A12: Global Warming: Man or Nature? P1

This article is dedicated to the Formula One Team.  For those of you who don’t know, the school is forcing our team to switch to an electric battery for the sake of going Green. Electric cars are inferior to the current gas engines, so all hope of the team competing will be destroyed. The goal of the club is to compete competitively, and our team dedicates many hours every week to this end. To have them switch now would destroy not just their chances, but the club’s very soul. This topic will be presented in a three-part series.

The Origins

Where does the view of global warming originate? Who invented it, and how was it propagated? To answer these questions, we must first go back to the late 19th century to its father, Nobel prize-winning Svante Arrhenius.

In 1896, Arrhenius calculated the potential warming impacts of rising CO2 on the Earth’s atmosphere. He then published the book Worlds in the Making: The Evolution of the Universe at one point arguing that an increase in new carbon dioxide, by acting like the glass roof of a greenhouse (the greenhouse effect), would raise the temperature of the Earth. Doubling or tripling the C02 content could increase temperatures by 8-9C.

Scientists were aware of his theory at the time, however most called it speculative and benign.

Off to the Navy

After the groundwork for the greenhouse effect had been laid, the next major step came a half-century later with an oceanographer, Roger Revelle. Director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, he saw an opportunity to obtain major funding from the Navy by doing research in the Pacific Atolls where the US military was conducting atomic bomb tests.

During this time, his institute produced two studies(by David Seuss in 1957 and David Keeling in 1960) showing the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and linking it to the increased burning of fossil fuels. These two studies became the bedrock of the science of global warming. However. no proof that carbon dioxide was a greenhouse gas and therefore raising the temperatures of the Earth.

A New Ice Age

A different storm however, had already hit the eyes of the American public: global cooling.

Between the 1960’s and 1970’s this “climate catastrophe” dominated the political sphere. 86% of scientists believed in great global cooling, and 220 out of 264 papers on the subject supported it. Even the CIA got involved, writing a piece claiming that cooling trends would cause mass starvation and social unrest across the globe. All this continued until…the Earth stopped cooling.

If you look up the 70's global cooling scare, you’ll get all the top results of it being climate denier propaganda and a fake hysteria, however here’s a list of primary source documents so you can make your own decisions. An important note is that the same scientists promoting a global freeze would become the standard bearers for the “deadly” man-made heating.

As the fear of a new ice age fell away, the global warming scare was on the rise. This view broke into the spotlight in 1998. First, the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) was formed. Over the next few decades, they would release six reports linking dangerous rising temperatures to an increase in carbon emissions. Strong incentives were in place to find evidence, as the IPCC would then become the leading panel in charge of policy regulations, economic treaties, public mandates, and so forth.

Secondly, James Hansen, leading NASA climate scientist, gave a dramatic testimony to Congress about the impending doom of a warming climate from the greenhouse effect unless immediate action was taken. His testimony created a media sensation, and soon this global crisis would dominate the public and political sphere.

Has the science already been settled? Are those who question it mere conspiracy-theorists and religious nutcases? Maybe, but let’s take a closer look, and I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

What Really Causes Climate Change

The claim put forward nowadays is that carbon dioxide is the global temperature control knob. Add a little more CO₂ and the temperature increases. Remove some, and it lowers. Is our climate really that simple?

I hate to burst your bubble, but NO it is not that simple. Carbon dioxide is just one of the hundreds of factors which govern our climate. These range from volcanoes to ocean cycles to atmospheric soot. Let’s look at two: water vapor and the sun.

Water is about 1000x stronger so the doubling or even the tripling of CO₂ will have virtually little impact since water vapor and water condensed in clouds dominate the atmosphere.

The Sun

The sun is one of the most potent factors affecting climate change, yet its variations have been entirely neglected in any of the calculations. “Based on the laws of physics, the effect on temperature of man’s contribution to atmospheric CO₂ levels is minuscule and indiscernible from the natural variability caused in large part by changes in solar energy output.”

These are just a few of the variables which have been entirely ignored by climate scientists. Yes, man does affect the climate however, such a rash decision of attributing it solely to CO₂ surely should provoke some questions.

Repeatedly, we are preached that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and that the ppm (particles per million) levels of reaching dangerous heights. This is the amount of carbon dioxide molecules in a sample of a million air molecules. Before the Industrial Revolution, the ppm level was 280 and supposedly, fully through man-made action, we crossed 400 ppm in 2013. If rapid action is not taken to lower it, world ending events will ensue.

Is this increase in CO₂  fully anthropogenic (man-made) as they say? One part the scientists do not tell you is that they treat the residence (length of time until absorbed by the Earth) of natural CO₂ the same as that produced by man. Natural CO₂ is given a residence of 4 years while man-made carbon dioxide is given one between 50 to 100 years. This makes little sense as nature’s sinks do not give special privileges to certain types of CO₂. If we treat their residences equally, then the anthropogenic CO₂  only accounts for as low as 3.5%, but more likely 14% of carbon emissions.

Any global warming assumption is that natural carbon emissions are a net zero, a net-sink, meaning all carbon emitted by the Earth is reclaimed. Therefore, any new additions to the ppm level must come from human action. Yet, we find that tropical regions are a net producer of CO₂, which increases exponentially with temperature. We may be putting the cart before the horse by claiming that CO₂ increases temperature when it seems quite the opposite.

Reader: Fine, so we only slightly add to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but we still add something. Should we not be worried about the part we do add?

Let’s investigate this further starting with a quote by William Happer professor emeritus at Princeton University who spoke in front of Congress in 2009.

The amount of carbon in the air has been changing far before the Industrial Revolution and reached rates much higher than its current rate. Not only that, but we were also at a world-ending low. At 250 ppm, plant growth stops and at 150 ppm they suffocate!.

Our plants were close to starving at such low levels, so instead of CO₂  being a pollutant, it should truly be seen as a great fertilizer. While only slightly responsible for an increase in carbon dioxide, human civilization should still be praised for adding to the Earth more of this lifegiving gas. Instead of giant, unreliable windmills, why do we not work to clean fossil fuels of harmful particulates like sulfur dioxide, while allowing the CO₂  to run free and benefit the Earth?

Reader: But, Francisco, have you not seen the charts? Look, the temperature is still rising! It pairs with the increase in carbon dioxide. Whether from man or nature, and whether carbon dioxide is beneficial, there is only so much heat we can take.

You might be right, however I am going to give you a different graph, and let’s see if you notice anything different.

Well, this paints quite a stark contrast. Based on this graph, we see a general warming, a peak, and then a general cooling. From 1880 to 1934, the Earth was slightly warming, and from 1934 to 1998 the United States was cooling.  The temperature does not parallel the rising rates of CO₂. Now lets look 2013.

As you can see, this graph portrays continuous temperature increases from 1880 to 2013. How we decide to slice the data matters. A 60-year period slight cooling trend has now become part of an over century long warming path.

Hopefully you’re beginning to see that the climate is far more complicated and uncertain than led to believe. With all these different factors one should question the doomsaying coming from the media and our politicians. Think about it, if meteorologists struggle to guess weather patterns a few days in advance, what weight should we give to these climate scientists who claim to know decades ahead?

This is Part 1 of 3. Get your popcorn ready for Friday when we will go into the most common myths perpetrated about climate change.

Your humble servant, Francisco Pereira

Morano, Marc. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change. Regnery Publishing, 2018.