The New Improved Apocalypse!

OK. . .

A while ago, I blogged about the algal bloom apocalypse set to kill us all by about 2060, but was hampered by the lack of specific information on that point. “Fortunately”, I have now resolved that problem and can talk about it in more detail.

Before I start properly, I want to recap on the general picture. The problem is parallel to and separate from climate change related to increase in carbon dioxide – note that I haven’t mentioned the anthropogenic aspect because this would happen anyway, wherever the excess is coming from. Anthropogenic climate change is of course both real and catastrophically dangerous to us all as such, and that shouldn’t need saying but apparently it does because people don’t seem to want to believe it. But it isn’t the only problem. The ocean absorbs 30% of the excess carbon dioxide, and dissolved in water it becomes carbonic acid, making the oceans more acidic. The immediate problem with this is that animals whose hard parts are made of calcium carbonate such as most molluscs and many corals will have those dissolved and they will die out. It’s fatal to them. But there’s another problem. The situation promotes the growth of plankton which is responsible for the poisonous “red tides”, which release paralytic toxins into the sea water and the atmosphere which stop skeletal muscles, including the ones which enable breathing in humans and most other land vertebrates, from working. Research has shown that the current increase in the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere and oceans will lead to that catastrophe in the 2060s. This much I knew, but I didn’t know the details of the research.

Well, I’ve now finally managed to track down the details and I didn’t find them particularly reassuring to say the least. This is how it goes. In 2018, a group of marine biologists created a sealed column of water in the Caribbean Sea where they were able to control carbon dioxide levels. As they gradually increased the concentration, which pre-industrially was 330 parts per million in the atmosphere at sea level, they found that at around 800 p.p.m. a particular species of alga, Vicicitus globosus, formerly known as Chattonella globosa, began to thrive and multiply out of control, a situation often referred to as an algal bloom. This organism in particular produces cytotoxins, which are among the most powerful poisons known and cause huge amounts of damage to vertebrates. They cause liver damage and failure, and paralyse muscles, meaning that they would kill any vertebrate coming into contact with them in high enough amounts. Nor would this effect be confined to the oceans, because it’s so powerful that even the tiny amounts present in the air onland would be enough to kill people. We’re talking about a world with no vertebrates at all by the end of the century, including humans.

Although this particular finding is quite recent and it isn’t clear how plausible it is, I have previously mentioned normalcy bias here. It isn’t enough just to think “well things have carried on before so they’ll surely carry on in future”, and in the same way as it might be difficult to come to terms with what happened to the people on the Titan who left what were described as “presumed human remains”, the sheer scale of this disaster is hard to comprehend and therefore take seriously. This is Mount St Helens all over again, on a global scale. Moreover, no real efforts are being made to allay this problem. In fact it’s definitely worthwhile to talk about the con that is “carbon capture and storage” while I’m at it.

Carbon capture is a myth. It suits multinational companies and world governments to con us into believing that we can carrying on buying all that stuff from China, drive around in petrol-driven vehicles or EVs powered by fossil fuels, fly all over the world in heavier than air craft and plant a few trees, or even a lot of trees, to offset the problem. There are even vast machines in Switzerland and Iceland which take the carbon dioxide out of the air. But it’s still a myth. The plants (not the growing kind) run off electricity produced by fossil fuel powered stations which produce more than two and a half times as much of the gas as they absorb. If it’s run off sustainable power, that power is not going into the grid and reducing the carbon dioxide production of other domestic and industrial power use. Moreover, if carbon-neutral energy is used to power the machines to absorb it, why isn’t it just used to replace the processes releasing carbon dioxide in the first place? If a grid has enough renewable or otherwise sustainable power to run such a set of devices, it has enough power of that kind to run the other things which are currently running off fossil fuel generation anyway. Trams, buses and bikes are other ways of reducing this just as much.

In 2000, it was forecast that carbon capture and storage (CCS) (I know there are other kinds, which I’m coming to) would be absorbing 4900 megatons of carbon a year by 2020. In reality, it only got to 10 megatons, so for whatever reason it’s a complete failure, and is clearly only there so governments and oil companies can pretend they’re doing something about it when they’re not. The emission of carbon annually is in any case 36000 megatons a year, so even if it had reached that target it’d still be a drop in the ocean. While I’m at it, a lot of hydrogen is produced either using fossil fuel electricity or actually from fossil fuels directly, so that’s also a load of nonsense.

