Events
Anti-War Vigils
Wednesdays in Lincoln Stratcom Vigils
Wednesdays in Omaha Email Chuck Hagel Nebraska Peace Stratcom
The Most Dangerous Place on the Face of the Earth Whiteclay
Updates on Nebraska's tiny reservation border town. Dick Cheney
Impeachment is on the table. Speaking Our Peace On Liars that Figure
By Paul Olson, NFP President Global Warming Cut CO2 10 Percent in 10 Years
By Professor Bruce E. Johansen Peace Matters
Omaha NFP Newsletter StratCom Conference Space Conference
 Alexandra Svoboda
An Injury to One is an Injury to All… Event World Peace forum
 Peace Propaganda Peace Propaganda

Global Warming Is Alive and Well

Professor Bruce E. Johansen

Having done my best to explain thermal inertia and feedbacks in an Omaha World-Herald “Midlands Voices,” I seem to have aroused several counter responses in the letters to the editor from hard-core climate contrarians. If carbon dioxide had a sense of humor, it might get a chuckle over the fact that some human beings reject the notion that CO2 retains heat and will have a role in warming the Earth beyond environmentally safe limits.

At the University of Nebraska at Omaha, we have such a rare bird on our chemistry faculty — Robert Smith, a full professor, no less. Professor Smith has his doubts about evolution, too, having signed a petition to that effect offered by Seattle’s Discovery Institute, which promotes “Intelligent Design.” Smith is locally renowned for exercising his First Amendment rights to make a fool of himself, cock-walking our Faculty Senate meetings and the op-ed page of the Omaha World-Herald, telling, in the name of science (as he sees it), non-chemists such as myself that we are ignorant nobodies.

Working the public prints, I have crossed paths with some very weird ‘science.’ Jack Kasher, who used to teach physics at UNO, also tossed a denier’s log on the fire. Professor Kasher is well known for advocating alien abductions. Several letters to the “Public Pulse” upbraided me for raising the subject of global warming when it is cold outside.

True enough, it’s been an average winter around here. We still have the good Nebraska fortune of freezing our rear ends off now and then. We have lost our perspective about what is ‘average,’ however, because the last several winters have been so wimpy. Rest assured, global warming is alive and well. Meanwhile, here are a few dispatches from other places.

Solar Power Developing Quickly

Robert F. Service reports in Science (February 8, 2008) that the cost of solar power has been declining sharply, from $22 per watt in 1980, to $6 per watt in 1990, and $2.70 in 2005. Economies of scale, as well as improvements in efficiency and less-expensive construction materials may bring solar energy down to cost that completes with fossil-fuel generation by about 2015. By 2008, the solarpower industry’s generating capacity worldwide was growing at an astonishing 40 percent a year, but it still generated only a fraction of one percent of total electrical power.

The silicon solar panels that dominate the industry today may be replaced by new technologies that combine several light-absorbing materials able to capture different portions of the solar spectrum, or solar cells manufactured in rolls of thin copper-indium film gallium selenide atop a metal foil. Nanotechnology plays a role in some designs for future solar-generating technology that is been theorized, but not yet commercialized. While today’s silicon cells convert about 15 to 20 per cent of sunlight to electricity in the field (up to 24 per cent under perfect laboratory conditions), new technologies that have broached the realm of theory (and some in design, but not commercialization) raise that figure to 40, 60, even 80 percent. Photovoltaics made of plastic may dramatically reduce manufacturing costs.

Lake Mead May Run Dry

Lake Mead, the vast reservoir for the Colorado River water that sustains the fast-growing cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas, could lose water faster than previously thought and run dry within 13 years, according to a study by scientists at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography.

With weather patterns in a warming world favoring a drier American West, a study by scientists at Scripps indicates that Lake Mead, which spans the border of Nevada and Arizona, could run so low by 2013 that water pumps would become useless. The study has become a center of controversy between scientists at Scripps and others at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, who assert that its climate models are too crude to forecast the future water level of a single large lake.

The Scripps study found that Lake Mead’s water supply has a 50 percent chance of becoming unusable by 2021 if the demand for water remains at present levels, and if global warming trends conform to mid-range models. Researchers Tim P. Barnett and David W. Pierce of Scripps say that even with an occasional snowy winter (such as 2007-2008) demand for the lake’s water exceeds the amount added each year by runoff. “We were really sort of stunned,” Barnett told The New York Times. “We didn’t expect such a big problem basically right on our front doorstep. We thought there’d be more time.” He added, “You think of what the implications are, and it’s pretty scary”.

Other research has found that the Colorado River watershed, of which Lake Mead is a part, has had a long-standing tendency toward drought that makes the last century look unusually wet. Climate models also indicate that a warmer climate favors persistent drought in this area.

Ethanol May Not be Eco-Friendly

When the full emissions costs of producing bio-fuels are calculated, most of them are environmentally more expensive, causing more greenhouse gases than fossil fuels, according to studies published in Science early in 2008. Growth of feedstock for many bio-fuels, from corn to sugar cane to palm oil, destroys natural ecosystems (most notably rainforest in the tropics and South American grasslands), releasing gases as they are burned and plowed. Destruction of these older, natural ecosystems also removes carbon sinks. In addition to the greenhouse gases caused by growing bio-fuels, additional emissions result from refining and transporting them.

“When you take this into account, most of the bio-fuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially,” said Timothy Searchinger, lead author of one of the studies and a researcher in environment and economics at Princeton University. “Previously there’s been an accounting error: land use change has been left out of prior analysis.”

Clearance of grassland releases 93 times the amount of greenhouse gas that would be saved by the fuel made annually on that land, said Joseph Fargione, lead author of the second paper, and a scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “So for the next 93 years you’re making climate change worse, just at the time when we need to be bringing down carbon emissions.”

Many U.S. farmers are growing corn year-round, whereas previously corn crops were alternated with soybeans. More soybeans are being raised on newly cleared rainforest land in Brazil.

Frederick W. Kayser Professor of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, Johansen is the author of the three-volume “Global Warming in the Twenty-First Century” (Praeger, 2006).