Hot Enough for Ya?

Lee Gerhard sits in his office on the University of Kansas campus during a scalding summer afternoon and dismisses a global-warming summit in Europe. “Our world is a belief system,” Gerhard says, “and it’s always easier to sell people on a disaster.”

One month earlier, Gerhard and fellow Kansas Geological Survey scientist William Harrison released a book that challenges the Kyoto Treaty’s premise. Geological Perspectives of Global Climate Change concludes that humankind may have more to fear from global cooling.

Some root facts go undisputed. The sun heats the earth, and the earth radiates heat back into space. But gases in the earth’s atmosphere capture some of that heat energy.

While this “greenhouse effect” makes the planet habitable, many scientists believe human activity has caused a dangerous rise in greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide. If current behavior continues, they say, global temperatures will rise, and the result will be more droughts, floods, famine and disease.

But according to Gerhard, any substantial increase in greenhouse gas production is likely to be caused by the earth’s natural internal activity — movement of continents, changes in ocean currents — and perhaps more significantly, by increases in solar radiation. “You really can’t go out and change the environment,” he says.

One study suggests that 600 million years ago, there was eighteen times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than today. Gerhard and Harrison say there’s no scientific proof that a human-produced rise in carbon dioxide causes any increase in temperature above natural variations. That relationship, Gerhard says, could be backward: Natural environmental conditions could be causing the much-ballyhooed rise in temperatures, which in turn may be boosting the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content.

Gerhard asserts that global temperatures can be proven to be rising or falling. “If you take the last 2,000 years, the temperature is cooling,” he says. “If you take the last 600 years, the temperature is even. If you take the last 100 years, the temperature is rising.” Such a cycle could lead to an ice age, which Gerhard considers far more threatening to human existence than rising temperatures because food sources would be wiped out.

That contention faces some hefty opposition.

“The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate,” said an influential 1995 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,500 scientists commissioned by the United Nations to study global warming. The IPCC held fast in a new report issued earlier this year: “Human-induced climate change represents an important additional stress, particularly to the many ecological and socioeconomic systems already affected by pollution, increasing resource demands, and non-sustainable management practices.”

And just weeks after the release of Gerhard and Harrison’s book, a study in the journal Science predicted that the earth will be five degrees warmer by 2100.

Much of the book’s content comes from two symposiums organized by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the Tulsa-based organization that also published the book.

But Gerhard says neither the book’s editors nor contributors were financed by the petroleum industry. He maintains that fossil fuel usage needs to be curbed because oil resources will dwindle by the end of the century. Global warming is not the reason to be doing this. There are other reasons for doing this,” he says.