I was an anti-corporation, anti-oil, politically left person who was also regularly depressed and thoroughly freaked out about climate change since first reading about it in 1998.
So I jumped at the chance in 2015 to put my advertising creative skills to work on a voluntary project where I created a viral campaign concept to promote climate change and renewable energy. I spent almost a year developing the concept, using my spare time and money and doing vastly more reading on the subject than I had before, including many things about CO2.
Here are some of the conclusions I personally came to, slowly at first, then eventually all at once in the following few years after the project, and some salient points I read along the way:
There is an element of the movement that makes money out of scaring the public and politicians and who keep the scare going, despite none of their apocalyptic predictions coming true for the last 30 years. Whilst it is unlikely scientists are getting rich out of researching CO2–caused catastrophic climate change – many jobs, university departments, tenured professorships, mortgages and college funds on the money governments give to it continuing to flow.
An atmospheric physicist or meteorologist who now comes out against the theory of human caused ‘climate emergency’ will have their livelihoods and reputations destroyed, rather than having their science objectively considered.
Much of the public’s belief or disbelief of the theory is more about their political ideology and continuous microdosing of the message in the media than any significant research into the subject, and I would have included myself in this categorisation a few years ago.
There is still evidence that CO2 causes catastrophic climate change, only correlations and extrapolations. Any graph or chart you see about temperature trends or sea level rise is often , still has no demonstrable link to CO2 and may be entirely due to natural cycles. The location of New York city used to be under roughly one mile of ice only after all.
We still don't know enough about how all of the terrestrial and extraterrestrial factors from clouds, multi-decadal ocean current oscillations, cosmic rays, sun activity, water vapour, forests, urban heat island effect, Milankovitch Cycles, undersea geothermal activity, the strength of earth’s magnetic field and natural CO2 variability to name just a few, interact with each other in a myriad of ways to be able to make any claims about climate trends, and there is powerful enough to calculate it, even if we understood all of the interactions.
Atmospheric physicists who have been in the field for decades, long before the theory of CO2–caused catastrophic climate change became widespread, used to study around 22 drivers of climate (a few of which are mentioned above), the least of which was CO2 as it was known to have a very weak influence.
The UN's IPCC predictions are all based on computer models, which contain large errors or omit
There are enough and who don't believe that CO2 can cause catastrophic climate change to be able to confidently question the hypothesis.
“A profound fact is that only a very small change, so small that it cannot be measured accurately with the currently available observational devices, in the global cloud characteristics can completely offset the warming effect of the doubled atmospheric carbon dioxide…” .
Of the 0.9 degrees C warming that has occurred since the turn of the last century, half could be attributed to human activity. Of that half, 0.225 degrees C could be caused by the urban heat island effect. The remaining 0.225 degrees C of warming is theoretically possible to have been caused by our additional CO2.
The 0.6C of warming that occurred from took place when when the additional CO2 added to the atmosphere by human activity is estimated to have been just 18 parts per million (going from 280ppm pre-industrial to 298ppm) - acknowledged as being far too small to have had any impact in any way. Therefore what caused early 20th century warming had to have been caused by something else, and could still be causing warming, if any, today.
Wind and solar are not capable of providing the energy and resources we require to live a modern life. They also create immense problems and inefficiencies for power grids with their constant peaks and troughs in output. Only because we keep traditional forms of power generation in ‘spinning reserve’ can we absorb or balance out the problems of intermittency with renewables, and only when used on a small scale. A battery or batteries big enough to store electricity to power northern hemisphere populations through winter even for just one full day, would be so huge, so expensive and so resource–intensive to manufacture, that they’re practically in the realm of fairytales.
Coal and oil are single-handedly responsible for lifting humanity out of a brutal, hard manual labour, 18th century agrarian lifestyle where 85% of the population were required to farm, with little or no leisure time, no access to cheap affordable medical care and where most of us were dead by 40. They are both still responsible for maintaining our long, healthy, comfortable lives.
