Has climate change been blown out of proportion? Is this a global crisis in the making something we have coming or is it a recurring phenomenon that happens over the ages? International Business Review explores this heated debate that might be uncomfortable to uncover but its importance necessitates looking under every stone.
A Cause for Concern
Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns that occur over decades or longer periods of time. According to the British Geological Survey, it is caused by a variety of factors that include natural processes like changes in solar cycles,
volcanic activity, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, vegetation patterns, cyclical ocean patterns, the Earth’s orbit around the sun, even meteorite hits.
These observed changes can be compiled into a computer model to create a simulation that showcases past, present and possible future climate changes. The complex way that the factors interact with each other plays a huge role in affecting the Earth’s climate. However, former Head of Australia’s National Climate Centre, William Kininmonth states in his paper, ‘Rethinking the Greenhouse Effect’, that the global warming approach of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is “very simplistic” and that “mainstream climate science may have led us all up a blind alley”.
Former United States Vice President Al Gore pontificated in his docu-movie, An Inconvenient Truth, that there is a relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) and temperature, which unleashed a torrent of CO2 fear, Kininmonth however explains that the reality of this greenhouse effect can be explained by the natural changes in ocean currents. Tropical oceans contain heat, a form of energy that was absorbed from the Sun, that is transferred to the atmosphere by way of winds. The oceans act as conveyor belts and constantly move heat around the world. Kininmonth says that since the sun’s heating pattern on the Earth’s surface is uneven, increased heat transport from tropical oceans are the most probable cause to changes in the ocean currents which in turn explain the changing in Earth’s temperature.
Euan Mearns, geologist and geochemist, wrote about the connection between oceanic temperature and CO2 in his blogpost ‘The Vostok Ice Core: Temperature, CO2 and CH4’ stating, “The most likely source for most of the CO2 is considered to be the oceans where warming seawater can hold less CO2”. Mearns believes that the Earth’s surface and atmosphere “had cooled with the oceans lagging a few thousand years behind” which echoes the sentiments of Kininmonth that “evidence for CO2 forcing of climate” has “no correlation at all”.
Andrew Montford, Deputy Director at The Global Warming Policy Foundation, found Kininmonth’s theory that recent temperature changes may not entirely be of anthropogenic origin discerning especially when combined with previous misconduct from the science community to ensure a nonbiased approach. In 2009, emails between climate scientists were publicised that garnered the attention of many when the exchanges indicated data collected by the scientists were allegedly forged.
Professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia (UEA) provided data that showed rising land temperatures in recent decades. So, when hackers found responses between Jones and his unit that were questionable, doubts over the team’s fidelity and its findings came to mind. Former U.S. Vice President candidate, Sarah Palin wrote in a Washington Post article that the emails, “reveal that climate ‘experts’ … manipulated data to hide the decline in global temperatures”.
An alarming exchange from Dr Tommy Wills, Swansea University was found, “What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably …”
Climate scientists from the UEA Unit featured in the emails along with the University were criticised by the United Kingdom’s House of Commons committee for their mishandling on raw data release and freedom-of-information requests.
“The results for 400 ppm (parts per million carbon in the atmosphere) stabilisation look odd in many cases … As it stands we’ll have to delete the results from the paper if it is to be published.” Rachel Warren, UEA Professor of Global Change and Environmental Biology, wrote in one of the emails.
Multiple investigations were launched and though Jones was acquitted with one of the reports chaired by Lord Oxburg, which found “no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice”, it exposed a lack of transparency and “proper sense of openness” when it came to data inquires of an entire research institution. If one of the leaders in climate research that is supposedly dedicated to pure and applied research was found to be misconstruing information that is being blindly accepted as truth, then what else are we being blinded by?
The Power of Fear
Fear is one way to get people to believe in something. Through fear, people will blindly follow the masses as there’s a sense of security in numbers. The hold this influence has on society shows the significance of getting all your bases covered before launching a witch hunt that might redirect attention from more important matters.
Plastic is seen as an enemy of the environment just as much as CO2 is labelled as a pollutant – even though CO2 is a natural by-product of every living thing on the planet. Chemical engineer Beverly Sauer of Eastern Research Group (ERG), an independent American research company, led a study to examine the carbon footprint of various plastic packaging with its substitutes.
Saur found that, “The impacts associated with plastic are generally much lower than the impacts for the mix of substitute materials that would replace packaging.” The study also accounted materials and resources required to produce each packaging with plastic coming up as using less.
The ERG conducted the analysis on behalf of the American Chemistry Council (ACC) where its Vice President, Steve Russell, stated, “Plastics are often used in products that help to reduce much larger amounts of greenhouse gas emissions over their life cycle.”
The concept that paper is better than plastic when it comes to your grocery trip is misleading when the cost of producing paper equals to fewer trees to absorb CO2 – the main suspect being pinned for climate change. Not only does this heavier, more space consuming plastic alternative use 942 times more water to produce, it also has an extensive recycling process – handpicking out non-paper items, washing, turning into sludge, purifying, flattening, drying, colouring, cutting and packaging before it can be reused. It takes 0.5 kg of plastic 91 percent less energy than 0.5 kg of paper to recycle.
