I’ve
tended to be pretty neutral about the whole debate on climate change and CO2 alarmism
or denial in our society. Then, a few months back I was viewing a video presentation on Youtube. But, it did initiate one thing in me at least —— this overt display of 'social mantra' or 'dogma' really concerned me. I kept at it for weeks, dedicating a few hours here and a few there. Turns
out it’s hard to get solid, unbiased information. Both sides have their stack
of ‘experts’ of course and arguments can appear convincing from each. But from
looking into it simply based on science, there are some quirky little things
about CO2, the inert gas, and how it accumulates
in the air, multiplies and how that effect affects temperature in the
atmosphere around it. Things that make the 'climate-change-alarmist' side a bit harder to warm up to…
(I made a pun!)
It does well to remember that the first prominent Goliath to emerge in the early climate change movement was the unctuous (slimy, smug) and preening Al Gore. However, it was still called 'global warming' at the point he took the idea and thrust it prominently into popular culture.
To refresh anyone not sure, Al Gore was U.S.A. President Bill Clinton's underling and Vice President in the 1990s. He also is famed to later have lost a presidential race of his own to the then considered 'dumbest person' to have ever run for office, George W. Bush, mostly because Al really comes across as quite elitist and out-of-touch with everyday life when interacting with crowds of common people. Another funny note about Al G. is that he claims to have 'invented' the internet in many public speeches. He certainly didn't, of course, but scarily this myth still continues on as many people are grossly missinformed about many things and sadly they default to unvetted random internet 'facts' as their prime source of knowledge. Also Gore, being the snake-oil salesman he has proven to be, as he fished around during the late 1990s for something big to attach his built up notoriety to and to profit from, astutely latched onto the global warming trend that was experiencing a social birth/awakening/popularity-explosion. He systematically and quickly, much to his credit, fashioned himself into its premier world oracle.
'Global Warming' was the original designation for this new ideology favoured by Gore and the U.N., the legions of NGOs, compensated climate scientists, Greenpeacers, tree huggers, hippies, institutional academics, the new 'hipsters' coming onto the scene, new-agers, and their ilk. But as time passed, it ironically proved too sturdy a framing. Perfect!
Climate Change is a binder you can stuff everything into. Warm, cold, hot, dry, wind, drought, frost or fry. Tsunami, hurricane, tornado, brown Christmas, forest fires anywhere and even volcanoes or the shaking, quaking earth. I've watched as many of these natural events have found an alarmist 'climate change!' headline splashed very predictably in some media outlet somewhere, without fail. Yet, 'Climate Change' says everything and nothing at the same time. In fact, it is the perfect synonym that the generations before us just kinda called 'weather'. Weather always happens, changes, surprises, confuses, and it always will. It is sort of a definition of change itself, at the daily level — ask any Newfoundlander or Alberta foothills resident.
But please let me talk about 'Global Warming' again as it was the initial premise that Al Gore pushed. His main propoganda was the production and marketing of a fact-parched, overblown, manipulative pseudo-documentary called 'An Inconvenient Truth'. At the time it was considered a great milestone in social consciousness but in hindsight was just a pioneering effort in the genre of what we now commonly experience as super-hyped social media. What concerned me at the time was that it found its way into almost every school in North America and Europe as a compulsory presentation to be attended at some point during the curriculum by young, impressionable minds. All this, while its science remained extremely dubious and unconfirming. It was basically a fancy PowerPoint production backed by a very big, unknown multi-corporate budget and polished by the fine skills of the Academy of Arts and Sciences (i.e. Hollywood). Basically, a slick screen presentation. Gore even got the California elite's highest piece of tinsel -- an Oscar -- for it. But that's not totally surprising... since many of them were involved directly or indirectly in the project themselves and certainly everyone in the greater 'Hollyclan' basked gloriously in the spotlight of the moment when it was ostentatiously flashing fresh-and-new on every tv screen & magazine of the time. And then —— the Norwegian Nobel Committee granted him another bauble for the film — the secular world’s highest honour, a Nobel Peace Prize.
