A SIMPLE REASONING ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

Over the years I have seen an often been in some very frustrating discussions regarding the reality of climate change.

Often anti-climate change promotors state things like:

“It has not been provide that climate change is real. “
or
“I accept that global warming is real. But there is no such thing as climate change”. Climate change is the human driven global warming effect.

I often find this frustrating because these people are using technologies that have come about from scientific “theories” every single day, relying on them to make their lives easier. They seem completely oblivious to the fact that most if not all of scientific theories have not been proven. Your phone, your computer, the electricity we use, your heating, your vehicle, etc etc. The list is infinite when it comes to what science and engineering has given us without proof. Most of it is simply through reasoning, using theories.

You don’t have to “prove” gravity in the scientific sense. You just need to prove it “enough”. If you drop a ball 10 times at the height of 1m and time how often that ball hits the ground you will see that it is reproducible, and you can calculate that gravity on earth is roughly 9.8 m/s^2. Basically no one will claim that it is not proof and will dispute this. Why can we not approach climate change in the same manner?

There are experiments showing that CO2 and other emitted gases are in fact green house gases. Their presence in the air causes the heat of the sun to be trapped and cause a rise temperature. Anyone can pretty much test that.

1. Build a small green house in doors and away from a window, to have a controlled environment.
2. Setup a lamp over it as a heat source.
3. Measure the temperature in the green house, until the temperature stabilises. This would be the baseline temperature.
4. Introduce a known (approximately) concentration of CO2. This is easy, since you can just use dry ice.
5. After the dry ice has fully released the CO2 into the enclosure measure the temperature till it stabilises.
6. Let the air out of the enclosure and repeat the test several times and you can see that it is reproducible.
7. Test with increased and reduced CO2 concentration and you can see that there is a trend.

You would find that CO2 does indeed cause more heat to be trapped resulting in a hotter environment. You can repeat this over and over again and the trend would be the same. So in conclusion a higher concentration of CO2 in the air will cause temperatures to rise.

From here you could built larger green houses, and introduce CO2 to get the same concentrations as the smaller version and yet again you will get to the same exact conclusion.

COUNTER ARGUMENT

So the counter argument that you would then hear from some anti-climate change people is “Ok fine, I concede that CO2 does cause the green house effect, but that doesn’t mean that climate change is man made”. They refer basically to just one data set as their main scientific argument against the climate change.

REALITY

Well, lets rip the bandage off. Currently we humans are responsible for emitting 40 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per year. One ton of CO2 is 27’x27’x27′ (so approximately 8m x 8m x8m). We are emitting 40 billion tones of that a year. Think about that for a moment.

Here is something for reference. In 2010 New York City emitted 54 million metric tons of CO2. Below is an image of a single day’s emissions. Imagine 356 times this amount, just from New York City.

Of course CO2 isn’t concentrated in a dense block like this. Since it is in the air it is more like a blanket that covers the planet. So below is another visual to show this.

One year of CO2 emissions is like covering the earth with one such blanket that is 1.2″ thick (31 mm). Now remember we have been emitting into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. Though the earth has mechanics to absorb CO2, we have to also remember that the earth was pretty much in equilibrium before we started emitting. We have not put anything in place to balance things out, if anything we have taken drastic steps to make things worse, by removing vast amounts of ecosystems that serve as carbon sinks.

And soon this warming of the planet will lead to amplifying global warming even more. There are a significant amount of carbon stored in vegetation, and permafrost. Consider for example that Australia’s 2019 bushfire crisis released as estimated 250 million tons of CO2 (approximately 5x what NYC does in a year). Additionally the world’s oceans has been absorbing the vast majority of CO2. As time goes by the oceans will become saturated with CO2, reducing the amount of CO2 it can absorb, and temperatures rising also reduces the capacity the ocean as to absorb CO2.

ITS COMPLICATED THAT’S WHY

So why is it that like in the green house experiment we don’t see massive rises in temperature, or why aren’t scientists able to predict, everything?

Well, its complicated. But, it can also be reasoned out just like the green house experiment. It is well established that green house gases trap heat. So visualise the CO2 concentration in a green house vs the temperature in the green house. That is pretty straight forward. Now add a big pond containing fish in that green house, what happens? As I stated the water would absorb a portion of that CO2. So the actual concentration of the CO2 in the air is lower that with an experiment without the pond. Thus though the temperature would be higher it won’t be as high.

