If you have read some of my other writing you know I like to research and find original real data and interpret it myself. I have been in ‘Marketing’ and it scares me how readily data AND people are manipulated. I don’t want someone else’s interpretation of the data or issue. I have a brain and like to brush off the dust now and then. On issues, I want to find the root cause and jump to my own conclusions. So often we end up focusing our energies on, being distracted by, the wrong thing.
We develop solutions for something that is only an ephemeral issue instead of throwing our collective might into a real solution for the real problem. If you know the real underlying problem you might be able to come up with a real solution. If you don’t know the real problem, how can you?
Let’s look at climate change. I DO think it is real and caused by us, but I am going to poke a stick at the dogma because people accuse me of thinking otherwise. Because I question our reasoning and, especially, our response. I do not think it is the root cause.
We are all hot and bothered about rising CO2 now. The End of the World. Fifty years ago it was nuclear annihilation (Cold War). In 1918 it was a flu pandemic.In 1350 it was fleas (OK, they didn’t know it was fleas, and their parasites, they called it the Black Death). Like politicians and police, we always want to find an easy scapegoat for our problems. Let’s look at CO2 as the sine qua non of Climate Change.
By the way, I am not suggesting these things are, or were, insignificant things to worry about. The Plague wiped out about HALF of Europe’s people in less than 10 years. Pretty significant. I am not suggesting humans have not caused, are not causing, CO2 to rise rapidly or that it is unimportant in climate change. It is pretty unambiguosly clear we did, are, and it is. What I am suggesting is that, just as witches, Jews, and Satan were blamed for the plague, you need to dig a bit, and think on your own, to find the truth. And the solution. Because, often, what is thrown around as the problem is not really, and the proposed solutions are, often, self serving. I mean, killing witches did get rid of the community oddballs and political/religious competition, but it did not address the plague.
Often we attribute something happening due to correlation vs causation. They are readily conflated but are not the same. For example, high bad cholesterol has not been shown to CAUSE heart disease. What we see is a CORRELATION between those who have high levels and who get heart disease. This is pushing things too far but it is kinda like saying getting old causes death.
When we look at CO2 levels over time – a relatively short time – we DO see a strong correlation between its rise and increased global average temperatures. But there are other things going on that have strong correlations as well. Maybe those should be considered too? What is interesting, to me, is that over a LONG time this particular correlation breaks down. Massively.
This is from earth.org:
And here is a corresponding synthesis of modern credible temperature research on the matter:
Skeptical? How can we know what CO2 levels were BILLIONS of years ago if we are arguing about it for today’s levels? Well… we actually have preserved tree rings for several thousands of years and glacial core ice samples from Antarctica that go back over 800,000 years (they have trapped air bubbles). After that there are various chemical methods for checking oxygen isotope ratios in fossil shells and other sea creatures, or even counting features on fossil leaves. Seems a bit nebulous the further they go back. One way or the other, there seems wide scientific concurrence on that chart above. On the general trends and times. The bottom line is that there were long periods of times – before humans – when the earth had both MUCH higher CO2 and, sometime, it was accompanied by LOWER average global temperatures. Did all life end? Nope. Did some? Yup. Will we survive this time? Maybe.
And here’s another interesting thing: Did you notice a couple of repeated bumps in that graph? A guy named Milutin Milanković did. Every 90 thousand years there’s a little Ice Age followed by 10 thousand years of recovery. This guy wondered why and noticed a couple of things – nothing to do with CO2.
Our earth’s path around the Sun is not always perfectly round. Other big planets like Jupiter and Saturn have gravitational effects and when they start to line up every 100 thousand years they pull our orbit off a bit. Enough to increase our distance from the Sun so we cool a tad or warm up a bit, depending. We are erratic that way, and others too. Because our planet is not a perfect sphere with uniform density the moon and sun pull on us and make us wobble on our spin axis a bit. We have a predictable wobble every 26 thousand years. The axis we spin around is not tangent to the Sun’s rays, we are ’tilted’ between 22 and 24 degrees. That is what gives us seasons in the North and South – and every 41 thousand years it hits one extreme or the other and the cold seasons can get longer and average global temperatures go down. All that apparently explains those hundred thousand year temperature cycles. Before humans, and unconnected to CO2. It IS important to note that these seemingly unnoticeable changes, a very few degrees, translate to more snow that accumulates little by little and, over time, builds up ice sheets, which reflect warming sunlight out of the atmosphere and gradually decrease the planet’s average temperature.
OK, so far I have pointed at some OTHER things that have caused climate change and I have pointed you at other data saying this planet has been much colder when CO2 was much higher and FAR warmer when CO2 was lower, lower than current worriers are considering – and it survived. It flourished. It ended up with us. But I have also pointed out climate change is real, CO2 levels are rising fast and we are certainly contributing to that. A lot.
So what I am suggesting is that CO2, and many of the things we are told to fret about, are red herrings or sometimes just… Henny Penny (Chicken Little) ranting. I am suggesting that, in this particular example, that while CO2 is certainly A culprit in our mismanagement of our world, it is not THE culprit to focus on. That is Marketing.
Now let me get back to root causes and, from that, a possible solution. I want to show you only two more graphs. Here is one that shows human population over time. On another post (topic: Extinctions) I will show you this again with some other data. This planet hit 8 billion lucky humans in 2022. The same tabulators project a peak of 10.4 billion in 2086. We are pretty sure of that (though it did come from the UN) because governments like to keep track of their revenue sources (us).
You will note that, as our human population has grown and used resources (cut down forests that sequester carbon, burned carbon based fuel, etc), the CO2 levels have gone up commensurately. In parallel. Admittedly, this is correlative data. But it is a hint. Really, if you think the cause of climate change is rising CO2, and humans are the culprits behind it (vs cow burps, vulcanism, etc ), doesn’t it seem obvious, follows logically, that more of us doing what we do is not going to be helpful? We all eat, want stuff, drive cars, have houses…
Now let’s consider this graph that shows what happens to anything used, with and without trying to cut back. For example, if one person currently produces X pounds of CO2 a year and they nobly cut back 20% (or even 60%) of their CO2 emissions, but still spawns 2 more kids vs cutting back on the growth in the number of people. You can readily see that even at the unrealistically high reduction rate (60%) in the use of things that generate CO2, you still shoot up relative to simply having fewer people.
See it? If the global population were to get back to 1900 numbers we would be fine. In so many other ways besides CO2 (resource availability, immigration, poverty, etc etc etc).
Here is another opportunity for a digression: you don’t even have to tell people to have fewer kids – you can just tell them to have them later in life and space them out more… but I will save that for another day.
And I will leave you with these rhetorical questions: Why don’t we hear ANY talk about curtailing population growth at COP28 or in the Media when Climate Change is mentioned? Why do we, as a nation and in many other places on the planet, still pay people (tax credit) to have babies and fight like hell against birth control? Even when people do not want, can not afford, or should not have, babies? Why is it the only thing we hear about are the new products we can buy to ‘lower’ our impact? Why are we told that electric weedwhackers don’t pollute? Hmmm?