I remember thinking at the time... now a Peace prize? wow - really?? for a (throat-clearing-sound) movie?
Almost predictably, it turns out that Al Gore isn't quite the prime example of a person concerned with climate change, global warming or even personally concerned with what he said would be the consequences of our abusive personal actions as planetary citizens. His lifestyle isn't even close to this paradigm of perfection. Look it up. Instead, he lives like an actual entitled, hyper-privileged emperor. You know, even though I saw this early on, I mostly held back through the years - kept my opinions to myself. From what I see, most people, yes all us common folk — the hoi polloi, are mostly just hypocrites. We don't follow the preached climate change dogma any more than the elite do. It's all for show —— the joke we're all in on. All
experts agree, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2)
in the Earth’s atmosphere has varied a great deal over time. Sometimes it has
been lower than it is now and sometimes it has been much higher. It is also
true that the Earth’s average yearly temperature has been both a lot hotter and
lot colder at various times in the past. But, there is no evidence that
CO2 has caused the temperature to change
in the past. I’ve found that all studies of
temperature and CO2 levels in the past show
that it is the temperature changing that precedes the CO2
level change and not the other way around. Before
modern industrialization began in the late 1700s, the natural level of CO2 in
the Earth’s atmosphere has been determined to be about 270 parts per million.
It is now considered to be about 386 parts per million (December, 2016). This
suggests, we are told, that humans have added about 116 parts per million (ppm)
of CO2 to the Earth’s atmosphere as a result
of our industrial progress and activities. (This is a logical fallacy by the way). CO2 is
a gas that makes up a tiny, tiny part of the atmosphere. To put the figures
above in a different way: There used to be about 27 molecules of CO2
for every 100,000 molecules of air and now there are roughly 39 molecules of CO2
for every 100,000 molecules of air. So humans, it is suggested, have added
about 12 molecules of CO2 for every 100,000
molecules of air in the last 300 years or so. Here, let’s
picture that in another way. I'll try to give you an idea of the scale of CO2
compared to the total atmosphere. The Calgary Tower in
southern Alberta is 627 feet high (191 metres) (taken from Wiki). If the
height of the Calgary Tower represented the total height of the atmosphere then
‘natural’ levels of CO2 would be 2 inches
of that height (5.1 centimetres) and the amount added by humans up until today
would be an extra .9 inch (2.2 centimetres). We
are told that humans are adding extra CO2 to
the atmosphere at the rate of about 2 to 3 parts per million every year. People
are told to believe that CO2 addition at those levels is causing dramatic change. This is pushed with much social pressure and constant propaganda which includes the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph like the one below. The following
graph, presented by climate scientists, shows the estimated atmospheric CO2 levels over the last
10,000 years. It comes from ice core data for CO2 levels before 1950. For
data values after 1950, direct measurements from Mauna Loa, Hawaii were used. (Food for thought: Mauna Loa has historically been considered the largest volcano on Earth. Just think about that for a minute - what do volcanoes spew out?) I found Mauna Loa is often used as an
example of rising carbon dioxide levels because it’s the longest, continuous
series of directly measured atmospheric CO2 data. The reason why it's
acceptable to use Mauna Loa as a proxy for global CO2 levels is because CO2 has been found to mix easily and well throughout
the atmosphere. Consequently, the trend in Mauna Loa CO2 (1.64 ppm per year) is
considered statistically indistinguishable from the trend in global CO2 levels (1.66 ppm per
year). If global CO2 was used in the graph, the resulting 'hockey stick' shape would be virtually identical, we are told. However,
in my opinion, having had another existence in life when part of my job was preparing many statistical graphs on plant production, warehouse traffic, staff efficiency tracking, budget spending, warranty tracking, etc. — I completely understand how easy it is to 'bend', 'skew', 'subjectively present' information and data so it appears in your favour when in fact it is merely neutral or even negative in some cases.
