Some facts about pedophilia
Mr. Sam Miller, Guest Speaker
First Friday Club of Cleveland
Thursday, March 6, 2003, 12:00 p.m.
When I first discussed my subject with Mr. Ginley, I told him the title of this speech would be “From Bed Sheets to Business Suits” he seemed flustered — he did not understand my point. So I changed the title to “Kangaroo Journalism”. I presume most of you are familiar with this and are suffering because of it.
I’m going to say things here today that many Catholics should have said 18 months ago. Maybe it’s easier for me to say because I am not Catholic but I have had enough, more than enough, disgustingly enough.
During my entire life I’ve never seen a greater vindictive, more scurrilous, biased campaign against the Catholic Church as I have seen in the last 18 months, and the strangest thing is that it is in a country like the United States where there is supposed to be mutual respect and freedom for all religions. This has bothered me because I too am a minority in this country. You see, unfortunately, and I say this very advisedly, the Catholics have forgotten that in the early 1850’s when the Italians, the Poles, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, all of Catholic persuasion, came to this country looking for opportunity — because of famine, (particularly the Irish) they were already looked upon with derision, suspicion and hatred. Consequently the jobs they were forced to take were the jobs that nobody else wanted — bricklayers, ditch diggers, Jewish junkmen, street cleaners, etc. This prejudice against your religion, and mine, has never left this country and don’t ever forget it, and never will. Your people were called Papists, Waps, Guineas, frogs, fish eaters, ad infinitum. And then after the Civil War, around 1864, the fundamentalists, conservatives, Protestants and a few WASP’s began planting burning crosses throughout the country, particularly in the South. And today, as far as I’m concerned, very little has changed. These gentlemen now have a new style of clothing — they’ve gone from bed sheets to gentlemen’s suits.
There is a concentrated effort by the media today to totally denigrate in every way the Catholic Church in this country. You don’t find it this bad overseas at all. They have now blamed the disease of pedophilia on the Catholic Church, which is as irresponsible as blaming adultery on the institution of marriage. You, me have been living in a false paradise —wake up and recognize that many people don’t like Catholics. What are these people trying to accomplish?
From the Sojourner’s Magazine dated August 2002, listen carefully to a quote, “While much of the recent media hype has focused on the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal, relatively little attention has been given to the high rate of sexual misconduct in the rest of American Christendom. This is truly a crisis that crosses the borders of all religions.
Now let me give you some figures that you as Catholics should know and remember. For example, research by Richard Blackman at Fuller Theological Seminary shows that 12% of the 300 Protestant clergy surveyed admitted to sexual intercourse with a parishioner; 38% acknowledged other inappropriate sexual contact. In a 1990 study by the United Methodist Church, 41.8 percent of clergywomen reported unwanted sexual behavior by a colleague; 17 percent of laywomen said that their own pastors had sexually harassed them. Phillip Jenkins concludes in his book “Pedophiles and Priests” that while 1.7% of the Catholic clergy has been found guilty of pedophilia, 10% of Protestant ministers have been found guilty of pedophilia — this is not a Catholic problem. This is a problem of pure prejudice.
Why the papers, day after day, week after week, month after month, see fit to do nothing but come out with these scurrilous stories…when I spoke recently to one of the higher-ups in the newspaper I said, this is wrong…he said…why do you want us to shoot the messenger? I said no, just change the message….change the message. He said, how? I said I’ll tell you how.
Obviously, this is not just a Catholic problem. And solutions must be broader and deeper than those carried out by Catholic cardinals. The whole church has a responsibility to offer decisive leadership in the area of sexual misconduct—whether it is child abuse, sexual exploitation, or sexual harassment.
Recently, churches have shown unprecedented unity on issues of poverty and welfare reform. Now it is necessary to call for a broad based ecumenical council addressing the issue of sexual misconduct in the church, not only the Catholic Church, all churches, including synagogues. Its goal would be transparency and openness in developing stringent, forward-looking guidelines, consistent with denominational distinctions, for preventing and addressing sexual misconduct within Christian churches and church-related institutions. Such a council could include not only denominational representatives but also a majority presence from external organizations such as child protection agencies, law enforcement, psychiatric services, victims’ agencies, and legal and legislative representatives.
Crisis, the strange thing about the word crisis, crisis in Chinese is one word. Crisis in Chinese means, on the one side, a real crisis problems etc., but the other side means great opportunity. We have a great opportunity facing us. Crisis is often accompanied by an opportunity for extraordinary growth and leadership. We have that today, even though you are the lowest, by far the lowest of any organized religion today when it comes to sexual harassment. American churches have a unique opening to develop and adopt a single set of policies, principles, practices, and common language on sexual misconduct in Christian institutions that is binding across denominations. A system of cross-denomination review boards could be established to help compliance and accountability. A centralized resource bank could be formed that provides church-wide updates on new legal, financial, psychological and spiritual developments in the field. Guidelines, both moral and legal, could be established on how clergy, churches, and victims should best use civil and criminal actions in pursuit of justice and financial restitution for injury. A national database could be established with information on all applicants for ordination in any member Christian religion. Every diocese, conference, presbytery, and district could have a designated child-protection representative whose job is to ensure that the policies and procedures are understood and implemented and that training is provided.
Any religious institution or system that leaves power unexamined or smothers sexuality with silence—rather than promoting open conversation that can lead to moral and spiritual maturity—becomes implicated in creating an unhealthy and potentially abusive environment. An ecumenical Christian council authentically dedicated to strong moral leadership in the area of clergy sexual misconduct might move the church beyond the extremes of policing our own or abandoning our own.
For Christians, the true scandal is not about priests. It’s about a manipulation of power to abuse the weak. When Jesus said, “Whoever receives the child, receives me,” he was rebuking his followers for putting stumbling blocks in front of the defenseless. Church is supposed to be a place where one can lay one’s defenses down; where one is welcomed, embraced, and blessed. This can only be authentically expressed in a culture that requires absolute respect for each individual’s freedom and self-hood. Until all churches bow humbly under the requirement, the indictments by wounded women and children will stand.
Just what are these Kangaroo journalists trying to accomplish? Think about it. If you get the New York Times day after day, the Los Angeles Times day after day, our own paper day after day…looking at the record, some of these writers are apostates, Catholics or ex-Catholics who have been denied something they wanted from the Church and are on a mission of vengeance.
Why would newspapers carry on this vendetta on one of the most important institutions that we have today in the United States, namely the Catholic Church? Do you know, and maybe some of you don’t, the Catholic Church educates 2.6 million students every day, at cost to your Church of 10 billion dollars, and a savings on the other hand to the American taxpayer of 18 billion dollars. Needless to say that Catholic education at this time stands head and shoulders above every other form of education that we have in this country. And the cost is approximately 30% less. If you look at our own Cleveland school system they can boast of an average graduation rate of 36%. Do you know what it costs you and me as far as the other 64% who didn’t make it? Look at your own records, you graduate 89% of your students, your graduates in turn go on to graduate studies at the rate of 92%, and all at a cost to you. To the rest of the Americans it’s free, but it costs you Catholics at least 30% less to educate students compared to the costs that the public education system pays out for education that cannot compare.
Why? Why would these enemies of the Church try to destroy an institution that has 230 colleges and universities in the United States with an enrollment of 700,000 students?
