AGW speech

On the way to this talk, I stopped to make a walking stick. Like it? Actually, I spent more than a few minutes making this and more than a few years getting to this speech. It’s something that’s been on my mind for quite a while and I hope to inject some doubt in your minds, doubt about an accepted belief held by many people in our society.

I call this my air stick. It’s a meter long so each centimetre represents 1%.  The different parts represent how much of each gas makes up our atmosphere. The brown 78 centimetres represents nitrogen, the blond 21 represents oxygen, and The dark piece represents argon. There is a hint of carbon dioxide. I’m sure most of you know a little about air but I’d like to see if I can give you a different perspective.

So maybe you’re wondering, why this lesson on the composition of air. Well, if you’ve heard of global warming, climate change, carbon taxes, carbon trading, and carbon sequestering did you also know it is all to do with carbon dioxide? Do you know  

Pass stick around.

Our air contains more nitrogen than anything else and the next most abundant gas, oxygen,  supports our lives. The black part is argon and the rest of the gases in our atmosphere are so scarce they don’t show up until we take my stick apart.

Take stick apart.

This shim shows us roughly how much carbon dioxide there is in normal air and to satisfy the science, I’ve painted one side to show how much CO2 mankind produces from our energy use. I’ve painted it brown to make environmentalists happy because human-produced carbon dioxide is always labelled ‘dirty’ by the crowd that follows and supports Al Gore.

Display pie, bar and percentage charts

These charts of air (pie chart and bar chart) along with numerical data list air percentages. CO2 is 0.038%.  In 2500 units of air only 1 unit will be carbon dioxide. And so I’ll introduce to you some sugar cubes (13 boxes) to represent those proportions. 

Display 1, 25, 524, 1950 sugar cubes.

As you can see, there isn’t much CO2 in a given volume of air. So now, how much do you remember from school, from biology? We breathe in oxygen and we spew out carbon dioxide and water vapour. We get that oxygen because plants spew it out when they breathe in the CO2 that animal life has no use for. 

Put up plant prop.

This, and all other green plants survive on carbon dioxide. Plants take in carbon dioxide and water and make cellulose for building their bodies. They emit oxygen into the atmosphere. If I were to state that in ‘green talk’, I‘d say plants dump their waste into our air, but since I claim to be rational, instead I’ll say thank you to all those oxygen factories. Without them, there’d be no us. 

Change air stick to show exhaled breath.

As you can see, there is still plenty of oxygen left in the breath we exhale but it becomes very difficult to hold it in longer. Our breathing reflex makes us get rid of carbon dioxide as fast as possible and plants do the same for oxygen. We each consider them respectively as poisonous waste. And that leads to the symbiotic relationship between oxygen users and carbon dioxide users. Our waste feeds plants and plant waste feeds us. Both are needed to have life on this earth. 

So let’s spend a couple of minutes talking about life. What are the components of life? What are the main chemical building blocks of life? How many of the 92 natural elements makeup living things? Well, I went to one of my favourite chemists, Isaac Asimov to learn a little about that.

Hold “Life and Energy”.

This book by Dr Asimov goes into a good deal of detail in determining exactly what is the difference between life and non-life. And though I’d urge you to read the book yourself, summing up, he settles on one main point – living things have the ability to build more complex molecules, essentially to grow. That is what differentiates a life form from a non-life thing. So what does ‘life’ use to grow? We, and all other life forms use the chemicals found on this earth to grow.

Many elements are found in living things but three, hydrogen, oxygen and carbon make up the bulk of all life. About 95% of all life’ molecules are built from just these three. And that applies as well to what makes up the food we eat.  Sugars, starches, protein and fat are all formed from those three, carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Much of the oxygen and hydrogen is in the form of water bound to carbon atoms in a variety of ways and these form the molecules of life.

We breathe in air (hold up air stick) and breathe out air that has been somewhat depleted of oxygen and enriched with carbon dioxide. The breath we exhale has about 4% CO2 as opposed to the 0.03 % of standard air. So how does this happen? Well, our bodies are essentially internal combustion engines. Both hydrogen and carbon are combustible meaning they easily combine with oxygen. In the body, extracting energy from food is called metabolism not combustion as there are no flames involved.  A multitude of secretions break food into component molecules and take the energy we need to power our brains and muscles from those reduced food particles, finally rejecting those molecules we can’t use.

