A Business Approach to Global Warning

People have asked me if I believe in global warming.  I hesitate to answer that question because belief is an absolute term.  It’s binary, a zero or a one. Global warming is a real world issue and rarely in the real world do problems fall exclusively into one category or another.  Do we need to act on global warming?  That’s another story.

Here is my reasoning for acting now on global warming.  It is divided into three parts.  First is my own personal testing, which isn’t much.  Second is my understanding of the scientific literature.  Third is my experience in business about how you act when you have less information than you’d like.

My testing.  When I was in college I took a lab course in physical chemistry.  One day we were given several unknown gas samples in glass ampoules.  We had to identify them with a spectrophotometer.  It occupied the side of the lab; you can probably get one on your cell phone today. 

We were told the gases were oxygen, argon, helium, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide.  They all looked clear and colorless in their ampoules.  We put each one into the spectrophotometer and it started measuring how much light the sample absorbed starting with ultraviolet and working its way to longer wavelengths, through visible and down to infrared.

UV is what burns your eyes if you watch a welder.  Visible is what we see.  Almost all of the energy that comes from the sun is in the visible.  Infrared is the heat you feel when you hold your hand over a hot sidewalk after the sun goes down.

All the samples absorbed in the UV.  None of them absorbed anything in the visible, as would be expected from the fact that they were all clear and colorless.  None of them absorbed anything in the infrared except one. 

One of them absorbed strongly in the infrared.  There was a more that we had to do, but to cut to the chase, that one was carbon dioxide.  If we could see infrared, carbon dioxide would be totally opaque in those wavelengths.

I forgot about that experiment until a few years later when global warming got into the press.  The theory behind global warming is this:

1. Burning of fossil fuels, which increased dramatically during the industrial revolution, increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
2. Visible radiation from the sun penetrates the atmosphere.  Virtually none of it gets absorbed by the gases in the atmosphere.
3. When it hits the ground it gets absorbed by dirt, grass, ocean, concrete, etc
4. That absorbed visible radiation heats up the dirt, grass, ocean, concrete, etc and…
5. They all re-emit that energy as infrared radiation.
6. The infrared radiation gets absorbed by carbon dioxide, which heats up and shares that heat with the other gases in the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide traps heat that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere. 

When I saw this theory in a publication, I thought, ‘Well, that makes a certain amount of sense, and my lab test in college produced a tiny amount of evidence for it.  I decided to investigate further.

The scientific literature.  The hard facts are these.  The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 1959, when continuous measurements were started, was 300ppm.  That level has since climbed steadily to 400ppm.  These measurements are verified through a multitude of repetitions with multiple technologies.  There’s really no doubt about this data.

What may be more speculative – but not much – is glacial core sampling.  This technique allows the measurement of carbon dioxide back hundreds of thousands of years.  The trend line shows a steady concentration in the atmosphere until about 1800.  It then gradually starts to head upward with an increasing slope.

These are old fashioned chemical tests that produce these results.  There is no computer modeling.  The trendlines can be produced with graph paper and a pencil.

The following are slightly more speculative, but not much.  Global temperatures are rising.  If you do the calculation, what you find is that the extra 100ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere should cause a significant temperature rise.  The Arctic ice pack is heading toward extinction.  Glaciers are retreating.  Sea levels are rising. 

The amount of carbon dioxide created by burning fossil fuels matches its increased concentration in the atmosphere.  That's pretty strong evidence that human activity is causing the temperature rise.

There’s a lot more evidence that I could spend all day discussing.  Does it prove that global warming is occurring and that it is due to human actions.  Some people say yes; some will say no.  I know one thing for sure.  If we wait until we’re all convinced for sure that it is, then if it is true, we will be way past the point of doing something about it.

A business approach.  So my approach would be more like we do in business.  I say this because I’ve had a lot of experience with it and it works very well.  In the business world you rarely have all the information you would like before you have to act.  If you wait until you know exactly what your competitor is going to do, your goose is cooked.

We use a technique called risk assessment.  These are fancy words for a pretty simple process.  We get all the stakeholders into a room.  We make sure that we have all the information we can get about the problem, even if we wish we had more.  We SYSTEMATICALLY evaluate all the risks and prioritize all the actions that could mitigate those risks.

When we walk out of the room we have a plan.  Rarely is everyone totally happy with the plan, but everyone can support the plan.  Why?  Because laying out all the existing information and comparing it with the potential options almost always brings reasonable people to common conclusions.

So, bottom line, I don’t “believe” in global warming.  But based on my own risk assessment of the facts that are available to me, doing nothing is not an option.