A green herring

A wind is gathering ever greater momentum over the sticky issue of climate change. As we are all doubtless aware by now our climate is changing, an inescapable fact which was recently confirmed by a conference of climatologists held in Paris. The lights on the Eiffel Tower were even switched off for a few minutes in recognition of the perceived gravity of the issue. Such a selfless act by the Parisian authorities may even have saved a few chips from melting on an iceberg. Such token corporate symbolism probably sums up the issue and our response to it in a nutshell. Coal production is increasing, as is that of oil, air travel is more extensive than ever, and more people now own cars than ever before. The economies of the West are still consuming at a sustained level, and those of Asia are expanding rapidly, yet individual consumers are being asked to cut their carbon footprint whilst industry expands unbound. So the solution to the perceived crisis is simple – the consumer pays. Caps on carbon use are on their way in – but don’t fret, if you need to use more you can always buy someone else’s allocation from them. At least we’re clear - energy pollution is bad unless you pay for it, in which case it’s permissible.

OK so it makes sense, as more carbon fossil fuels are burnt so more CO2 enters the atmosphere acidifying our oceans and causing the earth to retain more heat. OK, trees and plants do soak up atmospheric CO2 and grow faster when there’s (a lot) more of the stuff around, but at the rate at which global deforestation occurs and urbanization consumes our natural environment, this natural buffer is diminishing by the day. Not good news, but did anyone mention that one burning a tonne of carbon consumes 2.7 tonnes of oxygen? More CO2 sounds bad to me, but personally I worry more about oxygen loss as CO2 is still a small component of the atmosphere, but oxygen (used) to comprise 20% of the earth’s atmosphere and we need it more than our cars do (well at least I do). Given that a car consumes around 100,000 times more oxygen than a human in a year the mathematics are too frightening to confront.
Worried yet? Well perhaps we should mention that burning coal produces CO2, but burning hydrocarbons like kerosene, natural gas (methane), and gasoline releases water into the atmosphere as well as CO2. So what you might say? Well for those of us who haven’t yet worked out that those streamlined clouds which seem to follow in the wake of airplanes are composed of water, and that for every cubic meter of CO2 produced by burning a cubic meter of natural gas, a further two cubic meters of water are produced (2 x O2 + CH4 = CO2 + 2 x H2O), not withstanding the two cubic meters of oxygen we consumed in the process. So visualize that for every cubic mile of natural gas or petrol vapor we consume that we are producing two cubic miles of water vapor. Now picture how much we airplane fuel, petrol and gas we all burn. Now tell me that all of that water vapor we pump into the atmosphere isn’t going to affect the weather or change our climate.

Well now we’re painted a bigger picture than just the CO2 issue, it’s time to put it all into perspective. The climate is getting warmer, almost certainly. Well that may well be, but in the American mid West they’ve just had their coldest February in 120 years, and the North-Eastern sea board has been buried deep in snow for months. So what am I ranting about now? Taking small regional snapshots in time in defiance of a trend of three hundred years of weather measurements! Well, that’s exactly the point. How can we gauge the fluctuations caused by human activity over three hundred years against hundreds of millions of years of changing weather and climate patterns? In two words we can’t, but we can say that the climate is now about as warm as it was some two thousand years ago when the Romans occupied Britain, but not as warm as it was some four or five thousand years ago when the Neolithic peoples of the Orkney Islands (off North East Scotland) fished for warm water species, and the hunters who inhabited the plains of Britain lived amongst animals we normally associate with the plains of Africa.

So what was it that caused the ice fields to melt, flooding the Black Sea and the Mediterranean some 8,500-14,000 years ago? What caused the global warming that made the ecology of Northern Europe more akin to that of Africa? Whether it was initiated by a wobble in the distance between the sun and the earth, by a change in the angle of the earth’s axis, or by an increase in solar activity is uncertain. Well the answer to this rhetorical question isn’t so much indentifying a cause as it is eliminating a non-cause. Such climate change certainly wasn’t caused by heavy industry and by billions of motor cars. So taking the wider picture into account we can be sure that the earth’s temperature has swung between periods of great ice ages and interglacial spells far warmer even than today without man’s interference. It is nigh impossible to gauge the impact of human behavior upon this super cycle of heating and cooling of our planet. Suffice it to say that I’m more worried by all the water vapor above our cities and by the loss of oxygen (and ozone) from our atmosphere than I am about all the CO2 or a few degrees rise in the earth’s average, average temperature (which is the figure that is popularly bandied about by TV commentators, I mean the earth’s average temperature will increase by 2-5 degrees over the next hundred years!?!!@!? What they mean if we take the average of the temperatures of all the points on the earth’s surface every day for a year and divide by 365 we can estimate…?).

Well never mind, if we get too anxious we can always ask the Eurocrats of Paris to make a call from the back their limousines or private jets and have the lights on the Eiffel Tower turned off for a few minutes. Personally I’m off the beach to enjoy the weather and unwind from all the worry…