I find it annoying to read or hear assertions that human
activity is causing climate change especially when the people making the
assertions never even heard of the Milkovitch cycles and don’t even know what makes
some gases "greenhouse gases" while other gases do not create the
greenhouse effect. Many articles on the subject give the impression the the
author does not understand what he is writing.
One item that is less prevalent now than it was a few years
ago is the matter of whether the recent climate change is unprecedented, as it
is sometimes called by authors. In fact, since civilization began about six
thousand years ago, there have been three cycles that we can clearly see from
written records. Those are the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period, and
the current warm period. There were cool periods in between, the Dark Ages and
the Little Ice Age. There certainly have been other warm and cool periods in
earlier times, but there is less information about those.
And since the last Ice Age maximum there has been even more
warming and cooling, and sea level has risen by about nine hundred feet, but
the level hasn't varied by much in the last three thousand years; although
there was a rise during the Roman Warm Period and a drop during the Little Ice
Age. The change in sea level can be seen in the location of a few cities fairly
far up rivers from the mouths, but in some cases, they were located well
upstream to avoid pirates, but some cities that failed as seaports because a
sand bar grew across the harbor actually suffered from sea level drop. Notable
examples of this problem in ancient cities include Ephesus and Pisa. Sea level
change is not the only reason why harbors became useless, because subsidence and
rebound from glacial periods also change the local sea level. It should be
clear that there have been periods that were warmer or cooler that it is at
present.
It has been claimed that greenhouse effect caused by
increased carbon dioxide has been the main cause of recent warming, but carbon
dioxide is not much of a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gas potential of a gas is
determined by its dipole moment. Most sources point out that Carbon dioxide has
no dipole moment, but some sources give a value of 0.112 for its dipole moment.
For comparison, Water has a dipole moment of 1.8546, which is 16.56 times as much as concentration of carbon dioxide. In
the atmosphere carbon dioxide has an average concentration of about 400 parts
per million, while water vapor has a concentration of from 0.1% to 4% (call it
2% average), or about 48 times the concentration of carbon dioxide to one
hundred times the concentration. This means that water vapor in the atmosphere
has approximately 800 times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere.
If we apply that to the total amount of greenhouse effect on
the atmosphere, and it is thought that the Earth’s atmosphere would have a
temperature of about 0 F, if there were no greenhouse effects, versus the
average of 59 F at present. The warming that carbon dioxide has caused is less
than one tenth of a degree (<.01). Because of the small dipole moment, the
concentration would have to rise to more than one half of one percent (5000
ppm) before it would become significant to the Earth’s atmosphere.
To be succinct, the matter of carbon dioxide as a factor in
global warming or climate change is a red herring, at best, or a bald-faced
lie, if we wish to be blunt.
For those reasons, it appears that the idea of carbon
dioxide driving recent warming is extremely unlikely. Consider also that while
it has been determined that the average surface temperature of Earth would be
about zero degrees Fahrenheit, if there were no greenhouse effect, rather than
the present average of fifty-five degrees. water vapor is responsible for about
fifty-two degrees of that; carbon dioxide is responsible for about two degrees,
and other greenhouse gases are responsible for the other degree.
There has been an increase in warming since the beginning of
the Industrial Revolution around 1750 CE, and some people assert that that
warming was caused by increased burning of organic fuels, which put more carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere, but that ignores that fact that the Earth was
still in the Little Ice Age at that time, and it was warming from natural
events. The warming that took us out of the Little Ice Age has yet not topped
out. If we compare temperatures now with the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman
Warm Period, then we can expect additional warming.
People who assert that human activity has been the cause of
warming ignore the effects of the Solar cycles and the Milkovitch cycles in the
Earth's orbit and rotation. But more serious is the matter of in earlier
periods there was much more atmospheric carbon dioxide during ice ages. While
correlation does not show causation, counter examples usually show that there
is not a cause-effect relationship. The idea of carbon dioxide causing climate
change is a red herring.
If the climate change alarmists had done a good, logical presenting
their argument, then the argument would be worthy of serious consideration, but
there are major logical fallacies in the climate change argument, and those
fallacies bring the whole concept into doubt.
Logical fallacies of climate change alarmists:
I do not think that there has been no climate change or
global warming. I have no doubt that there has been continued warming as the
Earth has warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age, but the mechanism for
warming that has been put forth would not work.
I encourage reader to read the linked websites for more
information.
On the lack of relationship between CO2 levels and
temperature from prehistoric evidence:
cyclical climate change
Climate cycles
Climate cycles
Milankovitch Cycles
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