Why would anyone want to destroy an institution like the Catholic Church which has a non-profit hospital system of 637 hospitals which account for hospital treatment of 1 out of every 5 people, not just Catholics, in the United States today? Why would anyone want to destroy an institution like that? Why would anyone want to destroy an institution that clothes and feeds and houses the indigent, 1 of 5 indigents in the United States, I’ve been to many of your shelters and no one asks them if you are a Catholic, a Protestant or a Jew; come, be fed, here’s a sweater for you and a place to sleep at night at a cost to the Church of 2.3 billion dollars a year? The Catholic Church today has 64 million members in the United States and is the largest non-governmental agency in the country. It has 20,000 churches in this country alone. Every year they raise approximately 10 billion to help support these agencies.
Why after the "respected" publication the New York Times running their daily expose’ on the Church finally come to the conclusion of their particular investigation, which was ongoing for a long time, and guess what — buried in the last paragraph –and guess what, in the last paragraph they came up with a mouse. In their article “Decades of Damage” the Times reported that 1.8% of American priests were found guilty of this crime, whereas your own Cardinal Ratzinger in Rome reported 1.7% - the figure I gave you earlier. Then again they launched an attack on the Church and its celibate priests. However, the New York Times did not mention in their study of American priests that most are happy in the priesthood and find it even better than they had expected, and that most if given the choice would choose to be priests again in the face of all this obnoxious P.R. the church has been receiving. Why wouldn’t the New York Times, the paper of record they call themselves, mention this? You had to read it in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times refused to print it. If you read only the New York Times you would begin to believe that priests are cowards, craven, sexually frustrated, unhealthy criminals that prey on the innocent, what a shame. Sometimes freedom of the press should have some type of responsibility too.
So I say this to you — instead of walking around with a hangdog look, I talk to a lot of Catholics all the time, “how’s everything going?” … “Well, in the face of things I guess okay” … that’s the wrong answer, the wrong answer. Also, I ran into a fellow who said they started a discussion at some social function on pedophilia and he said, “I excused myself and left the room.” I said why did you do that, “Well you know how it is.” I believe that if Catholics had the figures that I enumerated here…you don’t have to be ashamed of anything. Not only are you as good as the rest, but you’re better, in every respect.
The Catholic Church helps millions of people every day of the week, every week of the month, and every month of the year. People who are not Catholics, and I sit on your Catholic Foundation and I can tell you, and what I am telling you is so. Priests have their problems, they have their failings just as you and I in this room do, but they do not deserve to be calumniated as they have been.
In small measure let’s give the media its due. If it had not come out with this story of abusive priests, (but they just as well could have mentioned reverends, pastors and rabbis and whatever,) probably little or nothing would have been done. But what bothers me the most is this has given an excuse to every Catholic hater and Catholic basher to come out loudly for the denigration of your Church. If some CEO’s are crooks it does not follow that every CEO is crooked, and if some priests are sexually ill it does not follow that all are sick. And your Church teaches that you’ve got to take in the sick and a priest who is this way has to be taken in and cannot be thrown out the 21st story of a building. He’s got to be looked upon and given the same type of health that you would give anybody who has a broken leg or cancer or whatever.
The Church today, and when I say the Church keep in mind I am talking about the Catholic Church, is bleeding from self-inflicted wounds. The agony that Catholics have felt and suffered is not necessarily the fault of the Church. You have been hurt by an infinitesimally small number of wayward priests that, I feel, have probably been totally weeded out by now. You see the Catholic Church is much too viable to be put down by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, take your choice, they can’t do it, they’re not going to do it and sooner or later they are going to give up, but you’ve got to make sure that you don’t give up first.
In 1799 a notice was placed in a French newspaper that a citizen Brachi had died in prison. Little did the people realize that this was Pope Pius VI who had occupied the Chair of Saint Peter for 25-years. He had been taken prisoner by Napoleon’s forces and died in prison as an indigent. At that time the thought was that this was the end of the Catholic Church, this was 200 and some odd years ago. And the reason was that there was no Pope to succeed him at that time. But you fooled them then, and we’re going to fool them again.
I’ve been talking more or less about the United States of America as far as the importance of the Church; let’s bring it home to Cuyahoga County and the seven surrounding counties. In education you save the county 420 million dollars per year. Wherever there’s a Church, and most other churches have fled the inner city, there’s a Catholic Church, and wherever there’s a Catholic Church there’s an absence of drug dealers. You talk to any bank that has real estate mortgages in the inner city, and they will tell you that the one thing that keeps up the value in that particular area is your Church. I’ve seen for example on Lorain near the Metro Catholic Schools there at the Church the nuns used to go out in the morning with brooms and sweep away the drug dealers from around the particular area. On Health and Human Services, the homeless, adoption, drugs, adult care and so on you saved the county 170 million dollars a year. At the end of the day the difference that your local Catholic institutions make in the eight counties that comprise this diocese are several billion dollars per year. Why don’t we hear about this? Why, because it’s good news. If some priest was caught with his hand in the collection plate it would be front page news. But the fact that you have thousands of students being education free, as far as the rest of the country is concerned doesn’t make news. Why? Because it is not newsworthy, it’s not dirty.
I’m not here to deny freedom of the press, but I believe that with freedom comes responsibility, and with rights you have an obligation. You cannot have rights that are irresponsible. Unfortunately our society today is protected by all rights and ruled by some of their wickedness. Anybody who expects to reap the benefits of freedom must understand the total fatigue of supporting it.
The most important element of political speech, as Aristotle taught, is the character of the speaker. In this respect, no matter what message a man brings in it shouldn’t it collide with his character.
The other day I was shocked when I opened up America, a Catholic magazine, and my good friend Cardinal Keeler, whose a very dear friend of mine, was being fingerprinted by the Baltimore police — not for a crime but as part of the new law put in place that all members of the Church hierarchy must be fingerprinted.
Amos of the Old Testament accused the people of Samaria in words that seared and phrases that smote. They “cram their palaces,” he said, “with violence and extortion.” They had “sold the upright for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals” — from Gucci, no doubt. But he also said that all this could be reversed, if only the people of Samaria would turn away from their own self absorption and toward those who, however silently, cry out for help. “Then,” promised Amos, “shall your justice flow like water and your compassion like a never-failing stream” (Amos 5:24)
The worst feature of contemporary society is its tendency to leave each of us locked up in himself or herself, connection-less. To lessen this isolation we have developed all kinds of therapies, spiritual, psychological, and physical—from groups that meet and talk endlessly all day long in spas, week spas, month spas, life spas. But none of these things, from primal screams to herbal wrap, seem to be doing the trick, any more than the huge houses and wine parties that the Samaritan did.
What we need to do is open our heart to the plight of others, even some of your priests who have been condemned, they’re human beings and they should be shown the same type of compassion we have shown anybody who is critically ill. We need to open our hearts to the plights of others, like our hearts were a dam, so that indeed our justice and compassion may flow to all. What is essential is that each of us steps forward to hold out our hand to someone. There is no other way to walk with God.
One of the biggest Catholic bashers in the United States wrote — “Only a minority, a tiny minority of priests have abused the bodies of children.” He continues, “I am not advocating this course of action, but as much as I would like to see the Roman Catholic Church ruined. I hate opportunistically retrospective litigation even more.” He now he’s talking about our tort monsters. “Lawyers who grow fat by digging up dirt on long-forgotten wrongs and hounding their aged perpetrators are no friends of mine.” I’m still quoting this man, “All I'm am doing” he said, “is calling attention to an anomaly. By all means, let’s kick a nasty institution when it is down, but there are better ways than litigation.” These words are from a Catholic hater.
