BOOK:
The Truth About Energy, Global Warming, and Climate Change: Exposing Climate Lies in an Age of Disinformation
By Jerome R. Corsi
MEDIA SYNOPSIS
Summary: Chapters 1-4
The first four chapters of the book deal with the politics of energy, global warming, and climate change, emphasizing that the environmental movement grew out of the Malthusian worry about global overpopulation at the end of WWII. John Holdren [who became Obama’s science czar] worked with Paul Ehrlich [The Population Bomb] to say too many people and capitalism would destroy earth’s climate by burning hydrocarbon fuels. At first, they worried about “Global Warming” predicting a coming Ice Age. Then in the 1970s, when the earth resumed warming, Holdren shifted to Global Warming as the fear. In recent years the “reimagining capitalist” movement of the radical left has hijacked the Holdren/Ehrlich climate fear for Marxism, realizing climate hysteria over CO2 could force the industrialized west to abandon capitalism [since relatively cheap and abundantly available hydrocarbon fuels have been the engine that drove the Industrial Revolution].
- What is the political origin of the Green New Deal movement? (Chapters 1-3).
I cover in Chapter 1 Julian Simon’s optimism that we have abundant natural resources, including oil and natural gas. Julian Simon stressed that the “ultimate resource” is human intelligence. With human intelligence the resources of Earth are abundant, more than enough to expand human populations dramatically. Chapter 1 makes clear Julian Simon was right that M. King Hubbard’s “peak oil” was wrong – we are no where near running out of coal, oil, and natural gas—a proposition the Trump administration proved.
Chapter 2 shows how the Malthusians—Harrison Brown’s book The Challenge of Man’s Future in 1954, and Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book, The Population Bomb, argued there were too many people in the world. With Harrison Brown and Paul Ehrlich, the environmental movement got taken over by the Malthusian worry that we humans are our biggest enemy. John Holdren (who became Obama’s science czar) joined forces with Paul Ehrlich. Under Ehrlich’s influence the Malthusians began worrying that humans burning hydrocarbon fuel were going to cause a climate catastrophe. In the 1970s (when Earth was in a cooling spell), Holdren and Ehrlich worried about a new Ice Age. In the 1990s, as Earth resumed a warming trend, the fear became Global Warming.
Chapter 3 shows how the neo-Marxists (e.g., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) hijacked the global warming movement to demonize carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide was a convenient demon because burning hydrocarbon fuels emits carbon dioxide. If humans could be convinced to “decarbonize,” the neo-Marxists could destroy capitalism because relatively cheap and abundantly available hydrocarbon fuels are the engine that drives capitalism. With Holdren’s influence, the Population Bomb morphed into the Green New Deal.
Quotes:
Chapter 1, Page 16:
“These U.S. achievements in producing hydrocarbon fuels again validate Julian Simon’s analysis that despite peak oil predictions, the U.S. was not running out of oil, natural gas, and coal. As Simon would have pointed out (had he lived to see the U.S. resurgence in hydrocarbon fuel production): first, the U.S. had more reserves than were previously estimated; and second, technological advances, including fracking and hydraulic drilling, have made it economically feasible to obtain energy resources that were once largely unexplored and typically underdeveloped.”
Julian Simon, “Why We Will Never Run Out of Oil,” pp. 7-9.
- King Hubbert, “Theory of Peak Oil,” pp. 9-12.
“Demise of Peak Oil,” pp. 12-16.
Chapter 2, Page 20:
“Holdren’s selection of Harrison Brown as his mentor gives us a good hint of how radical Holdren himself was as a young man. Consider the type of solutions Brown proposed in The Challenge of Man’s Future. Brown proposed using eugenics to “prevent the long-range degeneration of human stock.” He recommended implementing the ‘science of human genetics in a two-step process designed to improve the species.”
Chapter 2, Page 38:
“By 1986, Holdren appears convinced the ultimate Ecoscience catastrophe will be climate change, regardless of whether the global climate change is cooling or warming. Holdren’s definition of the resulting catastrophe is relatively undeveloped compared to Al Gore’s 2006 film, Inconvenient Truth. However, by 1986, Holdren had already identified the melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels as the global warming catastrophe. But note, Holdren said the ice caps would melt, and the seas would rise from the heat resulting from burning hydrocarbon and nuclear fuels, not from CO2 emissions.”
Chapter 3, Pages 62-62
Let’s return to why Marianna Mazzucato [economist with dual Italian-U.S. citizenship who is a professor of economics of innovation and public value at University College London] felt climate lockdowns were a good idea. She argued that under a climate lockdown, governments “would limit private-vehicle use, ban the consumption of red meat, and impose extreme energy-savings measures, while fossil-fuel companies would have to stop drilling.” Mazzucato argued that COVID-19 was itself “a consequence of environmental degradation” that could rightly be termed “the disease of the Anthropocene.” Mazzucato completed her analysis by returning to her familiar themes of “reorienting corporate governance, finance, policy, and energy systems toward a green economic transformation.”
Chapter 2, Page 67
The ecological/environmental left has joined with politically motivated neo-Marxists to transform the Green New Deal into an attack on capitalism. For Green New Deal radical activists, the mixture of fighting for decarbonization as an energy policy and advocating a broad socialist agenda is an easy transition. Today, decarbonizing has morphed into neo-Marxism. Climate change activists also want to fight inequality, impose social justice, fight racism, and create government-funded, minimum annual income, along with government-guaranteed employment.
- What is the Solyndra Syndrome? Why Wind and Solar Power require government subsidies?
Chapter 4 points out that Obama tried to implement his version of the Green New Deal by subsidizing with government grants and tax breaks a wide range of wind and solar renewable fuel projects. All these projects failed because wind and solar power is not sufficiently scalable to power a major metropolitan area reliably.
Chapter 4, p. 73
By 2015, the Obama administration had subsidized solar and other renewable energy in the United States with taxpayer money averaging $39 billion per year over five years. The five year federal subsidy for developing renewable energy technologies amounted to nearly $200 billion, with the dismal result that this massive investment in renewable energy resulted in less than 1 percent of additional electrical generation. In total, the Obama administration financed some thirty-four faltering or bankrupt green energy companies, including the following: solar panel manufacturers Solyndra LLC ($535 million loss in federal loan guarantees) and Abound Solar Manufacturing, LLC ($400 million loss); Fisker Automotive ($529 million), a green vehicles program; and green energy storage companies Beacon Power ($43 million) and A123 Systems ($132 million).
Chapter 4, p. 95.
If the Obama administration had succeeded with green energy, we would feel optimistic about the repeat green energy policies of the Biden administration. Given the failure of the Obama-era green energy initiatives, the Biden administration appears to be a redo of expensive “Solyndra Syndrome” green energy failures. What seems to be the case from the Obama years is that even with massive government financial support backed by regulation and law, solar and wind power fail to be economically viable ventures. What reason is there to imagine that the experience under Biden will be any different? Or, we can ask more directly: If wind and solar power worked as promised and were a reliably robust and economically sound energy alternative to hydrocarbon fuels, why would we need a junior, first-term member of Congress, [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] a professed socialist representing New York’s Fourteenth Congressional District (parts of the Bronx and Queens) to propose an FDR-like, government-mandated, sweeping Green New Deal to shove hydrocarbon fuels into the dust bin of world energy history?
