05/20/2005: "Global Weapons of Mass Pollution"

By William J. Weissinger

Gordy Peterson's recent Column, WEAPONS OF MASS POLLUTION, tells it like it is: we here on the San Juan Islands are downstream of a spume of toxic pollution from Victoria. And we have every right to be concerned. But Victoria's complacency at the problems we are suffering is merely a mirror in which our own images reflect. The greenhouse gases that we of the United States (the biggest worldwide contributor per capita of greenhouse gases) spew into the atmosphere are themselves weapons of mass pollution. But rather than being limited to polluting Puget Sound – as is Victoria's pollution – greenhouse gases appear to be changing the climate of the world right now.

Skeptical about the dangers? Global warming is easy to pooh-pooh, because the cause-and-effect cycle is spread out over decades rather than hours or days. Genetically, humans are programmed to understand causes which have immediate effects: poke a sleeping lion with a sharp stick, or eat a poison berry, and (if you survive) you will quickly learn not to do that again. But we don't do so well when the negative consequences don't arrive for decades. And of course, the world's climate is complex: who is to say that current warming is part of a natural trend that would happen anyway?

In fact, most scientists acknowledge that we are now in the throes of global warming to which we humans are contributing. "In legitimate scientific circles, it is virtually impossible to find evidence of disagreement over the fundamentals of global warming… [A] study of … more than nine hundred articles on climate change published in refereed journals between 1993 and 2003 … found that 75% endorsed the view that anthropogenic [that is, human-caused] emissions were responsible for at least some of the observed warming of the past fifty years. The remaining 25%, which dealt with questions of methodology or climate history, took no position on current conditions. Not a single article disputed the premise that anthropogenic [human-caused] warming is under way." "The Climate of Man – III", by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, May 9, 2005.

And what are the predicted consequences? As summarized by Ms. Kolbert in her article, "Barely a month passes without a new finding on the dangers posed by rising C02 levels – to the polar ice cap, to the survival of the world's coral reefs, to the continued existence of low-lying nations." And of course, on a more local level, to the continued existence of many salmon runs, which depend on water flows from a winter snow pack that will no longer exist – and to the continued existence of the Orcas which rely in part on salmon for their existence. In addition, we have all read that global warming is forecast to create, not merely warmer weather, but more weather extremes.

Of course, it is possible to find opposing views. Witness for instance the fiction book State of Fear, by Michael Crichton. Not meaning to ruin the plot for you, the author invents a band of environmental extremist whackos who, amidst a whirl of murders and intrigue, plot to create artificial catastrophes which they can blame on global warming. The bad-guy extremists are headed off at the end by the "good guys" – the ones who now understand as "truth" this fiction book's premise that global warming and its predicted dire consequences are mere hype.

Although a fiction book, it comes across as more than that, since it has footnotes citing real studies, by which the author purports to present a "fair and balanced" explanation of the support [well, in Crichton's view the lack of support] for the premise that humans are causing worrisome levels of global warming. Reading the book is like listening to a trial where one side doesn't appear: even in the footnotes, you read only one side of the story.

In an Author's Message at the end of the book, Crichton suggests that "[b]efore making expensive policy decisions on the basis of climate models, I think it reasonable to require that those models predict future temperatures accurately for a period of ten years. Twenty would be better." He asks, in other words, for certainty. But seeking certainty is a fool's path.

Remember that nursery rhyme, "The House that Jack Built"? Imagine you're Jack, and you find you've built yourself a house on a thick vein of coal. So you put in a coal furnace. The coal being free, you chip away at it, and for a long time, you have no worries: you get free heat. But then one day, you've removed enough coal that you begin to wonder whether your house will be stable if you remove any more. So you hire an expert for an opinion: "If I remove any more coal, will I endanger my house?" What if the expert said "there is a five percent chance that if you remove another bucket of coal, your house will fall down" -- would you fill that bucket with coal anyway? What if the expert said the risk was ten percent? Twenty percent? Surely you wouldn't take a fifty percent risk? Would you require certainty? No way – long before you removed so much coal that removing any more would be certain to destroy your house, the increasing level of risk would have stopped you. Whether we're talking destruction of your house or the balance of the world's eco-system, the question isn't just the probability of the consequence, but also, how much will we hate it if it happens.

We have every right to be angry at Victoria for sending pollution our way. But we also have good reason to be concerned about the impact of our pollution on the world's climate. A global weapon of mass pollution indeed.

About the author: William Weissinger was graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1982, with honors. Since 1990 he has had a general law practice in the San Juan Islands, focusing on real estate and real-estate litigation, general business law, and estate planning. For more about the author, see sanjuanlaw.com.