Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (73 page)
Read Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist Online
Authors: Patrick Moore
Figure 3. This graph shows global levels of CO
2
and the global temperature for the past 600 million years. The correlation between the two parameters is mixed at best, with an Ice Age during a period of high CO
2
levels and Greenhouse Ages during a period of relatively low CO
2
levels.
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The graph does show a limited correlation between temperature and CO
2
during the late Carboniferous, and a very weak correlation from then until today. It is true that the most recent Ice Age corresponds with a relatively low CO
2
level in the atmosphere. None of this is intended to make the argument that CO
2
does not influence climate. I am no denier. We know that CO
2
is a greenhouse gas and that it plays a role in warming the earth. The real questions are: How much of a role? and If warming is caused by our CO
2
emissions, does this really harm people and the planet?
Figure 4. Graph showing temperature and CO
2
levels from 150,000 to 100,000 years ago. Note that temperature rises ahead of a rise in CO
2
.
Coming closer to the present, one of the best sets of data comes from ice cores at the Russian Vostok station in Antarctica. These cores give us a picture of both temperature and atmospheric CO
2
levels going back 420,000 years. Al Gore uses this information in his film
An Inconvenient Truth
to assert that it provides evidence that increased CO
2
causes an increase in temperature. Closer examination of the data shows that it is the other way around.
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Through most of this period it is temperature that leads CO
2
as shown for the period 150,000 to 100,000 years ago in Figure 4. When temperature goes up, CO
2
follows and when temperature goes down, CO
2
follows it down.
This does not prove that increases in temperature cause increases in CO
2
, it may be that some other common factor is behind both trends. But it most certainly does not indicate rising CO
2
levels cause increases in temperature. It may be that CO
2
causes a tendency for higher temperatures but that this is masked by other, more influential factors such as water vapor, the earth’s orbit and wobbles,
etc.
The April 2008 edition of
Discover
magazine contains a full-page article about plants, written by Jocelyn Rice, titled, “Leaves at Work.” The article begins with this passage, “In the era of global warming, leaves may display an unexpected dark side. As CO
2
concentrations rise, plants can become full. As a result, their stomata—the tiny holes that collect the CO
2
…will squeeze shut. When the stomata close, plants not only take less CO
2
from the air but also draw less water from the ground, resulting in a run of water into rivers. The
stomata effect
[my emphasis] has been responsible for the 3 percent increase in river runoff seen over the past century.”
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At this point my BS meter went off. There is no possibility anyone has a data set that could determine a 3 percent increase in global river runoff in the past 100 years. The U.K.’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research was given as the source of this information. A thorough review of the Hadley Centre website turned up nothing on the subject.
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The story goes on to predict that, given present trends in CO
2
emissions, “runoff within the next 100 years could increase by as much as 24 percent above pre-industrial levels… in regions already hit hard by flooding, the stomata effect could make matters much worse.” The Great Flood will return and inundate the earth due to trillions of tiny stomata shutting their doors in the face of too much CO
2
!
I also knew immediately that the entire article was bogus because I am familiar with the fact that greenhouse growers purposely divert the CO
2
-rich exhaust gases from their wood or gas heaters into their greenhouses in order to greatly increase the CO
2
level for the plants they are growing. I searched the Internet using the phrase “optimum CO
2
level for plant growth.” All I needed were the first few results to see plants grow best at a CO
2
concentration of around 1500 ppm, which boosts plant yield by 25 to 65 percent.
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The present CO
2
level in the global atmosphere is about 390 ppm. In other words, the trees and other plants that grow around the world would benefit from a level of CO
2
about four times higher than it is today. There is solid evidence that trees are already showing increased growth rates due to rising CO
2
levels.
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Greenhouse growers are able to obtain growth rates that are 40 to 50 percent higher than the rates plants grow under in today’s atmospheric conditions. This makes sense when you consider that CO
2
levels were generally much higher during the time when plant life was evolving than they are today. The fact is, at today’s historically low CO
2
concentrations, all the plants on earth are CO
2
-deprived. Those plants are starving out there!
