Understanding Natural Climate Cycles

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CLIMATE CHANGE PART II: AS THE WORLD TURNS, EARTH’S NATURAL CLIMATE CYCLES

In our daily perusal of the news and social media, we should be alarmed at the frequency and magnitude of what I would call “climate apocalypse hysteria.” This manner of com­municating seems to dominate the coverage of every weather event or release of a new “scientific” study that connects some mundane aspect of our daily lives to the global climate-change catastrophe. To illustrate the insanity, consider recent and typical headlines such as “Scientists unnerved by record shattering 2023 temperatures,”¹ “Scorching October puts 2023 on track to be hottest year in 125,000 years,”² and “Climate Change and its human causes cannot be denied, papal document says.”³ Major media outlets issue several of these types of fear-mongering headlines per day.

The steady diet of this type of alarmist news and the extended durations often cited (such as the past one hundred twenty-five thou­sand years), combined with religious authority (the Pope) ascribed to these pronouncements, would lead many to assume that 2023 was the worst weather (or climate) year in human his­tory. However, there is one major problem with drawing this conclusion, despite the constant barrage of doomsday narratives—it simply is not true. By the most objective measure of climate-related stress on humanity, namely fatalities directly caused by natural disasters, the 2020s are actually one of the safest times to be alive in human history. In fact, as Figure 1 shows, the past hundred years have seen a reduction in natural-disaster-related fatalities by over 13,000 percent (not a typo). Although not included in Figure 1, the year 2022 continued the trendline, with three hundred eighty-seven documented natural disasters resulting in less than forty thousand climate-related deaths. I expect 2023’s figures to be similar in magnitude.

Given that much of the current fervor re­garding the life-and-death implications of “climate change” seems to be much ado about nothing, are there historical examples where extreme climate events have indeed substantially influenced the weather and the health and fitness of humanity? It turns out that there are more than a few, but a couple of specific years stand out. In discussing these two years in particular, it is important to note that this is counterfactual from the current mainstream climate narrative, as covered in my previous article on climate change⁴ in which I discussed the infamous “Hockey Stick” graph produced by paleoclimatologist Michael Mann. What we are sup­posed to believe is that the Earth’s climate has been extremely stable for the past two thousand years (or now one hundred thousand years), until the Industrial Revolution (about 1850) and mass combustion of fossil fuels. Since then, we are told, the average temperature of the Earth has increased asymptotically in almost perfect correlation with the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

THE YEAR WITHOUT A SUN

The first of the two historic corollaries where changes in the climate did have a profound impact on the well-being of humanity occurred roughly fifteen hundred years ago—in the year 536 AD—which is viewed by some historians as one of those hinge years connecting late antiquity to the early medieval period. The Western Roman Empire (Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, North Africa, England) had administratively collapsed roughly fifty years earlier and was now ruled mostly by a collection of Germanic warlords. The metropole of the world had shifted from Rometo the “New Rome” of Constantinople, seat of the Eastern Roman Empire. Emperor Justinian, who had been in power since 527, was a man with celestial ambitions and even bigger earthly plans. The main thrust of his strategy was something called Revnovatio Imperii or “Restoration of the Empire” (the ancient version of “Make America/Rome Great Again”). Justinian’s big plan was to reconquer the Western Roman Empire in order to swell available manpower and resources, thereby providing the means to take on the other great superpower of the day, the Sassanid Persian Empire stretching to the East.

By early 536, affairs were proceeding as planned. Justinian’s chief general, Belisarius, had successfully pushed the Vandals out of North Africa and recaptured Sicily from the Germanic Ostrogoths. The next year appeared promising, as Belisarius captured Naples and planned to march up the length of Italy toward Rome, the eternal city and namesake of the Roman people. Then the weather intervened.

The year 536 AD would go down as one of the worst for human exis­tence ever recorded, becoming known colloquially as the “Year Without a Sun.” As recorded contemporaneously by the scholar Procopius, “During this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness. . . and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear.” Across Europe, the Middle East and even as far as China, records indicate a year without heat and sunshine, as well as documented widespread crop failure. The Irish chroniclers were succinct in their appraisal (“a failure of bread in AD 536”), while Chinese bureaucrats reported a failed crop following snows in August; even the Moche civilization of Peru recorded widespread drought over the same period.