But where does that energy content of food come from? It originally comes from the sun as plants take in carbon dioxide, add water and build cellulose and other more complex molecules in that process we call photosynthesis. Life. Yes, we are a carbon life form that must continually take in new carbon to sustain our lives.

So how did we ever get to the point that large numbers of people believe that carbon dioxide is both dirty and a pollutant? Carbon remains essential to all life yet most commentators in public communication vilify the gaseous form. Taking this a step further, can you answer the question, why are so many highly educated individuals convinced there is truth in the global warming theory? Why do they consider there to be a grave danger to life on earth because atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing from our use of energy? Really, can we consider ourselves to be properly educated if we support the idea that we want to eliminate the very thing that gives us life?

Pollution

While it may seem off-topic, here I want to offer a definition of pollution. Often we hear that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and that pollution is killing us. But we have an accurate term to describe those things that kill us – they are properly called poisons, not pollutants. Accurately, pollution refers to those things that are distasteful, dirty or degrading in some way. By labelling something pollution, you are really saying that you resent the way someone is getting rid of something they don’t want. Exhaust from a car, smoke from a factory, sludge from mineral extraction, all are byproducts the person who is acting doesn’t want. They are the unwanted byproducts from a desired process. 

The fact is, both desired and undesired products came from this earth. We sort through the molecules found in nature, removing the usable ones and discarding the unwanted ones.  An analogy, while walking on a beach, pick up a handful of pebbles, walk a few steps away pick out the shiny ones, drop the rest back on the beach and you’ll get yelled at for being a polluter. To the ‘green’ purist, moving natural material about on the earth, the thing that keeps us alive is to be condemned. When we take carbon from one place on this earth and release it in another we are told we are polluting. 

Carbon dioxide and thinking

But what of fearing the effects of carbon dioxide? Are the facts with respect to the earth’s climate and the effects CO2 has on temperature, being presented understandably or is there widespread obfuscation? Are we being misled, either deliberately or possibly through improper interpretation of science?   

We can glean a bit of truth from an observation made by Dr Richard Feynman back in the ‘70s. While discussing scientific experimentation with a student he explained the folly of believing the validity of an experiment done by another without replicating it to check the results oneself, the student told him her professor said there’s no need to “reinvent the wheel”. Dr Feynman considers that type of thinking to be the root of the rot in the scientific education system. Though you need not reinvent that wheel, not knowing how to make it round will keep it from rolling far. Only by replicating another’s experiment and getting similar results can you know the information derived is accurate and you’re able to unravel more of nature’s secrets. 

Today we are taught to believe ‘experts’, yet we ignore the fact that all too many experts have proven to be wrong, time and again.  And so it is that we can never delegate our thinking for how else will we personally know? Multitudes of philosophers have considered that question and this essay isn’t about to give you a full answer but I need to make a couple of points to support my argument.

One of the prime tenets of knowledge is that we take most of what we believe from another person. We seldom are even able to do the original work of finding things out ourselves. By that I mean, have we measured how many parts per million of CO2 there are in air, have we recorded earth temperature changes over time, over both a 100-year and a million-year time span? Virtually all that we claim to know is the information that we acquire that suits or fits with our previously held beliefs. There are very few prime researchers and many repeaters. I am generalizing now, but I think we’re most in danger from the zealous repeaters rather than the prime researchers. Ideas based on discovery grounded in the real world can be changed but passionate agreement with a guru is usually beyond question. And of course, beliefs accepted without proof are impossible to refute with reasoned arguments. That’s why so many of our arguments fall on ‘deaf ears’. If each of us truly introspected and worked at trying to ‘know why we believe it is so’ for all things, the situation might change. But most people don’t remember why they’ve changed their minds when they do.

And so the question is, how often is the idea expressed as being ‘absolutely certain’,  a discovery that originated with the person expressing belief in the idea? I believe the original thinker will calmly point his audience to the steps leading to his conclusion rather than expect his audience to blindly believe. It is the repeater of information that takes a strident stand, mainly because they have never learned the steps needed to defend the conclusion they fail to question. 

And so it is that I share some of the things that lead me to believe the general public has been misled about carbon dioxide. And it’s why I can only say, I hope you think very seriously about carbon dioxide. 

I believe the science that claims that 4 ½ billion years ago our early earth’s atmosphere was mainly carbon dioxide and it was not until plant life appeared about a billion years later that free oxygen started to accumulate in the earth’s atmosphere. After another billion years, oxygen breathers formed and animal life became possible and the rest is our human history. But in those millions of years between the beginning of plants and the appearance of animals, a lot of plants died and left a legacy for us. It is believed this became the fossil fuel that now drives our industrial society. 

