A
few observations about global climate.
Positive
feedback appears to be important. If you cool the climate, then more GHG
is absorbed in the sea thus reducing the temperature even more. The solubility of carbon dioxide in water is
well known to decrease with increasing temperature. This is why your drink
loses fizz as it gets warmer. Thus a warmer ocean releases more carbon dioxide
into the atmosphere and so it continues until some dramatic event stops it or
turns it around to cooling which then becomes self perpetuating and unstoppable
until a different sort of dramatic event occurs. An extreme demonstration
of this reinforcement and unstoppability occurred 716 MYBP when the turn to
warming did not occur and the globe froze over in what we are calling snowball
earth. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/03/100304-snowball-earth-ice-global-warming/ There were several snowball Earth moments.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth]
Similarly,
if warming, whatever it's cause isn't stopped by some event the planet could
warm up to the long term normal that pertained throughout most of the 4.5BY
This was very hot and dry. Suitable for reptiles and a few human
ancestors survived for a million or so years before the on-set of the
Pleistocene ice age but only a few and on the cool coast of South Africa or in
the Olduvai Gorge https://ozonedepletiontheory.info/ice-ages-and-volcanism.html]
But there is no way 7.4B humans could survive in this 'normal' climate.
Similarly, our ancestors survived through 4 glacial but there's no way for 7.4B
to produce food and survive another glacial. We are trapped in this ideal
inter-glacial period.
Geologists
had long sought to understand the dramatic events that turned the Earth from
cooling to warming and back again to create the four glacial and interglacial
periods. That was part of the justification for drilling the deep holes
through the remaining ice sheets. A paper by a former US Geological Survey scientist, attributes
the turnings to volcanic events which affect the ozone levels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAnacf4eboQ
A
Waterloo researcher also expresses the importance of ozone depletion: https://uwaterloo.ca/news/news/global-warming-caused-cfcs-not-carbon-dioxide-study-says
Thus
the turn from warming to cooling is attributed to a series of highly explosive
events year after year for a number of years. We had the beginning of
this in 1815 with the explosion of Tambora
https://www.amazon.com/Year-Without-Summer-Volcano-Darkened/dp/1250042755]
The resultant aerosols https://www.ozonedepletiontheory.info/ice-ages-and-volcanism.html]
in the atmosphere cooled the Earth for several years to the extent that crops
failed. If explosive events had repeated several times, it might well
have turned the climate from warming to cooling. Another type of
volcanism (effusive) puts bromine and
chlorine into the atmosphere and eats up the ozone layer thus allowing
radiation in that warms the climate. We
inadvertently tested this concept by releasing CFC's into the atmosphere
causing the ozone hole and associated warming from 1970 to 1998. This is
the warming that caused all the panic. 1940 to 1970 the temperature
didn't rise and again from 1998 to present there has been no significant
rise. You will recall the panic over the ozone depletion and the danger
of sunburn in that period. That too declined in 1998 because we stopped
release of CFC's based on the Montreal Protocol but it will take decades for
the effects of CFCs to lessen. The
ozone effect is sufficient to explain the major climate changes. Minor changes in the heat retaining GHG are
insignificant by comparison but even this is not largely attributable to the
trace carbon gasses.
When
the climate changed to warming in the ending of the last ice age, all the GHG
became less soluble in the warming sea and became a positive feedback to
warming. But which GHG is important and which is insignificant? In
the ice record there is such a slow response from the carbon gasses that it is
not discernable in the record for many hundred years after the onset of
warming.
The
principal GHG is water and it responds immediately to the temperature. It
so dominates, that the fraction of the greenhouse effect attributable
to anthropogenic CO2 is only 0.28% http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1797900/posts
When questioned about the role of water, the scientists hanging their hats on
CO2 claim that water is constantly in balance with the temperature.
Look up at the sky. The clouds are much closer to saturated than the
space between them. There's always room for another cloud. We take
whole river systems and in farming and lawn watering we evaporate them into the
air with nothing reaching the sea. Why do scientists concentrate on
CO2? The ice cores give them a record of CO2 in the past but not of
water vapour. http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/watervapor01.htm
As
well, we dig up fossil water and send it skyward and we increase evaporation by
holding water in dams. Even if that water falls back out in a few days we
are sending such a stream of water that we must be increasing the water in the
atmosphere unnaturally, by a few percent which would have many times more
greenhouse effect than the anthropogenic carbon gasses. Add to that the large proportion of the
other anthropogenic emissions attributable to our eating and it is overwhelming
that insofar as the GHG's are having any significant effect in warming the
climate our eating is the main cause. Conclusion: stop eating! (or
light up the BarBQue and enjoy our demise). Conclusion No. 2 - the liklihood that population increase will continue is the only problem worth our attention. In Centennial year, I attended a lecture by David Suzuki at the University in Perth. I asked him what he thought the reasonable carrying capacity of Earth was in terms of humans. He replied that we needed four Earths. The population has risen 16% since then so we'll soon need five!
I
must acknowledge that Peter Ward helped me with this treatise.
Hugh
Pertinent
documentaries:
Hopefully
the movie, Climate Hussle will eventually be available on-line.
Attached
is a paper being published this month. In September I am speaking at a
conference in London. You might enjoy the abstracts https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305781827_The_London_Conference_Volume_of_Extended_Abstracts_Commentary_Notes_Second_Revised_Edition
Peter
Ward's book is available, https://whyclimatechanges.com/the-book/ personally
autographed, but you might get it cheaper from Amazon because of the cost of
shipping to Canada.
Peter
Ward on-line