So, what happened? We still do not entirely know for sure—and people at the time certainly did not know, other than assigning their plight to divine misfavor. The current consensus theory is that a series of large volcanic explosions occurred in late 535 or early 536, in a loca­tion hypothesized as either Iceland, North California, Alaska or Indone­sia—or possibly all of the above. These volcanic eruptions would have thrown millions of tonnes of ash, pumice and sulfur dioxides into the atmosphere. All of these materials act as aerosols or “solar reflectors” in our upper troposphere, impeding the entry of heat and light from the sun into our lower atmosphere. This would have had a great impact on the natural variability of the seasons and the ability to grow food. Current estimates hold that this volcanic blanket, which covered large portions of the Earth, reduced the average temperature across Europe, Asia and the Mediterranean by up to 5°F (2.6°C).

The collapse in the regional food supply was only the beginning of the problems for Justinian and his generals. Belisarius did in fact recapture Rome in early December of 536, but this proved to be a pyrrhic victory. The city of Rome would change hands about half a dozen times over the war for the Italian Peninsula, which ended up dragging on for another eighteen bloody years. By the time the Italian campaign was completed in 554, estimates are that the population of Rome itself had declined to fifty thousand citizens from an estimated five hundred thousand before the war.

Records from the time indicate that the sudden failure of the food supply was not isolated to the auspicious year of 536 but continued for three to four years after the volcanic winter. In 541, with food in short supply, a new disease emerged in Roman Egypt. By 544, plague across Europe and Asia was decimating the populations of both the Eastern Roman and Sassanid Empires, with the most acute effects felt in the large population and trading centers. Procopius’s records, likely an exaggeration, indicate that at one point ten thousand people a day were dying in Constan­tinople, but even the modern estimates put the plague’s impact at fifteen to fifty million deaths in a population that was approximately two hundred fifty million prior to the outbreak. It has become known as the Plague of Justinian.

The epilogue of this historical anecdote is that by 560, the combination of the volcanic winter crippling of the food supply and war across the Mediterranean and Near East had not in fact made Rome great again, but instead had critically sapped the strength and manpower of the relatively urban Eastern Roman and Persian Sassanid empires, leaving both vulnerable to a previously unknown and unforeseen threat. Emerging about sixty years later from the depths of the Arabian Desert, a new group riding under the banner of their monotheistic prophet Mohammed would provide the final nail in the coffin of the great Sassanid Empire and leave the Eastern Roman Empire as nothing more than an on-again, off-again rump state confined to safety behind the walls of Constantinople.

DUST BOWL HIGHS AND LOWS

No one should be ashamed of having only a limited knowledge of catastrophic weather pat­terns that occurred over fifteen hundred years ago, especially given that our knowledge of that period is sparse at best and wholly incomplete at worst. The second example of extreme weather is more interesting in that it occurred a mere ninety years ago—which is practically contem­poraneous from a climate perspective—and oc­curred in the age of the modern instrumentation and mass media record, yet significantly, it is almost never discussed in the context of modern climate change hysteria.

The event that I am referencing is the “Dust Bowl,” which afflicted a collection of Midwestern states (Kansas, Oklahoma, northwest Texas, Colorado and New Mexico) from roughly 1934-1940. The years in question sit squarely in the modern instrumentation record but before the apparent upward spike in temperatures and CO2 levels to which all climate and weather events in the past thirty to forty years have been ascribed. Like many weather-related disasters, the Dust Bowl had distinct natural and man-made components. This is in direct contrast to the current climate narrative, which claims that all weather events are 100 percent human-induced (anthropomorphic), with no or only minimal associated natural attribution.