Then there’s tree-planting. Oh dear. Assuming it does get done, a number of problems emerge. Trees can be much darker than the ground they cover, which leads to overall global warming rather than cooling whether or not it soaks up carbon. This is particularly true in temperate areas. They’re also often planted where there was no forest biome before, thereby damaging the ecosystem, and in peatland areas like round here, this reduces the amount of carbon absorbed as peatland is a better carbon sink than trees. They can displace human activities to other areas, so for example farming, thereby damaging biomes which were previously better, and they tend to be monocultures which are the opposite of biodiversity. If not monitored for decades or potentially centuries, they can be cut down and exploited in other ways which doesn’t promote their role as a carbon absorber. That said, we’re not talking about climate change directly here. Tree planting can only rationally be supported if it’s in an area of net cooling, is a mix of indigenous tree species, is planted by people who are properly involved with local people. It should also be monitored for at least a decade. Experts in the field advise the restoration of small farmers, hunters (boo hiss) and nomadic pastoralists. In other words, climate change mitigation solutions have to be people-centred. Most carbon absorption wouldn’t be from trees, and the idea that this is going on acts as an excuse for allowing carbon emissions in the first place.

Tree-planting is one example of activity marketed as carbon offsetting. It works through brokers and clients, similarly to selling and buying land, and very long chains of people can be involved, all of whom need to be competent, trustworthy and reliable. It can be very difficult to trace what’s happening, and it doesn’t help that it’s mainly a marketing exercise. There are four types of carbon offsetting, not all relevant to ocean acidification, and in fact it’s quite difficult to cover this topic because most of the focus is on climate change and not the ocean problem, which is less well-known and has had less research done into it. The four areas are: tree-planting, investment in green energy, investment in energy efficiency such as more efficient cookers and insulation schemes, and reduction of other greenhouse gases. The last one is probably irrelevant to the issue here, but in terms of climate change, many other greenhouse gases such as water vapour and methane are a much bigger problem molecule for molecule than carbon dioxide.

There has been a tendency recently for people to say it’s okay to push climate change past the safe limit and then make extra efforts to pull it back again. This is basically never a good idea. Regarding tree planting, when it’s a good thing, it takes decades for the tree to absorb enough carbon to be significant, and in that time the ocean may well have been acidified beyond the trigger point. Consumers are less well-informed about carbon offsetting than other environmental subjects.

Carbon emission calculations often miss out the carbon used in manufacture, which can be the majority of the carbon produced by a product over its useful lifetime. Obviously after it’s been scrapped it may well emit significant carbon dioxide too. It’s about improving image more than actually doing anything. Investing in green energy projects is more effective than planting trees. Offsetting is also often publicised before anything at all has been done, so the decades it takes for trees to cause a net loss haven’t even started when the label has been applied. Consumers can be more likely to buy something if they think they’re doing something good, and that overall increases consumerism and therefore carbon emissions, if a connection is made, say, between buying a product and planting a tree. Overconsumption is never a good thing environmentally.

Now I could go on more about this, for instance it’s bugging me that I haven’t mentioned the sexual harrassment and rape connection with tree-planting projects or the dishonesty involved, but I don’t want to drift too far from the issue of the plankton species which is an existential threat to much complex life on this planet including humans. So, Vicicitus globosus.

Most people are familiar with the algal bloom situation, where an overgrowth of blue-green algae in particular leads to reservoirs being declared off-limits because they’re too dangerous. This is another similar risk, but the V. globosus situation is somewhat different. This species is not a blue-green alga but an actual alga. Just to clarify, so-called blue green “algae” are not algae but related to chloroplasts and are more like bacteria who can photosynthesise, although they do contain chlorophyll. They’re scientifically known as “cyanobacteria”. Vicicitus, who incidentally is not in Wikipedia under that name, is a protist, that is, a usually single-celled organism with a clear-cut nucleus which is not a land plant, fungus or animal, but they don’t form a single related group of organisms solely descended from a common ancestor. For instance, Amoeba is a protist, as is Chlorella. If they were considered as a single related group, animals, plants and fungi would all have to be included, as we’re all descended from single-celled organisms, and in many cases each of us actually used to be a single-celled organism. Vicicitus is a green alga. It has chloroplasts like other algae and in basic terms it’s a plant. It’s already had an effect on the ocean, in that it impacts the populations of small and medium-sized animal plankton. The acidification as such also reduced the effectiveness of enzymes since they are tuned to operate at very precise levels of acidity, slowing metabolism. This leaves more organic waste in the water, which acts as a fertiliser for the alga in question, and also has a geological effect because the organic matter which isn’t being digested as fast due to slower digestive enzymes is not broken down into a form which can be used to build up more complex molecules, effectively starving sea life. Algae, however, don’t need complex nutrients because they’re basically plants, and in particular this encourages the growth of Vicicitus.

