Just when I thought everyone was on board with global warming, there appears to be one more holdout on this editorial page. And he was a climatologist, no less. In one of the most bizarre claims denouncing the projections of a rising sea level, Dr. Timothy Ball said, "One of the factors that people forget is that most of the ice is already in the ocean, and so if you understand Archimedes' Principle, when that ice melts it simply replaces the space that the ice occupied- even if the ice caps melt completely."

I confess to becoming a little warmer myself after reading this statement. In rebuttal, let me cite a Web page dedicated to debunking the "myth" of global warming. It is titled, "What if All the Ice Melts? Myths and Realities" and can be found at www.johnstonsarchive.net/environment/waterworld.html. This Web site states that 98 percent of the earth's ice is grounded, and 2 percent floating. It goes on to say that if all the grounded ice melted, the sea would rise 60 meters, about 200 feet. I can't vouch for this data, but since the bias is hostile to the theory of global warming, I won't challenge it. If anything, the results are probably conservative.

So most of the ice is "not already in the ocean" and when it melts it will not simply "replace the space that the ice occupied." Instead, 98 percent is grounded and when it melts it would raise the sea level by 200 feet.

It should also be pointed out that most of the actual sea level rise would be due to thermal expansion of the ocean's water and not to the melting ice. In time, due to mixing created by deep ocean currents, the worldwide temperature increase will permeate throughout the ocean's temperature gradient. While water doesn't expand all that much, the oceans are very deep, 12,000 feet on average. Each foot will expand just a little bit. Since water is relatively incompressible, the rise due to the expansion of each of these 12,000 feet would add up and become significant (see www.science.org.au/nova/082/082key.htm).

Assuming Dr. Ball was accurately quoted, why would a scientist make such a glaring mistake? Scientists are human, and like the rest of us they believe what they want to believe, they follow their emotional biases. Now why is that?

In his book, "Descartes' Error, Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain," Professor Antonio Damasio relates the history of a number of patients who have had injuries to the frontal cortex of their brains, the seat of one's emotional network, but whose other mental faculties - reason, memory, IQ, language and vision - remained intact. These individuals found it difficult to come to conclusions, to make decisions. Professor Damasio's conclusion is that our reason works in conjunction with our emotions, reason surveying the landscape of alternatives until our emotions choose something that strikes their fancy.

Philosopher David Hume put it more strongly: "Reason alone can never be a motive for any action of the will ... It can never oppose passion in the direction of the will. ... Reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

I confess to being a servant to my biases. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a retired professor of physics from the University of California, Davis. As such, my bias is to put my trust in other specialists when I am in over my head. Although I taught a graduate course in statistical mechanics and thermodynamics for many years, I am not qualified in the complex subject of atmospheric physics.

Unlike Dr. Ball, most scientists are not motivated by ideology. Personal ideology will not get you very far in peer-reviewed journals.

There is a need to publish; it's a publish-or-perish world in science. Believe me, any scientist would relish the opportunity to come up with something new that would disprove current theories on climate change. But it needs to be real, not such wild claims as, "Most of the ice is already in the ocean."

The virtue of the scientific method, the accumulated pursuit of many individuals, is that it averages out the emotional bias of the individual. The wisdom of crowds (see the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki) homogenizes the body of self-interests to provide the common sense, the sense of the commons, not to be confused with the oxymoron of the common sense of the individual.



<i>Jim Hurley lives in Nevada City.</i>