The Dust Bowl has been assigned two root causes; the first, topsoil erosion in the semi-arid or shortgrass prairie region; the second a pro­longed drought (of approximately ten years’ duration) across the same region. The topsoil erosion was a function of mechanized farming prac­tices, largely introduced and adopted after World War I, and of intensive monocropping in “marginal” agricultural land. This marginal quality was itself the result of low average annual rainfall (less than twenty inches, on average) and frequent droughts.

Why this area was so intensively planted in the period after WWI is in part due to the global price of wheat and other staple grains. The combination of WWI in Europe and the Communist Revolution in Russia and Eastern Europe had resulted in a global cereal crop shortage by 1920. This incentivized U.S. farmers to expand into increasingly marginal land. By coincidence or luck, the 1920s was a period of unusually high rainfall and mild winters in the Midwest, leading to an ideal planting environment and producing a global cereal crop surplus by 1930.

By 1934, after several years of extended drought, the region’s shal­low topsoil was effectively desiccated. In May of that year, a strong two-day windstorm created the first of what became known as “black blizzards,” enormous dust storms across the Midwest. The dust clouds would subsequently reach Chicago, depositing some twelve million pounds of particulate matter across the city, and two days later reaching the East Coast. Famous monuments such as the Statue of Liberty and Washington Monument were blotted from view, and when winter hit that year, red snow fell in New England. These black blizzards would become a common feature in the Midwest (from Texas to Canada) over the next couple of years.

The peak of Dust-Bowl-related weather oddities occurred two years later in 1936, a year with perhaps the most unusual, volatile and down­right strange weather in the past hundred years or within the modern temperature record. The winter of 1935–1936 was the most severe in recorded U.S. history. Cold records that still stand to this day were set in nine states in February 1936, with the Upper Midwest hitting an all-time low of minus 60°F (minus 50°C). Many schools across the Midwest were closed for the month of February, and supply shortages occurred across the Dakotas.

Despite the brutal winter, as 1936 progressed, it was also exception­ally dry, with much of the Midwest averaging only three to four inches of rain for the first six months of the year. The drought was further com­pounded, in 1936, by one of the warmest summers on record. By July 4th, an enormous heat dome had settled over the Midwest, raising daytime high temperatures for much of the Midwest to 105°F to 110°F for the next three weeks. What this means is that in one six-month period, places such as South Dakota and Nebraska ex­perienced a temperature range of almost 170°F (from the winter nighttime low of minus 60°F to the summer daytime high of 110°F).

The heat wave of 1936, in an era before air conditioning, killed an estimated five thou­sand people, but in the long run, the extended drought, dust storms and environmental col­lapse had a greater impact. Government records suggest that the Dust Bowl years (1930–1940) left some five hundred thousand Americans homeless, and resulted in net emigration from the Midwest Plains states of some three and a half million inhabitants.

One would think that 1936 would qualify as one of the most studied years in history from a climate change perspective, given the extreme-temperature highs and lows and the significant impact on the populations of the Midwest. Yet in the mainstream climate narrative, it is almost never, if ever, mentioned. Why? Perhaps it is because examples that exist throughout history, whether they be the volcanic summer of 536 or the Dust Bowl events of 1936, are contradictory to the modern climate change narrative—a nar­rative of extremely stable temperature across the globe for thousands of years (perhaps hundreds of thousands), followed by a dramatic spike in temperatures associated with the advent of fossil fuels.

THE SUN AND THE SOLAR SYSTEM

If you have become a bit suspicious of the narrative claiming that all weather and/or cli­mate is controlled solely by human-produced carbon dioxide, then you may be asking your­self, what other variables in our physical world influence the Earth’s long-term climate and daily weather? Non-carbon dioxide variables can be roughly split into three categories: the sun and solar system; the atmosphere; and Earth and the oceans.