I noticed immediately that the graph used a known technique among 'clerk' types that I consider a bit dishonest. Perhaps this is
a fine example of the now popular idea of ‘alternative’ facts? There is truth, then there is a clever spinning of truth to make it seem contrary or sensational. The
trace level of CO2 in the atmosphere is not
poisonous (it’s an inert gas) or directly damaging in any way but CO2 in
the air does have two important effects. One is good and one is thought to be
seriously bad. Let's
start with the good. CO2 is
plant food. It is generally accepted that the extra CO2
pumped into the air (as a byproduct of our industrial output, agricultural innovations and enhanced way of life) has increased global plant growth by about 10% to 15% in the
last century. That means about 15% extra growth on the globe from this natural fertilizer and about 15% more food for humans. But
CO2 is also a ‘greenhouse gas’ and this,
it is explained, is a bad thing. Earth receives incoming heat from the
Sun and it then radiates away heat into space. Greenhouse gases are various substances
in the atmosphere that impede or reduce the amount of heat radiated away from the earth
causing more heat to be trapped within the atmosphere. There are several
greenhouses gases. Water vapour (in the form of clouds) is by far hugely more abundant and most important to the greenhouse effect. CO2 is
so very much less significant than water vapour. Let
me explain what a greenhouse gas does. The energy that reaches Earth is from the Sun's shortwave
radiation that passes through the atmosphere easily to hit the Earth’s surface.
It is not absorbed by the greenhouse gases on its way down because the wave length of the energy is too high, too vigorous.
At the surface, some energy is absorbed, some reflected, but most importantly, energy that is re-radiated upwards now does so at longer wavelengths — as ‘heat’. Some of this heat radiation is at just the right wavelength to be in fact
absorbed by the carbon dioxide molecules and water vapour in the air as it passes
through them towards space. This absorbed energy is reemitted by the carbon
dioxide and water molecules. So this is why they say that more CO2
in the atmosphere means that outgoing heat is 'trapped' and this bit gets added back to the atmosphere in the form of low energy waves, very slowly, gradually warming the planet over centuries of time. The
obvious question becomes: is the amount of warming enough to be significant? As
explained above the heat bouncing back into space has a different, longer
wavelength compared to the ultraviolet energy coming in but only a portion of
these new wavelengths are absorbed by the CO2.
CO2 only ever absorbs a very narrow band
of the heat bouncing back out of the atmosphere so there is an upper limit, a threshhold, as to
how much heat CO2 can absorb. Even if the
atmosphere was entirely CO2, lots of the heat
spectrum would still get out and the temperature would only increase to a
certain point. I noticed that this is where the arguments get fuzzy and confusing. From what they suggest to us, it
is easy to get the wrong impression and to think, for example, that CO2 is
cumulatively adding more and more heat to the atmosphere in some sort of
runaway, exponential process — like a runaway train or a growing snowball rolling down a mountain. But this can't happen. The chemistry doesn't work that way.
A good way to think about
it is to imagine an aluminium pot, full of water. If you place that pot in
direct hot sunlight outside on the sidewalk, the water will get warmer. But no
matter how long you leave the pot in the sunlight, and you could do it for
hours and hours, the pot of water would never boil. It will never get hot
enough to do so. Even if you painted the pot black and put it back in the
sunlight the water would get a bit hotter than before but the water would still
not boil. Without stretching this analogy too far you can think of the black
paint on our pot as the rising CO2
levels — it’s pushing the temperature up a bit but it can only do it so far. As
I mentioned at the beginning, before manmade emissions added to the CO2 in
the atmosphere, there was already a level of CO2 in
the air — a level which was the natural occurring level for this particular
period of Earth’s history, whether we were here or not. It has been calculated and is generally accepted that this natural level of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was already high enough to absorb virtually
all the infrared radiation, produced by the Earth-Sun combination, of the right wavelength that can be absorbed by the CO2 molecule. Because
most of the energy which CO2 can absorb was
already being absorbed before the CO2
level was increased, any subsequent addition of CO2
can only absorb a small extra bit of energy. (i.e. Increasing CO2
but not increasing output from the Sun wouldn’t cause much change here on Earth). Even if
the atmosphere were heavily laden with carbon dioxide, it would still only
cause an incremental increase in the amount of infrared absorption over current
levels and temperatures could only go up fractionally. For example, doubling
carbon dioxide would not double the amount of global warming. This has been confirmed by
climate scientist's own measurements and calculations made since the industrial revolution.
