There's More To Climate Than Carbon

“Many lines of evidence demonstrate that human activities, especially emissions of greenhouse (heat-trapping) gases, are primarily responsible for recent observed climate change,” -NYTimes

“… especially emissions of greenhouse gases,”

No they fucking aren’t.
Jesus Christ I’m getting tired of reading this,
So I’m going to break it down for everybody,
Just in case anyone still gives a damn.
Anybody?

Chances are good you’ve heard me go off about this at least once before, but I’m usually all pissed off and frothy and don’t make my point as clearly and concisely as I ought to because I’m so goddamn aggravated by repeated failures by scientists to recognize that all their fields are interconnected, or to talk to each other about it.

If all you ever studied in school was the geometry of arrangements of carbon, you’re gonna miss it.
If you’re specialized in the field of meteorology,
And consequently all you see are meteors,
This might slide right past you.

I’d think that professional climate scientists would know a little bit more about a few things other than cow farts and diesel exhaust, like this fantastic invention you might have heard of,
Called “plants.”

See, plants do this awesome thing called cellular respiration.
Fueled by the sun, the molecular machinery of the leaf absorbs CO2, and similar machinery in the roots soak up H2O.
Using low energy methods physics has yet to understand or reproduce,
The plant severs the bonds of the CO2 and H2O,
Then recombines the H from the H2O,
With the C from the CO2,

Creating a stable hydrocarbon or carbohydrate, depending on the sequence and quantities of the arrangement, effectively sequestering the carbon, at the same time as it releases free oxygen.
Amazing, right?

In the case of say, hemp, that hydrocarbon arrangement can be used as a food or a fuel for just about any of our energy needs.
Vegetable oils, when used as fuel, are
CARBON NEUTRAL

Because all that carbon came from CO2 in the first place.
You’ve probably also heard that we humans, since the dawn of civilization and more recently, industry, have cut down
MORE THAN HALF OF THE FORESTS ON THE ENTIRE PLANET. WHICH SURELY HAS NO IMPACT ON CLIMATE WORTH MEASURING.

“Effective management of forests offers the opportunity to reduce future climate change — for example, as given in proposals for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation in developing countries and tropical ecosystems (see Ch. 14: Mitigation) — by capturing and storing carbon in forest ecosystems and long-term wood products (Lippke et al. 2011).
Afforestation in the United States has the potential to capture and store 225 million tons of additional carbon per year from 2010 to 2110 (EPA 2005; King et al. 2006).

However, the projected maturation of United States forests (Wear and Coulston 2015) and land-cover change, driven in particular by the expansion of urban and suburban areas along with projected increased demands for food and bioenergy, threaten the extent of forests and their carbon storage potential (McKinley et al. 2011).”

:P

All those trees, as they process that H2O and CO2,
Use a method called evapotranspiration,
Which allows their tender leaf surfaces to be exposed to the intense radiation of direct sunlight without getting hot and cooking to death.

This is because evaporating a substance causes a decrease in temperature.
So when you take millions of leaves, as you might find in a forest we haven’t cut down (yet,) you get a
GIANT REFRIGERATOR.

Not only do they sequester CO2,
They actively lower the temperature.
Damn near every joule of solar energy that would be converted into heat on contact with the ground, instead turns into biochemical energy for the cell. Phenomenal.

If you read the full report, they’re not totally ignorant of this, they just gloss over it as one of many footnotes to THE EVIL OF HORRIBLE AWFUL CARBON:

“Land-cover changes (LCC) due to anthropogenic activities in the industrial era have changed the land surface brightness (albedo), principally through deforestation and afforestation. There is strong evidence that these changes have increased Earth’s global surface albedo, creating a negative (cooling) RF of −0.15 ± 0.10 W/m2 17 (Myhre et al. 2013). “

Now let’s get back to demonizing the basic building blocks of life, shall we?

So then we cut that forest down, and write on it.
Where it used to stand, we build some houses out of its corpses, and then surround the houses with concrete and asphalt heat sinks.

This is referred to as the “urban heat island” and is well known to meteorologists as a place where temperatures will be higher than average… So somehow they KNOW that pavement generates additional heat, and yet they leave that out of their equation for global warming.

Global warming has nothing to do with heat, folks.
Nothing to see here, move along.

“ Recent studies confirm and quantify that surface temperatures are higher in urban areas than in surrounding rural areas for a number of reasons, including the concentrated release of heat from buildings, vehicles, and industry. In the United States, this urban heat island effect results in daytime temperatures 0.9°–7.2°F (0.5°–4.0°C) higher and nighttime temperatures 1.8°– 4.5°F (1.0°–2.5°C) higher in urban areas, with larger temperature differences in humid regions (primarily in the eastern United States) and in cities with larger and denser populations. The urban heat island effect will strengthen in the future as the structure, spatial extent, and population density of urban areas change and grow (high confidence). “

See? They don’t totally ignore it!
I found this gem on PAGE 405.
I wonder if our president will make it past the introduction?

All the engines running on fossil fuels, everything running on electricity (your refrigerator AND your oven) produce excess heat, at the same time as they result in more CO2 entering the atmosphere.
I’m not saying it’s a great idea for everyone to own and operate their own personal vehicle that runs on gas, it’s a stupid design, but if we hadn’t cut half the fucking forests down, you could probably still get away with it.

Carbon is not to blame for our problems.
It is one of many contributing factors to climate,
Which is extremely complex,
And cannot be boiled down to a singular cause.
STOP DOING THAT, QUOTE UNQUOTE SCIENTISTS.

“Earth system models differ significantly in projections of terrestrial carbon uptake (Lovenduski and Bonan 2017), with large uncertainties in the effects of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations (i.e., CO2 15 fertilization) and nutrient downregulation on plant productivity, as well as the strength of carbon cycle feedbacks (Anav et al. 2013; Hoffman et al. 2014; Ch. 2: Physical Drivers of Climate Change). When CO2 effects on photosynthesis and transpiration are removed from global gridded crop models, simulated response to climate across the models is comparable, suggesting that model parameterizations representing these processes remain uncertain (Rosenzweig et al. 2014). “

Translation:
We don’t know how much or of what.
Nobody’s ever really done the measurements,
We just modeled stuff in the computer and called it good enough.

Obviously, it is more important to academia that they simplify systems so they can talk down to stupid people, and hopefully reach them in an attempt to maintain their tenure and justify their own existence while contributing to climate change [maybe?]… Then it is to actually analyze and understand the system they’re working with, in an attempt to fix it.

And I feel their pain,
Because out of the five or ten of you that bother reading this,
None of you are going to do anything about it.
Knowing the problem doesn’t magically create the solution,
You’ve got no free time to contemplate it,
And nobody in a position to act asks me,
Even though I have a solution.

Oh well.

P.S.
If anybody bothers to ask how to solve it,
I’ll be happy to tell you all about it, free of charge.