I never thought in my life I would ever see these things. Walk with your shoulders high and your head higher. Be a proud member of the most important non-governmental agency today in the United States. Then remember what Jeremiah said “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.” And be proud, speak up for your faith with pride and reverence and learn what your Church does for all other religions. Be proud that you’re a Catholic. Thank you.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Quadrant article May 2010
Carbon and Our Climate
Einar Vikingur
The Earth Does Three Waltzes
What I would like to do is to take you through my own journey from being an accepter to a resister on the role of carbon in our climate. I did not have a “Road to Damascus” moment; it came together gradually, and in a sequence. Some stuff was almost incidental, sometimes from way in the past, but it all turned out to be relevant as I pieced the story together. In other words, I am not a bloke who read Professor Ian Plimer’s Heaven + Earth and converted—no, I did my own work. I am interested in the science and what its conclusions should drive, and that is good policy.
When I became wary of the explanations for climate change (while accepting that something is happening to our climate), I began to wonder about what had occurred as the planet’s climate altered in the past. Why had it gone through these wild cycles of hot and icy and back and forth many times? One factor, which immediately appealed to me because the mechanics were real, calculable, and rather majestic, was what the whole Earth did as it moved and rotated and generally carried on its business of being a molten-core metallic rock flying about the Sun. Further, it seemed to me that the Sun itself had a place in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, and that arm itself was moving around the core of our galaxy. Come to think of it, the whole show was moving through a supposed void, but one actually stuffed with gas clouds, particle streams, dust, and the occasional burst or stream of radiation from supernovas (exploding stars), quasars and pulsars (both intense sources of energy), and various other interfering bits and bodies.
Whilst the picture as a whole is very complicated, what the Earth itself does is quite simple and regular, and it has been worked out with great exactitude. I knew the basics of orbital mechanics, buried somewhere in my education, but I did not know that an engineer from Serbia, called Milankovitch, had spent years around the time of the First World War working out the details of the Earth’s orbital journey. What he described is no fantasy, not an issue anyone questions. He showed that the amount of heat delivered to our planet by the Sun varies in three precise cycles, the interaction of which produces a net result which changes constantly and which is affected by the uneven distribution of land between the Earth’s two hemispheres.
First, the Earth’s orbit moves between being nearly circular to being slightly elliptical—I word it in this odd way because the change is very small. To put it another way: sometimes the circle is squeezed a little about its diameter and it takes about 100,000 years for the orbit to go through an entire cycle of changing shape. As it does so, there is a tiny but constant change in heat delivery to our planet.
Second, the Earth’s axis is tilted a little, and the amount of tilt changes in a cycle of about 40,000 years—and it is this tilt which drives the seasons, because it changes the amount of heat delivered to the two hemispheres as the Earth rotates about itself and revolves around the Sun (here the second cycle, tilt, interacts with the first cycle, orbital shape).
Third, the axis itself wobbles like a spinning toy top—so, not only is the tilt changing its angle, it is also wobbling in a cycle which takes about 20,000 years to complete. So, here is the third cycle acting on the second cycle which is working in the first cycle. Since the three cycles have different lengths, the net result was tricky to compute at first but is now well understood.
The net effect is that heat delivered to the Earth varies in ways which can be calculated. However, this does not mean we know the precise result, and that is because the Earth is not a perfect sphere with a uniform surface. The Earth has land in all sorts of awkward places and shapes and elevations—and it is covered by an atmosphere which is a chicken broth in one place and a pea soup in another (and vice versa tomorrow). Further effects are added from numerous and diverse sources such as sunspots, attenuation of solar radiation by interstellar gas clouds, volcanic eruptions, storage of heat and gases by the oceans and glaciers, various long and short cycles in the Sun’s energy output, cloud cover, reinforcing or damping feedback loops in the atmosphere—and so on. However, we do know the imprecise result: sometimes it gets very cold for very long and we have ice ages. Sometimes it gets warmer, and we have periods between ice ages, called interglacials. Sometimes it gets colder for a little while, and sometimes it gets warmer for a little while. Now, I am an Icelander, and owe my existence to a warm period because my ancestors were able to settle Iceland at the start of such a period eleven centuries or so ago (and many of them died during a cold period five or six centuries later).
The Milankovitch Cycles do not explain everything about our climate, but they do form a very important part of the story. For the layman and the scientist alike, they are a real, explainable, unarguable factor in our climate. For me, in my journey of understanding what lay behind the hyperbole of the excited and the ignorant, they were a milestone of clarity. I did not have to believe in anything other than gravity to accept that they were fundamental truth.
Tectonic Plates, Gobblers of Carbon
I next began to think about the element carbon, and all those terms bandied about such as the “carbon cycle”, “poisonous carbon dioxide”, “carbon sequestration”, and so on. Once again it was the fundamental long-term stuff which might hold the answers, so I asked myself questions such as: What happens to all this stuff pouring out of coal-fired power stations, volcanic vents, rotting trees, Mount Hekla in Iceland, my ridiculously powerful V8 car, and the breathing of six-odd billion people? Does it just bank up and lie in wait? Does it reappear in trees or dissolve in the sea, or what? I did find the answer, and it lies in a surprising place. What was generally described as the carbon cycle was actually just a blippy little sideshow in the bigger picture of how the Earth works. But there is a real carbon cycle, and I’ll describe it.
Let’s start with Mount Hekla, which erupts every now and again and chucks out enormous amounts of lava and hot gases (including carbon dioxide). The lava cools and becomes rocks, largely made from calcium silicon oxide. Over millions of years, this rock gets broken up and turned into pebbles and sand and eventually the calcium in it gets weathered away and dissolved. In fallen raindrops and lakes and seas the calcium combines with carbon dioxide to form limestone deposits, and the shells of crabs, and coral reefs and so on. Over tens of millions of years, everything becomes sludge on the sea floor; and yet that stuff never seems to build up. Mount Hekla erupts because Iceland sits on a joint between two tectonic plates being driven apart by circulating molten rock kept hot by the radioactive decay of naturally-occurring isotopes in the Earth’s interior (also the energy source for geothermal power, incidentally). But the sea floor’s sludge finds itself one day at a different type of tectonic joint, where one plate is driven into the Earth (taking the sludge with all this carbon dioxide locked up in limestone with it) and the other one stays on top. In the molten lava, the limestone combines with silicon again to make the same rocks, and then the Earth releases lava and carbon dioxide out of Hekla (or Vesuvius) to do the circuit again for millions of years.
This is the carbon cycle which regulates the amount of carbon dioxide in circulation, but it works on time-scales not easily grasped by a humanity which popped into existence microseconds ago in the geological way of thinking. It is also a cycle in which the quantities of material on the move dwarf anything we can do, including when natural variations such as eruptions occur. The natural variations are a part of the control loop which regulates the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Control loops are called that because they are systems which can deal with variations, and this one plays a role in regulating temperature over geological time. Variations are a part of how such a process works. The system is driven by tectonic plate movements, the idea of which was ridiculed by most of the scientific community for decades, until eventually it entered the mainstream as an unarguable fact.
