lower than they are now.” The British climatologist James Annan contacted Lindzen and offered to take Lindzen’s bet and pay 2:1 odds in Lindzen’s favor if temperatures declined. According to the magazine, Lindzen would only accept a bet if the odds were 50:1 or better in his favor.
Of course none of us know the future, but a basic feature of human intelligence is our ability to generalize patterns from particular experiences. All of us ask ourselves questions, propose answers and test the results to see if our guesses turn out to be right or wrong. Currently the U.S. government’s policy appears to be betting a substantial part of our future that the doom-saying global warmers like Al Gore and a very substantial part of the scientific establishment are Chicken Littles.
For the Maine coast and islands, a portent of climate change that bears special watching is how any shifts in the North Atlantic ocean circulation will affect currents and hence the temperatures throughout the Gulf of Maine. Such changes have the potential to directly affect the distribution and harvest of lobsters and shrimp for starters, two species whose migrations we know are closely related to water temperature.
Another index to watch is the incidence of northeast storms during the spring. For the last several years, spring storm tracks have spun up the coast from the Virginia capes. Storms from the south are nature’s way of transporting excess heat from the tropics northward. They also draw in strong northeast winds that spread torrents of rain and red tides along the entire coastline of the Gulf of Maine all the way to Cape Cod. More typically, spring storms trend down the St. Lawrence Valley from Midwest low pressure cells and fronts and produce less severe southeasterly gales that generally do not spread red tides. In addition, if the incidence of damaging coastal storms continues to increase, insurance rates for islands and remote coastal communities will continue to skyrocket bringing additional economic stresses to this coast.
Going forward, the Island Institute will be paying attention to both the science and policy dimensions of the global warming-climate change issues on behalf of our many members and far-flung constituents.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.