Summary: Chapters 5-8
These are the science chapters that drive the core of the book.
Chapter 5: Sun Heats Earth
The central argument is that the Sun is the main driver of temperature on Earth. “Sun Heats Earth” is a news flash the global warming minimizes in their determination to blame all global rises in temperature on CO2 and the human burning of hydrocarbon fuels.
- What are the concentrations of CO2 on Earth in geological time?
Chapter 5, pp. 99-100
Ph.D. meteorologist Roy W. Spencer, formerly a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, and currently a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, charges the IPCC with expressing the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere in a manner intentionally designed to alarm a scientifically naïve public. The IPCC typically reports the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere in units of tons, claiming that total global emissions are running in the range of thirty billion tons per year. Yet, the IPCC fails to specify that the total weight of Earth’s atmosphere is approximately five quadrillion tons. A quadrillion is the number “1,” followed by fifteen zeroes. Expressed in other terms, one trillion equals 1,000 billion, and one quadrillion equals 1,000 trillion. So, one quadrillion amounts to one million billion, a number that, if expressed with zeroes, would be written as 1,000,000 billion. Appreciating this, the total amount of annual global CO2 emissions amounts to thirty billion divided by 1,000,000 billion, for a result of .00003 percent, read as “three hundred-thousandth of 1 percent.”
Chapter 5, p. 121
Some 4.5 billion years ago, Earth’s atmosphere was predominantly composed of carbon dioxide, with a CO2 concentration (as measured today) of approximately one million parts per million (i.e., 1,000,000 ppm) compared to about 420 ppm today. Some 500 million years ago, the CO2 concentration fell to around 7,500 ppm, about eighteen times today’s levels. Between twenty-five million and nine million years ago, the CO2 atmospheric concentration appeared to have varied between 180 and 290 ppm. With the inception of the Industrial Revolution, the air’s CO2 content increased to above 400 ppm registered today.
Chapter 5, p. 121
Daniel H. Rothman, a professor at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT, published an important paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2002.82 His research established that over most of the geologic record of the past 500 million years, Earth’s CO2 concentration fluctuated between values two to four times greater than those of today. However, over the past 175 million years, the data shows a long-term decline in the air’s CO2 content. Again, we encounter an inherent problem with time-series analysis. What is the proper period to identify the actual trends the data reflects? Since the inception of the industrial age, CO2 levels in the atmosphere have risen. Yet, the trend if we look back over the past 175 million years is different. If we look back over the past 175 million years, the CO2 levels in the atmosphere have continued to drop, including through today.
- In geological time, what is the relationship between CO2 and Earth’s temperature?
Chapter 5, pp. 121-122
Still, IPCC [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] adherents want to blame global warming and climate change disasters on human beings burning increasing amounts of hydrocarbon fuels since the dawn of the industrial age. The argument demands that IPCC adherents can establish CO2 levels today are at historically high levels. From the evidence just presented, this argument fails when we examine the scientific evidence of atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the history of geological time. As we have just noted, the scientific evidence is not clear the industrial age burning of hydrocarbon fuels has caused a rise in atmospheric CO2 levels. Looking over the past 175 million years, CO2 levels today have continued to drop, such that the recent rise since the industrial age does not change the trend curve when the time-series analysis extends back millions of years. In other words, to make their argument work, IPCC adherents fall into a classic trap of time-series statistics by choosing a time period for their analysis that is nonrepresentative of the data as a whole. Clearly, with the historical record of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere going back 4.5 billion years, the trend curve of CO2 concentrations dropping over the past 175 million years receives further confirmation.
- What is the Russian scientific evidence that the Sun is the major driving factor of Earth’s temperature changes?
Chapter 5, p. 109
Habibullo Abdussamatov, the head of space research at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, has argued that total sun irradiance (TSI) is the primary factor responsible for causing climate variations on Earth, not CO2Abdussamatov has concluded that changes in the increases and decreases in TSI, characterized by the number of different manifestations of its sunspot-forming activity, are the primary determinant of global temperature on Earth. In an article published in Earth Sciences in 2020, he stated his conclusions as follows: “The Sun, being the main source of energy for the Earth, controls the climate system, and even the smallest long-term changes in TSI can have serious consequences for the climate.” In the same article, Abdussamatov examined changes in Earth’s temperature and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 over the past 420,000 years as determined by ice core data drilled from a depth of over 3,768 meters near the Vostok Station, Antarctica, during the glacial/interglacial cycles. “A rise in concentrations of greenhouse gases has begun every time after warming begins and ended after the warming was replaced by cooling,” he concluded.
Russian Data Supporting the Conclusion Sunspot Activity is a primary driver of global warming and cooling, not CO2.
Chapter 5, p. 110
Abdussamatov’s analysis that the “Sun heats Earth” as the primary cause of global warming and global cooling supports Edward Maunder’s work at the Greenwich Royal Observatory documenting the decline in sunspot activity between 1615-1715. Maunder found that in one thirty-year period, only fifty sunspots were observed and documented, instead of the usual 40,000 to 50,000 typically recorded. The sun’s inactive period, known today as the Maunder Minimum, coincided with the Little Ice Age that lasted from approximately 1300 to 1850. Abdussamatov’s independent research correlated the onset and the passing of the Little Ice Age to what he found was a bicentennial cyclical increase/decrease of TSI as the sun rotated between periods of active sunspot activity and minimal sunspot activity.
- How does the Earth’s thermometer work?
Chapter 5, p. 101
Ph.D. meteorologist Roy W. Spencer, formerly a senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, and currently a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, correctly stresses that Earth’s climate system is “possibly the most Spencer correctly stresses complex physical system we know.” Water vapor accounts for between 70 and 90 percent of all greenhouse gases, combined with clouds that have a significant greenhouse effect even though clouds are not a gas but consist of water droplets and ice crystals. The amount of infrared radiation absorbed by Earth on average is very close to the amount of sunlight absorbed by Earth since the infrared energy emitted from outer space to Earth is virtually zero. Earth warms during the day when the sun shines and cools at night when infrared energy escapes into outer space because the sun is not shining. Spencer noted that “the combination of solar heating and infrared energy transfers are continuously trying to make Earth’s surface unbearably hot and the upper atmosphere unbelievably cold.” The purpose of what we call weather is “to move heat from where there is more, to where there is less.” Spencer stressed that these flows of heat demonstrate one of the most fundamental laws in science, the second law of thermodynamics. In simple terms, the second law of thermodynamics “just states that energy tends to flow from where there is more to where there is less.”
