This morning I did my usual car trip to Sainsbury's to get the groceries. I suppose that will annoy the Green Believers, but that is part of the fun. What is depressing is the profoundly unscientific nature of the Green Argument: they seem to think it is enough to extrapolate a few graphs of the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and to blame human industrialisation for it. It marks us as an unscientific country that such arguments can be supported, although no other country is any different, not even the United States.
Climate is not static: in geological terms we are still recovering from the last Ice Age. However, during the last two million years there have been four ice ages. Clearly the first three came and went in a way that had nothing to do with human industrialisation. For most of its history, the earth has been far warmer than it is today. Sea levels were much higher: the Mississippi and Amazon basins were shallow seas, like the North Sea today. When the dinosaurs basked on the banks of English rivers, some were struck by lightning and others were turned into fossils; the probabilities were about the same. But none of them had to put up with snow and ice in winter, unlike modern Britain. The academic botanists tell us that many plants, especially in the tropics, evolved when there was much more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there is today. If the world's climate is getting warmer, it is not because things are out of control but because things are returning to a long-term geophysical norm.
That norm may be uncomfortable for humans, with the ensuing rise in sea level. That shows, however, that the planet was not created as some cosmic test bed for human life. Humanity is a million year flash in the pan that follows four billion years of planetary history. It is absurd to suppose that humanity at its current level of science and engineering can control the climate. The energy of sunlight falling on the daytime side of the planet is about a hundred million gigawatts. The electricity generation capability of the UK is about fifty gigawatts.
There are about a million million tons of carbon dioxide in the whole atmosphere. This is a trifling amount compared with the mass of the whole planet, five thousand million million million tons. If that were the only carbon dioxide around, it could be easily influenced by planetary processes, such as humanity burning ten thousand million tons per year of coal and oil. However, for every ton in the atmosphere, there are a thousand tons in the oceans, as dissolved gas or dissolved carbonate minerals; and for every thousand tons in the ocean there are five thousand tons of carbonate rocks such as the white cliffs of Dover. So the overall impact of human industry on carbon dioxide is very small, and is very likely dwarfed by the output from volcanoes and other geophysical sources. There are many more volcanoes under the ocean than above; and for all our recent advances we still have little idea of the totality of these oceanic processes.
I have not seen published any analysis similar to this. I suspect it would be almost impossible to find a publisher in modern Britain, so unscientific are we, despite the enormous taxes that are poured into our schools and arguably wasted there. Even the better publishers, such as the New Scientist and the BBC, focus on the gee-whiz results of science rather than the illumination of the facts provided by thorough scientific analysis. It does not help that our Crown Prince, Charles, seems to regard science as just another debating angle rather than a historically successful way of explaining the world around us.
Anyway, I reject the arguments of the Greens, and I shall continue to use my car to go to Sainsbury's.
Copyright © M. J. Gorman 2006