Climate research has always focused too much on the atmosphere and not enough on the oceans.
Text from 1994
The opportunity to carry out the industrialization of the earth in harmony with the preservation of the climate system has been missed for over a hundred years. Even now it is not recognized that the climate and the sea are a synchronous entity. Instead, there is already a recommendation to invest around 40,000 billion marks in the air. This is intended to clear the sky of some of the excess greenhouse gases. A reduction of 25 percent by 2010 is under discussion. Otherwise nothing would stand in the way of a climate catastrophe, the experts have been saying for years. Rather, the outstanding hazard potential must be sought in the wasted years and in the previous greenhouse discussion. This also prevented the constitution of the seas, completed in 1982, from not being used to record and protect the climate.
Although climate should have been defined as the blueprint of the oceans for a long time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Organization (UNEP) had no idea what the term climate was. Instead, the experts simply stuck the term “climate system” to the usual term “natural system”.
It was just four years ago that the IPCC startled the world with its findings that carbon dioxide emissions from cars and factories are changing the climate. It pathetically stated that the “understanding and discovery of the global climate system is one of the greatest scientific challenges facing mankind now. This is a worthy theme under which the nations of the world can unite.” The theses of the IPCC on the greenhouse effect, presented with all scientific authority, were granted rapid success. Just two years later, the experts were able to see their analyzes of international politics put into practice at the environmental summit in Rio and, on March 21 of this year, they were able to note the entry into force of the climate agreement. The understanding of the climate and the forecasts of the experts were taken seriously. International politics had acted. In order to discover the climate, a lot of tax money is now pouring down like warm rain over the searching experts.
But what is good for science is by no means also good for climate protection. For one thing, meteorology had never been overly interested in climate. The collecting of
Weather data and their statistical processing were required anyway as the basis for weather forecasts. On the other hand, some natural scientists interested in geophysics wondered why the ice ages came about. In 1900, the Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius, now known by experts as the father of the greenhouse theory, was neither the first nor the last in the line of theorists who simply converted changing greenhouse gas values into changes in air temperature. When, since the beginning of the 1970s, it became apparent that the average air temperatures were increasing, everything was clear to many experts. If statistics of A and B are increasing and science finds this out, then science has done whatever it takes to do its job. From now on it is up to the politicians to act, explained one of their spokesmen. They did not have to worry about understanding the climate, because every textbook said that climate is nothing more than statistics and can therefore be recorded using mathematics and computer models. And the climate discussion has not yet gotten out of this narrow (how crooked) perspective.
While the seas drive the climate machine and anthropogenic influences intervene in their functional mechanisms in a lasting and irrevocable manner, thereby conjuring up climate changes, science stares into space. The climate ticker is being searched for there. Without hesitation, greenhouse gas emissions were carried among the people and into government offices as the cause of global warming and climate change. The thesis cannot yet be based on more than consensus among the leading experts. As a precaution, the IPCC report stated that proof will not be available before the year 2000. Nevertheless, huge sums of money are now being invested in highly questionable research goals. This may soon prove to be the true tragedy of the climate debate to date. Because the oceans are still the part of the world that is least understood. There is still no “inventory” of the seas.
An observational system is not even in place. Even more depressing is the fact that even today, climate is far from being understood as a blueprint for the oceans.
Instead, the IPCC is concerned about its role in the implementation of the Climate Convention, as fundamental decisions are expected to be made about this at the first follow-up conference to the Rio Earth Summit next year in Berlin from March 28 to April 7, 1995. Of particular concern for the work of the IPCC are articles in the popular press and daily newspapers, IPCC Chairman Bert Bolin recently noted, because they are written by people who do not understand much of the relevant scientific literature. He took the position that “the resolution of fundamental scientific issues cannot be achieved with articles aimed at the general public.” Too bad. Fortunately, the common people have always had more feeling for the climate than science after the all-round scientists like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt. Therefore, be warned against the IPCC’s call for collaborative action in an effort to understand the climate.
The climate problem is far too serious to be left to those who should have known better long ago and who neither recognized it nor were interested in the climatic specifications of the oceans. For a protection of the climate, the Constitution of the Seas, which has been lying fallow for twelve years, the 1982 United Nations Law of the Sea and its energetic application is needed
It is the only international legal instrument worthy of the name Climate Convention. Because climate change can only be avoided with an understanding of the sea and marine protection. Only with this convention can it be ensured that all states participate in this task in a sustainable manner. The belief of many experts in the thesis of the greenhouse effect resembles Russian roulette with its 40 trillion bet with full revolver drum. A highly questionable leitmotif that was set here. Important time has already been wasted anyway. It is a waste of IPCC time and scarce resources to “discover Earth’s climate”, The Oceans will act.
*) Published by the newspaper DIE WELT, April 26, 1994 (translation.)