Earth’s climate is a complex system with feedback features that affect how the Sun’s TSI [total solar radiance] hits Earth.
Chapter 5, p. 103
Two energy flows determine the energy balance of Earth: the rate at which Earth absorbs solar energy (a forcing factor) and the rate at which Earth loses infrared energy to outer space (a feedback factor). Clouds are the most significant and most uncertain feedback factor in the atmosphere. “I cannot overstate the importance of the uncertainty over cloud feedbacks,” Spencer wrote. “At the least theoretically, clouds could either save us from global warming, or cook us.” He pointed out that the two sides of the role clouds play in global warming involve forcing and feedback, i.e., cause and effect. “Forcing (cause) would be the clouds causing a temperature change,” he distinguished. “Feedback (effect) would be causation flowing in the opposite direction, with temperature causing a cloud change. This effect then feeds back upon the original temperature change, making it larger or smaller.”
The importance of ocean flow patterns on Earth’s temperature: Roy Spencer’s study of the Pacific Decal Oscillation currents.
Chapter 5, p. 108
Spencer stressed his primary conclusion that PDO causes cloud changes would explain most of the significant variations in global average temperature since 1900, including 75 percent of the warming trend. Spencer hypothesized that the PDO might cause a slight fluctuation in cloud cover resulting from changing weather patterns over the North Pacific Ocean.
Spencer shows the importance of ocean flows (e.g., the PDO) in terms of Earth’s feedback mechanisms.
Chapter 5, p. 108
The importance of Spencer’s work is that as a trained Ph.D. meteorologist, he permits us to understand the function and the complexity of weather on Earth. Weather on Earth serves as a mechanism for moving heat back into outer space and shifting heat from warmer locations on Earth to cooler areas. Spencer reminds us that clouds can act as heating mechanisms (forcing effect), for instance, when low-hanging clouds are sparser, permitting more rays from the sun to heat Earth. Or clouds can serve as cooling mechanisms (feedback mechanisms) when low-hanging clouds allow more heat to escape from Earth to outer space as infrared energy. Spencer also points out that it is essential to note whether the buildup or thinning of clouds precedes or follows changes in global temperature. If the cloud activity follows the change in global temperature, the cloud activity is an effect of the temperature change, not a cause of the temperature change.
The same analysis will hold for CO2. Does the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere correlate in geological time with temperature changes on Earth? If the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere does not correlate statistically with changes in Earth’s temperature, CO2 is not an essential mechanism for causing Earth’s temperature to change. Similarly, suppose the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere changes after a temperature change occurs on Earth. In that case, the amount of CO2 is a function of the temperature change, not a cause of the temperature change. Weather patterns like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation affect global temperature changes by focusing on the amount of infrared energy retained or released by Earth given changes in cloud cover (here acting as a feedback mechanism). Other ocean patterns that affect Earth’s temperature include La Niña natural climate cycles (i.e., cooler-than-average sea currents in the Pacific Ocean) or El Niño climate cycles (i.e., warmer sea currents in the Pacific Ocean).
Each chapter summarizes the topics covered in the bolded list of items below the chapter number on the first page of each chapter.
For example:
Chapter 5
Sun Heats Earth
CO2—a Trace Element,
the Weather Thermometer,
the Importance of Clouds,
the Maunder Minimum,
the Little Ice Age,
and the Chilling Stars
and the next:
Chapter 6
Climategate
True Believers Falsify Data,
the Hockey Stick,
the East Anglia University Hack,
and
the Built-in Failure of Climate Change Computer Models
So, the discussion of how cosmic rays affect cloud cover is in Chapter 5 at pages 114-120. This discussion may be too technical for an interview, but cosmic rays are important to the operation of the Earth’s weather and climate patterns, and the subject is an important one, rarely covered in politically correct university-level climate courses.
Chapter 6 focuses on the extent to which the global warming/climate change scientific community has rigged their climate data to make a case the Climategate emails prove these scientists knew was fraudulent, ideologically-motivated pseudo-science.
- What is Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick?”
Chapter 6, pp 132-133
When he published his first infamous “Hockey Stick” article in 1998, Michael E. Mann was in his early thirties. He was a relatively unknown recent adjunct/research assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University. The highlight of Mann’s infamous 1998 “Hockey Stick” paper published in Nature was a graph of Northern Hemisphere temperatures from 1400 to 1980 that looked like a hockey stick. A long handle over 500 years showed Earth’s temperatures were relatively flat from 1400 until the start of the twentieth century when temperatures shot up in an almost straight line. But from the twentieth century on, the temperatures went dramatically up, thus forming the “blade” of the “hockey stick.” Mann’s method was to search the archives to find some 112 temperature indicators that he could put into a mathematical model as temperature proxies in the effort to reconstruct historical Earth temperatures back to the year 1400.
In constructing the “Hockey Stick” graph, Mann followed the 1994 work of his co-author Malcolm Hughes, a professor from the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research at the University of Arizona. The “statistical trick” of Mann’s Hockey Stick graph was to make the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age disappear.
Chapter 6, p. 132
Four years earlier, in 1994, Hughes had coauthored an article in Climatic Change entitled “Was There a ‘Medieval Warm Period, and If So, When and Where?” In this article, Hughes utilized tree ring analysis to argue that the Medieval Warm Period and the subsequent Little Ice Age were regional phenomena, limited largely to Europe but not experienced in other parts. In the article, Hughes concluded: “The generalized behavior of the global climate of the last millennium as a Medieval Warm Period followed by a Little Ice Age, each one or more centuries long and global in extent, is no longer supported by the available evidence.”
Mann’s Hockey Stick graph also erased the Younger Dryas sudden warming period some 14,500 years ago.
Chapter 7, pp. 192-193
The Younger Dryas is one of the most well-documented examples of abrupt climate change. About 14,500 years ago, Earth’s climate emerged from an ice age to a warmer interglacial state. Yet, the warming stopped suddenly, and conditions in the Northern Hemisphere returned to near-glacial conditions that took less than one hundred years and maybe only a decade, as suggested by an analysis of ice core data in Greenland. The Younger Dryas is named after a flower (Dryas octopetala) known to grow in cold conditions that became common. Some 11,500 years ago, the Younger Dryas ended equally abruptly. During the Younger Dryas, temperatures in Greenland rose 10°C (18°F) in a decade. A 2000 study published in Quaternary Science Reviews by Richard Alley, a professor at the Department of Geosciences and Environment Institute at Pennsylvania State University, found that the abrupt climate changes of the Younger Dryas occurred worldwide. “Near simultaneous changes in ice-core paleoclimatic indicators of local, regional, and more-widespread climate conditions demonstrate that much of Earth experienced abrupt climate changes synchronous with Greenland with thirty years or less,” he wrote. Professor Alley also concluded that “post-Younger Dryas changes have not duplicated the size, extent, and rapidity of these paleoclimatic changes.”
- What are the Climategate emails and why are they important?
