1.0 Introduction
That the Earth has been warming steadily for the past few centuries and intermittently for over 10,000 years is incontrovertible fact. However, there have been a number of asser-tions about global warming that are half-truths or outright falsehoods. This blog will focus on my problems with the current conventional wisdom about global warming.
Fifteen years ago I accepted the conventional wisdom about global warming. My back- ground was in geology and operations research, and I had no reason to doubt what some climate scientists were saying about it. At that time I was engaged in an email discussion with an old college fraternity brother, and he happened to make an assertion about global warming that I knew was untrue because of my knowledge of the geologic record of the Earth.
By refuting what my friend had said, I precipitated a debate that went on until he died a couple of years ago. My friend kept citing things about global warming that were often scientific charlatanism or outright scientific fraud. To refute the things he said, I was forced to expand my own horizons in climate science, meteorology, biology, paleontology, oceanography, zoology, and even cosmology. As I did so, I found that the conventional wisdom about global warming had a rather large number of problems. Essentially this blog is a compendium of that research.
For the record, I regard myself as an environmentalist. I do not believe we should be burn- ing fossil fuels for energy because our posterity is going to desperately need them in a few centuries. I do not believe we should be driving species to extinction in pursuit of aphrodisiacs, perfumes, and culinary delicacies. I certainly do not believe that we should trash our natural environment with unbridled human development. And I believe there are numerous organizations, such as the Nature Conservancy, that are pursuing rational environmental policies.
However, there are three environmental organizations that I have serious problems with: the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Meteorological Organiza- tion (WMO), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In my opinion these organizations have been advocating a view of global warming that is riddled with half-truths and falsehoods. I believe this is because these organizations are dominated by scientists who are mostly meteorologists that are now calling themselves climate scien- tists. For the rest of this blog I will refer to these people as the Global Warming Crowd, or GWC for short. But, I want to be clear that I am only talking about a very narrowly defined group of environmentalists that espouse the following message about global warming…
- The Earth’s climate has been warming continuously throughout the Industrial Revolution.
- Climate change is due to increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.
- The annual surplus of CO2 is all Man’s fault due to burning hydrocarbons for energy.
- Global warming will continue so long as Man continues to burn fossil fuels.
- Continued global warming will result in imminent economic catastrophes.
- Continued global warming will result in imminent ecological catastrophes.
- Venus once had permanent oceans but suffered a runaway greenhouse effect, which could also occur on Earth if Man continues to burn fossil fuels.
Of these statements, only the first statement is completely true. The second statement is only partially true. Atmospheric Methane has increased three-fold in the past two centu- ries. It now provides more that half of the greenhouse warming that CO2 does.
The third statement is also a half-truth. Man is very likely fully responsible, directly or indirectly, for the current CO2 surplus, but only about 25% of that surplus is due to the burning of hydrocarbons for energy. The fourth statement is highly unlikely to be true, because we are currently poised to return to a glacial phase of the Quaternary Ice Age.
The fifth statement depends on how we define “catastrophe”. If the polar ice caps com- pletely melt (the Earth has permanent polar ice caps only during ice ages), the area of the planet covered by water will increase from 70% to 75%. That will flood our coastal cities and inundate substantial areas currently employed for agriculture. However, there are some things the GWC neglects to mention. Sea level is rising at the rate of millimeters per year, so we will have a century or two to adjust. Sea levels have been rising intermittently for 10,000 years, so scuba divers in places in the Mediterranean Sea can view ancient cities that are now completely submerged. In other words, we have already been adjusting to rising sea levels.
In addition, we have no reason to doubt that the huge advances in agri- cultural productivity seen in the past half-century will not continue or be supplemented with aquaculture. While the economic effects of adjusting to rising sea levels will be quite substantial over a century or more, I don’t see anything approaching an imminent catastrophe.
For the sixth statement, IPCC provides a list of ecological catastrophes with the implica- tion that they could all occur with a rise of only a few degrees C. In fact, most of them, such as turning the Amazon basin into a desert, are regional weather phenomenon, not global climate issues. (Even then it is due more to clear cutting for homesteads by the Bra- zilian government than global warming.) One of the disasters in IPCC’s list, the sublima- tion of the methane clathrates in the continental shelves, is a true catastrophe, but has only occurred in the geologic record when the surface temperature of the Earth approaches 20°C warmer than present. Although such temperatures occur periodically, the forces driving them work very slowly, so we are tens of millions of years away from that sort of catastrophe.
