Take close look at CO2, scientist urges

SALT LAKE CITY — Don't tell us how much carbon dioxide our farms and businesses can emit, say Utah legislators. To which Tyler Volk says: Maybe this would be a good time to understand the carbon cycle.

Volk, science director of environmental studies at New York University, will be in Utah later this week to give the keynote address at the Climate of Change conference at the University of Utah.

To not understand the science of carbon, he says, means you can be "swayed by the winds of politics, either by the disaster-mongers or those who say everything's fine, party on." What he wants, he says, is to "get people to a healthy level of concern."

Volk's appearance — 7 p.m. Friday at Orson Spencer Hall on the U. campus — comes on the heels of a 10-1 vote last week by the Utah House Natural Resources Committee that threw support behind a resolution urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to halt its plans to regulate carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. The committee expressed its skepticism about reports that the Earth's climate is undergoing a gradual warming.

And on Tuesday, the Utah House passed a bill that questions global warming. The bill's sponsor, Rep. Kerry Gibson, a dairy farmer from Ogden, initially included language referring to global warming as a conspiracy based on "flawed research."

Here's what Volk wishes people would keep in mind:

The entire global atmosphere gets thoroughly mixed in about a year. It's an "Earth-scale stew in constant circulation," so no matter where the emissions come from, everybody everywhere is affected by it equally, Volk says.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, which means it blocks the very form of energy the Earth uses to cool itself. Even if it's not clear yet how much temperatures might rise, we know they will rise if there's too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, says Volk.

The amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere is nearly 40 percent more than it has been in over 500,000 years.

The world's total fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions have more than doubled since 1970. Prior to the year 1850, the carbon cycle was in a nearly steady balance (nature's own cycle of carbon compared to the human-caused). "Without a doubt," Volk writes in his book "CO2 Rising," humans have put the atmosphere into "a new chemical state."

As nations get richer, they require more energy. World energy use — much of it likely fossil fuels — is expected to double by 2050 compared to 2000.

U.S. per capita emissions of carbon dioxide are about four times the world average "and responsibility needs to be apportioned accordingly," he says.

"If all you do is talk about climate, and not the carbon cycle," says Volk, "then it's easy to get lost in abstraction. You could almost start believing anything."

Panic about climate change is the wrong approach, he says, but so is nonchalance. "It's not OK to do nothing. There should be some kind of price to be paid for carbon emissions."

More information about the "A Climate of Change" conference, organized by the Healthy Planet Mobilization Committee, can be found at utahjwj.org/hpmc/climate-of-change.html.

e-mail: jarvik@desnews.com