The level of carbon dioxide is rising, but it is easy to calculate the number of tonnes required to produce the increase in concentration, and to demonstrate that humans contribute perhaps only as much as a tenth of the increase. There is evidence which indicates some recent rise in average temperatures, except for the past eight years. Humans are unquestionably making a contribution to the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and even a 10 per cent contribution would be a very serious issue if carbon dioxide were connected with this temperature rise.
The connection between carbon dioxide and temperature rise is such a simple story that when I first grasped it, I discarded it. However, I dug a bit deeper and made sure I understood the science.
What Is This Carbon Dioxide Stuff?
In the first two sections I covered two factors influencing climate, neither of which explain the whole picture. I do not for a moment claim to be able to give you the whole picture; the best I can do is to lay out the things which are proven to be truth, and try and draw some conclusions from those things in aggregate. Having described what happens with heat when the Earth moves about its business, and what happens in part with the regulating of that heat when the tectonic plates move about the Earth’s surface, I think we should take a look at what carbon dioxide does in more detail. Since many in the world speak continually about the wretched molecule (although most people know nothing about it), a bit of information might be in order. As governments everywhere rush to implement expensive measures to limit or cap release of the gas, should we not get to know the villain properly?
When sunlight is reradiated off the Earth, some of it is absorbed by the atmosphere. A molecule is hit by a bundle of energy which it can absorb, it wiggles about and bumps into other molecules—and a bunch of excited atoms and molecules is what heat actually is. If the bundle of energy had just passed back out through the atmosphere, no heating would have occurred. This trapping of heat is the greenhouse effect. Gases like oxygen and nitrogen (about 98 per cent of the atmosphere) do not trap heat. Carbon dioxide, methane, water vapour and ozone do—they are examples of greenhouse gases.
In a box of our air that contained 10,000 molecules, fewer than four of them would be carbon dioxide. It is pretty difficult to excite the others, no matter how much energy you can absorb. So, would it make a difference if we doubled or tripled the number of carbon dioxide molecules? The surprising answer is that it would not, and the reason is that carbon dioxide is very selective in the wavelength of energy it absorbs—it works only in a very narrow band. So, at any given moment, most of the tasty light for carbon dioxide is absorbed by a few lucky ones, and the rest of them just float around the place unexcited. If we add more of the stuff, a bit more energy gets absorbed, but mostly we just have more unexcited carbon dioxide doing nothing more than wait around to be absorbed by plants, or get dissolved in water, or combine forces with calcium to make limestone (and then get dragged into the roiling earth by a tectonic plate in a gazillion years).
The bottom line is that not only is carbon dioxide an uncommon gas, it is a pretty poor absorber of energy. Water vapour is another matter: it is ten times more common than our villain, and it absorbs energy across pretty well the entire spectrum. So, there is not only much more of the stuff, it also works much harder as a greenhouse gas. It also forms clouds and rain (and this action releases heat, too), reflects light back out, back in—does all sorts of stuff carbon dioxide could never hope to do. Clouds and their unruly behaviour are one of the main reasons why climatic computer modelling is so difficult to do beyond a few weeks, incidentally. It is also instructive to note that cloud formation is influenced by solar activity in an indirect sense—reduced emission of a wide spectrum of radiation from the Sun permits increased penetration of cosmic rays (mostly particles; it is a historical misnomer) into the atmosphere, increasing cloud formation as water condenses around the particles.
As an aside, the Earth’s magnetic field is one of the sentinels which deflect harmful radiation and particles from reaching us. The magnetic field is influenced by the movement of gigantic quantities of molten metal in the Earth, a movement which also drives the tectonic plates. The isotopes which provide the power were formed in nuclear reactions in the guts of stars which then turned supernova and distributed their material—and our own planet collected some as it coalesced out of dust clouds billions of years ago. Everything is connected, and there is rarely a single explanation for anything.
The paragraphs above can be backed up by numbers and calculations and graphs until the cows come home, none of which could be disputed. All the statements about absorption, rarity and heat release are undisputed facts of nature. What these facts scream at us is that it is impossible for carbon dioxide alone to heat up the atmosphere—this is such an important statement that I am going to reiterate a few things. There are not enough carbon dioxide molecules to do the job. The molecule does not absorb heat well, because it is fussy about wavelengths. There is a lot more water vapour than there is carbon dioxide. Water vapour is many times more effective as a greenhouse gas. Whatever heating is happening cannot be the work of carbon dioxide, except for a small portion. It is physically impossible. Whatever is happening, carbon dioxide cannot be blamed for it. What’s more, carbon dioxide is actually plant food and having more of it promotes plant growth. Greenhouse growers the world over pump into their greenhouses a carbon dioxide concentration several times that of the atmosphere.
I want to make an important point about cause and effect: if the Earth is heating up and carbon dioxide levels are rising, that does not mean one is the cause of the other. All the spectacular reporting about changes to glaciers and coral reefs only shows that warming is taking place. It does not show what is causing the warming, and all the physics evidence demonstrates that the cause has to be something other than carbon dioxide. I do not say that burning fossil fuels in a profligate manner should continue, far from it. I just say that we cannot blame fossil fuels for climate change (I do wish we would plant more trees, though, for a thousand reasons other than temporarily absorbing carbon dioxide).
The Deeds of Carbon Dioxide in the Past
In the first three segments we started with a Serbian engineer and his slide rule, and worked our way up to the physics of how carbon dioxide behaves in the atmosphere. What I would like to do now is return to geological time and what the gas has been getting up to as the climate has cycled through high and low temperatures. Surely this must be important, as carbon dioxide today is the same structure and is bound by the same laws as whatever of the gas was swirling around in the past.
It is possible to reconstruct the temperature and carbon dioxide relationship with startling accuracy for the past half a million years or so, using ice cores drilled out of the glaciers (which therefore have never melted) in Antarctica and Greenland. This work has been done several times, by different people in different places. The data has been analysed several times, in different ways, by different researchers. The conclusion is consistent, and beyond dispute: temperatures rise, and about eight centuries later the level of carbon dioxide rises. The temperature increase precedes the rise in carbon dioxide, and it is therefore not possible for temperature to have been driven up by the gas. As temperatures rise, from whatever cause, the oceans get warmer and this reduces the amount of gas which can be held in solution. The oceans therefore release the gas as a result of more heat—and that is the likeliest explanation as to why carbon dioxide concentration lags behind temperature increases.
As I worked through the science behind carbon and our climate, the ice-cores data was for me a sort of a coup de grace for carbon dioxide being the cause of temperature increases. The data demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the major causal link between the two was the reverse of what was the generally accepted one. Heat causes carbon dioxide levels to rise. Carbon dioxide does not cause heat to rise, other than as a minor contributor. I found this situation utterly astonishing, once I became confident that I understood the facts, because entire governments, large bureaucracies, swathes of the scientific establishment, and practically every commentator on the planet seemed not to have understood the facts.
I looked at things from different directions, I checked my logic, I wondered whether there was something I had missed. However, because I tried to focus on science grounded in proven facts, I always came back to the same thing: carbon dioxide is a minor player, a sideshow in the global warming story. So why were we all being told by so many clever and competent people that we were about to be engulfed by a cataclysm caused by this sideshow? And, incidentally, what was warming us up late last century?