The sun—the large spinning fusion reactor and star at the center of our solar system— contains 99.86 percent of the total mass of our solar system and is the single largest influencer on Earth’s climate. Specifically, the distance between the sun and Earth largely sets the broad average temperature of our planet at 15°C (60°F). The sun’s electromagnetic radiation output enters the top of Earth’s atmosphere as a roughly average radiative flux (also known as solar irradiance) of 340 Watts per square meter (or enough energy to light five to six light bulbs per one-meter box if perfectly converted), averaged across the surface of the Earth. The geometry of Earth’s approximately spherical shape, the tilt of the Earth on its axis, the sur­face topography and atmospheric resistance in the forms of atmospheric composition and, most importantly, clouds (which both reflect and absorb incoming solar irradiance) directly influence how much solar radiation reaches the Earth’s surface (see Figure 2).

Regarding the Earth and the sun, there is a collection of observable natural cycles that are constantly influencing the sun’s electromagnetic output and the relative position and axial tilt of the Earth with respect to the sun. Changes in the sun’s radiative output can be expressed as solar flares, coronal ejections and, most consistently, in the tracking of sunspots. Humans have been observing sunspots since Greek and Chinese astronomers started doing so around about 300 BC. What we would call reliable observations began in the 1750s and have followed regular intervals between solar maxima (more sunspots) and solar minima (fewer sunspots) of approxi­mately eleven years with varying degrees of amplitude. Low sunspot maxima experienced from 1800 to 1850 are thought to have contrib­uted to the climatic cold period known as the “Little Ice Age” (see the solar cycles shown in Figure 3). An interesting footnote to Figure 3 is the fact that the year 2023 was a solar sunspot maxima year, possibly contributing to higher temperatures, a fact rarely if ever discussed in the mainstream media.

Operating on much longer intervals than the decade-long sunspot oscillation, several epochal cycles subtly change the position of Earth relative to the sun. Commonly known as the Milankovitch cycles, these consist of three components (Figure 4):

• ECCENTRICITY: The shift of Earth’s orbit around the sun, from circular to elliptical and back, over a one-hundred-thousand- to two-hundred-thousand-year interval, influenced by the push and pull of other large-mass bodies in our solar system, namely the position of Jupiter and Saturn relative to Earth.
• OBLIQUITY: The axial tilt of Earth relative to the sun, usually measured from the Y-axis, oscillating between 24.5 degrees (more sun Northern Hemisphere, less sun Southern Hemisphere) and 22.3 degrees (reversed) and back every forty-two thousand years (mid­point max/min interval of twenty-one thousand years). The current tilt is 23.4 degrees—or about halfway between min and max—put­ting the last Northern Hemisphere axial tilt minimum at about ten thousand five hundred years ago, which aligns with the end of the last recorded ice age, where glaciers extended to below the Great Lakes in North America and the Alps in Europe. The axial tilt of Earth directly aligns with periods of glacial maximum and minimum extending from the poles in each hemisphere, depending on the tilt.
• PRECISION: Effectively the wobble of the spinning top that is our planet on its axis, experiencing a full eccentric revolution every twenty-six thousand years.

All these factors (sunspots and celestial mechanics) constantly influence the incoming radiation received by and distributed across the Earth. Given the sun’s enormous influence, what is perhaps most interesting in the current climate change discussion is how seldom the sun is mentioned. As a crude example, doing a keyword search in the latest twenty-four-hundred-page release by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),⁵ the terms “sun” or “solar” are used a mere six hundred eighty-nine times, with maybe 75 percent of those mentions referring to solar panels; in comparison, the terms “carbon dioxide” or “CO2” have over forty-three hundred mentions.

In addition, the scientific literature almost always treats the sun and incoming radiative flux as a constant across time and space. This is perhaps understandable given the long-term nature of the orbital mechanics, but it is puz­zling and odd regarding the sunspot (radiative output) cycles, which occur regularly every eleven years, and the overlapping nature of the three Milankovitch cycles.

THE ATMOSPHERE

Earth’s protective gas bubble extends some thirty miles (or fifty kilometers) radially from Earth’s surface and is essential for life as we understand it. (This includes the troposphere, ozone layer and stratosphere, but not the me­sosphere, thermosphere or exosphere.) The atmosphere is our collective greenhouse, and its primary benefit to humans is that it prevents our planet from becoming an ice ball. Without the atmosphere, based solely on distance from the sun, Earth would be approximately 0°C instead of the balmy 15°C that we currently experience.

