Which came first?
Dr. Robert M. Gresham, Contributing Editor | TLT Lubrication Fundamentals July 2011
The age-old chicken or egg riddle has revealing lessons for those interested in the causes of climate change.
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KEY CONCEPTS
• Individuals sometimes confuse the nature of cause and effect for social or political purposes.
• A closer examination of the full range of data might suggest that man-made carbon dioxide might not be the cause of climate change.
• The tribology community should analyze these situations closely before taking action.
It’s the classic enigma—which came first, the chicken or the egg? Such enigmas or seemingly such enigmas by their nature leave the door open for those whose logic is flawed or, more maliciously, those seeking to take advantage of presumably unanswerable questions.
So whether they believe the egg came first or the chicken, or put it another way, whether the chicken caused the effect of the egg or whether the egg caused the effect of the chicken, they may for their own reasons prefer one answer over the other. Then to negate the naysayer, they frequently use the philosophic argument, “Can you prove it is not so?” Philosophers know this is impossible, of course, because you can’t disprove a negative.
Scientists also like to remind us not to confuse cause and effect. But as part of the scientific community, we know that we are not immune from making that mistake ourselves. Citing a recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Matt Ridley, even climate scientists have encountered such cause effect confusion. This is easy enough to imagine, as much of what we know or take as known is often based on computer modeling, which, like all modeling, is based on a set of assumptions. If there are flaws in our logic in formulating those assumptions, let alone the careful addition of biases, our conclusions can be flawed.
When in 1999 Antarctic ice cores revealed high carbon-dioxide concentrations and temperature marching in lockstep over 400,000 years, many found this a convincing argument for attributing past climate change to the emergence of evil carbon dioxide. About 95% of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is natural, coming from normal biological processes. In the past, carbon-dioxide levels rose as the earth warmed at the end of ice ages and fell as it cooled at the end of interglacial periods.
However, a few years later more in-depth analysis of ice cores showed that the temperature changes, in fact, preceded the changes in carbon dioxide concentrations by about 800 years. The cause-and-effect mechanism is that as the oceans begin to warm, the rate of the dissolved carbon dioxide begins to out-gas more into the atmosphere. Since the effect cannot precede the cause, we have to change our thinking about this particular chicken/egg conundrum.
Temperature changes caused the changes in carbon dioxide levels, not the opposite. Or, gods forbid, carbon dioxide does not really cause global warming! This is heresy of the highest order.
So the ever-clever climate scientists came up with a novel rationalization (or, if you prefer, hypothesis): An initial change, probably caused by variations in the earth’s orbit (really) that affected the warmth of the sun, was then amplified by changes in carbon dioxide levels. But this makes for a circular argument as the reversal of the trend after a period of warming (when amplification should be at its strongest) still harder to explain. Did the earth shift again? Or if carbon dioxide is still driving the temperature upward but the temperature is falling, then something else must be happening and is the more dominant process.
Alternatively, with increases in temperature caused by Mankind and all of his heat-generating activities and machines and/or this business of the earth shifting its orbit, and/or volcanoes and the like, perhaps we should consider thermal pollution as a greater problem and, thus, the cause rather than the effect of carbon dioxide. Clearly, we have cause and effect confusion in our climate modeling, at least with respect to temperature and carbon dioxide. Socially and politically, this is all idle claptrap as we as a society have determined that man causes increases in carbon dioxide, and in turn, that will cause lethal global warming. Hmmm.
Regardless, no matter which side of the fence you choose to come down on, or for that matter straddle, regarding global warming, the lesson from Mr. Ridley’s fine article is that we in the tribological community need to be clear headed in our thinking. Whether you are advancing the study of tribological processes at the nano level or dealing with the tribology of equipment-reliability problems in the field, let’s be careful to not confuse the cause with the effect.
That having been said, I still don’t know which came first, the chicken or the egg, do you?
Bob Gresham is STLE’s director of professional development. You can reach him at rgresham@stle.org.