My last part will try and answer those questions. I am not confident about my answers, but I think I am on the right track. The one thing I am certain about is this: carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of global warming, and therefore humanity (whilst there are too many of us) is not to blame. And in any case, should we be blaming or rejoicing? Does it occur to anyone that warmth is good? That we are in an interglacial right now, and should be afraid of cold returning? Haven’t humans thrived during warm periods (Medieval Warming) and suffered terribly during cold spells (the Dark Ages)?
What the World Should Not Do (and What It Might Consider Doing)
Remember the Millennium Bug? In the 1970s some dork (apparently) wrote code using only the last two digits for the year, and the result was supposed to be doomsday when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999. Billions of dollars were spent on upgrading equipment and software, thousands of boffins beavered away for years all over the world leading up to the magic moment—and nothing happened! At that time I was the chief information officer for one of the country’s biggest corporations, and I swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker. I spent millions of the shareholders’ dollars—and nothing happened. Along with everyone else, I had failed to dig until I found the facts. I was a member of the world’s biggest unintended con job and groupthink; just an unthinking member of the herd, and I have been ashamed of it ever since. You reckon groupthink could not happen on carbon dioxide and global warming?
Many have staked a lot on climate change and carbon emissions—they have become vested interests, captured by personal or institutional pride, and a certainty born of habit. But the known facts have changed since the game began, and everyone needs to have the courage to change with them. It will be easier for most than for the thousands of climate scientists who are now earning both a good living and a place in the sun (sorry). Worse still, the politicians and their bureaucrats are thick into this, and many of them would find it extremely difficult to reverse positions even if they understood the facts and wanted to recant. And much worse still, financial institutions the world over are sniffing out the money to be made out of carbon credits, permits trading, you name it, and they’ll think of a fancier name still (something like “leveraged derivatives twice bonded and once removed”?)—and these institutions therefore have every reason to believe in and encourage what is happening. This is what they are designed to do; it is their primary motive, unfettered by either kindness or malice.
Let’s get this straight: some warming has happened over recent decades—even though the measuring is dodgy and disputed, and the last eight years have been on a cooling trend. The population is large, and we are making a real mess of our home—and the solution to over-population lies not in coercion of anyone but in the emancipation and education of women. We have chopped down too many trees (I love trees). We are not investing enough in renewable energy, specifically on how to harness in a distributed way the ultimate source of all energy, the Sun. We are using up resources fast. We should allow fish stocks to recover (I love marine creatures of all kinds), and stop dumping so much rubbish into the oceans and into landfill. We need to work against religious bigotry and the resulting violence, and we need to feed and govern and protect all people properly, on the basis of liberty and compassion. What we should not be doing is wasting huge resources on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, because it would be on a problem which does not exist. The other problems do exist.
So, the world’s climate is changing yet again. We have a choice between homing in on a non-existent carbon problem, and thereby condemning half of the world’s people to continued poverty as they are forced to pay for expensive energy (the rich world’s prosperity is based on cheap fossil fuels), or we can adapt as the world changes its climate of its own accord. As we adapt, the cost and effort of a carbon focus and the economic dislocation it would cause could be redirected towards solving the problems we know to be real.
Incidentally, why has the globe warmed (a little) since about 1850? First, that was the end of the Little Ice Age, so it is hardly surprising a bit of warmth has been returning. We know that the climate has fluctuated in the big sense (ice ages) many times, but it also fluctuates in a smaller sense, in that it has warmed and cooled appreciably often, even during recorded history. What we are seeing now is such a fluctuation, and the cause is a combination of things—a net warming as a result of the Milankovitch Cycle interactions, the Solar System is perhaps coming slowly out of a very wispy interstellar gas or dust cloud which has been attenuating sunlight slightly, the Sun is in a different part of its radiation cycles—and a myriad of other factors quite beyond our ken as yet are just lining up in a particular way for a little while. This sort of thing has happened many times before, and will happen again.
The Likely Future
I have focused on the role of carbon dioxide and have not spent much time on what is likely to happen, but I think it is possible to describe the next few decades. We can all relax, actually, because the planet itself will answer the questions most emphatically by continuing the cooling which has been occurring since 2002. By 2030 we should be at the lowest point of the next sunspot cycle (and it will most probably be an unusually low one) a process that began in 2002. I say “lowest point” in the context of the effects on Earth, as there is a lag of several years as the planet digests the energy delivery and translates it into climate.
The Sun has many interacting cycles of activity (one of them cycles every 1500 years) of which the eleven-year Schwabe radiation intensity cycle is the simplest one, and the one that people focus on. The irradiance variation is thought of as quite small—perhaps only about 0.1 per cent variation, but that is a great deal of energy in absolute terms. However, there is a twist or three, and I love the way they work.
First, the Schwabe Cycle oscillates in length, and can go a year or so either way. If you plot the length over a couple of thousand years (there are various kinds of observational records of sunspots that far back) against intensity of magnetic disturbance, and then do some mathematical transformation of the graph, it emerges that intensity is proportional to length and varies in a 166-year cycle, called the Gleissberg Cycle—there is a weak period followed by an intense period every eighty-three years.
The second twist is that sometimes there is a phase shift in the Gleissberg Cycle, which means that a weak magnetic cycle is followed by another weak one (instead of weak and intense alternating)—but it happens eleven years apart (amazing—I cannot work out whether it is just a coincidence). The middle of the Little Ice Age about three centuries ago saw two weak periods in sequence—reduced irradiance coupled with more cosmic rays, resulting in more cloud cover, with a net cooling. The predictability of phase shifts is based on orbital mechanics, and therefore has a fairly high degree of certainty.
The third twist is that there is a lag of several years (about four to eight) as the Earth works out how to translate energy delivery into climate. This is where it gets complicated, and where computer modelling of climate cannot work beyond a few weeks.
When sunspots are active (and they are gigantic magnetic storms, about 40,000 kilometres across) the Sun’s magnetic field deflects cosmic rays (which are particles) entering the Solar System and reduces the amount which enters the Earth’s atmosphere. Since water condenses around the nuclei, fewer particles mean fewer clouds, reducing reflection of radiation back out to space. The net result is warming, which is amplified as there is also more radiation and magnetic energy available for the planet. The ozone in the upper atmosphere absorbs more ultra-violet radiation, and that energy eventually circulates down. There is also direct energisation of particles in the atmosphere from solar eruptions and storms during strong sunspot activity. This effect is an amplifier: more energy gets transferred to the planet than might be expected from increased irradiance alone.
When sunspots are inactive, the opposite happens—more particles from cosmic rays are available for cloud formation, more reflection occurs, and there is also less radiation, and less transfer of energy from solar magnetic fields into the atmosphere. The net result is cooling. This is a phase we are well into now.
The sunspots are driven by orbital mechanics, those lovely and predictable dances—the four gas giants shift the Solar System’s centre of mass from the centre of the Sun in a regular pattern, one which is well understood. The Sun therefore revolves around the centre of mass as well as rotating (the centre of mass can move as much as two to three solar radii from the Sun’s centre). The Sun has a metallic structure (this comes as a surprise to most people, but any element other than hydrogen for astrophysicists is a metal) and therefore movements of gigantic masses of metal generate sunspots (magnetic storms, remember) via the solar dynamo effect.
These are the reasons why it is possible to predict with a high degree of confidence that we will be in another Little Ice Age (not very cold actually) by 2030. I think it is a most beautiful symmetry, an exquisite demonstration of how a small part of the universe works.