Chapter 6, pp. 141-142
On November 17, 2009, an unidentified hacker began publishing thousands of emails and other documents taken from a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, England. The CRU was a source of much of the data supporting the anthropogenic CO2 theory, responsible for co-compiling the HadCRUT global temperature series, in conjunction with the U.K. Met Office Hadley Center. The hacked emails created a firestorm for the IPCC. Phil Jones, then the director of the CRU and a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at UEA, had exposed that Mann introduced an obvious bias into his analysis. Mann appeared determined to tag CO2 as the sole culprit for global warming, even if coming to that conclusion required falsifying or otherwise altering data. Jones, on November 16, 1999, sent one of the most damaging emails to Mann and the other two authors of the Hockey Stick papers published in 1998:
Chapter 6, p. 142
The hacked emails revealed a disturbing pattern. The IPCC scientists had falsified data in published studies purporting to prove anthropogenic CO2 was causing global warming. The hacked emails also showed the IPCC scientists were willing to falsify data and lie to intimidate critics.
Mann’s Hockey Stick graph was designed to erase the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Although before Mann published his graph in 1998, the IPCC in its 1990 Climate Change Scientific Assessment had admitted the importance of both.
Chapter 6, p. 135
Before Michael Mann published his Hockey Stick graph, the IPCC appeared not to have realized the extent to which the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age destroyed the IPCC narrative that CO2 was the only significant driver of Earth’s temperature and climate. In 1990, the IPCC published a graph in its first Climate Change: Scientific Assessment—a climate assessment the organization would never have published had Mann published his graph a decade earlier. In retrospect, the graph the IPCC published in 1990 repudiated the data Mann’s Hockey Stick displayed. In the IPCC 1990 graph, they appear to have reported the truth about the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. The graph showed accurately that Earth’s temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period were higher than today from the late tenth to early thirteenth centuries (about AD 950-1250), characterizing the period as the “Medieval Climatic Optimum.” The same 1990 IPCC graph presented the Little Ice Age as a period “which resulted in extensive glacial advances in almost all alpine regions of the world between 150 and 450 years ago so that glaciers were more extensive 100–200 years ago than now nearly everywhere.” The executive summary of the climate assessment report also acknowledged both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, noting the following:
Over the last two million years, glacial-interglacial cycles have occurred on a time scale of 100,000 years, with large changes in ice volume and sea level. During this time, average global surface temperatures appear to have varied by about 5–7°C. Since the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 BP, globally average surface temperatures have fluctuated over a range of up to 2°C on time scales of centuries or more. Such fluctuations include the Holocene Optimum around 5,000–6,000 years ago, the shorter Medieval Warm Period around 1000 AD (which may not have been global) and the Little Ice Age which ended only in the middle to late nineteenth century. Details are often poorly known because palaeo-climactic data are frequently sparse.
Temperature data from the 1930s to 2001 shows CO2 lags global warming, rather than causing global warming.
Chapter 6, p. 147
Global temperatures cooled in the mid-1940s, when CO2 emissions were increasing—the exact opposite of what the IPCC insists had to happen. “Global temperatures began to cool in the mid-1940s at the point when CO2 emissions began to soar,” Easterbrook noted in Evidence-Based Climate Science. “Many of the world’s glaciers advanced during this time, and recovered a good deal of the ice lost during the 1915-45 warm period. Although CO2 emissions soared during this interval, the climate cooled, just the opposite of what should have happened if CO2 causes global warming.” A study of atmospheric CO2 from January 1980 to December 2001 again found CO2 changes lag temperature changes. Correlation analysis of CO2 and temperature showed CO2 lagging global surface temperature by eleven to twelve months, lagging global surface air temperature by nine and a half to ten months, and lagging global lower troposphere temperature by nine months.
Chapter 6, p. 147 (continued)
Once again, we see that the IPCC confuses cause and effect. For instance, a Great Climate Shift occurred in 1977 when the global cooling since the mid-1940s ended. Yet even though global warming resumed in 1977, that year was not proof a rise in CO2 caused the shift from cooling to warming. “The abruptness of the shift in Pacific sea-surface temperatures and corresponding change from global cooling to global warming in 1977 is highly significant and strongly suggests a cause-and-effect relationship. The rise of atmospheric CO2, which accelerated after 1945, shows no sudden change that could account for the ‘Great Climate Shift,’” noted Easterbrook.
- What is Cataclysmic Climate Change?
Chapter 7, p. 162
A traditional debate among professional geologists has been historically divided between uniformitarianism and catastrophism. Geologists who hold the uniformitarianism view of Earth tend to view historical changes as occurring gradually because of continuous and uniform processes unfolding methodically over millions of years. Geologists having the catastrophism view see Earth changes over geological time due to sudden and violent events. An essential doctrine of uniformity is “the assumption that the same natural laws and processes operating in the present-day scientific observation have always operated in the past.” “Catastrophism is the idea that the Earth’s features have remained fairly static until dramatic changes were wrought by sudden, short-lived, violent events.”
Chapter 7, p. 162 (continued)
As we will see in this chapter, climate change true believers see Earth as uniformitarian. The logical coherence of their argument that Earth is warmer today than ever falls apart unless Earth’s carbon cycle as a law of nature operates today as it did billions of years ago. Suppose its carbon cycle changes its rules of operation just as catastrophic events dramatically changed Earth’s geology and ecology. In that case, determining cause and effect with the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere today becomes more problematic. Deciding whether the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere today is a plus or a minus for the human condition also becomes difficult.
Chapter 7, p. 171
Let’s engage in a thought experiment and ask ourselves how the modern rise in Earth’s global temperature could cause a rise in atmospheric CO2. A warmer Earth is a more productive, greener Earth. A warmer Earth is more receptive to life and human activity. In 1900, the global population was approximately 1.6 billion people. The worldwide population of 2021 totals some 7.9 billion people. Estimates are that Earth’s population will top eight billion people between 2022 and 2023. Despite the devastating horror of tens of millions killed in two world wars, a massive explosion in human population in the twentieth century occurred, not accidentally, in the global warmth of this interglacial period.
Chapter 7, pp. 174-175.
We need to ask climate change advocates what should the “right,” “correct,” or “perfect” temperature of Earth be? While Earth is estimated to be some 4.6 billion years old, Homo sapiens originated in Africa between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago. Hominoids as a proto-human species dates back some four million years. In geological time viewed as a twenty-four-hour clock, Earth’s conditions that allowed the appearance of Homo sapiens occurred as the last-minute wound down. So, was Earth’s climate “wrong” to have so much CO2 in the atmosphere eons ago? Yet somehow, climate change true believers continue to insist Earth’s climate will not be fixed or possibly survive unless we human beings take control of the environment by decarbonizing. For most of the geological time on Earth, human beings did not exist, yet the planet survived.
- What caused the disappearance of the DINOSAURS at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary Periods (the “C-T” or “K-T” boundary) 65 million years ago?