Plastics expert with the Ocean Conservancy Susan Ruffo states, “We have a history as a species of solving one problem with great intensity, only to figure out that we’ve created another one.”
The fear of plastic straws and plastic bags has essentially turned plastic into Public Enemy Number One when it was invented with environment conservation in mind – to replace the loss of trees used to create paper shopping bags. Our fear response to losing trees led to an ever bigger time bomb that has embedded its way into every part of our lives from pens to towering infrastructures, even life-saving surgical implants.
But who is behind the plastic fear-mongering campaign and why?
Governments all over allude to charging consumers 20 cents – 50 cents for plastic bags and make them feel guilty for using plastic when every manufacturer is allowed to use plastic in bulk for production. The ULS Report showed findings from 2007 that plastic bag bans caused more harm than good to the environment.
It’s as if people in power are doomed to repeat history all over again.
Hope for a Changing World
There’s still a chance to make it work though. According to journalist McKenzie Funk, it’s not a crisis for everyone as there are those that are just adapting to an environment that has always been changing.
In an interview with National Geographic, Funk said, “The obvious case is Greenland, where there’s hope that they can make money off melting ice in the form of better fishing and better access to minerals, oil, and gas, which will fuel their independence from Denmark.”
Yes, the global temperature is rising but so has the cost of living and technological advances over the past ten years alone. The only constant is change. Looking back at the past has shown us that this has happened before and since nobody can predict the future, are we to just bury our heads in the sand or learn to adapt to a constant change.
Putting together the pieces of the puzzle requires a complete picture, but how can anyone be expected to see the big picture if they have an incomplete puzzle set?
CHALLENGING THE NARRATIVE
Jason Kowalyshyn
“How do we know the government is also lying about climate change besides the fact that they are making money through fraudulent carbon tax and that they lie about everything?
Just stop 18,000 years ago almost all of Canada sat under giant thick sheets of ice. Both the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets were continuous sheets thousands of kilometres across and several kilometres thick. They melted entirely without human intervention (as did their equivalents in Asia and Europe). They melted so quickly that the rocks upon which they rested (including the Canadian Precambrian Shield) are still rebounding from the rapid removal of their incredible weight. Sea levels have risen over 100 metres during that period separating Alaska from Russia and modifying ocean currents around the globe. The changes we are observing and living through at present are simply the tail end of that
monumental transformation and are absolutely in keeping with natural climate change.
Imagine the energy required to melt several continental ice sheets thousands of kilometres across and several kilometres thick, thereby raising the sea level by over 100 metres in just a few thousand years – a blink of an eye in geological time, just on the edge of recorded human history. Let the fact that humans had nothing to do with that sink in, and then ask yourself how taxing Canadians and issuing government subsidies to install windmills and solar panels will stop that sort of planetary-scale climate change.
Rather than the disaster that you would have us believe has befallen us or will befall us in the future, what we have in fact observed is that access to abundant and reliable energy has increased human life spans, reduced famine and suffering and lead to unprecedented levels of prosperity around the globe. Access to secure sources of energy reduces the impact of climate to humans, not the other way around.
Furthermore, if we study what has been happening at the geological level for several million years, we realise that the present period is characterised by an extraordinarily low CO2 level. During the Jurassic, Triassic, and so on, the CO2 level rose to values sometimes of the order of 7,000, 8,000 and 9,000 ppm, which considerably exceeds the paltry 400 ppm that we have today.
Not only did life exist, in those far-off times when CO2 was so present in large concentration in the atmosphere, but plants such as ferns commonly attained heights of 25 meters.
Reciprocally, far from benefiting the current vegetation, the reduction of the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere would be likely to compromise the health, and even the survival, of numerous plants. To fall below the threshold of 280 or 240ppm would plainly lead to the extinction of a large variety of our vegetal species.
In addition, our relentless crusade to reduce CO2 could be more harmful to nature as plants are not the only organisms to base their nutrition on CO2. Phytoplankton species also feed on CO2, using carbon from CO2 as a building unit and releasing oxygen.
By the way, it is worth remembering that ~70 percent of the oxygen present today in the atmosphere comes from phytoplankton, not trees: contrary to common belief, it is not the forests, but the oceans, that constitute the “lungs” of the earth.
When I calibrated CO2 metres 20 years ago our atmospheric carbon was 400 ppm just like it is today! If it raised to 406 or even 412 like the government said it might, it would be difficult to measure the increase in vegetation because it would be so little but if we were to somehow lower it to let’s say 275 ppm then over 25 percent of the world’s vegetation would die off which would likely kill close to half of the world’s population!
The earth goes through natural heating and cooling phases as recorded throughout history, Yes, we are destroying and polluting the earth and we should clean up our environment but manmade climate change from CO2 is a hoax to generate fraudulent carbon taxes, change my mind!”