Einar Vikingur has a BSc with first-class honours in organic chemistry, an MSc in guided weapons engineering, and a Bachelor of Modern Languages in Russian. He has worked in the mining industry for many years. He lives in Perth.
Carbon and Our Climate
Einar Vikingur
The Earth Does Three Waltzes
What I would like to do is to take you through my own journey from being an accepter to a resister on the role of carbon in our climate. I did not have a “Road to Damascus” moment; it came together gradually, and in a sequence. Some stuff was almost incidental, sometimes from way in the past, but it all turned out to be relevant as I pieced the story together. In other words, I am not a bloke who read Professor Ian Plimer’s Heaven + Earth and converted—no, I did my own work. I am interested in the science and what its conclusions should drive, and that is good policy.
When I became wary of the explanations for climate change (while accepting that something is happening to our climate), I began to wonder about what had occurred as the planet’s climate altered in the past. Why had it gone through these wild cycles of hot and icy and back and forth many times? One factor, which immediately appealed to me because the mechanics were real, calculable, and rather majestic, was what the whole Earth did as it moved and rotated and generally carried on its business of being a molten-core metallic rock flying about the Sun. Further, it seemed to me that the Sun itself had a place in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, and that arm itself was moving around the core of our galaxy. Come to think of it, the whole show was moving through a supposed void, but one actually stuffed with gas clouds, particle streams, dust, and the occasional burst or stream of radiation from supernovas (exploding stars), quasars and pulsars (both intense sources of energy), and various other interfering bits and bodies.
Whilst the picture as a whole is very complicated, what the Earth itself does is quite simple and regular, and it has been worked out with great exactitude. I knew the basics of orbital mechanics, buried somewhere in my education, but I did not know that an engineer from Serbia, called Milankovitch, had spent years around the time of the First World War working out the details of the Earth’s orbital journey. What he described is no fantasy, not an issue anyone questions. He showed that the amount of heat delivered to our planet by the Sun varies in three precise cycles, the interaction of which produces a net result which changes constantly and which is affected by the uneven distribution of land between the Earth’s two hemispheres.
First, the Earth’s orbit moves between being nearly circular to being slightly elliptical—I word it in this odd way because the change is very small. To put it another way: sometimes the circle is squeezed a little about its diameter and it takes about 100,000 years for the orbit to go through an entire cycle of changing shape. As it does so, there is a tiny but constant change in heat delivery to our planet.
Second, the Earth’s axis is tilted a little, and the amount of tilt changes in a cycle of about 40,000 years—and it is this tilt which drives the seasons, because it changes the amount of heat delivered to the two hemispheres as the Earth rotates about itself and revolves around the Sun (here the second cycle, tilt, interacts with the first cycle, orbital shape).
Third, the axis itself wobbles like a spinning toy top—so, not only is the tilt changing its angle, it is also wobbling in a cycle which takes about 20,000 years to complete. So, here is the third cycle acting on the second cycle which is working in the first cycle. Since the three cycles have different lengths, the net result was tricky to compute at first but is now well understood.
The net effect is that heat delivered to the Earth varies in ways which can be calculated. However, this does not mean we know the precise result, and that is because the Earth is not a perfect sphere with a uniform surface. The Earth has land in all sorts of awkward places and shapes and elevations—and it is covered by an atmosphere which is a chicken broth in one place and a pea soup in another (and vice versa tomorrow). Further effects are added from numerous and diverse sources such as sunspots, attenuation of solar radiation by interstellar gas clouds, volcanic eruptions, storage of heat and gases by the oceans and glaciers, various long and short cycles in the Sun’s energy output, cloud cover, reinforcing or damping feedback loops in the atmosphere—and so on. However, we do know the imprecise result: sometimes it gets very cold for very long and we have ice ages. Sometimes it gets warmer, and we have periods between ice ages, called interglacials. Sometimes it gets colder for a little while, and sometimes it gets warmer for a little while. Now, I am an Icelander, and owe my existence to a warm period because my ancestors were able to settle Iceland at the start of such a period eleven centuries or so ago (and many of them died during a cold period five or six centuries later).
The Milankovitch Cycles do not explain everything about our climate, but they do form a very important part of the story. For the layman and the scientist alike, they are a real, explainable, unarguable factor in our climate. For me, in my journey of understanding what lay behind the hyperbole of the excited and the ignorant, they were a milestone of clarity. I did not have to believe in anything other than gravity to accept that they were fundamental truth.
Tectonic Plates, Gobblers of Carbon
I next began to think about the element carbon, and all those terms bandied about such as the “carbon cycle”, “poisonous carbon dioxide”, “carbon sequestration”, and so on. Once again it was the fundamental long-term stuff which might hold the answers, so I asked myself questions such as: What happens to all this stuff pouring out of coal-fired power stations, volcanic vents, rotting trees, Mount Hekla in Iceland, my ridiculously powerful V8 car, and the breathing of six-odd billion people? Does it just bank up and lie in wait? Does it reappear in trees or dissolve in the sea, or what? I did find the answer, and it lies in a surprising place. What was generally described as the carbon cycle was actually just a blippy little sideshow in the bigger picture of how the Earth works. But there is a real carbon cycle, and I’ll describe it.
Let’s start with Mount Hekla, which erupts every now and again and chucks out enormous amounts of lava and hot gases (including carbon dioxide). The lava cools and becomes rocks, largely made from calcium silicon oxide. Over millions of years, this rock gets broken up and turned into pebbles and sand and eventually the calcium in it gets weathered away and dissolved. In fallen raindrops and lakes and seas the calcium combines with carbon dioxide to form limestone deposits, and the shells of crabs, and coral reefs and so on. Over tens of millions of years, everything becomes sludge on the sea floor; and yet that stuff never seems to build up. Mount Hekla erupts because Iceland sits on a joint between two tectonic plates being driven apart by circulating molten rock kept hot by the radioactive decay of naturally-occurring isotopes in the Earth’s interior (also the energy source for geothermal power, incidentally). But the sea floor’s sludge finds itself one day at a different type of tectonic joint, where one plate is driven into the Earth (taking the sludge with all this carbon dioxide locked up in limestone with it) and the other one stays on top. In the molten lava, the limestone combines with silicon again to make the same rocks, and then the Earth releases lava and carbon dioxide out of Hekla (or Vesuvius) to do the circuit again for millions of years.
This is the carbon cycle which regulates the amount of carbon dioxide in circulation, but it works on time-scales not easily grasped by a humanity which popped into existence microseconds ago in the geological way of thinking. It is also a cycle in which the quantities of material on the move dwarf anything we can do, including when natural variations such as eruptions occur. The natural variations are a part of the control loop which regulates the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Control loops are called that because they are systems which can deal with variations, and this one plays a role in regulating temperature over geological time. Variations are a part of how such a process works. The system is driven by tectonic plate movements, the idea of which was ridiculed by most of the scientific community for decades, until eventually it entered the mainstream as an unarguable fact.
The level of carbon dioxide is rising, but it is easy to calculate the number of tonnes required to produce the increase in concentration, and to demonstrate that humans contribute perhaps only as much as a tenth of the increase. There is evidence which indicates some recent rise in average temperatures, except for the past eight years. Humans are unquestionably making a contribution to the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and even a 10 per cent contribution would be a very serious issue if carbon dioxide were connected with this temperature rise.