The cataclysmic events of the Chicxulub Asteroid that hit the Yucatan in the Gulf of Mexico some 65 million years ago is explained in detail in Chapter 7, pp. 175-181.
The simultaneous catastrophe of the Deccan Volcanism beginning some 65 million years before the impact of the Chicxulub Asteroid extended in India over thousands of years, throwing massive amounts of sulfur dioxide SO2 into the atmosphere, blocking the sun, and ending the photosynthesis upon which the dinosaurs fed. See Chapter 7, pp. 181-183.
Chapter 7, p. 183
Researchers Courtney Sprain and Paul Renne at the Department of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California, Berkeley, now believe the Deccan volcano eruptions began 400,000 years before the Chicxulub impact, releasing 75 percent of their total lava volume in the 600,000 years after the Chicxulub impact. The Sprain-Renne research team has suggested the magnitude of the Chicxulub impact’s seismic shock may have struck the planet so hard that it sent the Deccan Traps into “eruptive high gear.” The Berkeley researchers explained the possibly interrelated nature of the phenomena. “The close temporal coincidence of the impact and the accelerated volcanism makes it difficult to deconvolve the environmental perturbations attributable to each mechanism,” they wrote. In other words, the Sprain-Renne research team has attempted to resolve the conflict between whether the Chicxulub impact or the Deccan volcanism killed the dinosaurs by saying the C-T boundary extinction event was an event that “probably resulted from the supposed effects of both phenomena.”
Chapter 8
The Chaos Theory of Climate
The Butterfly Effect,
Unpredictable Weather and Strange Attractors,
the Unknown Precambrian Era,
the Expanding Earth Theory,
Another Explanation for the Extinction of the Dinosaurs,
Milankovitch Cycles,
Ice Ages, Shifting Magnetic Poles, and
Catastrophe Theory
- Who was Edward Norton Lorenz and what is the chaos theory of climate?
Chapter 8, pp. 198-199
Edward Norton Lorenz was a mathematician and meteorologist who followed in von Neumann’s footsteps. As a professor in the Department of Meteorology at MIT in the 1960s, Lorenz used an early digital computer, a Royal McBee LGP-30, to run a computer model he constructed to predict the weather. The computer model used twelve independent variables to measure various aspects of the weather, including temperature and wind speed. One day, in February 1961, Lorenz repeated a simulation he had run earlier. This time, he rounded off one variable from .056127 to .506, and then he went to get a cup of coffee. When he returned to his office, he was shocked to find “this tiny alteration drastically transformed the whole pattern his program produced, over two months of simulated weather.”
Chapter 8, p. 199
What he [Lorenz] found out was that slight variations in the variables produced drastic changes in the results. He found that “slightly differing initial states can evolve into considerably different states.” He concluded the article by applying his findings to the atmosphere. “In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise very long-range forecasting would seem to be non-existent,” he noted. Lorenz had concluded that the problem with long-range weather forecasting is that the variety of weather possibilities are so immense that even small changes can drastically affect weather outcomes. Lorenz’s conclusion challenged the classical understanding of nature. Sir Isaac Newton published laws in 1687 that suggested a highly “predictable mechanical system—the ‘clockwork universe.’” Though Lorenz had just developed a mathematical proof that weather is unpredictable, his 1963 paper went largely unnoticed. Yet, the importance of Lorenz’s work was enormous. “By showing that certain deterministic systems have formal predictability limits, Ed put the last nail in the coffin of the Cartesian universe and fomented what some have called the third scientific revolution of the 20th century, following on the heels of relativity and quantum physics,” said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at MIT.
Chapter 8, p. 200 – the “Butterfly Effect”
On December 29, 1972, Lorenz presented a paper at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The paper was entitled “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” When applied to the atmosphere, the power of Lorenz’s discovery is that any variations in measurement will produce enormous differences in outcomes.
The book next engages in a fascinating discussion of the problems of getting exact measurements on Earth. We consider fractal math and the problem of measuring a coastline precisely. Pages 200-214 discuss the mathematics of Earth’s weather and climate. We explain that the problems not only involve measurement imprecision and the consequences to weather models of small decimal point differences in measurement estimates, but the logic of weather and climate involving non-linear mathematical equations.
Chapter 8, p. 209 is a key paragraph to understanding the book.
Chapter 8, p. 208
In a linear mathematical model, we expect initial conditions, symbolized as I1, to produce predictable initial results, represented as R1. We go to the following period, such as I2 R2, with subsequent periods represented as I3 R3, and so forth through all model iterations. An example demonstrating why the IPCC logic regarding their case for global warming should make clear the IPCC predicates its case on linear equations. So, we assume that in I1, we burn hydrocarbon fuels, with the result that in R1, we get increased CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. Then in I2, the CO2 in the atmosphere becomes a greenhouse gas, with the result that in R2, we get an increase in global temperatures, i.e., global warming. The logic of global warming hysterics is that burning hydrocarbon fuels adds CO2 to the atmosphere in at least an arithmetic manner, such that the CO2 emitted in I1 plus I2 results in R1 CO2 plus R2 CO2. In other words, CO2 builds as a percentage of the atmosphere arithmetically as we continue to burn hydrocarbon fuels. Similarly, global warming hysterics believe the global warming produced by the CO2 is also an additive process, such that more CO2 admitted increases global temperatures arithmetically.
Chapter 8, pp. 210-211 explain why these mathematical concepts invalidate the IPCC’s CO2 warming assumptions.
Chapter 8, pp. 210-211
In a nonlinear model, global warming theorists are incorrect to assume CO2 is also an additive process, such that more CO2 admitted increases global temperatures arithmetically. By thinking that continued burning of hydrocarbon fuels will increase Earth’s temperatures by more than 1.5°C above preindustrial levels by 2030 or 2050 at the latest, the IPCC makes the mistake of assuming Earth’s climate is a linear system and that CO2 emissions into the atmosphere are additive. The truth is that we do not know why CO2 levels on Earth are where they are today, other than to conclude that CO2 levels are where Earth’s thermometer regulates CO2 to be. As we have noted, the planet is currently in an interglacial period. Earth has no emotional reaction regarding whether it is good or bad to be in a glacial or an interglacial period. Similarly, Earth has no value position on whether having more or less CO2 in the atmosphere is right or wrong morally. But the dynamic climate Earth has, the nonlinear mathematics of Earth’s weather/climate system, can operate equally well with different results even when outside forces (like, for instance, variations in solar activity or intergalactic supernova activity) force dramatic warming or cooling changes in the overall average temperature of the planet. The bottom-line driving force result of higher CO2 content in the atmosphere is today that plant growth is stimulated and Earth is greener. Why? Because we are in an interglacial warming period and there is more solar irradiance hitting Earth’s surface to mix with more CO2 in the atmosphere. These are the exact conditions needed to stimulate plant photosynthesis processes. If we were in a glacial period, higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations would not equally stimulate plant growth because there is less TSI in an ice age.
