Global warming may be real, but I don’t believe it’s man-made – and this article really isn’t about Al Gore.
It’s about the doubt I’ve always had about so-called man-made global warming. I admit that I didn’t particularly like Al Gore as a vice-president, but I felt that he was relatively harmless during his time in office. I actually think he’s caused a lot more harm in his post political years with his scientifically unsubstantiated cries that “the sky is falling.”
Gore, along with a media that is ever ready to jump on the wrong bandwagon, harangued the deniers, a growing cadre of scientists who have been expressing their doubts about the science of “human caused global warming.”
In many countries throughout the world, global warming skeptics are outnumbering believers by as many as ten to one. In the United States, Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the UN’s 2007 climate summary on global warming. That’s thirteen times the number of scientists who authored the summary. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist, calls man-made global warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.”
For me, as a lay observer, the mass balance of it all has just never made sense. The associated sciences, chemistry, math – and my own common sense - makes it impossible for me to comprehend the premise that mankind and our machines are having any major impact on the this massive planet’s climate.
One major factor: The Ice Ages
It’s generally conceded that the earth has had four major ice ages dating back almost 3 billion years. While an ice sheet on Antarctica began to grow about 20 million years ago, the current (yes, current) ice age started over 2 million years ago. 
Since that time there have been cycles of glaciation with ice sheets advancing and retreating on 40,000 and 100,000 year time cycles.
There are glacials (when ice sheets advance) and interglacials (when the ice sheets retreat). The last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago. The earth is currently in an interglacial period that has lasted almost 11,000 years; all that remain are the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets. While it is generally conceded that interglacials last about 12,000 years, there is also an argument that this interglacial period may mirror one that lasted 28,000 years.
Forty years ago in Alaska, the face of Portage Glacier, located just south of Anchorage, was right next to the parking lot at the visitor center. If you go there now you won’t be able to see it from the visitor center and you’ll have to take a boat to get close to it.
Do you begin to get a sense of the immensity of what happens to the earth? Given this information, does it surprise you that the polar ice cap is retreating? It’s been retreating for a very long time. Do you think that you or anybody else could have done anything to either start or stop this process?
Another arguable cause: Sunspots
Al Gore would have you believe that we have global warming that is causing sunspots to disappear. That is akin to saying a mosquito makes an elephant step out of the way – and may explain why Al thought he should be president. For a while, I subscribed to the idea that sunspots were a major culprit in global warming. It is more correct to say the sun drives the earth’s climate. In other words, the activity of the sun can cause global warming or global cooling. There is heated debate on both sides of the argument, but there is no question that the sun impacts our climate.
A study points to the sun’s impact: Solar Energy
The amount of solar energy that reaches earth can vary due to changes in the sun’s output. One study by Rhodes Fairbridge of Columbia University with help from NASA found that the sun embarks on a new cycle of orbits about every 179 years. We are currently in a cool period that began in 1996, and if the pattern holds, the effects will be felt beginning in 2010 – and some predict will begin three decades of severe cold. Last year, in Anchorage we had the third coldest, wettest summer since readings have been recorded. How many of you around the “Lower 48″ had the winter from hell in 2008-2009?
The most misunderstood factor of all: The Greenhouse Effect
“The Greenhouse Effect” is the rise in temperature that the earth experiences because gases in the atmosphere trap energy from the sun. Without these gases, heat would escape back into space. Scientists disagree about how much the absence of these gases would impact earth’s temperature, but they all agree earth would be much colder- from 30°F to 60°F colder. In either case – life as we know it would be over.
Not the major culprit: Carbon Dioxide
Water vapor is earth’s most significant greenhouse gas. It accounts for about 95% of earth’s greenhouse effect, and it is 99.999% of natural origin. Other greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and other miscellaneous gases are also mostly of natural origin. Human activities contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. In reality these emissions are dwarfed when compared to emissions from natural sources we can’t do anything about. According to many scientists even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small - and probably undetectable – effect on the global climate.
Skip from the concept of natural global warming to the concept of man-made global warming. One reason that man-made global warming has never made sense to me is because the earth’s surface is 71.11% water. That leaves 28.89% of the earth’s surface as land, with huge areas that aren’t populated or are un-livable.
The Human Footprint Map was completed by a collaboration of The Wildlife Conservation Society, Columbia University, and NASA a few years ago. The purpose of the map was to identify human impact around the earth. I think that what the map does best is to show massive areas on this planet where there is almost no human impact. These are represented by unpopulated areas of Canada, Alaska, Antarctica, Greenland, northern South America, north Africa, Siberia, Australia, and other smaller areas.
The areas mentioned above all have a “human impact factor” of 0-1 on the map’s scale of 100 – meaning that there is little or no impact. On the other hand, huge areas where the human impact is actually much greater are regions that are not industrialized. All of this makes it almost impossible to measure the true impact of humans and their activities on earth.
