Consequences of Kuwait's Fires

When he ordered the retreating Iraqi army to set more than 700 Kuwaiti oil wells afire, Saddam Hussein may have become history's most spectacular sore loser. He also became the promulgator of one of history's most uncontrolled experiments on the effects of air pollution.

Right after the shooting stopped, scientists' speculations on just what those effects would be covered a full range of possibilities. Some people thought the sooty clouds would intercept so much sunlight that air temperatures would be lowered. Within that group, expectations went from minor local chilliness to global catastrophe as the probable result of the cooling.

Others claimed that view was totally wrong. Pointing to the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by the tons of burning oil, they suggested that the overall effect would be hotter temperatures rather than colder ones.

Many meteorologists thought these gloomy predictions were just short of preposterous. To the massive global atmospheric system, the smoke, heat, and gases of Kuwait's oil fires were a tiny disturbance--a bit like spraying a fire hose into Niagara Falls.

Like the atmospheric scientists, health scientists battled over the probable effects of the burning wells. Their predictions also ranged from near-catastrophic results to trivial ones, from more sickness for much of the world's population to some inconvenience for many Kuwaitis.

The debates over the fires' effects left the headlines almost before any of the fires were extinguished. When an array of environmental and medical specialists convened to assess the effects after six months had passed, the world press took little note of their deliberations.

That was probably sound journalistic judgment. The assessment conference found that not much of significance had happened because of the burning oil wells. The climate has become neither appreciably warmer nor perceptibly colder. And even though the smoky pall hanging over Kuwait, Oman, and part of Saudi Arabia still looks horrible, so far it has only mildly affected the health of people living in those places.

This seems to be truly a case of no news being good news; the dire predictions are not coming true, and Hussein's vengeful gesture was futile. But perhaps the situation is not so simple. I suggest there's bad news hidden in that good news. Despite all the studies, all the advances in knowledge, all the computerized number-crunching we can now employ, we are still profoundly ignorant about the real workings of the world.

The burning oil wells of Kuwait show that not only by the predictions they disproved but by the unpredicted events they generated. A British meteorologist, for example, found that particles emitted by the fires are able to bond with water. The hydrocarbon-rich flecks shouldn't be able to do that---it's like oil mixing with water. But it's happening in the skies over Kuwait; the smoke particles may serve as water collectors, eventually leading to unusual amounts of rain over Kuwait, India, and even China.

Then there's the suite of unusual chemicals being emitted by the fires. Some of these compounds have not been reported before in industrial pollution, and their effects on human health are wholly unknown.

The only genuine good news may be that these things are happening far from Alaska, and apparently will not affect us directly. Yet we have good reason to be unhappy with ignorance about the effects of oil fires. As the September 13 issue of the journal Science reports, "In the summer of 1992, industry researchers hope to spill and set ablaze tens of thousands of gallons of crude oil in the ice-choked waters of the Beaufort Sea off Alaska's northern coast."

It will be, researchers agree, a risky experiment. The only thing more risky would be preserving the present state of ignorance.