Taking The Long View On Carbon And Climate Change

The Earth has been emitting and absorbing carbon dioxide (CO₂) for more than half a billion years. The primary sources of current emissions are the roughly 500 active volcanic fields on the planet’s surface. These emissions are not only the spectacular, boutique eruptions seen in geography books, but relentlessly degassing volcanic systems that live quietly for millions of years.

Without this primary supply of CO₂, the Earth’s surface would degrade to a lifeless moonscape. Carbon dioxide is not “pollution” — it is a component of the atmosphere, vitally important to life on Earth. Its concentration level in the atmosphere is naturally variable in time. There is no such thing as a “normal” concentration.

Notwithstanding some recirculation in the biosphere, all of the emitted carbon is continuously “sunk” into the planet’s great sedimentary basins, where it is fixed as lithic carbon in limestone (13% carbon) and shale (0.8% carbon), virtually forever. The sinking or sequestration process is accomplished, in ocean basins, by phytoplankton, which metabolize CO₂ in the upper sunlit portion of the water column before expiring and settling to the bottom. At the same time, oxygen is released into the atmosphere. On the continents, carbon is sequestered in buried plant remains.

Paleo-climatologists estimate that, in Cretaceous time (65 million to 145 million years ago) CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere was two to 10 times greater than it is today as a result of high levels of volcanic activity. Still, life was abundant. The Earth responded to the increased CO₂ supply by sequestering carbon at a very high rate, eventually forming about 50% of the currently known deposits of oil in marine sedimentary basins. Also at this time, thick deposits of coal were formed in continental sediments.

Sequestered carbon, in the form of fossil fuels, is such a small portion of the entire carbon sink that it cannot be expressed as a meaningful percentage of the total. Burning the even smaller exploitable percentage of this fuel and temporarily returning that carbon to the atmosphere represents a very unlikely climate-changing force.

The atmosphere is not a static CO₂ reservoir with a limited capacity. It is a dynamic, flexible pipeline system that is constantly delivering CO₂ from the Earth’s interior to surface sedimentary basins. This has been the very foundation of life on Earth for hundreds of millions of years.

The huge mass (5 X 10 to the 15th tonnes) of the atmosphere, with all of its prevailing winds, storms and jet streams, is solar-powered. The burning of fossil fuels, at today’s rate, represents less than 1/10,000th of the energy potential of total solar radiation incident on the surface of the planet. Applying all of the energy produced by humanity to changing the atmosphere is akin to pushing a car with a feather. The Earth’s climate has a history of constant change, over millions of years without the help of human beings.

Today, anthropogenic global warming makes a convenient political cause due to its apparent high moral value and long-term consequences. The public is subject to a steady stream of selected “scientific” information from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) editorial board that supports the concept of anthropogenic global warming. The results of studies by IPCCsponsored scientists are not published directly. Recent leaks of private emails from the Potemkin fortress of the IPCC editorial board at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. suggest that only data that support the theory of human-caused global warming are published. This is a scientific anathema. I no more believe in polluting anything than I believe in the IPCC.

–The author is an engineer based in Gibsons, B.C.