Musing of an observer of the political and scientific scene by one who would see us reforest the Earth, end our wars, control our population and right the“ship of Earth” —today so far off course and listing dangerously at 45deg first to port then to starboard.
In 1992 Al Gore wrote “The Earth In Balance” and set off a tidal wave of literary and media responses which shortly led to a well funded cottage industry populated by political and scientific climate influencers devoted to supporting only one concept—that the Earth is on course for a cataclysmic overheating that will end our economy and the human presence on Earth. They emphasized the worst case scenario, a common human failure. If there is only “doom ahead” we create unwonted panic —they are climate catastrophists. The catastrophists have created a “climate doom” future. For some it may serve their purposes as a way to enlist and engage the population to action. For others it is a valuable means of supporting their often underfunded pet science projects. Left leaning politicians found climate panic as a valuable bludgeon for attacking political enemies on the right who often questioned “the science”.
These events and questions have an interesting past. About 175 years ago humans discovered the usefulness and value of certain sedimentary layers of “black rock” cropping out on the face of steep cliffs and hillsides in Pennsylvania. Native Americans of the Iroquois Confederacy used “stone coal”: as a source of pigment to make a black face paint. From prehistoric times California native Americans knew of petroleum, the viscous black liquid or “rock oil” often found weeping out of earth depressions. They used it to seal hulls of their planked wooden vessels and also make useful waterproof baskets.
By the beginning of the 19th century both these substances were found to be excellent sources of cheap heat. By the 1850s many Americans had come to realize that these common fossil carbon rich substances could be used as fuel and could generate more heat when burned than wood, and with much less effort.
Petroleum and coal can burn at temperatures much hotter than wood— and had the advantage of being easily obtained in comparison to wood, which (in 1850 had become scarce) had to be laboriously cut, split and then aged for a few years to dry before use.
The primary source of these ancient, buried and altered, black, carbon rich fuels were prehistoric 300 million year-old forests and swamps. There, early chlorophyll bearing trees and ferns used photosynthesis to combine CO2 with H2O to make carbohydrates such as sugars, starches, cellulose and other plant tissues. Each one of these CHO carbohydrate molecules stores carbon as a component . When taken from the air, converted into a carbohydrate, buried and metamorphosed into coal, carbon, is stored (almost) permanently.
During the Carboniferous Period (360-300 mya) of the Paleozoic Era the spread of forests across the Earth’s surface, and their luxuriant growth, drew vast amounts of CO2 out of the ancient (carbon dioxide rich and much warmer— 68F!) atmosphere. The carbon was stored as a compound known as a carbohydrate (such as sugar, starch, cellulose) in organic solid plant matter. At the end of the Carboniferous atmospheric temperatures had dropped to about 54degF, cooler than our modern temperature of 59F. Forests remove carbon as a gas from the atmosphere and converts it to a solid..which separates it (sequesters it) from the atmosphere. Over vast stretches of time, with episodes of mountain range uplift, mountains eroded away, surges of sediments covering lowland and marshy swamps those luxuriant forests were buried deep underground to become sedimentary layers of “black rock”. After the Carboniferous the Earth continued on a with a lower concentration of CO2 in its atmosphere and a cooler atmosphere as noted above 54F!.
During the 1850s most of North American forests had been cut over for fuel and building material. Wood became more expensive. Demand for more fuel increased to serve the growing population and the needs of industries and businesses. This demand led to the exploitation of underused fuel resources such as coal (and eventually petroleum) as cheap fuels (yes they were cheap then).
These fossil fuels sought to feed the steam engines, factories and businesses of the Industrial Revolution extracted needed energy by “burning it’ in the air (combining it with oxygen) and venting waste CO2 into the atmosphere. The need for more annd more energy to heat water, a house or a steam engine, or later to move a sleek gasoline powered vehicle along a superhighway grew exponentially. The result of burning carbon (C) based fuels is (CO2) or carbon dioxide which when released into the atmosphere acts as a heat trapping gas which warms the air.
Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, it was almost always a component of the Earth atmosphere with one unusual physical characteristic: it can absorb heat energy radiated from the Earth surface. Adding it to the atmosphere causes the atmosphere to trap more heat radiation and raises the average Earth temperature.
Thus there are two ways the Earth’s atmosphere is heated today (1) the Earth’s natural cycle of heating and cooling is not fully understood, but we know that factors such as :the Earth’s position relative to the Sun, the Sun’s energy output, the tilt of the Earth axis of rotation, Earth volcanic activity, the location and patterning of the continents on the Earth’s surface, and even the pattern of heated ocean currents all have an impact of Earth temperatures . The Eaarth went into a cooling phase of this cycle began more than 2.5 million years ago with the Pleistocene (Glacial Epoch) and ended about 20,000 years ago with the end of the Pleistocene and beginning of a (perhaps temporary) heating phase of the cycle. We live on in that natural heating cycle today!
(2) The other form of Earth heating is a result of humans unearthing fossil fuels, burning them in the atmosphere and releasing the resultant CO2, a heat trapping gas, into the atmosphere.
Sadly the frenzy of the catastrophists misconception is that the planet Earth is a static, unchanging, rocky sphere which if left in its natural state (a state they propose) would remain at its “pre-industrial global temperatures” which in the 1850-1900 period averaged about 57 deg F. The present day average, almost 125 years later after massive alterations to the Earth and its atmosphere, is about 59 deg F, or about 2 F degrees above the 1850-1900 value. How much is human caused? The Earth so massive and complex it is a very conservative body..slow to change —even large changes in some areas make little change in it overall…it sis not likely to make catastrophic changes in short periods of time.
Increases over the 1850-1900 “standard” are interpreted by “doomers’ as strictly unnatural perturbations and are the result of past human actions—which presumably other modern day humans could alter so as to return the Earth temperatures to its 1850-1900 “standard”.
There has been no effort to tease out of these data the difference between the average natural rise in post Pleistocene glacial temperatures vs what human pollution has caused.
The Doomers (who claim to “cleave to the science”) have ignored the scientific supported evidence that we live on a planet which has been warming for the last twenty millenia. For the last 20,000 years the Earth has been warming up—with no human intervention..and has experienced (melting of glaciers, alterations in flora and fauna, extinctions of species, etc.,etc.) in a natural cycle of warming. Only in the last two centuries have humans had an impact on these warming trends..But how much has that been?
Some of that 2 deg F rise is no doubt caused by human alterations to the Earth. Today there are too many people (9 billion is a massive unsustainable burden), way too much of our carbon absorbing forests have been cleared, too much heat absorbing asphalt and concrete poured out to cover its surfaces, too many houses and autos spewing pollutants and heat trapping gases, too many manufactured products used for an instant in Earth time then abandoned to rot away.
Heating up of the Earth has been going on a long time. Seventeen thousand years ago at this very place on a glacial morainal hilltop in New York, where I write this today, was covered by more than 1,500 feet of glacial ice. Happily that ice is long gone.
Misconception of the Earth pressed on us by the climate fear mongers is that the Earth is or should remain as an unchanging and stable platform for human activities is not supported by past Earth history.
The Climate Doomers who tout their adherence to “the science” have abandoned over 200 years of geological science. The Earth is a “living” evolving planet in which almost nothing is stable—even the very continents upon which we all live have been drifting around on is surface at the rate at which our fingernails grow. The continents go through a “clumping together” cycle too. “Pangaea” a supercontinent formed 400 million years ago then some 200 mya began breaking apart completing a cyclic pattern which appeared to complete in a 200-300 million year period.
The “doomers” assert that climate warming is solely human generated, and that without radical alteration to human lifestyles—such as: abandonment of fossil fuels, achieving “zero carbon footprint”, limiting global temperature rise to some specific level (always patently impossible to achieve) catastrophic heating of the atmosphere is unavoidable and would lead to collapse of the economy and society in general.
