Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
4
THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT AND
THE FERTILIZER EFFECT
CLIMATE CONFUSION
Growing up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a suburb inside the Beltway of the D.C. metro area, I learned only
one thing about fossil fuels in school for the first eighteen years of my life: They were bad because they
were causing global warming. It wasn't very clear in my mind what warming was or how it worked, but the
gist was this: The CO
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my parents' SUV was spewing in the air was making the Earth a lot hotter, and that
would make a lot of things worse. Oh, and there was one more thing I learned: that everyone who knew the
relevant science agreed with this.
Perhaps this would make a better story if I told you that I promptly joined Greenpeace and fought fossil
fuels until discovering a massive hoax that I will reveal later in this chapter.
But that's not quite how it went. As a young free-marketer, my sixteen-year-old self did not like all the
talk of political restrictions that went along with global warming. So I wasn't going anywhere near Green-
peace. But at the same time, the idea that this was a matter of established science was extremely significant
to me. I come from a family of scientists (two of my grandparents were physicists, two were chemists) and
I was being told about global warming not by scientifically illiterate teachers who repeated what they read
in the paper (well, not only by those), but by my math and science teachers at the internationally renowned
Math, Science, and Computer Science Magnet Program at Montgomery Blair High School.
My strongest memory from my senior year statistics class is of the time when my teacher, a very bright
woman, stopped talking about statistics one day and started talking about the perils of global warming. That
she brought it up in statistics class and that she was so adamant about it gave all of us the impression that
this was an issue the scientifically minded should get involved with.
It was the same story at Duke. In freshman chemistry, local legend teacher James Bonk explained that
the greenhouse effect was simple physics and chemistry and denounced the Republicans who denied it.
Atthat time, asIwent searching foralternative views, Ibecame familiar with theexistence ofprofession-
als in climate science, such as Richard Lindzen of MIT and Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia,
who argued that global warming wasn't the big deal it was made out to be.
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