Hunting down carbon dioxide is of benefit to no one: geologist

Re: ‘Steps taken on climate plan, but work still to be done,’ In My Opinion, Beach Metro Community News, April 4.

The column is understandable and logical except for a few thoughts that the well-respected MP and his co-writer could not have imagined, and which raise another issue. What are we to do if government is uninformed?

I’ve been involved in science since my college days of the 1960s and have analyzed a lot of interesting natural science data.

I am a field geologist and let it be known, geologists often tread where no man has ever gone. Moreover, geological science is a juggling act more complex than the weather with animals that become minerals, marine plants that turn to lime mud, 3,800 minerals (of which I can identify fewer than 10), thousands of chemical compounds, unknown subsurface fluids, geophysics, deep time, organic and planetary evolution and a host of other mysterious and daunting unknowns. Volcanoes come and go.

Despite the machine age of isotopes, microchips, vast libraries, and 250 years of common knowledge, the multiple working hypothesis is still the best tool in a geologist kit and skepticism is still the best attitude.

I participated in ‘global warming–climate change’ debates when they were the more common and illustrated them with graphs of temperature sequences through time created by National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration better known as NOAA to support my position. Many graphs, but not all, had a rising slanted line (called linear regression) from colder in the past to modern warming. The devil was in the distraction. On some graphs the trend is downward.

The oldest graphs, however, covered the end of the Little Ice Age (not the Pleistocene of the Beaches Oak Ridge) but a more recent glaciation in the European Alps. Some of those charts that were old enough to show colder weather in the Little Ice Age also showed that when the Little Ice Age ended in about 1840, the cities in North America warmed to modern temperatures by about 1870. This was long before the ‘Oil Age’.

For instance, the Key West, Florida time series showed rapid rebound from the Little Ice Age as did Albany, NY, Harrisburg, PA, and Chicago. IL long before the petroleum-industrial revolution got into full swing.

That warm period, comparable to today, was interrupted by major volcanic eruptions starting before but increasing in frequency in 1875 with Askja in Iceland, an eruption so severe that many Icelanders migrated to Europe. In 1883, eight years later, Krakatau erupted followed by 12 more very violent worldchanging eruptions in 57 years (roughly every four-and-a-half years) until Cerro Azul in Chile, 1932. A few more followed infrequently up to and including Pinatubo and Mt. St. Helens which were tiny by comparison with the old timers but despite being ‘small’ kept my tomatoes from ripening in Toronto.

Recording at many cities started later however, during a volcanic induced temperature minimum thus giving an impression of global warming today for which industrial carbon dioxide (4 per cent of the annual organic cycle) is held responsible. Carbon dioxide, however, cannot be proven responsible for these temperatures nor the current hiatus.

These and likely subsequent temperatures are likely the result of regression to the normal equilibrium temperatures of the earth (for now). A global tempera- ture (approximately 14 C) was calculated by Arrhenius in 1906 (his second paper on global warming) and cited by NASA today as the current the global average of approximately 14 C. Apparently, there has been no global warming since Arrhenius (1906) up to the current NASA estimates.

Therefore, in my opinion, climate modellers are over-specialized and have used many global time series seriously affected by volcanic activity from 1875 to 1932 to document anthropogenic global warming without realizing the volcanic consequences. The consensus attribute that warming to carbon dioxide which cannot be teased out of the temperature data and is not science except as a tentative assumption.

Environmental events such as cleaning beaches, woodlands and waterways are extremely praiseworthy and should be increased orders of magnitude, but the war on carbon dioxide is unnecessary and distracts from other worthy efforts.

EVs should be encouraged for all cities, especially for delivery and maintenance vehicles; EVs should be made from materials that never exploit the poor to improve the air we all breath.

Let us all step back and prepare best for a future where oil and gas are less necessary.

There is danger in applying ‘Net Zero’ to each behaviour of the economy using what is clearly a shaky assumption.

It is even more important to realize that ‘Big Oil’ means OPEC and Russia who collectively hold 85 per cent of global oil resources and reserves. It is unrealistic to believe many of those nations will ever cut back carbon emissions (even if it did matter), but in my opinion, carbon dioxide is being hunted down like a witch and the hunt benefits no one.

Francis Tucker-Manns, Ph.D. Artesian Geological Research