In fact, it’s been discovered that the effect of carbon dioxide is roughly
logarithmic. Each time carbon dioxide is doubled, the increase in temperature
only remains the same as the previous increase. The reason for this is that, eventually,
all the long-wave radiation that can be absorbed has already been absorbed.
There is no ‘new’ long wave radiation being produced. It would be analogous to
closing more and more shades over the window of your house on a sunny day — it
soon reaches the point where constantly doubling the number of shades in the window frame, then closing them, can’t make it any darker in the
room inside. Another
way of looking at it is by thinking of adding blankets to your bed on a cold
night. If you have no blankets, adding one will have a big effect. Add 4 more
and yes, it may feel even cozier. But if you add a hundred more blankets on top
of you, it begins to make no change to the warmth you experience. Your body
only produces so much heat (like the Sun only provides a finite amount of energy). Adding another thousand blankets will have an unmeasurably,
teeny-tiny effect (well, except for the fact of probably crushing you to death ☺). So here
is some basic, agreed upon information that I’ve been able to discern so far from reading about the basic physics
of this CO2 greenhouse warming. It
is reliably estimated, and generally accepted on both sides, that the current elevated levels
of CO2 has added about 2 watts of heat per
square meter across the entire globe above the natural level assumed at
pre-industrialization. In order to picture this, think of a square meter of the
ground and then think of the whole column of air sitting above that square
meter, stretching miles up, all the way into the vacuum of space above us. Then
think about adding one 30th of a sixty watt light bulb's heat, glowing on your
desktop, to that entire column of air and dispersing it throughout, completely.
That’s not a huge amount of energy. For
various reasons that are publically available, climate scientists have also said that most of the heating
from the CO2 greenhouse effect is
expected to take place in the upper atmosphere. Yet, satellite measurements of
upper atmosphere temperatures do not show much warming in the upper atmosphere
of Earth in recent decades; the heating that has taken place appears to
be near the surface where they did not expect it and the sources of data at these altitudes has been called into question on many occasions due to measurement technique, equipment style and even equipment placement with respect to 'heat-sink' type areas. The satellite data is at odds with the CO2
warming effect hypothesis of most advocates. Not much is said of this unfortunately and I think it would go far if they could provide credible explanations to account for this. Instead, it
is smoothed right over and just 'empirically' claimed and advertised that heating from CO2
has pushed general global temperature up and will continue to do so in the
future in a dangerous, even disastrous way. Yet no authority on the subject
seems to be able to prove for sure whether the gradual warming of 0.7 degrees,
that is said to have occurred in the average yearly global temperature over the
last 100 years or so, is the result of manmade CO2, natural warming of some sort relating to Sun activity and consequential Earth response to that, or a combination of both, or something else altogether that we haven't considered... The
natural level of CO2 before we started adding
extra CO2 was about 270 parts per million. Since
the industrial revolution it is said to have increased 116 part per million but they can't be absolutely sure it was all man-driven.