To get some idea of the harm this alga does, there have been a series of mass fish deaths related to algal blooms of this species in various parts of the Pacific in recent years. Wellington Harbour in Aotearoa/New Zealand has suffered a number of different algal bloom events associated with different species, including this one, in 2010. In a study in 2015, an extract of the toxin was found to kill all nine species of distantly related protists within ten minutes and a rotifer (an animal, unfortunately) within half an hour. It’s also been found in waters off Australia, Japan and China, and outside the Pacific region in Greece and Brazil, and the closely related Chattonella marina off Norway, India and the Netherlands, both among many other places. The poison causes the shells and the cytoplasm itself of the other organisms mentioned to disintegrate, so in other words it’s like ricin. A two-cell alga called Alexandrium catenella, which is incidentally also associated with paralytic shellfish poisoning, also lost its integrity and the cells separated. The exact degree of toxicity seems to be unknown, but algal toxins are generally extremely potent and deadly. In fact, earlier on before I tracked down the papers, I thought it was saxitoxin, produced by A. catenella, which was the culprit. Saxitoxin is one of the poisons which pufferfish use. And it’s going to be in the atmosphere within half a lifetime if things go on the way they are, because the oceanic concentration of carbon dioxide will rise above eight hundred parts per million by about 2060, and in fact probably before that given the kind of inadequate climate mitigation strategies mentioned above.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration provides a vital part of the data and research on this situation and of course many others. From this point on, of course, the US government’s withdrawal of funding from the NOAA means that the world is probably not going to find out more about this situation any more, and also any other threats as yet unanticipated. It reminds me of that situation in ‘Futurama’ where garbage asteroids are produced in space and are in danger of crashing into New New York and destroying it, about which concerns are raised and “were dismissed as depressing”. Just because no more research is being done into a problem, it doesn’t make it go away.

A few things occur to me about this. One is that it might suit the super-rich absolutely fine to allow this situation to develop because it means they can sell the public purified air without which we would all suffocate. It also makes me wonder if they’ve come to believe their own propaganda about the situation and believe there will somehow be a techical fix. Finally, Musk’s interest in colonising Mars makes sense in a context where such catastrophes of this render Earth disposable in billionaire’s eyes, but in fact it doesn’t look like a sustainable Mars colony will be possible for much longer than we’ve actually got, or for that matter orbital space habitats, and as I’ve said before my version of the Doomsday Argument strongly suggests that they will never happen or the probability of us not living in them is tiny, but we’re not so it won’t. I don’t want to spell that out again.

Finally, this is not a guilt trip. The system makes it impossible to live one’s life without being involved in environmental damage, and also makes it very hard to do anything about it. I’m not pointing the finger here: even the billionaires are only acting according to how the economic system determines that they will. But it would be nice to find a solution to this, wouldn’t it? And they want us to be doom-laden, so hope is subversive.

The Fog Of Misinformation

Back when I used to do a lot of stuff in the peace movement, during the first Gulf War in fact, this guy came up to us and said that Saddam Hussein burning oil fields should convince us that he was a madman and that the war was therefore a good thing. This struck me as totally weird because at that very moment I was thinking that that very incident was a big reason why the war was so wrong. It’s astonishing, sometimes, how the very same “evidence” can seem to convince two people to draw exactly opposite conclusions.

My understanding of rhetoric is extremely primitive and outdated, but I’m aware of the classic division into three factors: pathos, ethos and logos. I didn’t know this division at the time, but did think in this way. Logos is the use of rational arguments, ethos the reputation of the speaker and pathos the evocation of emotion. It’s actually slightly different from that if I remember correctly, such as eliciting sympathy in the audience. Ethos sounds similar to the argument from authority and ad hominem fallacies, but this is not so much about rational argument as how people are persuaded. Because rhetoric has been used so much for negative ends, this sounds like a nefarious approach, but it need not be so. For instance, it could be used to address someone’s anxieties or downheartedness and it needn’t be deceptive.