- What is the Expanding Earth Theory?
I give the background for traditional plate tectonic theory and the idea that in Precambrian time all the continents were joined together in one huge continent “Pangea” surrounded by all the oceans “Panthalassa.”
Chapter 8, p. 215
Alfred Wegener, a German who was born in Berlin in 1880, was a lecturer in meteorology and astronomy at the University of Marburg, Germany, when he published a paper in 1912 entitled “Die Entstehung der Kontinente” (“The Origin of the Continents.”) In 1915, Wegener published a book-length treatment of the subject entitled Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of the Continents and Oceans). Wegener’s theory of continental drift proposed that in the Triassic Period at the beginning of the Mesozoic Age, about 250 million years ago, Pangaea, a single landmass that included all the continents, began to break up. Wegener introduced the concept Kontinentalverschiebung, or of “continental drift,” arguing that after the breakup of Pangaea, the continents moved to their current position, “closing oceans ahead of them, and opening oceans behind them.”
Yet, this makes for an unstable Earth, uncertain to spin in control
Chapter 8, p. 217
Yet, there is at least one fundamental question in physics the continental drift theory leaves unanswered. Earth continues spinning because of inertia. In the vacuum of space, objects maintain their momentum and direction, including their spin, because no force intervened to stop them. But would Earth, with all the land masses in one gigantic Pangaea mass and all the oceans separate in one big liquid Panthalassa, be sufficiently balanced to spin evenly? Oceans cover 70 percent of Earth’s surface. If 30 percent of the planet consisted of one big landmass continent and 70 percent were water, would this constitute an uneven distribution of mass around the axis of rotation? Unbalance involves an unequal distribution of mass, causing the mass axis to differ from the bearing axis. A rotor or a sphere that is unbalanced will cause vibration.
Chapter 8, p. 217-218
The point here is that while water covers 70 percent of Earth’s surface, water represents only 0.05 percent of Earth’s mass. Thus, before Pangaea broke apart, Earth was 70 percent water with a significantly lower per unit mass and 30 percent land with a considerably higher per unit mass. Wegener’s continental drift theory presumes that Earth, with an uneven distribution around the globe of landmass and oceans, would not begin vibrating so wildly that Earth would spin entirely out of orbit. Today, the seas divide the continents reasonably evenly. Did that just happen out of chance?
Samuel Warren Carey, an Australian geologist born in Campbelltown, New South Wales, in 1911, noticed that the continents fit together more precisely on a sphere, not on the type of relatively flat surface that would constitute even a giant continent. Carey argued the Earth expanded cataclysmically such that the continents broke apart and the Earth gained mass.
Chapter 8, p. 217
Ironically, Wegener’s theories began with cataclysmic events involving massive unexplained forces that caused Pangaea to break up and end with an idea at the heart of uniformitarianism. Despite the breakup movement of continents drifting to their positions today, adherents of continental drift theories insist Earth was the same size when Pangaea broke up at the end of the Paleozoic Age that it is today. Proponents of continental drift imagine the continents have just moved apart, shifting around oceans that were there in Precambrian time.
Carey placed this continent-dividing cataclysmic Earth expansion at 65 million years ago, identifying another cause for the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Chapter 8, pp. 220-221
Carey insisted there were no great oceans on Earth’s surface before the mid-Mesozoic Era. The mid-Mesozoic was some 170 million years ago in the middle of the Jurassic Period. Carey placed the time of Earth’s expansion, during which the oceans first formed, in the age of dinosaurs, a point we will consider more in-depth in the next section of this chapter. While Carey mentioned “extensive ancient seas,” he failed to demonstrate geological evidence of their existence. He left open the question of when water first appeared on Earth. But he left no doubt that there was no water on the surface of a pre-expansion Earth.
Chapter 8, pp. 220-221 (continued)
Carey had concluded that plate tectonics became a factor only after the continents broke apart as Earth expanded. But he saw oceans forming and continents drifting not as the cause of Pangaea’s breakup but as the effect of Pangea’s breakup. He argued, for instance, that since the Cretaceous, North America has rotated a further 45° counterclockwise. He also claimed the oceans have continued to expand, especially the Pacific, which he did not believe was initially nearly twice the size of the Atlantic Ocean. Many of Carey’s writings are devoted to examining Earth’s changes, including the ongoing movement of the continents and shifting of the poles.
We consider another mathematical principle: A difference in size is a difference in phenomenon.
Chapter 8, p. 221
We can understand the concept if we contemplate a bumblebee. A bumblebee can fly, given the size of the bumblebee and the dynamic construction of its wings. Yet, if a bumblebee is ten times or a hundred times its standard size, the bumblebee can no longer fly, even if we increase its wings proportionately such that the dynamic construction of its wings is still maintained. A giant bumblebee is not the same critter made larger. An enormous bumblebee is a different order of animal that requires different mathematical principles if the bumblebee is to fly in its larger form. In other words, being larger is not the same thing just made bigger. A difference in size typically involves a difference in the phenomenon. The famous Italian genius Galileo Galilei understood this mathematical principle as he made clear in his 1638 book Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences. Galileo realized that the skeletal structure of an animal was related to gravity
We conclude that animals as gigantic as dinosaurs would only be structurally viable on an Earth before expansion, with less mass, and therefore less gravity.
Chapter 8, pp. 221-222
In his 1994 book Dinosaurs and the Expanding Earth: Solving the Mystery of the Dinosaurs’ Gigantic Size, British mechanical engineer Stephen Hurrell proposed how the expanding Earth theory explained why the dinosaurs disappeared. Hurrell argued that Earth, before expansion, had less mass, hence less gravity. He discussed a Reduced Gravity Earth theory that argued animals as gigantic as dinosaurs would only be structurally viable in a reduced gravity environment. Near the end of his life, in the second edition of his book Earth, Universe, Cosmos, published in 2000, Carey agreed with Hurrell. In that book, Carey wrote the following:
Reduced Earth radius with constant Earth mass implies higher surface gravity, but much reduced surface gravity is essential for dinosaurs to have existed. The mass of Earth must have been less. The size of dinosaurs peaked in the Jurassic with Diplodocus, Brontosaurus, and flying reptiles like Quetzalcoatlus. By the mid Cretaceous Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus rex were much smaller, although still huge. Oligocene animals were still smaller although very much larger than their modern relatives. Birds also became lighter from heavy-boned Archeopterix and the bird-like Iguanadon to much lighter modern birds.
Chapter 8, p. 222
Referring back to chapter 7, the death of the dinosaurs was a complex phenomenon that involved the cataclysmic impact of the Chicxulub asteroid and the Deccan volcanism, as well as most likely the reduced gravity of a smaller Earth as seen here. The extinction of the dinosaurs began tens of millions of years before the Chicxulub impact, and most likely, Earth expanded significantly as bigger, heavier dinosaurs gave way to still gigantic but smaller species of dinosaurs. Yet, global warming theorists want to argue that CO2 is the only independent variable affecting climate throughout Earth’s history.
