Warming to the Fight
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Warming to the Fight Multiscale effects are challenging issues in materials science, but ours is not the only domain in which they are of current interest. Global climate change obviously operates at the largest length-scales available on a planet the size of Earth (or even Saturn, where the famous red spot is shrinking) but it is a product of effects that operate on the scales of individual machines, buildings, cities, tidal systems, and the molecular reactions within each of these. Understanding all of these is a daunting task. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has become the primary focus of much of the attention, now championed in the United States by President Obama’s chief science advisor, John Holdren. At 385 ppm, the CO2 concentration is the highest it has been in the current epoch, and its concentration seems to correlate with mean global surface temperature, which all makes great sense in a simple way, when you recognize that CO2 is a “greenhouse gas.” Holdren is pushing hard for a set of initiatives that would slow the increase in the CO2 concentration, and eventually stabilize or even reduce it. The implication is that this would control global warming. That is where it gets controversial. The arguments boil down to two broad categories: There are some who believe that global warming is a change that we should embrace rather than resist; and there are others who assert that we cannot affect it through control of atmospheric CO2. It is only human nature to resist change, but it is also the genius of the human race to be able to adapt to it. Since the emergence of the first humans there have been many changes in the global climate and we are still here, even though the world is quite a different place than it has been. At the time of the first humans the Sahara was a vast savannah rather than a desert, and much more recently Europe has lived through “little ice ages” between AD 1150 and 1460, and from 1560 to 1850. Of course the human race had less infrastructure in those times, and was therefore much more able to adapt. With larger fractions of the population living near coastlines, it is getting harder and harder to adapt to things like rising sea levels and more
extreme storm systems. Ask the residents of the Maldives or New Orleans. In the words of U.S. Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, “If only half of the predicted effects are only half as bad as predicted, we have to do something about this.”
It is only human nature to resist change, but it is also the genius of the human race to be able to adapt to it. Then there is the question of what we can do. Nobody who has looked at the data can deny that there is a correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentration and mean surface temperature, but there are many difficult questions about how this multiscale, multicomponent system really works, and whether we can stop or even slow global warming by controlling the CO2 level. Leaving aside the question of what it costs to reduce CO 2 levels, there are still concerns about the predictions of our complex climate mode
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