As a consequence of the many hyperventilating “climate influencers” there was no natural event, or news item which did not elicit some dire connection to climate warming, whether it was an isolated severe winter storm, California wild fires, invasive insect species, unusual wild bird sightings, human immigration, Russian forest fires, volcanic eruptions, hurricane intensity, or most often, simply an unusually hot summer day—someone claimed it was all tied together in one all inclusive “causa causans” as one of the many evil effects of burning fossil fuels and adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
Climate Doomerism reminded me of other another academic and public conflict—one of an historic conflict of science between the uniformitarinanism and catastrophism. In the late 18th century and into early 19th century evolving ideas concerning the age of the Earth and what processes were responsible for the Earth’s existing—rock structure topography and its history——played out in academic conflict which was sharply complicated and intensified by religious beliefs.
In the late 18th century Europe and Scotland (in the Age of Enlightenment) led to many discoveries in natural science. As the Age of Enlightenment progressed during the late 18th and early 19th century natural scientists, miners and civil engineers began to accumulate more detailed knowledge of the natural world. Reports of the occurrence of marine fossils in mountainous terrane far from existing coasts, as well as documention of sedimentary rock layers occurring in repeating successions. Others reported and mapped the occurrence of crystalline rock types which suggested an origin as a precipitate from a saturated solution. These latter observations as well as the existence in nature of rugged mountain ranges, abrupt changes in topography, deep river gorges and steep cliff-faces encouraged natural scientists (who also relied heavily on religious dogma and biblical Old Testament revelations) to promote an explanation of violent and rapid alterations of the Earth surface as a result of the “great flood” an occurrence of the recent past was responsible for the existing topographic features as well as the deposition of layered rocks and chemical precipitation from sea water of the crystalline rock types. This hypotheses known as Neptunism (or later catastrophism) was also supported by the religious establishment of the time which acted as a rational and scientific support for the story of the Biblical Flood of the Old Testament.
One of the most effective and influential proponents of the Neptunists/Catastrophists was German mineralogist and geologist Abraham Werner (1750-1817) head of the Freiberg School of Mining in Freiburg, Germany who postulated that the Earth was once completely ocean covered and the various rock types (and their enclosed marine fossils) were either sediments which settled out of the water column, or were crystalline rocks (such as granite and basalt) which he considered chemical precipitates. Werner explained the variations in topography, existence of mountain ranges, steep cliff faces and river gorges as the result of flowing ocean water during as the cataclysmic flood receded and revealed a contorted and topographically altered dry land.
In the view of the Werner catastrophists, the Earth was very young—perhaps only some six thousand years old, and all of its topography could be explained as occurring during this one-time earth-alterning event.
In the late 18th century a Scottish scientist James Hutton (1726-1797), whose life experiences in geologically diverse Scotland as a physician, farmer, mineralogist, chemist, and natural historian led him to conclude that it was the invisibly slow processes of rock weathering, soil formation, earth creep, erosion, sediment deposition and slow imperceptible, gradual mountain uplift that are responsible for sculpting and shaping the Earth over immense unimaginably long stretches of time—- not sudden catastrophic events.
Hutton claimed that the Earth was shaped -not by a great flood—but (1) by the very same slow processes which alter the Earth today and which must have operated at a similar rate in the past. But to do so Hutton understood they must have operated over very long stretches of time. Thus he was the first to conclude (2) the Earth must be very very old and (3) to understand and interpret processes of modern day Earth we must refer back to present day processes for in geology “the present is key to the past”. Others who followed Hutton and popularized his concepts (Lyell, and ) coined the term “uniformitarianist” to contrast his theory with the popular theory of the time, that of Abraham Werner and the Neptunists.
Modern geologist—the modern day “Uniformitarianists”—understand that the Earth’s natural processes are in general characterized as imperceptibly slow uniform change punctuated irregularly by more robust and violent changes such as volcanic eruptions and meteorite impacts but these events are relatively common and naturally occurring over the long stretches of “Earth Time”.
The slow changes in Earth will continue whatever we humans do…yes we have exacerbated the “problem” to our society based as we are on the present state of the planet…but we must understand that all change is slow imperceptible and modulated by the vast size and mass of the planet Earth…nothing is going to happen catastrophically…
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