I think we all know this stuff is out there even if we don’t identify it, and we use it all the time, but naming things helps us notice and think about them. I was at this point, in 1991, naïve of them, but it occurred to me that arguments for the retention of nuclear weapons, the justification for the Gulf War and so forth at least aspired to be rational, and I didn’t want to play their game, because it seemed to me that this way of portraying things was an important part of patriarchal discourse, so I decided it would be more effective to argue emotionally. By that, I don’t at all mean crying, screaming and shouting. I did enough of that, mainly in the privacy of my own bedroom, but not in conversations with the general public or acquaintances. I should point out here that the 1991 Gulf War constituted a pivotal moment in my adult life, moving me in a direction I’m still pursuing now in 2023. Although I am talking about pathos here, Immanuel Kant and the Categorical Imperative were also important in my strategy.

Our children got really sick of hearing the Categorical Imperative from me, but I’ll repeat it here:

Act on that maxim which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law of nature.

– Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten

(„Der kategorische Imperativ ist also nur ein einziger, und zwar dieser: handle nur nach derjenigen Maxime, durch die du zugleich wollen kannst, dass sie ein allgemeines Gesetz werde.“).

This has several formulations in his work, and although I often quoted it, I don’t actually agree with it because it varies according to how an act is described. For instance, someone steals a loaf of bread from a bakery (24601?). Is that person depriving someone of a means of earning a living or are they trying to save their loved ones’ lives by preventing them from starving to death? Which universalisation is more appropriate. It can also be used disturbingly effectively as an argument against abortion: one cannot will that one’s life as a foetus be terminated, since one wouldn’t exist to do the willing. Since I view the ethics of abortion as the single central issue from which all ethics is derived, there must be a flaw in this argument and therefore probably in the Categorical Imperative itself. Nonetheless, it works well as a rhetorical device and appeal to the emotions.

One example of the kind of thing I used to say was, “if your mother was in Baghdad right now, would you feel okay about the city being bombed?”. This is a naked appeal to the emotions, but seeing as each person has infinite value (should be treated as an end rather than a means, as Kant would put it), it’s a fair one. I’m not saying this is an effective way of arguing. It’s particularly questionable if the person one’s talking to has a particularly bad relationship with their mother or is an orphan, and it feels kind of sneaky. I’m currently less persuaded that it’s the right approach, but maybe someone could come up with an emotive argument which will help me convince myself that it is.

Another area in which Kant comes into how I think about ego defences. Kant believed that the blizzard of sense impressions with which we are constantly assaulted is structured into a world as we understand it through things called categories. These include the likes of existence, non-existence, negation and plurality, to choose a few arbitrary examples. I noted at the time that the ego defences, such as rationalisation, projection, transference and so forth, were remarkably similar to categories, and drew from this the conclusion that we actually don’t use reason at all, or rather, we do, but it has an emotional “mould” to it. It isn’t a case of reason being one thing and emotion another, but reason at all times being dictated to and dependent upon emotion. This is because, to use a stereotype, we’re human. We’re not calculators or computers.

This is of course very consequential. For instance, it means that NVC is fundamentally misconceived and involves being in denial about the ineradicably emotional element of all thought. This is more significant to me than most people though. Another aspect of this is that we only ever fancifully imagine that we believe the things we do merely because of cold reasoning, because there is no such thing. What may happen, much of the time, is that we have an opinion and proceed to rationalise it by finding a reason to believe it. It’s only ever what we want to believe, not something we’ve concluded through logic. Another example: people who eat meat are highly motivated to reject veganism as an ethical position, meaning that they may want to believe that the species they eat are incapable of suffering, not conscious, unable to feel pain or perhaps feel less acutely than humans. They may then find reasons for this which skew their world view in other ways. For instance, Christine Battersby once argued to me that a non-language user was incapable of consciousness. This is highly convenient as such beings are almost literally voiceless, so it’s tantamount to saying that if you can’t speak, not only are you not entitled to an opinion but that you can’t even have one and don’t have interests to consider. You may understand why I feel rather strongly about this.

I may have moderated my position on this somewhat, because it’s potentially problematic. There seems to be such a thing as reality “out there” somewhere and emotional arguments seem to be persuasive in the face of evidence and to have major political consequences, and therefore consequences which affect people. It’s also very much the position of a privileged person. It’s substantially an attempt to compensate for one’s unconscious bias, as it might be put today, and the problem with that is that if it’s adopted by a member of a marginalised group it may cause further marginalisation, and possibly even get murdered or something as a result.

