Splitting the Atom - The Carbon Dioxide Atom
Give Me Decarbonization or Give Me Death
Gone Fission
Yes, yes, I know. I at least took the required common core, math and lab light, survey course in physics at my alma mater: Physics 101-102. Thus, I do know that carbon dioxide is a molecule, not an atom. It features two atoms of oxygen and one of carbon.
It’s just that when I am exposed to climate catastrophist propaganda, I can’t help but think of atoms splitting. First, there is the language issue. It is always carbon, an atom, when we/they actually mean carbon dioxide, a molecule. Why carbon?
First and foremost, it is linguistic manipulation. In Spanish, el carbón is the word for evil coal. In French, coal is charbon. If any fossil fuel has absolutely no redeeming features, at least according to popular opinion, it is coal. Carbon connotes something dirty, polluting, odoriferous, smoky, noxious—an eyesore and lungsore. When burned, it gives off poisonous carbon monoxide. When using coal for home heating, there must be precautions taken to ensure adequate ventilation in order to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning.
Carbon dioxide on the other hand is not poisonous. It is a colorless, odorless gas that we exhale and that plants use for food. A further benefit of CO2 for plants is that they require less water at increased levels of carbon (already feeling the pressure to conform to the demands of ClimateSpeak). CO2 is pumped into greehhouses at thousands of parts per million to enhance plant growth. There is so little reference to CO2’s benefits in popular discourse that if I had not been up until recently teaching in a public school, I would think that photosynthesis was no longer taught in basic science.
Decarbonize or Die
So, we are told, we must control carbon emissions. If we do not decarbonize, we are doomed. Except in reality, it is more accurate to say we must decarbondioxize. It is that word decarbonize that conjures up a vision in me of atom splitting. I picture some subatomic particle streaking in to blast that pesky carbon atom out of the equation. Then, there would be nothing left but beneficent oxygen. We could all breathe again.
I am assuming that the extra oxygen would offset the carbon. We could even raise revenue (For Ukraine, perhaps?) by selling oxygen credits.
Most people probably know the basics of the carbon dioxide/climate consensus—that 97% of scientists believe that CO2 is the driver of our planet’s alleged overheating (overheating is a given for the consensus members) that it is the main driver of anthropogenic global warming (now, according to the U.N.’s António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, global boilling). All of governments’ mitigation efforts, from a cessation of fossil fuel use, to driving EVs, to shunning carnivores, to electrifying everything, to even breathing less frequently, are a result of the belief that carbon (dioxide) is the root cause of global warming.
If 97% of scientists agree with the proposition, there must be 3% who do not. Who might they be? Presumably, they are bottom-of-their-class outliers at some obscure Deep South bible college. Let’s do a quick check. Here is a Dr. William Happer. Bob Jones University?
Co-Founder and Chair of the CO2 Coalition, Dr. William Happer, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Physics at Princeton University, is a specialist in modern optics, optical and radiofrequency spectroscopy of atoms and molecules, radiation propagation in the atmosphere, and spin-polarized atoms and nuclei.
Dr. Happer received a B.S. degree in Physics from the University of North Carolina in l960 and the PhD degree in Physics from Princeton University in l964. He began his academic career in 1964 at Columbia University as a member of the research and teaching staff of the Physics Department. While serving as a Professor of Physics he also served as Co-Director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory from 1971 to 1976, and Director from 1976 to 1979. In l980 he joined the faculty at Princeton University.
Strangely, given all we have heard about irredeemable CO2, Dr. Happer does not seem to see the threat. In fact, he says we are in a carbon drought. We could use more carbon dioxide. Plants would thank us, and they would use much less water. Vegetarians should be ecstatic at the prospect of happier, healthier plants.
The first scientist climate denier I ever came across was Dr. Richard Lindzen. What do we find in his CV?
Richard Lindzen, Ph.D. is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT.
He has made major contributions to the development of the current theory for the Hadley Circulation, which dominates the atmospheric transport of heat and momentum from the tropics to higher latitudes, and has advanced the understanding of the role of small scale gravity waves in producing the reversal of global temperature gradients at the mesopause, and provided accepted explanations for atmospheric tides and the quasi-biennial oscillation of the tropical stratosphere.
Lindzen is a recipient of the AMS’s Meisinger, and Charney Awards, the AGU’s Macelwane Medal, and the Leo Huss Walin Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. He is a corresponding member of the NAS Committee on Human Rights, and has been a member of the NRC Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and the Council of the AMS.
He has also been a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.
Dr. Lindzen was a recent guest on Robert Bryce’s Power Hungry Podcast.
My introduction to Robert Bryce came with reading Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of "Energy Independence". Since then, I have been a regular reader of his columns and more recently, a regular listener to his podcasts. Bryce is extremely knowledgeable about the oil industry and related energy matters. His Iron Law of Electricity is right up there with Bernoulli's principle. People and their governments, to paraphrase Bryce, will do anything to get electricity. There are, however, two bones I have to pick with Bryce’s philosophy.