No matter how ‘green’ you try and live, everything you touch, hold, wear, eat, drink, every activity, every holiday, every minute of leisure time, everything you ride in, sit on, every place you live in or work in, every medicine and medical procedure still has oil and coal at the heart of its lifecycle — by powering your activity directly, by providing the energy to be manufactured and delivered cheaply to your door from across the world or your country, and in the case of oil, is directly made from it.
Whilst they do have environmental issues we should continue trying to resolve, rapidly removing oil and coal from our energy and raw materials mix as some advocate will result in an immediate and painful deindustrialisation and depopulation of the planet – which people often piously say is a good thing, until they realise it will likely include themselves, their children, friends, family and just about everyone they know and love.
A subset of environmentalists who are also driving the ‘climate emergency’ narrative know that the above point is the case, but actually think there should be no more than around 1 billion people on the planet living a lifestyle similar in terms of technology to that of the Amish community. However, a sudden move away from coal and oil use will not result in a nice smooth transition to some idyllic pastoral existence, as some might imagine.
Wind turbines, solar arrays and electric cars are far from 'green' to manufacture - with the mining and refining for renewables of the truly of rare earth elements, steel, concrete, copper cabling, fibreglass (and also land use and wildlife destruction) required to build enough of them, to even attempt to replace our current global energy production capacity, creating a very real and tangible environmental catastrophe in its own right.
Naturally occurring water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere, is more powerful at trapping heat than CO2 and is often 25 times more prevalent than CO2 in certain times and places. CO2 has been since the early 1800’s as a result of the mining industry and factory worker safety laws. Measurements of CO2 levels taken around the countryside in the UK and Europe during this period regularly returned samples as high as 380ppm, even 540ppm, and in Greenland as high as 700ppm. This means that the commonly promoted pre industrial levels of 280ppm is just an arbitrarily low number chosen by climate change alarmists. But it also means that natural variation in CO2 levels may be much bigger that currently acknowledged, and by comparison, human contribution may be nothing more than marginal.
CO2 has regularly been many multiple times higher in earth’s history and did not lead to an uninhabitable planet. For example, during the Devonian period between 400 and 360 million years ago when CO2 was around eight times higher at an estimated modern C3 and C4 vascular plants species first began to evolve and thrive. Far from being an extinction event, it appears life flourished during this time.
Plants die when CO2 is at or below 150 parts per million, which is why outspoken environmentalist, scientist and former harsh critic of humanity James Lovelock went from seeing us as a kind of parasite on earth to its potential unwitting saviours by unlocking much needed CO2 for plants. Which in earth’s geological time frame is currently extremely low. CO2 only absorbs 15% of the infrared spectrum (heat) and quickly becomes saturated with infrared energy - radiating some of it back down to earth, but of course much of it also passing back into the cold vacuum of space.
Each molecule of CO2 is surrounded by over 2400 molecules of non-heat trapping nitrogen, oxygen and argon, making it impossible to form a ‘blanket’ as we were once told - especially at high altitudes where wind speeds can reach 200 mph. The additional amount of CO2 we have added as a percentage of total atmospheric gases could be somewhere between 0.008 and 0.012 of a percent. The lesser amount when said as words is ‘eight thousandths of one percent’. Do we really think this will cause catastrophe on earth when CO2 has been many times greater naturally?
My advice is to continue to recycle, buy less junk, give money to charities who try and prevent deforestation and remove plastic from the oceans, support initiatives to create more fishing–free zones around the world, support initiatives to educate and bring energy to developing nations, support public transport, support of nuclear energy, buy an electric car if you want, or don’t – but above all enjoy your life and stop worrying about human caused catastrophic climate change.
We may just be scaring ourselves to death due to a lot of BS, a misunderstanding, an insidious conspiracy, political ideology, greed and egos, by humanity’s predisposition to a cataclysmic mindset, or all of the above.
Why did you change your views on climate change?
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