Therefore, we do unfortunately probably need good and apparently rational, evidence-based arguments, probably in all political and social arguments, or at least most. The use of emotive arguments seems to have led us to a position where people feel entitled to their own facts, and hence a lack of dialogue or mutual understanding. Another problem is that you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into, and while we pursue emotional means of persuasion, we’re doing that if we succeed, and if we later turn out to be wrong, what are we supposed to do? Are we then supposed to use emotive arguments again? Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Actually, I wanted to talk about climate change myths in this post, so that’s what I’ll do. Well, not so much myths as statements which are often made about the situation we find ourselves in. Partly to help myself, I’m going to make some bullet points:

• Cold weather refutes climate change
• Water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is
• The current change is due to fluctuations which would’ve occurred anyway
• Some glaciers are growing
• Climate change is good for the environment
• Renewable power generation is bad
• Renewable power generation is too expensive
• The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is from volcanoes, not human sources
• Sunlike stars fluctuate like the Sun

It is true that the phrase “global warming” was swapped out for “(anthropogenic) climate change” a while back. This is because the latter describes what’s happening more precisely, and such changes are part of how science works. All conclusions in science are provisional and the model has shifted from a straightforward idea of trapped heat warming the whole surface of the planet indiscriminatedly to the idea of more energy from the Sun staying near Earth’s surface. Before I state that more clearly, I want to describe what happens.

This is what I went running and did Yoga in yesterday. Some of the yellow bits are notably washed out in the photo because they are giving off more light than the visible light falling on them from the Sun. This is fluorescence: some substances absorb ultraviolet light and re-emit it in the visible range, at a different wavelength. Greenhouse gases do something similar. They absorb shorter wavelengths of light and re-emit them as infrared, including the wavelengths which constitute radiant heat. This causes more energy to stay in the lower part of the atmosphere than would otherwise happen. This is actually essential to life as we know it. Without greenhouse gases, the equator would be below freezing. Incidentally, I read this piece of information in ‘Everybody’s Book Of Facts’, published in 1939. That’s how long this has been known about, at least. The chief greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are water vapour and carbon dioxide, the former being much more powerful than the latter.

Trapping solar heat in the troposphere, the turbulent layer of atmosphere closest to the surface, is trapping solar energy. This increases the turbulence after which this layer is named, changing the fluctuation of the jet stream, boosting hurricanes and other storms. Although mean global temperature is rising because of this, it can mean colder weather in some places because of effects like evaporation increasing and making air more humid, thereby increasing rainful which takes heat out of the atmosphere, and causing masses of air to expand as they warm, pushing colder masses of air into other parts of the world which don’t usually have them. It supercharges climate rather than simply warming it.

As I’ve said, water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Venus used to have an ocean. This evaporated gradually, making its atmosphere very humid, and that trapped solar energy close to the surface. That heat then baked the carbon dioxide out of the rocks, ultimately leading to today’s scorching hellscape hot enough to melt lead. This fact is sometimes used to suggest that the relatively small amount of carbon dioxide released in industrial processes is insignificant next to the much larger amount of water vapour in the atmosphere. This is wrong, because released carbon dioxide increases water evaporation which exacerbates the greenhouse effect.

Climate fluctuates constantly over geological time scales. It’s sometimes stated that global temperatures today are higher than at any time since the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. This is completely false. The highest temperatures since then were 41 million years ago during the Eocene. It’s hard to believe this because the axial tilt was the same as today, meaning that the lands of the midnight Sun were subtropical even during months of darkness. Nonetheless this was so. It is true that it’s the hottest it’s been since humans evolved, and that’s more significant because we’re used to living on a cooler planet than we currently have. The rate of change is also important.

The current cycle of ice ages and warmer intervals is due to Milankovitch cycles. When I Googled that, “Milankovitch cycles GCSE” popped up, so I’m not going to bother to talk about them specifically because I presume it’s part of a general secondary education, but I will say that we’re supposed to be due for another ice age and the fact that it’s hotter on average than it has been for many centuries merely means the ice age we would’ve had otherwise is actually mitigating climate change, and this is far from the usual cycle.