- What are the Milankovitch Cycles?
In 1904, Serbian-born Milutin Milankovitch received a Ph.D. at the University of Technology in Vienna, Austria. In 1920, Milankovitch published a book in which he described the orbit of the Earth Sun as elliptical, explaining that the Earth goes through cycles in which the orbit around the Sun becomes more elliptical or more circular in cycles running about 100,000 years. Milankovitch realized that the occurrence of Ice Ages corresponded roughly to coming when the Earth reached its most elliptical orbit and lasting until Earth reached its most circular orbit.
Chapter 8, p. 233
The most extensive glaciation occurred 650,000 years ago and lasted 50,000 years. The most recent glaciation peaked some 18,000 years ago before giving way to the current interglacial Holocene Epoch approximately 11,700 years ago. Earth has alternated between long ice ages and shorter interglacial periods for around 2.6 million years. For the last million years, approximately, ice ages have occurred roughly every 100,000 years, with 90,000 long years of glaciation regularly followed by approximately 10,000 years of relatively interglacial global warming. Given this cycle, Earth is due for another ice age.
Chapter 8, p. 231-232
In the distant billions of years of earth history, atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were dramatically higher during both glacial and interglacial periods. With the abundance of life on the planet today, CO2 levels are lower than Earth experienced in Precambrian time, when Earth was largely devoid of life—a time period that comprised some 80 percent of Earth’s history as we previously noted. In other words, the study of Milankovitch cycles and the impact of those cycles on ice ages through geologic time demonstrates that CO2 cannot be understood as the only independent variable that drives global warming. Moreover, not only is CO2 one of many independent variables affecting Earth’s climate, CO2 also operates as a dependent variable in the climate equation, as for instance now, when the interglacial global warming and the blossoming of life on the planet causes more CO2 to be emitted from natural causes into the environment. The refusal of CO2 to behave only as an independent variable in geologic time is why Michael Mann and his desperate cohorts went to such great lengths to falsify data producing their fraudulent Hockey Stick graphs.
Chapter 9
Abiotic Oil
Biogenic versus Abiogenic Oil,
The Fischer-Tropsch Process and Synthetic Oil,
Thomas Gold and the Deep Hot Biosphere,
Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents,
Fractures in Basement Rock,
Offshore Drilling and Deep-Earth Hydrocarbons,
Extraterrestrial Hydrocarbons,
and
CO2 Emissions from Deadwood Decomposition
Chapter 9, p. 250
The purpose of this chapter is to argue that natural hydrocarbon fuels found fully formed in the earth are abiotic, i.e., not made up of organic, biological material. This chapter will also clarify that hydrocarbon fuels degassing through deep-sea hydrothermal vents and deep-earth fissures are an essential feature of Earth’s carbon cycle long before the first signs of life appeared on the planet in the form of deep-earth microorganisms. The carbon cycle starts in Earth’s core, not with biogenic decay. Conventionally trained petroleum geologists will find the idea of abiotic oil hard to accept, much as petroleum geologists demonized for decades anyone who dared suggest that peak oil was a tautology, not proven science.
- What is the theory of abiotic oil?
Chapter 9, p. 251
Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist, who in 1896 first arranged the sixty-three known elements into a periodic table based on atomic mass, also studied the origin of petroleum. Mendeleev was one of the first to suggest that oil is primordial material that arises from great depths from within Earth. He reasoned that oil moves upward toward Earth’s surface along structures he theorized were “deep faults” within Earth’s crust. Philosophy of science professor Clifford Walters published a historical survey of views on the origin of petroleum. In his survey, Walters observed that Mendeleev’s abiotic theory “was viewed initially as particularly attractive as it offered an explanation for the growing awareness of the widespread occurrence of petroleum deposits that suggested some sort of deep, global process.”
Chapter 9, p. 257
“Germany has virtually no petroleum deposits,” observed Anthony N. Stranges of the Department of History at Texas A&M University, noting a resource reality even today. “Prior to the twentieth century, this was not a serious problem because Germany possessed abundant coal resources. Coal provided for commercial and home heating; it also fulfilled the needs of industry and the military, particularly the navy.”
Chapter 9, p. 257
The solution came from two German chemists, Franz Fischer (1877–1947) and Hans Tropsch (1889–1935), working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Chemie (Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry) in Berlin. In the 1920s, Fisher and Tropsch developed a series of equations that became known as the “Fischer-Tropsch process.” Defining a methodology for producing synthetic petroleum from coal, Fisher and Tropsch were aware of the chemistry of carbon monoxide reactions developed since 1900. The hydrogenation of carbon dioxide, producing “water gas” from hydrogen and carbon monoxide, was key to the synthetic production of methane in the early 1900s. In 1923, Fisher and Tropsch realized that alkalized iron turnings (i.e., iron filings resulting as debris from manufacturing processes) at 100–150 atm of hydrogen (i.e., standard atmosphere, with 1 atm being Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level), plus carbon monoxide, and 400°-500°C produced synthetic hydrocarbons in a catalyzed reaction.
Chapter 9, p. 258
So, by the 1920s, Fisher and Tropsch had developed a process to produce synthetic hydrocarbons. Their process involved passing hydrogenated carbon gas (H + CO) through an iron (Fe) catalyst at high pressure and intense heat. The result produced methane (CH4) synthetically. For our discussion here, the importance of the Fischer-Tropsch process was the demonstration that hydrocarbons could be produced synthetically on a commercial basis without the involvement of any organic materials—no microbes, no dead plants, no decaying animals. The Fischer-Tropsch process alone proves hydrocarbon fuels are not necessarily organic in origin, a point Wöhler’s synthesis of urea had prefigured a century earlier, in 1828. Some may object that the coal used in the Fischer-Tropsch process is a fossil fuel. We would add that biomass can also be used in the Fischer-Tropsch process to produce synthetic hydrocarbons. But the critical chemical reaction, as German scientists began proving in the early 1900s, was the catalytic hydrogenation of carbon monoxide (CO and H2) to form C1 hydrocarbons like methane (CH4) and methanol (CH3OH).
The Fischer-Tropsch equations explain to produce synthetic hydrocarbons explains how the Earth manufactures oil in the mantle of the Earth on a continuing basis.
Pages 261-269 discuss inner Earth chemical processes in relation to the Fischer-Tropsch equations to explain how the mantle of the Earth synthesizes hydrocarbons.
Chapter 9, p. 261
This subsection will examine the chemicals in Earth’s core and mantle and the chemical reactions in Earth’s mantle. We will argue that all the chemical reactions that the Fischer-Tropsch equations specify for the synthetic creation of hydrocarbon fuels have been present in inner Earth in geologic time and are still operating today. The main point of this subsection is that the inner Earth is fully capable of manufacturing abiotic hydrocarbon fuels. In other words, Earth’s lower mantle acts to produce abiotic oil as if it were a Fischer-Tropsch plant producing synthetic hydrocarbon fuels.
