An inconvenient CO2 truth.

I saw Freeman Dyson (the guy we get the Dyson Sphere from, not the vacuum cleaner company) in a video once where he said that due to the rise in CO2 levels food production on this planet had increased by 10% so far.

I wish I knew what source he was citing. If true, (and of all the people on the planet that are the least likely to mis-speak Dyson is the least of the least likely) that’s an amazing number. Because CO2 hasn’t increased by anything close to 10% that number would mean that the benefits from an increased amount of CO2 are several orders of magnitude higher than the actual percentage of CO2 being generated.

Freeman Dyson’s position was that while there is no doubt regarding CO2 fluctuations and that there is a measurable increase in CO2 over the last few decades, there’s no way to know exactly what that increase will mean other than observations of the historical record. The historical record says we’re in a comparatively CO2 starved period in planetary history. Dyson maintained that going by the facts available an increase in CO2 was far more likely to be beneficial than disastrous.

It’s nearly impossible to predict the future but it’s not impossible at all to look at the historic results of certain conditions and scenarios. This is a far more productive and highly probable, more accurate means of modelling than ignoring (or cherry picking from) historical data and using computers as extremely complex dice to cast in prediction of the future. In all things, you ignore or slant history at your own peril. That is what makes historical revisionism so repulsive and dangerous, btw.

There has never been a point in the history of Earth where an increase in CO2 signalled the onset of a barren, baked, dead planet that the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming, a fancy way to say “manmade climate change”) alarmists claim is coming … in 10 years.

By far the greenhouse gas most influential to Earth’s surface is water vapor. Water vapor drives the climate to a factor of 94% – 98% with all other greenhouse gasses making up the last few percentage points. When it comes to climate and greenhouse gasses there is one, single heavy hitter and it is water vapor.

Bring that up in your next discussion and see what happens to the Greenie you’re arguing with. Most of them don’t even know this simple fact. They claim to “follow the science” and they’re convinced by people calling themselves “scientists” that the world is headed for disaster at the hands of mankind. Yet they are either unaware of the influence and impact of water vapor or they ignore it. Because while you might be able to alter the quantity of CO2 humans generate there’s not a damn thing you can do about water vapor.

Water vapor makes a terrible cudgel with which to beat mankind into submission to draconian civil, political and economic policies.

Climate alarmists often point to the planet Venus as an example of runaway global warming and they’re right … As it applies to Venus. Venus is one third of the distance between Earth and the Sun closer to our star (Venus’ orbit is 0.7AU for any astronomy types out there). The atmosphere of Venus is nearly all CO2 and the clouds are made of sulfuric acid, not water vapor. If Earth had that quantity of sulfuric acid in place of H2O (both are very active solvents, btw) we would not be here. So Thank God that Venus is not Earth and Earth not Venus.

Equating Earth to Venus is a false comparison. For Earth to become like Venus we would have to lose our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere and all our water vapor … well actually all our water in any form because at Venusian temperatures all water is vapor. If all the water on Earth was vaporized it would form a very, very thick and dense cloud layer that would reflect solar energy back into space and the planet would cool down … Until the water recondensed and fell back to land.

This is where the concept of “nuclear winter” arose. It doesn’t have to be a nuclear winter, it can be an asteroid winter or a comet winter. Anything that puts up enough cloud cover over Earth is going to cool the surface, eventually, because those clouds will be water vapor.

Earth has a failsafe positive feedback loop in the form of oceans. Long before Earth could become anything like Venus the water vapor of in our planet would create clouds that cool the planet back down. The oceans cannot evaporate because the temperature cannot reach a point high enough before water vapor clouds reflect solar energy back into space. Water vapor is much better for this than sulfuric acid and interestingly enough, the sulfur dioxide in our atmosphere combines with water vapor to create tiny droplets of sulfuric acid … which is even more heat reflective than water vapor. It’s also the main component in acid rain.

Feedback loops, both positive and negative, are the problem with using computer models as guides that are infallible enough to allow political action via projection into the future. Feedback loops, their forcefulness or weakness, are virtually impossible to model accurately in anything as complex as global climate trends. Get one single feedback loop wrong in either direction and the computer model is skewed to the point of uselessness. Computer models are great for predicting the stress failure point of an alloy used in aircraft manufacture and yet for all practical purposes nothing but fun toys when it comes to something as complex as global climate.

For instance, when CO2 levels increase, so do oxygen(*1) levels due to elevated plant exhalations. More oxygen means that every single animal of any sort that relies on oxygen respiration gets a “boost” from a higher oxygen content. The metabolism of everything from whales to spiders increases proportionately. They all get hungrier because they’re burning more fuel and they’re burning it more efficiently. The animals get bigger(*2). Plants are at the bottom of the food chain so more plants get eaten. More dung gets created. Which provides more fertilizer for existing plants. Which grow bigger and faster because of the increased CO2 levels and give off more oxygen in the process.

Ok, all of that’s fine and dandy but how do we know the predator populations will increase at a sufficient rate to keep the herbivores in check? What if the herbivore population runs amok and eats all the plants? Something the size of a brontosaurus can eat a heck of a lot of plants. What if all the predators eat all the herbivores and decide that “Hey, there’s lots of people. People taste good!” Questions, questions, questions …

There’s no way to calculate where the equilibrium point is in such a feedback loop and the above is a gross oversimplification. There are a lot more factors and nuances to the above feedback loop than I can get into here. Trying to model just that feedback loop on a global scale is impossible. Because we have neither the raw data nor the computing power to do so. Just trying to calculate the CO2 consumption and oxygen exhalation of plants on a global scale is impossible, let alone calculate out to sufficient accuracy the rest of the ramifications sufficiently to base political and physical responses to.

The thing about this “follow the science” stuff is that you have to actually be educated well enough to recognize and differentiate science and the scientific method from snake oil. That’s not what’s happening today, what’s happening is Science as a Religion and that is not science at all.

What we do not know and cannot know at this point is whether Planet Earth is being set up to become a hot, baked cinder devoid of life — Which seems highly unlikely and is not supported historically — Or if Planet Earth is simply gearing up, as it has done in the past, to support more abundant levels of life(*3). Which seems to me to be the more likely scenario and I’m in good company with minds like Freeman Dyson on my side.

(*1 – Oxygen is not considered a “greenhouse gas”, it is transparent to infrared and does not significantly slow higher wavelengths of light down into the infrared range as they pass through it like CO2 does.)

(*2 – There’s evidence in the historical record for this. This is thought to be how you get dinosaurs as big as construction cranes and dragonflies as big as eagles. At the time those sorts of things existed both the CO2 and oxygen levels on Earth were much, much higher. This caused an abundance of base level food (plants) and allowed oxygen metabolisms to flourish. When this was the case there were palm trees and alligators at the latitude of Anchorage, Alaska. The world did not end then, obviously. )

(*3 – Could this be the actual great fear and driver at the root of climate alarmism? That the carrying capacity of our planet for human beings would vastly increase? We all know that most of those activist alarmists are no friend of the human race and despise their own species. They argue that the planet would be better off with “less humans” but what they really mean is no humans but themselves. They see themselves as the only ‘proper’ caretakers of the planet and view the rest of us as a sort of planetary rapists. To such people the capacity for Earth to support billions more humans must seem an absolute horror. Think about it.)