Considering the information that I’ve presented above regarding ice ages, sunspots, the effects of the sun’s heat, and the natural greenhouse effect - I believe, as many scientists do, that the human factor in global warming is relatively miniscule.
Environmental Responsibility
Don’t take all of this as a step away from environmental responsibility. Cleaning up emissions, regulating de-forestation, and finding alternatives to the use of fossil fuels are all common sense measures that need to be accomplished. Even if humans are having a tiny impact on earth’s climate, it is still too much. Let’s approach it that way, and not run around like Al Gore, blindly claiming the sky is falling.
Some efforts, like the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill, accomplish some things that are good and needed, while going overboard on others. The cost of the bill over the next fifteen years will be $190 billion, and the oversight requirements will be daunting and expensive. In a fashion that is all too familiar in the Obama administration, there are elements in the bill that are very socialistic: fifteen percent of the revenue from the selling of pollution permits sold by the government will be used to offset increased energy costs for low and moderate income households and the “cash for clunkers” program. Workers displaced due to new emission regulations will be entitled to 156 weeks of income supplements, a health-care supplement, a job search supplement, and a moving supplement. That’s for three whole years – sign me up!
We have a home in Arizona. A few million years ago Arizona was completely covered in ice. Oh, boy! Wouldn’t Al Gore and his fellow criers have had quite a time with that one when that ice started to melt.
PDF 
…the rest of the story. Climate is changing and always will. The climate celebrities, however, are linking climate and the economy. Yes, there has been warming to end the Pleistocene. Climate is a multiple input, multiple loop, multiple output, complex system. The facts and the hypotheses, however, do not support CO2 as a serious ‘pollutant’. In fact, it is plant fertilizer and seriously important to all life on the planet. It is the red herring used to unwind our economy. That issue makes the science relevant.
Sulphate from volcanoes can have a catastrophic effect, but water vapour is far more important. Water vapour (0.4% overall by volume in air, but 1 – 4 % near the surface) is the most effective green house blanket followed by methane (0.0001745%). The third ranking gas is CO2 (0.0383%), and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the atmosphere trails warming which is clear natural evidence for its well-studied inverse solubility in water: CO2 dissolves rapidly in cold water and bubbles rapidly out of warm water. The equilibrium in seawater is very high; making seawater a great ‘sink’; CO2 is 34 times more soluble in water than air is soluble in water.
CO2 has been rising and Earth and her oceans have been warming. However, the correlation trails. Correlation, moreover, is not causation. The causation is under experimental review, however, and while the radiation from the sun varies only in the fourth decimal place, the magnetism is awesome.
“Using a box of air in a Copenhagen lab, physicists traced the growth of clusters of molecules of the kind that build cloud condensation nuclei. These are specks of sulphuric acid on which cloud droplets form. High-energy particles driven through the laboratory ceiling by exploded stars far away in the Galaxy – the cosmic rays – liberate electrons in the air, which help the molecular clusters to form much faster than climate scientists have modeled in the atmosphere. That may explain the link between cosmic rays, cloudiness and climate change.”
As I understand it, the hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center goes as follows:
Quiet sun allows the geomagnetic shield to drop. Incoming galactic cosmic ray flux creates more low-level clouds, more snow, and more albedo effect as more is heat reflected resulting in a colder climate.
Active sun has an enhanced magnetic field which induces Earth’s geomagnetic shield response. Earth has fewer low-level clouds, less rain, snow and ice, and less albedo (less heat reflected) producing a warmer climate.
That is how the bulk of climate change works, coupled with (modulated by) sunspot peak frequency there are cycles of global warming and cooling like waves in the ocean. When the waves are closely spaced, the planets warm; when the waves are spaced farther apart, the planets cool.
The change on cloud cover is only a small percentage, and the ultimate cause of the solar magnetic cycle may be cyclicity in the Sun-Jupiter centre of gravity. We await more on that.
Although the post 60s warming period appears to be over, it has allowed the principal green house gas, water vapour, to kick in with more humidity, clouds, rain and snow depending on where you live to provide the negative feedback that scientists use to explain the existence of complex life on Earth for 550 million years. Ancient sedimentary rocks and paleontological evidence indicate the planet has had abundant liquid water over the entire span. The planet heats and cools naturally and our gasses are the thermostat.
Check the web site of the Danish National Space Center.
FIRST CAUSE
“If we regard the fulfilment of our purpose as contingent upon any circumstances, past, present or future, we are not making use of first cause, we have descended to the level of secondary causation, which is the region of doubts, fears and limitations, all of which we are impressing upon the universal subjective mind, with the inevitable result that it will build up corresponding external conditions.”
