Climate Change?

Europe — indeed much of the northern hemisphere, thanks to five separate high-pressure domes — is sweltering under an unprecedented heat wave: airport schedules disrupted because runways are buckling… older folks dying from heatstroke… raging wildfires nearly everywhere.

Our favorite politicians and talking heads are already gearing up for the all-too-familiar confrontation: one side saying it’s due to human-induced climate change, while the other blames it on anything and everything else (or denying that the climate is changing at all). It would almost be humorous if not so devastating for humanity.

While I am certainly not going to resolve the debate here, I would like to offer the following observations:

To paraphrase Mr. Peabody: “Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for 360,000,000 years ago.” This marked the beginning of the Carboniferous Period — a sixty million year stretch of Earthtime that featured a very different planet covered with swamps and bogs and such, and led to the formation of much of the globe’s petroleum resources (peat and coal for sure, and the beginnings of our oil and gas deposits), and transitioned into the Karoo ice age as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere plummeted.

The short version is simple: Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that traps solar energy at the surface (it’s all about the wavelengths of the radiation, but more on that in a later post).

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were around 1500 ppm (parts per million) at the beginning of the Carboniferous, but had fallen to 350 ppm by the middle of the period as the abundant plant life continued to use the carbon in the air to build their cells. (Feel free to refer to the excellent article “The Carboniferous Period” on the website “Darwin’s Door” for additional details about this unique and critical period of earth history.)

For comparison, carbon dioxide in the modern atmosphere is currently around 420 ppm, having risen from approximately 280 ppm at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. (As a point of reference, it was about 380 ppm when I started paying attention to the number about forty years ago.)

In any event, the earth spent over sixty million years scrubbing carbon dioxide (a noted greenhouse gas) out of the atmosphere and hiding it in the ground. And here we are, digging and pumping it from the rocks and putting much of it back into the atmosphere within a couple hundred years. No wonder the surface temperatures are increasing so rapidly.

One can argue the culpability of humanity to climate change all they want, but — at least from my perspective — it’s pretty tough to deny the reality of the science.