The connection between carbon dioxide and temperature rise is such a simple story that when I first grasped it, I discarded it. However, I dug a bit deeper and made sure I understood the science.
What Is This Carbon Dioxide Stuff?
In the first two sections I covered two factors influencing climate, neither of which explain the whole picture. I do not for a moment claim to be able to give you the whole picture; the best I can do is to lay out the things which are proven to be truth, and try and draw some conclusions from those things in aggregate. Having described what happens with heat when the Earth moves about its business, and what happens in part with the regulating of that heat when the tectonic plates move about the Earth’s surface, I think we should take a look at what carbon dioxide does in more detail. Since many in the world speak continually about the wretched molecule (although most people know nothing about it), a bit of information might be in order. As governments everywhere rush to implement expensive measures to limit or cap release of the gas, should we not get to know the villain properly?
When sunlight is reradiated off the Earth, some of it is absorbed by the atmosphere. A molecule is hit by a bundle of energy which it can absorb, it wiggles about and bumps into other molecules—and a bunch of excited atoms and molecules is what heat actually is. If the bundle of energy had just passed back out through the atmosphere, no heating would have occurred. This trapping of heat is the greenhouse effect. Gases like oxygen and nitrogen (about 98 per cent of the atmosphere) do not trap heat. Carbon dioxide, methane, water vapour and ozone do—they are examples of greenhouse gases.
In a box of our air that contained 10,000 molecules, fewer than four of them would be carbon dioxide. It is pretty difficult to excite the others, no matter how much energy you can absorb. So, would it make a difference if we doubled or tripled the number of carbon dioxide molecules? The surprising answer is that it would not, and the reason is that carbon dioxide is very selective in the wavelength of energy it absorbs—it works only in a very narrow band. So, at any given moment, most of the tasty light for carbon dioxide is absorbed by a few lucky ones, and the rest of them just float around the place unexcited. If we add more of the stuff, a bit more energy gets absorbed, but mostly we just have more unexcited carbon dioxide doing nothing more than wait around to be absorbed by plants, or get dissolved in water, or combine forces with calcium to make limestone (and then get dragged into the roiling earth by a tectonic plate in a gazillion years).
The bottom line is that not only is carbon dioxide an uncommon gas, it is a pretty poor absorber of energy. Water vapour is another matter: it is ten times more common than our villain, and it absorbs energy across pretty well the entire spectrum. So, there is not only much more of the stuff, it also works much harder as a greenhouse gas. It also forms clouds and rain (and this action releases heat, too), reflects light back out, back in—does all sorts of stuff carbon dioxide could never hope to do. Clouds and their unruly behaviour are one of the main reasons why climatic computer modelling is so difficult to do beyond a few weeks, incidentally. It is also instructive to note that cloud formation is influenced by solar activity in an indirect sense—reduced emission of a wide spectrum of radiation from the Sun permits increased penetration of cosmic rays (mostly particles; it is a historical misnomer) into the atmosphere, increasing cloud formation as water condenses around the particles.
As an aside, the Earth’s magnetic field is one of the sentinels which deflect harmful radiation and particles from reaching us. The magnetic field is influenced by the movement of gigantic quantities of molten metal in the Earth, a movement which also drives the tectonic plates. The isotopes which provide the power were formed in nuclear reactions in the guts of stars which then turned supernova and distributed their material—and our own planet collected some as it coalesced out of dust clouds billions of years ago. Everything is connected, and there is rarely a single explanation for anything.
The paragraphs above can be backed up by numbers and calculations and graphs until the cows come home, none of which could be disputed. All the statements about absorption, rarity and heat release are undisputed facts of nature. What these facts scream at us is that it is impossible for carbon dioxide alone to heat up the atmosphere—this is such an important statement that I am going to reiterate a few things. There are not enough carbon dioxide molecules to do the job. The molecule does not absorb heat well, because it is fussy about wavelengths. There is a lot more water vapour than there is carbon dioxide. Water vapour is many times more effective as a greenhouse gas. Whatever heating is happening cannot be the work of carbon dioxide, except for a small portion. It is physically impossible. Whatever is happening, carbon dioxide cannot be blamed for it. What’s more, carbon dioxide is actually plant food and having more of it promotes plant growth. Greenhouse growers the world over pump into their greenhouses a carbon dioxide concentration several times that of the atmosphere.
I want to make an important point about cause and effect: if the Earth is heating up and carbon dioxide levels are rising, that does not mean one is the cause of the other. All the spectacular reporting about changes to glaciers and coral reefs only shows that warming is taking place. It does not show what is causing the warming, and all the physics evidence demonstrates that the cause has to be something other than carbon dioxide. I do not say that burning fossil fuels in a profligate manner should continue, far from it. I just say that we cannot blame fossil fuels for climate change (I do wish we would plant more trees, though, for a thousand reasons other than temporarily absorbing carbon dioxide).
The Deeds of Carbon Dioxide in the Past
In the first three segments we started with a Serbian engineer and his slide rule, and worked our way up to the physics of how carbon dioxide behaves in the atmosphere. What I would like to do now is return to geological time and what the gas has been getting up to as the climate has cycled through high and low temperatures. Surely this must be important, as carbon dioxide today is the same structure and is bound by the same laws as whatever of the gas was swirling around in the past.
It is possible to reconstruct the temperature and carbon dioxide relationship with startling accuracy for the past half a million years or so, using ice cores drilled out of the glaciers (which therefore have never melted) in Antarctica and Greenland. This work has been done several times, by different people in different places. The data has been analysed several times, in different ways, by different researchers. The conclusion is consistent, and beyond dispute: temperatures rise, and about eight centuries later the level of carbon dioxide rises. The temperature increase precedes the rise in carbon dioxide, and it is therefore not possible for temperature to have been driven up by the gas. As temperatures rise, from whatever cause, the oceans get warmer and this reduces the amount of gas which can be held in solution. The oceans therefore release the gas as a result of more heat—and that is the likeliest explanation as to why carbon dioxide concentration lags behind temperature increases.
As I worked through the science behind carbon and our climate, the ice-cores data was for me a sort of a coup de grace for carbon dioxide being the cause of temperature increases. The data demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the major causal link between the two was the reverse of what was the generally accepted one. Heat causes carbon dioxide levels to rise. Carbon dioxide does not cause heat to rise, other than as a minor contributor. I found this situation utterly astonishing, once I became confident that I understood the facts, because entire governments, large bureaucracies, swathes of the scientific establishment, and practically every commentator on the planet seemed not to have understood the facts.
I looked at things from different directions, I checked my logic, I wondered whether there was something I had missed. However, because I tried to focus on science grounded in proven facts, I always came back to the same thing: carbon dioxide is a minor player, a sideshow in the global warming story. So why were we all being told by so many clever and competent people that we were about to be engulfed by a cataclysm caused by this sideshow? And, incidentally, what was warming us up late last century?
My last part will try and answer those questions. I am not confident about my answers, but I think I am on the right track. The one thing I am certain about is this: carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of global warming, and therefore humanity (whilst there are too many of us) is not to blame. And in any case, should we be blaming or rejoicing? Does it occur to anyone that warmth is good? That we are in an interglacial right now, and should be afraid of cold returning? Haven’t humans thrived during warm periods (Medieval Warming) and suffered terribly during cold spells (the Dark Ages)?