Thomas Troward,
Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science 1904
I am quoting Troward because the current political climate of junk science zeitgeist is madness, or at least crazy making. History tells us that prosperity has always advanced as inflation permitted. A steady increase in the money supply leads to higher prices and wages to measure them, and more people able to participate. Adjusted for inflation, copper, iron, oil, and gas, e.g., are not much more expensive than they were in the early 20th century, and we have more supply available and more people have electricity and transportation. There are no shortages of resources; only the cautionary principle keeps resources from being elevated to economic reserves. The bleak Dickensian world has gotten a great deal smaller as the ‘American Dream’ expanded to Asia. The environmental impact also, adjusted for inflation, is less and society has generally progressed, as is reflected in human lifespan in the west.
A common web of fear links misguided environmentalism, peak oil and AGW. Environmental lobby groups (ELGs) since their inception have had a stronger inflationary effect than historical supply and demand pull and push. Witness the oil sands, for example, uneconomic in the early going but reaching ore grade by gradual steps and external (secondary) jumps, ratcheting upward to economic viability. In recent years, a number of ELGs have come to question the cost in CO2 and open pit mining. I will come back to that later.
Gradual inflation has allowed the development of oil sands and similar projects, and will lead to logical scientific and technical development of kerogen shale as it has already permitted the developments in unconventional shale oil and gas. Furthermore, there are vast areas untouched on continental shelves and in arctic Canada. How much hydrocarbon lies under the shelf off Bangladesh? I do not know, but I am willing to bet there is some. The Alaskan NWR could be drilled today from a platform of 2,000 acres.
Our situation in 2009, however, is that secondary causation (fear of the future) has disrupted the steady growth of prosperity. For instance, after 30 years of mining the oil sands footprint covers 0.072% (72 /100,000) of the total land area of Alberta and could ultimately reach 3,000 km2 (0.45%) without equilibrium reclamation (No reclamation has ever been approved by Alberta, so you see where that puts the companies; Syncrude has reclaimed over 23% but is vulnerable to not having that approved by bureaucrats in the thrall of ELGs). With reclamation, the proportion will shrink from 0.072% to zero. The annual CO2 contribution, moreover, is 4% of Canada’s 2% of the global 2% or 6 parts per billion (0.0016% of 380 ppm), a di minimis figure considering the CO2 seawater equilibrium of 50; nearly all of it will dissolve in the cooling oceans. That estimate is vanishingly small in the context that CO2 may not even be a greenhouse gas, and that water vapour moderates climate modulated by cosmic radiation. As I look out my Toronto window at the current rainy season, I realise I am in the Great Lakes cloud chamber and have been watching scenes like this for the past three years of the sunspot cycle. The sun, not CO2, drives the weather and the climate. Government in the thrall of ELGs is attempting the modify behaviour, based upon a deeply flawed secondary causation argument that resources and ingenuity are finite, and that CO2 is pollution. All this arises from fear that humans are our own enemy, but history also shows that, in fact, prosperity is the best birth control.
http://dailyreckoning.com/oil-shale-reserves/
“The technical groundwork may be in place for a fundamental shift in oil shale economics,” the Rand Corporation recently declared. “Advances in thermally conductive in-situ conversion may enable shale-derived oil to be competitive with crude oil at prices below $40 per barrel. If this becomes the case, oil shale development may soon occupy a very prominent position in the national energy agenda.
Estimated U.S. oil shale reserves total an astonishing 1.5 trillion barrels of oil – or more than five times the
stated reserves of Saudi Arabia. This energy bounty is simply too large to ignore any longer, assuming that the reserves are economically viable. And yet, oil shale lies far from the radar screen of most investors.”
Without fear or doubt, peak hydrocarbon is 1,000 years away. Relax the planet is fine…
Thank you, Francis, for your very educational comments on this article. As you probably realize, Craig’s position on this subject is very controversial and in opposition to the current political climate here in the United States. But it is his opinion and JOO is happy to publish it – because, like your comment, it is well written and supported with documentation and third party observations. I’m sure Craig will be replying back to you on this subject, but as Senior Editor of JOO I wanted to thank you for taking the time so early in the morning to write such literate and reasoned responses.
There is always change, but it it the rate of change that is the problem. Ifwe can slow down that rate by reducing pollution we need to do it. As for building renewable energy, the sooner the better if for no other reason than to have relaible power that you’re not being held over a barrell (oil barrell in this case) for. And what about a global one-child policy until the population gets to about 500 million?
Francis, thank you for your comments. You are obviously an intelligent and educated man. If I accomplished nothing other than getting someone like you to make the kind of technical response that will make fear mongers scratch their heads in doubt of their own beliefs, then I am a happy guy.
Roger, as I stated, I am certainly on the side of making the kinds of responsible decisions we need to make to minimize the impact of our actions on this planet, so I agree with you…with this exception: A global one-child policy is simply too far out there for me.
Craig, my kudos for a very well written post. And what excites me about this piece is the kind of comments it has generated. And unlike religion, we can have different opinions in a civil conversation that hopefully leads us to the ultimate truth. At this moment, I am leaning toward your take on this matter. Time will tell us what is so.
It’s an industry………….and the scaremongers are doing quite well financially………thank you.