Earth Equity News

The Question of Global Warming. By Freemon Dyson, New York Review of Books, June 12, 2008. "The average lifetime of a molecule of CO2 in the atmosphere, before it is captured by vegetation and... released, is about 12 years. [The] fact... that the exchange of carbon between atmosphere and vegetation is rapid, is of fundamental importance to the long-range future of global warming... Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb... into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp. [The wiggles in Keeling's Curve] prove that a big fraction of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world's forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, [they] would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the CO2 in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about fifty years... Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound... Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is... a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful... Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet... Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including... nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice. Whether they turn out to be right or wrong, their arguments on these issues deserve to be heard." Freemon Dyson is a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.