Those same two elements of life, hydrogen and carbon are in the fuel we use to run our machines. We call them hydrocarbons rather than carbohydrates as the molecules are smaller, lacking the oxygen component but they are nonetheless molecules containing various combinations of hydrogen and carbon. And as I said earlier, they grasp any loose oxygen when they are heated., releasing energy. Not a lot different than what takes place in our own bodies.

Our pre-industrial society appeared to stabilize carbon dioxide at some 280 parts per million, with the last 100 years having increased that to nearly 400 parts per million. Quite a number of scientists claimed the world’s plants were starving at that low level of atmospheric CO2. The scarcity of CO2 at 280 parts per million is apparent when we see how well plants grow when the amount of CO2 available is increased. Greenhouse growers routinely raise the CO2 content 4 or 5 times higher than normal and plant growth doubles while using less water. Humans burning fossil fuel has added to the CO2 load in the air. However, there is little argument with the idea that more carbon dioxide is beneficial to plant life.

Despite most of what the media reports, there are any number of scientists who do not consider our use of fuel and the CO2 released to be an impending catastrophic climate problem. The Oregon Petition Project gathered some 31,000 signatures from scientists, most with PhDs, questioning the validity of the global warming science. That petition was circulated by the author of a publication, Access to Energy, Dr Arthur Robinson. 

It was the publication  Access to Energy that warned me, many years ago. to beware of the ‘global warming claim’ when it first surfaced back in the late ’80s. The publisher then, the late Petr Beckmann, said, given the tiny amount of CO2 in the air and the minuscule amount added through human activity, it is highly unlikely that world climate or temperature could be driven by carbon dioxide. He has proven to be right. Over the past 15 years world temperature rise has stalled while carbon dioxide levels in air are still increasing.

The scary computer models used to predict forthcoming disasters are failing miserably, yet the shrill voices still scream, “Disaster ahead”.  

Why? Well for one thing the people who claim there is a climate problem get 10’s of billions of dollars, from you, from taxpayers, every year. They depend on you to continue to believe CO2 is causing a serious problem. They are desperate to make certain you remain willing to pay for their perks. With this speech, I’m trying to encourage you to hang on to your money instead. Don’t be so quick to give it away. 

I hope you’ll become convinced that it is a bad idea to trust anyone who labels carbon dioxide dirty. 

For a defence against manipulators, remember that the difference between food and fuel is the complexity of the molecules that make up carbohydrates and hydrocarbons.

Determining the truth

Humans are complex creatures. Life continuously presents us with unresolved puzzles to deal with. In the ancient world, before civilization, mistakes were resolved harshly. A wrong decision and that individual often became dinner. Such is no longer the case. In our modern world, many things can be separated into either a practical side or an intellectual side. On the practical side,  things deal with the here, the now and the personal. Correction becomes almost automatic in the practical world as we very quickly see where a mistake was made. But what about our intellectual beliefs? How well does self-correcting apply there?

The intellectual being the future, the remote and often, things pertaining to others or society, we can only rely on what ideas make more sense, and which ideas sound most reasonable. Any ideas that contradict our currently held beliefs raise unanswered questions. Our minds must be actively tuned to question those things we have previously accepted as true when there is a viable suggestion those ideas might be wrong.

An affluent society begins with access to abundant, low-cost energy. Because carbon dioxide is a byproduct of our energy use, restricting CO2 will reduce the amount of energy available to mankind. In the developed world it lowers our standard of living. In the undeveloped world, it is often a death sentence, the difference between survival and death is but a few calories of food. But that is what the environmental movement is advocating. The question is, will you continue to give to green causes if you know limiting CO2 is not beneficial to the world or to life on the earth? 

As Ayn Rand said, we face one fundamental choice in life; to think or not to think. And herein lies the dilemma – corrective feedback and proper interpretation. Reality remains the ultimate standard of measurement for determining right or wrong. Each of us is faced with the question, do we know or do we just think we know. By failing to ask that question we can easily cling tightly to our mistaken beliefs, holding them into our graves. 

It is regrettable to lose our lives because we were too stubborn to see where we were wrong, and we stubbornly refused to let go of an incorrect belief. But it is far worse if in our ignorance we seek to influence the political body, the governments that exercise control over many other, innocent people, causing their deaths with bad policies. Yet that is what is happening with the monstrous scam called global warming. Please consider wisely, where you place your support.