Some glaciers are growing. This is pointed to by a few climate change deniers as evidence against global warming. However, the glaciers which are growing are unusual. This illustration shows Sermeq Kujalleq, the Jakobshavn Glacier in Kalaalit Nunaat (Greenland), which is fed by a cyclical cold water current which varies, so it grows and shrinks over several years. This current has been altered by climate change, which as I’ve said involves the capture of more energy from the Sun in our global systems rather than simple temperature increase. The question to be answered here is how to ensure that something like this doesn’t look like an excuse or cherry-picking to an outsider, and unfortunately the answer is probably that people need to know, for their own sake and the sake of making political decisions, how science ideally works. It may not be enough to know why one particular glacier is growing. There are others, but the overall trend is shrinkage.

How do we know that the source of the increasing mean global temperature is not from the Sun? This one is quite straightforward: the troposphere is warming and the stratosphere cooling. The turbulent portion of Earth’s atmosphere, where most of what we would generally think of as weather is happening, ends where it stops getting colder with height, at the tropopause. Above this, air currents move horizontally, hence the name “stratosphere”. This layer shows a cooling trend, and is, like the rest of the atmosphere, exposed to the Sun. This is happening because greenhouse gases trap heat lower down, preventing light and heat which would otherwise reflect off the surface from warming the stratosphere. If global warming were due to the Sun warming the planet as part of some kind of cycle or warming trend, the stratosphere would be warming, but it’s cooling, so the simplest explanation, i.e. the most scientific one, is that climate change is not due to fluctuations in solar activity.

The influence of solar radiation on a body is referred to as “radiative forcing”, which is the rate of change of energy through a surface caused by climate change factors, measured in watts per square metre. Due to the peculiar nature of the troposphere, with its turbulent winds, cloud cover and precipitation, it only makes sense to measure this outside that layer of atmosphere, at the tropopause and the top of the stratosphere. This does vary, due to Earth having an elliptical orbit around the Sun and therefore receiving less radiation from it in the northern summer than the northern winter. This seems to many people to be the wrong way round, incidentally. It also varies because the Sun has a sunspot cycle as mentioned on my post on that star. This lasts eleven years, and involves a build-up of sunspots, which are cooler and therefore emit less light than the general photosphere of the Sun, which then wanes again, making the Sun slightly variable. These fluctuations are not reflected in the trend towards global warming, and therefore changes in solar activity are not responsible for the current change in climate.

One response to the arguments against anthropogenic climate change being lost is to say that climate change is a good thing. This can be made in several ways. In recent decades, a vineyard has been established in my birth village in Kent, and it produces very nice white wine. This has been made possible by climate change, and it presumably benefits the economy of the South of England. Norwegian wine now exists too. Wildlife moves away from the Equator. There are little egrets in the local bourne here in the East Midlands who have only arrived in the last few years. Because plants need carbon dioxide, the increase in the atmosphere is said to promote their growth, making arable farming more productive. However, this increased productivity is not accompanied by any increase in soil minerals or vitamins in the crops, so the result is a watered-down version of these crops, and other food plants, with more carbs without more vitamins and minerals. Some of the species moving away from the Equator bring infectious diseases with them, for instance ticks. Summer 2023 has brought an increase in insect bites in Britain. Moreover, the species which can move, which can be to higher altitudes or in the sea greater depths as well as towards the poles, can do so, but some can’t. This increases the risk of further pandemics. Beavers moving north have caused problems for the Inuit, that is, competition between humans and beavers. To some extent, humans are intellectually resourceful and adaptable, but competition with other species is not necessarily going to benefit any of them. Invasive species are more difficult to manage if they originated from warmer climates. Also, in the very hottest parts of the planet’s surface, the climate can become completely uninhabitable for some species, as can be seen with the deaths of Australian fruit bats. This translates, as usual, into problems for the poorest communities in the world, as they tend to live in its hottest regions.

