CO2 corruption rules. Scientists, whatever that means, are first government employees: universities, even private universities, are mostly financially dependent upon governments. And the governments have been fossil fuels dominated for two centuries now. Fossil fuels are powerful, in part because they are tyranny friendly, intrinsically, as fossil fuel research, production, and transportation is capital intensive, but requires few workers, especially at the highest levels.
For the last 45 years the Greenhouse Crisis has been clear and blatant, yet fossil fuel usage has only grown, greatly thanks to the manipulation of the fossil fuel lobby. The storage of CO2 in the atmosphere is so great in 2023, that, absent a deliberate effort in the proximal future to lower drastically the CO2 parts per million in the atmosphere, sea level will go up at least ten meters. Yes, that’s a personal theory, from what happened in the Eemian, around 120,000 years ago, when sea levels were 6 meters higher..a dnthe CO2 ppm equivalent was significantly less (a third less). Now, right, the Eemian warming was forced by orbital characteristics… but for reasons too long to expose here, I believe that the orbital forcing induces the CO2 forcing. Right now we have a man-made GreenHouse Gaz forcing on a scale not seen in… thirty million years (at least!)
Many, manipulated by the fossil fuelists, say: no problem, no panic. However Earth’s climate is the largest machine around. The mass of Earth’s atmosphere is approximately 5.1 × 10^18 kilograms. That is 5 million gigatons. Moreover, it is entangled with the oceans, with a mass around 300 times greater… And certainly the upper layers of the ground are also involved. So the climate system has huge inertia. In the F = ma equation, m is the mass of the climate, F the forcing, and a the acceleration, is what people do not see much of. What they will experience is the speed of change, which one gets by integrating a. Another problem is nonlinear effects which will augment the F, the force, as the Earth’s heats up. That’s the self-feeding, exponential character of the catastrophe.
The anti-nuclear lobby is a striking example of the lunacy commandeered by the fossil fuel lobbies. Recently the head of IAEA had to recognize that there was no problem with releasing tritium off Fukushima, but still, he recognized that he had to beg for forgiveness, due the masses of people who suffer from radiation fear. So they freak out about tritium… because they know nothing and they impose on all respect for their demented, immoral ignorance… That means they force everybody to respect irrationality.
And even more striking example of the machiavellianism of the fossil fuel lobbies has been the present course pursued by mainstream ecology: mainstream ecology utterly failed. And that’s no accident: that’s exactly what the fossil fuel tyranno-industrial complex wanted. The proportion of decarbonated energy is the same as 45 years ago… but of course, as energy usage augmented enormously in south and east Asia, in absolute value the emissions are higher than ever: 55 gigatons of CO2 per year (if one includes steel and cement production, plus deforestation, as one should).
On top of that other GreenHouse gasses, methane, CH4, Nitrogen oxides, NOx, Chlorofluorocarbons of all types, etc. add another third in CO2 equivalence.
That gets us above 600 ppm of CO2 equivalents, a percentage of forcing not seen in at least 30 million years. At the time, there was ice only on the highest mountains in Antarctica. More exactly it seems that around 600 ppm of CO2 is the tipping point for glaciation in Antarctica, and we are motoring through it at roughly 1% of added GreenHouse gases per year…
Oh, shut up, they bleat self-admiringly, we are so “net zero”, don’t you listen to our mellifluous discourses? Don’t you know we are net zero in 2050? Alternatively, we can destroy industry right away, and we will be a neat zero right away! (The latter being the “solution” in Europe and most prominently, in France!)
The treacherous ecologists with their middle age windmills, and hate for nuclear energy, have fostered the offshorization of employment and regulation to enslaving tyrants. Unbeknownst to themselves, they do as their masters want.
Nor are they alone: actually these ecologists are of course nothing, they just grate like Greta.
Ecology has served as a pretext to deindustrialization and offshorization, the process which advantages the plutocrats and transformed the Roman Republic into the Roman dictatorship.
The extremely highly educated, but just as ridiculous and treacherous French PM was recently insisting France had to totally deindustrialize in the next seven years. Just to cut the emissions (4 tons/year/person). Actually France uses 11 tons… in “China” and its ilk… Which means that PM Borne and her predecessor have sent 7/11 of the French economy to China. Borne est bornée….
Just as ecologists have been paid (in fame and money) to promote ineffective “solutions” to the GreenHouse Gaz (GHG) crisis, scientists have been paid to pretend that the crisis was a crisis, but not that bad of a crisis.
I begged to differ totally. Not only are we on a +7 degree C trajectory for 2100 CE, but should nonlinear factors come into play, we could get higher than that.
To my satisfaction, I made even more enemies at Berkeley than I already had, when I attacked one of the main climate high priests who pretended a magic stop to climate heating was possible… the sort of magic fossil fuels lobbyists want everybody to believe, so that putting an end to fossil fuels burning would be an instant stop, an act of utmost sorcery straight out of Harry Potter, just on a much grander and altruistic scale… didn’t they all learn witchcraft, reading Harry Potter? It works! At least in the popular imagination:
[UC Berkeley got 50 million dollars from British Petroleum shortly before this admirable bout of magical thinking …]
So what’s going, ladies, gentlemen, and species in between, or beyond like yours truly?
We are above 600 ppm of equivalent CO2 in GHG.
Indeed on top of the CO2, we have the other man made GreenHouse Gasses, methane, CH4, Nitrogen oxides, NOx, Chlorofluorocarbons of all types, etc.
They add another third in CO2 equivalence.That gets us above 600 ppm of CO2 equivalents, a percentage of forcing not seen in at least 30 million years. At the time, there was ice only on the highest mountains in Antarctica.
What exactly the levels of CO2 were in the distant past is still a matter of debate, it seems. However, it seems pretty certain that around 600 ppm of CO2 is the tipping point for glaciation in Antarctica…and we are motoring through it at roughly 1% per year… Now, granted, there is inertia in the system… But that’s part of the problem: when a monster avalanche starts, it looks cute in the beginning, a little cloud.
The exponential surge may have started (helped by coming El Nino). The planet just experienced its warmest June ever recorded, researchers said, with deadly heat waves scorching Texas, Mexico and India. Off the coasts of Antarctica, sea ice levels this year have plummeted to record lows.
The North Atlantic ocean has been hot. Surface temperatures in May were 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.6 degrees Celsius, warmer than typical for this time of year, breaking previous records by an unusually large margin.
This climate Armageddon is going to get way worse. California should start thinking about daming the Golden Gate… A big bad Golden Dam…
A solution? Besides hefty carbon taxes and cutting all and any subsidies to fossil fuels… Besides launching a hydrogen economy (which can use much of the existing fossil fuel and natural gas infrastructure)… Launch a Manhattan style project to develop nuclear fusion. It has become just a question of money, using high temperature superconductors.
Some of the preceding was published in the New York Times, and the usual silly objections by the ignorant to thermonuclear fusion were also published in retort. I will reply to them in a separate essay.
Patrice Ayme
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 