First, he says he is not political. He’s an independent. He just wants to help pave the way for the worldwide availability of cheap, reliable and abundant energy, a must for a modern, properous economy. To that end, the best strategy is natural gas to nuclear. I could not agree more. However, I do not understand how someone can have that goal and not realize how deeply politics are involved in achieving it, or even more important, in preventing it from happening.
After initially paying some attention to James Hansen’s 1988 Congressional testimony about the existential dangers of global warming, I soon came to believe that climate science was political science, much more politics than science. And there is clearly one party that is pushing the catastrophic climate change agenda and also pushing an anti-industry, anti-fossil fuel, anti-growth program for supposedly combating it. Hint: it’s not the Republicans.
My second frustration with Bryce, is his seeming acceptance of the premise that CO2 emissions are the villain in all this, that emissions must be curtailed. I have on occasion shouted at my screen and begged him in a few emails to interview Happer or Lindzen or any of the other real scientists who do not buy into the decarbonization hysteria or the headlong rush toward renewable energy, actually unreliable and expensive energy. I was ecstatic when I saw that Bryce had scheduled an interview with Lindzen.
The Love of the Marvellous and the Disbelief of the True—
Early on, Bryce asks Lindzen about his earned notoriety for his statements arguing that there is no catastrophic climate change going on, that there is no existential threat from climate change. Lindzen replies:
I mean, look, let’s face it. The existential threat hypothesis, you know, narrative, has nothing to do with science. It doesn’t even have to do with the U.N.’s IPCC science. It’s a complete political measure. It’s bizarre. It makes no sense no matter how you look at it, and yet by constant, constant repetition, and certain modifications, and a dependence on the ignorance of their audience and the quest for virtue signaling, it somehow has taken over.
I felt a warm glow infuse me. My opinion was being reinforced by the great Lindzen. It’s the politics, stupid.
If you think that the corruption of climate science (or science, for that matter) is a recent phenomeon, think again. By about 1990, Lindzen says that some major institutions had already been coopted. The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and the National Sciencd Foundation “were all in on this.”
I wrote a paper in…1989 called Some Coolness Concerning Global Warming. I sent it to Science Magazine, and it was returned immediately. They said they weren't even going to review it. There was no interest in it.
So, I sent it to the American Meteorological Society, and they reviewed it, published it, and the editor was fired immediately….
But this became common. There was something called ClimateGate in the early 2000s where somebody released the emails from the University of East Anglia which was pushing this issue, and there were all these discussions with people like Michael Mann and Phil Jones about how to make sure that publications that questioned this did not get published.
Toward the end of the dialogue, Bryce refers to a recent interview in which former Georgia Tech climate scienttist, Judith Curry, had told Bryce that she believes there is no urgency to do anything about climate change.
Given the lack of urgency, Bryce says that, “I posited that the best no regret strategy as we look at the future is natural gas to nuclear. That is a no regret strategy because both are in abundance. They’re low carbon (There’s that accepting the premise, again, ed.) and can scale up.” Bryce then asks Lindzen what he thinks.
“Look, there’s a simple best strategy,” Lindzen responds. “And what is that?” Bryce asks.
Forget about decarbonization and do everything necessary to make your societies as prosperous as possible. And that’s perfectly obvious because if you look at CO2, if you believe it’s terrible, you notice that nothing we’ve done—and we’ve already spent trillions of dollars—has had the least impact on its rate of growth.
So, if you think it’s a big problem, and what you’re doing is not changing the situation, the only thing you’re doing by raising the prices, curbing energy, all these things, is reducing the resilience of your society and that’s sadistic.
Lindzen goes on to say that the question is why are people doing this. He cites the fact that since the first Earth Day, the environmental movement has concentrated on the energy sector.
The energy sector involves trillions of dollars…and so what is the implication of that. Well, if you’re going to spend trillions of dollars somebody will get them, right? Or some group will get them….
I think the Inflation Reduction Act involves $9 trillion for climate related issues. You take 2% of that and that’s about enough to fund generously the campaigns of every elected official in Washington.
Sometimes I think we have lost our faculty of common sense in the quest to appear sophisticated, to virtue signal that we follow the science. We feel so much smarter that way. As Lindzen says, however, the moment you put that article the in front of science (as in follow the science), it is an indication that you do not understand what science is. Science is a process. Scientific knowledge is always changing, always being challenged, just as the climate is in a constant state of flux.
So, I hereby renounce the science, temporarily at least, and will rely on common sense until this hysteria passes. The climate crisis/renewable energy intellectual fad is our Dutch Tulipomania or South Sea Bubble—an extraordinary popular delusion and madness of the crowd.
Just as there are remnants of optical telegraph semaphore towers to be found in Europe, so at some future date, our descendants may find Stonhenge like fossilized wind turbine towers and ossified solar panels strewn about overgrown, otherwise empty fields. Tourists will wonder what in the world were they thinking.
An excellent thought provoking article which I have re-read.
Given that climate change has been a normal planetary cycle for untold millennia, and that the CO2 equilibria exchange cycles with terrestrial plants and ocean water and organisms are complex, it is best to default to 101 principles and pay attention to those scientists who cut their teeth pre-DEI and ESG.
You aim is true, Spike.