Note, that were you to fast forward in time, the temperature in the green house would still rise. First because the water doesn’t fully remove the CO2 from the air, and also because the green house effect is also present in the water. Some light/heat does enter the water, and the CO2 within it will cause that heat to also be trapped there. At high enough concentrations the fish in that water would die. And once the water is saturated and can’t absorb any more CO2 any additional CO2 added to the system will be in the air.

This thought experiment can be expanded infinitely. What if the enclosure were big enough to have a weather cycle? Water evaporates, forming clouds, leading to rain. This would mean that the system would have the flow of air as well as water. Add some animals into the mix and you have a complete ecosystem.

End of the day thought the tale is the same. An increase of CO2 in the system will disrupt and change a well established ecosystem. If enough CO2 is added quickly enough over time, the system won’t have time to evolve and adjust.

GLOBAL WARMING AS A NATURAL PHENOMENON

Let’s have a look at this notion of “global warming is a natural phenomenon and have have nothing to do with it”.

I will give it to them. The earth does seem to go through a global warming and cooling cycle. Below is a graph showing the pattern of glacial and interglacial periods.

Note carefully that the bottom excess is in thousands of years. Over the last 450 thousand years it has always taken thousands of years for the earth to cool down and to warm up. Massive changes to the planet occur from relatively small global temperature changes (lower graph vs those above).

HOW THE ICE AGES CORRELATE TO CO2

Below is a graph depicting the average temperature change vs the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. It can be seen that they correlate fairly well with one another.

I have to point out though that the CO2 concentration actually lags a bit compared to the temperature rise of the planet. Some people say that global warming is natural, but due to this lag others have gone further to claim that CO2 increase in the atmosphere is actually the effect, not the cause of global warming. However, this is actually in correct. Remember that I stated that as water heats up it loses its ability to absorb CO2? Well when it gets hot enough it also releases it into the air. But why say something that has been said better elsewhere? Here is how they lay it out on kepticalscience.com.

“This has led some to conclude that CO2 simply cannot be responsible for current global warming.

The initial changes in temperature during this period are explained by changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, which affects the amount of seasonal sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface. In the case of warming, the lag between temperature and CO2 is explained as follows: as ocean temperatures rise, oceans release CO2 into the atmosphere. In turn, this release amplifies the warming trend, leading to yet more CO2 being released. In other words, increasing CO2 levels become both the cause and effect of further warming. This positive feedback is necessary to trigger the shifts between glacials and interglacials as the effect of orbital changes is too weak to cause such variation. Additional positive feedbacks which play an important role in this process include other greenhouse gases, and changes in ice sheet cover and vegetation patterns.“

THE HUMAN CONTRIBUTION

I believe I have established by now that larger concentrations of CO2 in air causes an increase in temperature of the earth. I have also shown that that does happen naturally in a cycle that takes thousands of years. With respect to this people who claim that “global warming is a naturally occurring event” are in part correct.

This is the reason why scientists changed the term to climate change. The term climate change represents the human contribution to the system.

The graph above shows the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere due to human beings in comparison to the regular ice age cycles of the planet. However, I don’t find that this image drives the message home as well as this one.

Look carefully at this graph, and consider everything that has been said. After the industrial revolution the concentration of CO2 in the almostphere has increase in an amount equivalent to what normally takes thousands of years. To make matters worse we are inducing this rise in CO2 during a period when it was already going up, inline with the natural global warming cycle. Humans are effectively throwing gasoline onto the fire.

Small global temperature changes cause massive changes to the planet. A -6 degree change in average global temperatures causes ICE AGES. During the peak of the last ice age sea level was a whopping 120 m ( 393 ft) lower than it is today. When scientist talk about a 2 degree change in global temperatures the number may seem small, but the implications are huge.

The current level in CO2 is indeed high, but it also needs to be taken into account that humans continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere at the very high rate of 40 billion metric tones a year. This will cause global temperature levels to rise, causing the oceans to emit CO2 into the air as well, causing forest fires to become more frequent which also released more CO2 into the air. A rise in temperature will also lead to the release of green house gases from other CO2 traps such as permafrost. This positive feed back into the system will eventually trigger a run away train which we will be unlikely to stop once it gets going.

It is relatively easy to release the massive amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. Pump some oil out of the grown and through a lit match on it. However, we currently have no technology to remove it from the air. And no one is really interested in doing so, why? Because there is no money in it. The best we can try to do at the moment is try to reduce the amount of CO2 to emit, and trend to a zero carbon foot print system. Even so… if we don’t find a way to reduce the green house gases in the atmosphere, we may still get to a run away train situation. Then the anti-climate change promotors will be right. There won’t be anything we can do about it.