What the World Should Not Do (and What It Might Consider Doing)
Remember the Millennium Bug? In the 1970s some dork (apparently) wrote code using only the last two digits for the year, and the result was supposed to be doomsday when the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999. Billions of dollars were spent on upgrading equipment and software, thousands of boffins beavered away for years all over the world leading up to the magic moment—and nothing happened! At that time I was the chief information officer for one of the country’s biggest corporations, and I swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker. I spent millions of the shareholders’ dollars—and nothing happened. Along with everyone else, I had failed to dig until I found the facts. I was a member of the world’s biggest unintended con job and groupthink; just an unthinking member of the herd, and I have been ashamed of it ever since. You reckon groupthink could not happen on carbon dioxide and global warming?
Many have staked a lot on climate change and carbon emissions—they have become vested interests, captured by personal or institutional pride, and a certainty born of habit. But the known facts have changed since the game began, and everyone needs to have the courage to change with them. It will be easier for most than for the thousands of climate scientists who are now earning both a good living and a place in the sun (sorry). Worse still, the politicians and their bureaucrats are thick into this, and many of them would find it extremely difficult to reverse positions even if they understood the facts and wanted to recant. And much worse still, financial institutions the world over are sniffing out the money to be made out of carbon credits, permits trading, you name it, and they’ll think of a fancier name still (something like “leveraged derivatives twice bonded and once removed”?)—and these institutions therefore have every reason to believe in and encourage what is happening. This is what they are designed to do; it is their primary motive, unfettered by either kindness or malice.
Let’s get this straight: some warming has happened over recent decades—even though the measuring is dodgy and disputed, and the last eight years have been on a cooling trend. The population is large, and we are making a real mess of our home—and the solution to over-population lies not in coercion of anyone but in the emancipation and education of women. We have chopped down too many trees (I love trees). We are not investing enough in renewable energy, specifically on how to harness in a distributed way the ultimate source of all energy, the Sun. We are using up resources fast. We should allow fish stocks to recover (I love marine creatures of all kinds), and stop dumping so much rubbish into the oceans and into landfill. We need to work against religious bigotry and the resulting violence, and we need to feed and govern and protect all people properly, on the basis of liberty and compassion. What we should not be doing is wasting huge resources on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, because it would be on a problem which does not exist. The other problems do exist.
So, the world’s climate is changing yet again. We have a choice between homing in on a non-existent carbon problem, and thereby condemning half of the world’s people to continued poverty as they are forced to pay for expensive energy (the rich world’s prosperity is based on cheap fossil fuels), or we can adapt as the world changes its climate of its own accord. As we adapt, the cost and effort of a carbon focus and the economic dislocation it would cause could be redirected towards solving the problems we know to be real.
Incidentally, why has the globe warmed (a little) since about 1850? First, that was the end of the Little Ice Age, so it is hardly surprising a bit of warmth has been returning. We know that the climate has fluctuated in the big sense (ice ages) many times, but it also fluctuates in a smaller sense, in that it has warmed and cooled appreciably often, even during recorded history. What we are seeing now is such a fluctuation, and the cause is a combination of things—a net warming as a result of the Milankovitch Cycle interactions, the Solar System is perhaps coming slowly out of a very wispy interstellar gas or dust cloud which has been attenuating sunlight slightly, the Sun is in a different part of its radiation cycles—and a myriad of other factors quite beyond our ken as yet are just lining up in a particular way for a little while. This sort of thing has happened many times before, and will happen again.
The Likely Future
I have focused on the role of carbon dioxide and have not spent much time on what is likely to happen, but I think it is possible to describe the next few decades. We can all relax, actually, because the planet itself will answer the questions most emphatically by continuing the cooling which has been occurring since 2002. By 2030 we should be at the lowest point of the next sunspot cycle (and it will most probably be an unusually low one) a process that began in 2002. I say “lowest point” in the context of the effects on Earth, as there is a lag of several years as the planet digests the energy delivery and translates it into climate.
The Sun has many interacting cycles of activity (one of them cycles every 1500 years) of which the eleven-year Schwabe radiation intensity cycle is the simplest one, and the one that people focus on. The irradiance variation is thought of as quite small—perhaps only about 0.1 per cent variation, but that is a great deal of energy in absolute terms. However, there is a twist or three, and I love the way they work.
First, the Schwabe Cycle oscillates in length, and can go a year or so either way. If you plot the length over a couple of thousand years (there are various kinds of observational records of sunspots that far back) against intensity of magnetic disturbance, and then do some mathematical transformation of the graph, it emerges that intensity is proportional to length and varies in a 166-year cycle, called the Gleissberg Cycle—there is a weak period followed by an intense period every eighty-three years.
The second twist is that sometimes there is a phase shift in the Gleissberg Cycle, which means that a weak magnetic cycle is followed by another weak one (instead of weak and intense alternating)—but it happens eleven years apart (amazing—I cannot work out whether it is just a coincidence). The middle of the Little Ice Age about three centuries ago saw two weak periods in sequence—reduced irradiance coupled with more cosmic rays, resulting in more cloud cover, with a net cooling. The predictability of phase shifts is based on orbital mechanics, and therefore has a fairly high degree of certainty.
The third twist is that there is a lag of several years (about four to eight) as the Earth works out how to translate energy delivery into climate. This is where it gets complicated, and where computer modelling of climate cannot work beyond a few weeks.
When sunspots are active (and they are gigantic magnetic storms, about 40,000 kilometres across) the Sun’s magnetic field deflects cosmic rays (which are particles) entering the Solar System and reduces the amount which enters the Earth’s atmosphere. Since water condenses around the nuclei, fewer particles mean fewer clouds, reducing reflection of radiation back out to space. The net result is warming, which is amplified as there is also more radiation and magnetic energy available for the planet. The ozone in the upper atmosphere absorbs more ultra-violet radiation, and that energy eventually circulates down. There is also direct energisation of particles in the atmosphere from solar eruptions and storms during strong sunspot activity. This effect is an amplifier: more energy gets transferred to the planet than might be expected from increased irradiance alone.
When sunspots are inactive, the opposite happens—more particles from cosmic rays are available for cloud formation, more reflection occurs, and there is also less radiation, and less transfer of energy from solar magnetic fields into the atmosphere. The net result is cooling. This is a phase we are well into now.
The sunspots are driven by orbital mechanics, those lovely and predictable dances—the four gas giants shift the Solar System’s centre of mass from the centre of the Sun in a regular pattern, one which is well understood. The Sun therefore revolves around the centre of mass as well as rotating (the centre of mass can move as much as two to three solar radii from the Sun’s centre). The Sun has a metallic structure (this comes as a surprise to most people, but any element other than hydrogen for astrophysicists is a metal) and therefore movements of gigantic masses of metal generate sunspots (magnetic storms, remember) via the solar dynamo effect.
These are the reasons why it is possible to predict with a high degree of confidence that we will be in another Little Ice Age (not very cold actually) by 2030. I think it is a most beautiful symmetry, an exquisite demonstration of how a small part of the universe works.
Einar Vikingur has a BSc with first-class honours in organic chemistry, an MSc in guided weapons engineering, and a Bachelor of Modern Languages in Russian. He has worked in the mining industry for many years. He lives in Perth.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)