CBC’s host, Andrew Nichols, recently asked his listeners (August 19), “What are you prepared to do about climate change?”
The program ignored the fact that climate is always changing and wrongly suggested that we could stabilize the planet’s climate by reducing our carbon dioxide (“CO2”) emissions. The CBC is not alone in this propaganda war against CO2, an essential plant food.
The climate alarmists continue to cite weather events, including melting ice, as evidence of human-induced climate change, even though such events are well within natural variability.
They ignore the inconvenient fact that the anthropogenic (human-induced) global warming (“AGW”) hypothesis would require us to rewrite the laws of physics and chemistry.
However, please be assured that a knowledge of science is not required to assess the validity of the AGW alarmist message. All that is necessary is the application of common sense to the following facts:
1. Ancient atmospheres contained much larger quantities of CO2; and
2. The carbon content of the planet’s fossil-fuel deposits (coal, oil, and gas) is relatively small compared to the missing CO2.
The missing CO2 was used by natural processes to form carbonate rocks such as limestone and coral. This serious depletion of the life-sustaining carbon inventory has given us a CO2-starved atmosphere. As a result, greenhouse operators must generate CO2 to achieve acceptable yields.
Unfortunately, the carbon in the planet’s fossil-fuel deposits is not sufficient to restore the fertile (CO2-rich) ancient atmospheres.
For example, the planet’s oil and gas reserves would have to be 120 times larger to create an atmosphere with the CO2 content of a dinosaur-era atmosphere.
Therefore, it is nonsensical to believe that the return of a very small fraction of the sequestered carbon to its origins will cause a climate catastrophe. A historical perspective clearly demonstrates that the debate over CO2’s ability to drive our climate is irrelevant simply because the quantity of carbon in the planet’s fossil-fuel deposits is immaterial.
In conclusion, the answer to Andrew Nichol’s question is to do what our ancestors have always done; adapt or move to warmer climes.
Yes, warmer climes since global cooling has always been, and will always be, the greatest climate-change threat to civilizations.
Thorpe Watson
Warfield