Global Warming Myth: Lynching of Carbon Dioxide the Innocent Source of Life - 2

I will present some of the data that contradicts this Gore - IPCC hypothesis.

Also, several years ago, by pure chance, I met Alexander Cockburn, a columnist for the Nation magazine on a Nation cruise, and sensed that he too was a global warming skeptic. I sent him copies of my paper, my several letters to the editor, and other
correspondence. Last year he wrote a series of columns based in part on my work.

Politically, Cockburn is well to the left of me, and he has received lots of vituperative criticism from environmentalists and others for his articles. I myself have been
accused of being a tool of the coal barons, which would come as a great surprise to them, since I spent most of my career advocating for more stringent safety regulations in their mines. So let’s look at some more data, as shown here –

Here is the Vostok ice core data for the last 420,000 years. Gore showed this curve in his movie and in his book, An Inconvenient Truth. The red line shows the atmospheric CO2, and the blue line is the temperature relative to recent values.

The data show a remarkably good correlation in the long term variations in temperature and CO2. There are four Ice Ages shown with average temperatures some 6 to 8 C below current values. Those ice ages are characterized by CO2 concentrations as low as 170 - 190 ppm.

Five Interglacial Warming periods are shown with temperatures some 2 to 4 C above current values. They are characterized by CO2 concentrations as high as 270 to 300 ppm.

The last warming period shown is the current one that started after the last ice age ended some 20,000 years ago. Gore uses this data to argue that this proves that high CO2 causes global warming, and that the current levels at 385 ppm are higher than any over the past 420,000 years. And that’s all you read about in newspaper headlines.

Is that an objective evaluation of this data? Let’s look at what Gore failed to mention. First, this correlation has been going on for about half a million years, long before any significant human production of CO2 which began only two hundred years ago. Two hundred years is a bare pencil width on this time scale. Thus, it can be argued that the current overall increase in both CO2 and temperature are merely the continuation of a natural process that has nothing whatever to do with human activity.

What he also fails to mention is data from the Eocene period some 20 to 30 million years before humans even appeared on the earth. In the Eocene, high latitudes were ice free, some 10 C warmer than they are today, and CO2 concentrations were over 1,500 ppm, some 400 % higher than they are today.

But Gore’s most egregious error is his contention that these high CO2 values actually caused the temperature rises. What he knows but fails to mention is that these same data show that the changes in temperature always precede the changes in CO2 by about a thousand years.

The temperature increases or decreases come first, and it is after that that the CO2 follows. Any objective scientist looking at that result would conclude that it is the warming that is causing the CO2 increase, not the other way around as Gore claims.

Gore also neglects to ask the most logical question: where did all that CO2 come from during those warming periods when the human production of CO2 was essentially zero? The answer is that it came from the same place that the current increase is coming from: from the oceans. The amount of CO2 dissolved in the Earth’s oceans
is at least 50 to 100 times greater than the amount in the atmosphere. As oceans warm for whatever reason, some of their dissolve CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere, just as your soda pop goes flat and loses its dissolved CO2 as it warms to room
temperature. As oceans cool, CO2 from the atmosphere dissolves back into the oceans, just as soda pop is manufactured by injecting CO2 into cold water.

That explains not only the CO2 variations in this data for the 420 thousand years before any human production of CO2, but also the much larger CO2 increases that occurred some 20 - 30 million years before humans even appeared on the earth. So Gore and the IPCC have it backwards: it is the warming of the earth that is causing the increase in CO2, not the other way around as they claim. Let us look at some more data on the question of whether the current modest increase in the average temperature of the Earth is caused by the human production of CO2. The data for the recent decades is shown here:

This is the IPCC data for temperature changes shown in red with the scale on the right. The orange line shows the overall temperature trends. It is compared with the human production of CO2 from fossil fuels, shown in purple with the scale on the left. The
overall increase in both quantities over the last century or so does not prove a causal relationship.

After all, lots of things have increased over the same period: the average height of buildings, the population of San Diego, the production of corn, the cost of living, and none of those is causally related to atmospheric temperature. The devil is in the details, for if we look at the period from 1940 to 1970, the average temperature of the earth dropped some 0.25 C at a time when the human production of fossil fuels tripled. I remember that period of the 1960’s when we were warned that another ice-age was coming. Those warnings came from some of the same people who are now pushing the global warming scare. The rate of increase of temperature from 1910 to 1940 was about the same as from 1970 to 2000, yet the fossil production then was five times smaller than it is today.

One of the more dramatic contradictions to the Gore-IPCC hypothesis is one that I came up with myself, and which appealed to Cockburn and to an Australian group of fellow skeptics. Let’s assume for the moment that Gore-IPCC are right; namely that the human production is dangerous and that we must reduce human production of CO2. So let’s do it! Guess what? We’ve been there and done that, and we didn’t need the Kyoto protocol to do it. We reduced the world wide production of fossil carbon dioxide by a whopping 30% starting one year before I was born. Here’s the data:

This is what actually happened during the years of the Great Depression. In 1929, production was at 1.17 Gigatons of carbon burned per year. Then the stock markets crashed, the depression hit, and human generation fell to 0.88 Gigatons per year.

What did the atmospheric CO2 and temperature data show during those three years? As you can see from the lower curves, they didn’t skip a beat in their relentless rise at their normal rate. So a 30% decline in fossil carbon dioxide emission has absolutely no effect on temperature or atmospheric CO2. Why? Again because the increase in CO2 is coming from somewhere else: namely, the oceans, and the temperature is unrelated to human activity.

Lynching of Carbon Dioxide the Innocent Source of Life - 2 -3