Michael Moore is known for producing critically-acclaimed documentaries which oppose establishment views. Sadly though, this did not apply to his ‘Planet Of The Humans’, for which he’s executive producer, which focusses on the environmental damage caused by renewable power sources. There is a lot to be said about this film, but if I said it all it would turn this post into a debunking of the film as opposed to a survey of climate change denial arguments, so I’m going to provide a short summary. Clips from the early part of the documentary showed a solar-powered festival from the 1990s before renewable technology had improved to the point where the issues shown, where the electricity ended up having to come from the grid, are no longer important. Likewise the clip about the electric car which is recharged using mainly coal-fired power stations dates from 2010 and the situation has improved a lot since then. Comparisons are made between the open cast mining of coal which removes entire mountain tops with the siting of wind turbines on mountains when in fact this is far less destructive and the shots of the deforestation ignored the fact that whereas an open cast coal mine is pretty permanent damage, the trees would grow back in a few years for the wind turbine site. There were then some contentious comments about ethanol and hydrogen power, which are probably true but also accepted by environmentalists, who don’t recommend their use. I’m going to have to find out more about the hydrogen power issue as it seems to have changed recently, but my possibly obsolete understanding is that hydrogen works as a way of storing power rather than being a specific fuel in itself. That is, although it’s a fuel, it’s generated by electrolysis and the source of electricity for that is what matters. Solar panels are now very efficient. They bring in twenty times the cost of manufacture in power over their working lives, and their decline in efficiency is gradual, so it isn’t like they suddenly stop working after that period. Hence even if they are manufactured using only fossil fuels, this is because those fuels were what happened to provide that energy and not because that’s the only way that energy could ever be provided. The documentary also ignores the possibility of roof-based solar power rather than power plants taking up a lot of unoccupied land elsewhere. The intermittent nature of solar and wind power can now be addressed using the more efficient batteries which are now on the market, as found for example in power walls. The investment of one unit of fossil fuel generated energy into producing solar panels and installing them is likely to produce twenty times that in clean energy. Wind power, it’s twice as efficient as that. The film also blames the problem on overpopulation, but the issue here is that the communities whose population is growing fastest are those using the least energy. Moreover, consumption is growing twice as fast as the population. This is basically about blaming Black people, as it’s White Westerners who are the biggest part of the problem.

There are two issues related to this which I want to look into but can’t comment upon yet as I’m mainly doing this off the top of my head. One is the source of materials for batteries and the other is environmental damage caused by wind turbines. However, I will say this: I have long advocated for orbital solar power as the solution, which would involve materials taken from lunar sources rather than terrestrial ones and completely circumvent any problems arising from ground-based solar and wind power while allowing microwave receiving stations to be sited in areas which are less economically developed, making those countries wealthier.

Getting back to a more general point, increases in carbon dioxide are often blamed on the gas coming out of volcanoes. However, this is relatively constant, barring mass extinction events and various uncommon calamities, and it’s the extra emissions which are important. The planet and its biosphere is used to the vast amounts of CO₂ which maintain its surface temperatures at habitable levels. It’s the extra which constitutes the problem, which is many times as much annually as volcanic carbon dioxide emissions. And this extra is sometimes said not to be from fossil fuels. In fact, the excess CO₂ can be traced definitively to fossil fuels because the isotope profile in that gas is the same as in fossil fuels and not at all the same as in volcanic emissions. This also means that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide can be firmly laid at the door of human activity.

I’m just going to explain how this works. Each chemical element has the same number of protons in its nuclei, but the number of neutrons varies. For instance, carbon always has six protons but may have six, seven or eight neutrons. Elements exposed to certain forms of radiation can also become other elements or different isotopes of the same elements. It’s probably too obvious to state, but this is the basis of carbon dating because when carbon dioxide is exposed to the atmosphere, cosmic rays change a certain fraction of its carbon from carbon 12 to carbon 14 or convert nitrogen and oxygen to carbon at a known rate, leading to a known proportion in a living organism which changes when it dies at a known rate, allowing its age to be estimated. It has many other uses. For instance, oxygen 16 and 18 are used to measure water temperatures in ice core samples and calcium isotopes can be used as evidence for the source of food being marine or terrestrial when human bones are recovered from ancient sites.

Living matter very much prefers carbon 12 to carbon 13, and this was so for the organisms who became coal and oil. This is not so for volcanic emissions, which just emit what the expected profile of carbon isotopes would be in the form expected from sources without biological involvement. This can also be used to demonstrate that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is not simply incorporated in a larger biomasse. Hence even if carbon emissions fluctuate from year to year due to volcanic eruptions, it’s still possible to separate the volcanic and industrial sources, and the emissions cannot therefore be blamed on volcanoes.

I realise that I’ve stirred up quite a few questions as well as answering some, so I plan to address those too. These include the ethics of battery manufacture and supply chains, the “U”K government’s approach to energy policy, the issue of hydrogen and various other things. However, that’ll do for now. Please do correct me if I’m wrong and let me know what you think.