One of the ecological catastrophes the IPCC cites, though, is happening right now. There is a much-publicized die-off of organisms in the shallow tropical seas, notably corals. What the GWC fails to mention is that this is the fourth such die-off in the past 800,000 years. In other words, it is a natural process that has operated since before Homo Sapiens existed, much less had kitchen matches. Another thing the GWC doesn’t talk about is that evolution is already compensating. There are already corals taking over the abandoned reefs that have mutated to withstand warmer temperatures and more acidic oceans. I don’t see that as a catastrophe and I certainly don’t see it as being all Man’s fault.
In fairness, I have to say that very few GWC scientists talk about the runaway greenhouse effect. That is because it is scientific nonsense. Venus has always been a hell-hole and never had liquid oceans. (I will explain why when I discuss extraterrestrial drivers of cli- mate.) In addition, the Earth has long-term climate cycles that are self-correcting and make the possibility of a runaway greenhouse effect extremely remote (until the Sun becomes a Red Giant in a few billion years). It is far more likely that the Earth will become an ice ball, as happened 700m years ago, than that it will have a runaway green- house effect.
The criticisms of the GWC Message above are by no means the only problems with the message; they merely represent a sort of executive summary. One thread you may have noticed is that there are facts that the GWC doesn’t like to talk about. This will be a recur- ring theme throughout the blog. One of the problems I have with the GWC is that they believe their message with religious fervor. This allows them to ignore contrarian data or dismiss it out of hand; they know they are right, so such data must be wrong. This is sup- ported, in part, by the fact that many of them have devoted their entire careers to the notion of continued global warming and the catastrophes they associate with it.
Let me list just a few more facts that the GWC tends to ignore:
The average temperature of the Earth for the past 540 million years since multi-cel- lular life evolved is about 7°C warmer than present. That is because we are living in the Quaternary Ice Age. We don’t see a lot of ice sheets because we are currently in an interglacial hiatus, a brief warming period. Though the hiatus is warmer than a glacial phase, it is still well below the norm for the Earth.
The average atmospheric CO2 level for the past 540 million years is well above 3,000 ppm. This is more than eight times the current level.
The Earth’s biosphere is most profuse and most diverse at the norms for tempera- ture and atmospheric CO2. That is, at those norms the tropical zone extends from the present 10° north and south latitude to as much as 60° north and south latitude.
The lowest level of atmospheric CO2, about 200 ppm, in the entire 4.5 billion year history of the Earth was reached about 12,000 years ago. The long term trend for CO2 is downwards; the present interglacial hiatus is merely a small, temporary reversal of that trend.
The minimum atmospheric CO2 necessary support photosynthesis in plants is 185- 225 ppm. In other words, 12,000 years ago we were on the verge of extinction, given that plants are the bottom of our food chain.
The first three facts tell us that IPCC’s ecological catastrophes are not quite as imminent or catastrophic as they would have us believe. The last two facts tell us that we should be putting more CO2 into the atmosphere rather than cutting it back. The present 400 ppm is far too close to the extinction level for my taste.
While this blog will be highly critical of IPCC, WMO, NOAA, and the GWC that controls those organizations, I must be clear that I do not believe there is any malevolent conspir- acy. Nobody is calling a meeting on the first Monday of the quarter to decide how to hood- wink the public. These people really believe what they are saying. Nor were there any palace coups to take over these organizations. Such organizations are primarily populated by invitation, so it is quite natural to invite like-minded individuals to join. Unfortunately, a few members of the GWC feel it is imperative to raise public consciousness about the impending catastrophes they believe are imminent, so they embrace the notion that the end justifies the means and they step over the line into scientific charlatanism and scientific fraud.
The remainder of this blog is divided into four parts: (1) a discussion of the several mech- anisms that actually control global climate; (2) a brief geologic history to demonstrate how these mechanisms interact with one another to drive the real climate of the Earth; (3) a description of the present interglacial hiatus, because its future is critically important to the survival of human civilization; and (4) a discussion of the deceptive ways the GWC promulgates their message.
