Wednesday, February 16, 2005
Carbon dioxide is not pollution
Today, as environmentalists celebrate the Kyoto protocol becoming part of international law, there is inevitably blanket coverage of the event. One example (see EU leads Kyoto "carbon revolution") is from the BBC website, where carbon dioxide is referred to as a "pollutant". This is an egregious misuse of the word, if ever I heard one. Carbon dioxide is a trace gas in the atmosphere. Animals (including ourselves) breathe it out, plants use it as food and return oxygen to the air we breathe. A somewhat increased level in the atmosphere is not pollution by any normal definition of the word.
It's unarguable that carbon dioxide levels are rising, and it's also clear that humans have a part to play in this. However, despite theorising and intensive computer modelling, there is still no reasonable proof that continued increases will lead to "dangerous" climate change. Within my lifetime, the concern being bandied about was that we were due to enter a new Ice Age, and our basic understanding of what causes glaciations and warm periods is no better now than it was then.
This is not to say that reducing our use of fossil fuels is a bad idea in itself. As technology progresses, our energy sources will change and the efficiency of use will increase. With or without Kyoto, I'm willing to bet that by mid-century our mix of power generation will look quite different from the present (and also that wind power will be but a small fraction of the total). We genuinely don't know what technologies will be economic by then. My guess is that we will have invested in considerably more nuclear capacity, but that this will probably have been superseded by other technologies (perhaps, finally, including nuclear fusion). We don't need the Kyoto protocol for that, and we certainly don't need to mis-label carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
It's unarguable that carbon dioxide levels are rising, and it's also clear that humans have a part to play in this. However, despite theorising and intensive computer modelling, there is still no reasonable proof that continued increases will lead to "dangerous" climate change. Within my lifetime, the concern being bandied about was that we were due to enter a new Ice Age, and our basic understanding of what causes glaciations and warm periods is no better now than it was then.
This is not to say that reducing our use of fossil fuels is a bad idea in itself. As technology progresses, our energy sources will change and the efficiency of use will increase. With or without Kyoto, I'm willing to bet that by mid-century our mix of power generation will look quite different from the present (and also that wind power will be but a small fraction of the total). We genuinely don't know what technologies will be economic by then. My guess is that we will have invested in considerably more nuclear capacity, but that this will probably have been superseded by other technologies (perhaps, finally, including nuclear fusion). We don't need the Kyoto protocol for that, and we certainly don't need to mis-label carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