Like I said, the climate alarmists' own numbers claim that the overall yearly temperature has climbed only
0.7 degrees Celsius in that entire time. Yet,
I must go back over it, -science-. It is so easy to get caught up in the hyperbole. So
even if we accept that all the warming of the last century or so is solely the
result of manmade emissions of CO2
then we are only likely to see a further rise of about 0.7℃ in the next 100 years at present
rates. This is a pretty trivial figure and on its own I don't think will cause humans,
or most species or even the planet overall too much of a problem. Climate may shift or change from what we have historically experienced (and so minimally), but it always has. Earth's history is a long tale of many, many states of environment and the lifeforms adapt, life goes on. Another concern... The
climate alarmists create their computer models to project what might happen to
the climate in the future in various scenarios. But, suspiciously, these
climate models tend to produce wildly different results even from one guy's model to another person's
model and they all failed to predict climate changes like the absolute cessation of
yearly warming that happened just this past decade. The new trend I've noticed in the newer publications is to tweak their models to propose that the small
warming that CO2 might cause over the next
100 years, however small it may seem (hedging their bets?), isn't the greatest issue. They say this small warming will subsequently trigger various 'feedback mechanisms'
and it’s these mechanisms that will push the temperature even higher. But considering the track record of these experts, the models used to
estimate these proposed 'feedback mechanisms' appear very speculative and arbitrary also. They don’t convince. But that doesn't seem to matter. Usually climate change
enthusiasts, the vast groups below the 'experts', will pick from the models with the most extreme, biased predictions supporting their arguments and then
publicise these as 'facts' in a sensational way, in articles, documentaries and school
curriculums in order to increase concern and alarm and of course, justify the
need for continued funding, or new fees disguised inside green energy hysteria. Yeah, I know it's not a good thing to wreck our Earth. I think solar and wind energy has its merits. I like the idea of less packaging and waste. We shouldn't pour crap into our rivers, cut down all our forests, pollute the environment or jet-set around the world in a frenzy on 20,000 fuel hogging jets a day! But this whole cult of carbon dioxide alarm/the religious green thing... it's vague, manic and a wee bit scary... Let me ask a couple uncomfortable questions: Do you see your fellow humans curtailing their lifestyles? Here's a telling radar shot of our current love for travelling... ...and this one is just ironic... Do you see people flocking to turning off the heat in their house, driving only on Sundays, cancelling their Jamaican vacations, not buying that plastic gadget because of the tremendous energy consumed to create it, not eating bananas in northern Canada, not showering every single day, not ordering a scarf off eBay? If you are honest, the answer is no. It's all talk, it's all indoctrination, it's all pretty hypocritical. You only need to look to your government leaders for that amusing example let alone old Sally down the street or your own city community.
Ok, ok... 'cause I realize that I kinda slid into a rant at the beginning of all this... I want to be clear, incase it isn't, I haven't much problem with the concept that climate changes. That it does so, is logically obvious. It always has (with and without us) and I assume it always will (with or without us). It is the remedies our present society has concocted to deal with climate change that I have issue with. Let me repeat that because, to me, that is the important point... When I notice the societal lapping up of most things told to them by the 'climate' crowd without question or without demanding precise information, that saddens me. At this point in our society, public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity it seems. (BTW, accepting something only because the masses do, is a logical fallacy). We are starting to behave as if we only need vast agreement and not specific fact backed up by empirical evidence to confirm our belief in something. The sensation of certitude around the topic of climate change, as it is currently popularily framed, pervades right now throughout most of our societies but is based mostly on loose threads, inconclusive studies, and mostly little of anything convincingly concrete. It really appears to be based largely on social pressure, nothing more. This is paralyzing to me... it makes me feel sad and numb for my fellow inpressionable 'monkey' specie. I now tend to wonder if the 'crisis' of climate change (as described by the experts) may not be caused by anthropogenic CO2 at all. It indeed may or may not be just a greater natural event that we've yet to understand, that occurs regularly probably, and our proclaimed contribution to it may only be a conceit (albeit with a specific agenda). I've yet to be convinced reasonably (and anyone else if they are honest) that this is not the case. Perhaps (and I base this on noticing which areas of the argument appear to sustain the most popular interest, activity, and emphasis) this whole crisis is simply derived by the desire for increased public tax/fee revenue that specific elite, socialist, political, corporate members of our society and all their 'family and cascading-tree' benefit from. They're, afterall, the powerful and influencial persons of our society and they have ever increasing needs and wants to sustain. Their very professions, livings, social lifestyles, and family/progeny depend on constant and esculating income towards their personal situations.
Could it be that's all it's ever been about all along? (Yikes! that would be shocker, wouldn't it?...)
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