2.0 Climate mechanisms
Though the GWC focuses almost exclusively on atmospheric CO2, there are actually several other important mechanisms that drive global climate. These can be roughly charac- terized in five broad groups of processes: extraterrestrial; atmospheric; plate tectonic; biological; and oceanic.
2.1 Extraterrestrial climate drivers
The universe is a dangerous place. For example, a neutron star in the WR-104 system, 8,000 light years away, will generate a gamma ray burst sometime in the next 500,000 years or so that could sterilize life on the surface of the Earth and, perhaps, blow away most of our atmosphere. While that burst is likely to be a near miss of our solar system, another neutron star could target us at any time. Nearby novas and supernovas could pro- duce similar results. Massive solar flares could also raise havoc with the Earth’s climate. There have also been mass extinctions roughly every 30 million years that some attribute to intersections between Earth’s orbit and a cluster of comets from the outer solar system in a highly eccentric orbit. While these and other simiar events can cause climatic mass extinctions, they are quite rare so I won’t deal with them specifically.
2.1.1 Our Warming Sun
One extraterrestrial event of interest, though, is that the Sun is warming. The Sun is cur- rently providing about 30% more energy to the surface of the Earth than 4 billion years ago when life first appeared on Earth. That increase has been fairly steady, but the rate of increase has been so slow that it is unimportant at any time scale of interest to Man.
I only mention it because it supports the Gaia Hypothesis, which is a favorite of SciFi writers. Under the Gaia Hypothesis, a planet can act to control its own surface environ- ment in an intelligent manner, much like a single, vast organism. I don’t subscribe to the Gaia Hypothesis. However, it is a remarkable coincidence that the Earth’s greenhouse effect, which is largely determined by highly diverse life on the surface, has decreased in lock-step with the Sun’s increasing energy to maintain the very narrow climate band of 10- 30°C necessary for carbon-based life as we know it. Maintaining that narrow band is a remarkable coincidence. In passing, I will point out a number of other, even more remark- able coincidences in the geologic record that seem to support the Gaia Hypothesis.
2.1.2 The Goldilocks Zone
Of greater relevance is the Goldilocks Zone. This is an orbital zone around a star where it is possible for planets orbiting in the zone to have permanent liquid water on their sur- faces. Cosmologists have found evidence of water all over our solar system in the past few decades, but Earth is the only body with permanent liquid water on the surface. The Earth is just inside the Sun’s Goldilocks Zone, about 0.3 astronomical units (Earth’s average orbital radius) inside the outer edge of the zone.
The operative word in the above definition is ‘possible’. Earth is so near the outer edge of the Goldilocks Zone, that it would be frozen solid without a strong greenhouse effect. (In fact, about 700 million years ago the Earth was an ice ball with an average surface tem- perature of -15°C, but that is getting ahead of the story…). While the Goldilocks Zone has nothing to do with day-to-day climate change, it is important to the idea of a runaway greenhouse effect.
Venus is actually just outside the inner boundary of the Goldilocks Zone (though it was barely inside the zone during the first billion years of its existence). It receives about 42% more energy from the Sun than the Earth does. The Earth cooled enough for steam to con- dense from the atmosphere into our oceans about 4.1 billion years ago. But because Venus receives much more energy from the Sun, it would not have cooled enough to condense oceans until about 3.5 billion years ago. However, by that time Venus was dry as a bone due to its lack of a protective magnetic field. Without that field, Venus is bombarded by hard radiation from the Sun. That radiation disassociated the steam molecules into sepa- rate hydrogen and oxygen molecules. The hydrogen rose in the atmosphere and was swept away in the solar wind, leaving Venus completely dry.
The lack of water on Venus means that plate tectonics on Venus has no lubrication. There- fore the crustal rocks on Venus respond to the larger tidal forces there by breaking and sliding, generating massive friction heat. That is why Venus always has almost continuous volcanism, more than any other planet in our solar system. That volcanism has produced an atmosphere that is now 99% CO2. Thus Venus has always been a hell-hole since it started to form 4.5 billion years ago.
The presence of large amounts of water on Earth and its position just inside the outer edge of the Goldilocks Zone pretty much precludes the Earth from ever having a runaway greenhouse effect. But to understand why, I need to discuss the roles of plate tectonics and biologic processes in determining the Earth’s long-term climate later in the blog.
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