Yet believers in catastrophic climate change will not abide by this clear evidence. In May 2010 Science magazine published an article titled, “Carbon Dioxide Enrichment Inhibits Nitrate Assimilation in Wheat and Arabidopsis.”
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The article implied that increased CO
2
levels in the atmosphere might inhibit the uptake of nitrogen. The popular press interpreted this as evidence that increased CO2 might not result in increased growth rates, as has been conclusively demonstrated in hundreds of lab and field experiments.
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This is why greenhouse growers purposely inject CO2 into their greenhouses. Typically, the Vancouver Sun ran with the headline, “Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels May Hinder Crop Growth: Greenhouse Gas Is Not Beneficial to Plants, As Once Thought.”
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The Science article was clever enough not to suggest that CO2 would “hinder” plant growth, or even to question the proven fact that CO2 increases plant growth. But by raising a side issue of nitrogen uptake it encouraged the media to make sensationalist claims, apparently debunking the fact that doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling CO2 results in increased growth, regardless of some point about nitrogen.
It may turn out to be a very good thing that humans discovered fossil fuels and started burning them for energy. By the beginning of the Industrial Revolution CO
2
levels had gradually diminished to about 280 ppm. If this trend, which had been in effect for many millions of years, had continued at the same rate it would have eventually threatened plant life at a global level. At a level of 150 ppm, plants stop growing altogether. If humans had not appeared on the scene, it is possible that the declining trend in CO
2
levels that began 150 million years ago would have continued. If it had continued at the same rate, about 115 ppm per million years, it would have been a little over one million years until plants stopped growing and died. And that would be the end of that!
This is perhaps my most heretical thought: that our CO
2
emissions may be largely beneficial, possibly making the coldest places on earth more habitable and definitely increasing yields of food crops, energy crops, and forests around the entire world. Earlier I referred to my meeting with James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia Hypothesis and one of the world’s leading atmospheric scientists. I found it strange he was so pessimistic about the future and cast our species as a kind of rogue element in the scheme of life.
Whereas the Gaia Hypothesis proposes that all life on earth acts in concert to control the chemistry of the atmosphere in order to make it more suitable for life, Lovelock believes human-caused CO
2
emissions are the enemy of Gaia. But surely humans are as much a part of Gaia as any other species, past or present? How could we know we are the enemy of Gaia rather than an agent of Gaia, as one would expect if “all life is acting in concert”? In other words, is it not plausible that Gaia is using us to pump some of the trillions of tons of carbon, which have been locked in the earth’s crust over the past billions of years, back into the atmosphere? Perhaps Gaia would like to avoid another major glaciation, and more importantly avoid the end of nearly all life on earth due to a lack of CO
2
. One thing I know for sure is we should be a lot more worried the climate will cool by 2 or 3 degrees Celsius than we should be about it warming by 2 or 3 degrees Celsius. Cooling would definitely threaten our food supply; warming would almost certainly enhance it.
I’m not saying I buy into the entire Gaia Hypothesis hook, line, and sinker. I find some aspects of it very compelling, but it might be a bit of a stretch to believe all life is acting in harmony, like on the planet Pandora in the movie
Avatar
. But that’s not my point. What bothers me is the tendency to see all human behavior as negative. Lovelock and his followers seem to need a narrative that supports the idea of original sin, that we have been thrown out of the Garden of Eden, or is it the Garden of Gaia?
The Hockey Stick
No discussion of climate change would be complete without mention of the infamous hockey stick graph of global temperature. The graph, said to depict Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the past 1,000 years, was created by Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and his colleagues. It shows a very even temperature until the modern age when there is a steep rise.
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The surprise for many scientists was that the graph implied the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age did not exist and that the only significant change in temperature during the past 1000 years was a precipitous rise during the past century. The graph was very controversial in climate science circles. Despite the sharp debate, it was showcased in the 2001 and 2004 reports of the IPCC.
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