Chapter 9, p. 267
As we continue to learn more about the deep-Earth cycles of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, the IPCC’s assumption becomes increasingly suspicious. While conventionally trained petroleum geologists refuse to accept that Earth produces abiotic hydrocarbon fuels continuously, Russian and Ukrainian petroleum geologists have understood that the creation of hydrocarbon fuels are a natural part of the planet’s hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen cycles, not a process depending upon abundant organic material already being here to decay. The IPCC assumes humans bear the primary responsibility for adding extremely high CO2 into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. But seeing humans as the cause of an imminent Anthropocene climate crisis and possible sixth extinction requires the IPCC to assume that Earth’s hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen cycles cannot absorb the CO2 produced by our use of hydrocarbon fuels as our primary energy source. More CO2 in the atmosphere causes Earth to be greener. Plant photosynthesis absorbs solar radiation, acting as a negative feedback mechanism for temperature by keeping solar radiation from directly hitting Earth’s surface. This plant temperature feedback mechanism is similar to clouds acting as shields to bounce solar radiation back into space.
A study of the bedrock structure beneath Saudi Arabia reveals that the giant oilfields lie on deep-earth bedrock fractures through which hydrocarbons can up-gas.
Chapter 9, p. 296
An important but largely neglected study of the Saudi bedrock structure provided strong evidence that the Saudi oil fields resulted from fractures and faults in the basement rock. H.S. Edgell, a geologist at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, published the study in 1992. In the paper entitled, “Basement Tectonics of Saudi Arabia as Related to Oil Field Structures,” Edgell argued that the Saudi oil fields, including the giant field at Ghawar, were produced by bedrock fractures lying beneath the oil fields. “All the oil fields of Saudi Arabia are of the structural type, and they all lie in the northeastern part of the country, including the Saudi offshore portion of the Persian Gulf,” Edgell wrote. Edgell made clear he was referring both to the onshore and offshore fields. “These oil field structures are mostly produced by extensional block faulting in the crystalline Precambrian basement along the predominantly N-S Arabian Trend which constitutes the ‘old grain’ of Arabia.” Precambrian rock dates back geologically some 570 million years ago, back to the origin of Earth 4.6 billion years ago.
Woods Hole Oceanographic study of Lost City Hydrothermal Fields (LCHF) in the deep Atlantic Ocean confirm that hydrocarbon fuels exuding from the deep-sea vents emit hydrocarbons formed by the Fischer-Tropsch process.
Chapter 9, pp. 281-282
Then, in February 2008, this same team of ocean scientists published the conclusions of their continued research. Giora Proskurowski of the School of Oceanography at the University of Washington in Seattle was the lead author of the article entitled, “Abiogenic Hydrocarbon Production at Lost City Hydrothermal Field.” Proskurowski reported on research led by the University of Washington and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution that sampled the hydrogen-rich fluids venting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean in the Lost City hydrothermal field. Remarkably, Proskurowski and his team concluded that the hydrogen-rich fluids involved an abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons generated by seawater chemical reactions with the serpentinite rocks under the Lost City hydrothermal vent field in the Atlantic Ocean. The article rattled the conventional wisdom of petroleum geologists who insisted that all hydrocarbon fuels found in the biosphere had to be organic in origin. Even more impressive, Proskurowski and his team saw the link between the Fischer-Tropsch process and the deep-Earth hydrocarbons exuding from the Lost City hydrothermal chimneys. The article began cautiously introducing the idea that the Lost City chimneys were venting abiogenic hydrocarbons:
Chapter 9, pp. 281-282 (continued)
The oceanographic scientists left no doubt of their conclusion. They had found a source of abiogenic hydrocarbons in the biosphere. They wrote:
Although CH4 and higher hydrocarbons have been synthesized by FTT in the gas phase from CO for more than 100 years, only recently were FTT reactions shown to proceed, albeit with low yields, under aqueous hydrothermal conditions, with dissolved CO2 as the carbon source.
They concluded:
Here, we show that low-molecular-weight hydrocarbons in high-pH vent fluids from the ultramafic-hosted Lost City Hydrothermal Field (LCHF) at 30°N on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge (MAR) are likely produced abiotically through FTT reactions.
This article in Science was the first scientific publication where legitimate scientists were willing to put their reputations on the line by declaring they had found a biosphere case where the interaction of seawater with rocks originating in the mantle produced abiotic hydrocarbons. “Our findings illustrate that the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in nature may occur in the presence of ultramafic rocks, water, and moderate amounts of heat,” the oceanographic scientists concluded in print.
Chapter 9 contains a detailed description of the scientific work Thomas Gold conducted on abiotic oil. Thomas Gold’s 1999 book The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels was the inspiration for the 2005 book (my first of three books on energy and global warming) that I co-authored with Craig Smith, entitled Black Gold Stranglehold.
- Why are renewable fuels of wind and solar energy not replacements for hydrocarbon fuels?
Chapter 10, p. 310-311
Suppose we had a battery the size of a flashlight battery that could store enough solar energy to light a city. If solar technology that powerful existed, the entire world would drop hydrocarbon fuels in an instant to switch to these new, powerful solar batteries. Suppose we had a wind energy storage device equally as powerful. Suppose ten wind turbines placed a few miles outside a metropolitan area could provide all the electricity that the city and suburbs needed for a week, whether or not the wind blew. Again, a mighty wind energy capacity would dislodge hydrocarbon fuels from their current position as the world’s preferred energy choice. The physics of solar and wind power limit their usefulness. The sun does not shine in the sky at night, and the equinox, two times each year, marks the point where day lasts for twelve hours and night occurs for twelve hours in both the Northern and the Southern Hemispheres. Like every other component of Earth’s weather and climate systems, the wind is also variable. Wind and solar devices capture no energy when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. Current technology for generating and storing solar and wind energy is limited. Installations of solar and wind energy collection devices require enormous facilities that use up vast amounts of territory. The cost of providing sufficient backup or storage to run a stable electric grid from wind or solar power could multiply the cost of generating electricity by a factor of five or more, given the problem of intermittency. Intermittency is an inherent problem of wind and solar power given that wind and solar power generation fluctuates wildly not only between day and night, but also because of a score of factors including seasonal variations and weather events. While wind and solar technologies are advancing, the ability to create a mighty wind or solar battery the size of a flashlight battery is nowhere on the horizon.
Chapter 10, pp. 314-315, concludes with a discussion of Texas electric grid brownouts attributable to the legal requirement mandating a certain percentage use of wind and solar power.
Also discussed are the limitations of Electric Vehicles (pp. 315-317), the unreliability of wind and solar energy (pp. 317-319), and the decision by China to abandon CO2 emission reductions in China’s expansion of coal, oil, and natural gas (pp. 324-326).
Prepared by Jerome R. Corsi
July 27, 2022