On a dry gas basis, Earth’s atmospheric composition is 78.1 percent inert nitrogen, 20.95 percent oxygen, 0.9 percent inert argon and a 0.05 percent mixture of gases known as the “greenhouse gases.” On a part-per-million (ppm) basis, these greenhouse gases round to five hundred ppm (divide percentage by one hundred and multiply by a million to get ppm). Most of this greenhouse gas mixture is carbon dioxide (CO2), followed by methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (NOx), fluorinated gases (HFCs) and ozone (O3). These gases collectively warm our atmosphere by absorbing incoming and outgoing solar radiation. It is the absorption of outgoing radiation, after the sun’s energy hits Earth’s surface, where these atmospheric gases have the largest “greenhouse” effect.

However, these dry gases are not the major contributors to Earth’s greenhouse effect. For that, we need to look to a more mysterious but ubiquitous substance—water—most of the time a liquid (hence the emphasis of “dry gas basis” in the previous paragraph) but sometimes a vapor (see Figure 5). Water vapor (H2O) is the dominant greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, providing 95 percent of the greenhouse effect that keeps our planet habitable. Carbon dioxide provides a further 3.6 percent of the total green­house effect, and the other gases the remaining 1.4 percent.

Here we find another of these current green­house gas discussion anomalies. Water vapor, despite being the overwhelmingly dominant greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, is almost never mentioned, despite the fact that some changes in atmospheric water vapor concen­tration and distribution are clearly and directly related to human activity. Think of dams, irri­gation, hydrocarbon combustion, cities, smoke­stacks, cooling towers, terraforming and so on. Among the scientifically dubious reasons given for ignoring water vapor, one is that the water vapor distribution around the earth is constantly in flux, with the majority of water vapor produc­tion coming from the vast oceans, which makes it harder to measure consistently (as opposed to a dry, evenly distributed gas such as CO2). A second line of reasoning is that because water is essential for life, it would be strange to the point of being laughable to label water (and/or water vapor) as an atmospheric pollutant. For these reasons, water vapor—despite serving as our primary greenhouse gas and a main mover of day-to-day weather patterns—is generally excluded from analysis and discussions regard­ing climate change, leaving a glaring hole in the argument that carbon dioxide is the main ingredient responsible for all weather and cli­mate change.

The disregard of water vapor stands in stark contrast to discussions about carbon di­oxide, which climate alarmists label not just a pollutant, but the dominant pollutant in our atmosphere. What makes this so strange is that carbon dioxide, like water, is essential for life on this planet, being one of the three required ingredients (along with water and sunlight) to facilitate photosynthesis, which creates oxygen and simple carbohydrates/sugars—the key building blocks for life—as its byproducts.

What is true and should be considered a demonstrable fact is that the carbon dioxide concentration of our atmosphere has been in­creasing steadily across the industrial age into the modern era, from an estimated level of two hundred eighty ppm in the mid-1800s to four hundred thirty ppm today. If you can ignore the climate/CO2 hysteria, it turns out that this one hundred fifty ppm increase may not be all that bad.

There are a couple of details to consider. In the photosynthesis process, CO2 starvation begins to occur as CO2 levels drop below two hundred ppm and essentially halts photosyn­thesis at a level of one hundred fifty ppm. The cessation of photosynthesis on the planet would be detrimental to all living things. Further, the optimum level of CO2 for plant production (roughly twelve hundred ppm), repeated in nu­merous greenhouse experiments, is quite a bit higher than our current atmosphere (see Figure 6). CO2, for all effective purposes, is plant food or a form of supplemental fertilization, which is the reason that most commercial greenhouses in the world “enrich” their circulating air system with carbon dioxide to raise the CO2 level from four hundred thirty ppm to twelve hundred ppm.

With the one hundred fifty ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past two hundred years, a logical angle of inquiry would be whether we have seen a corresponding increase in global foliage. Although heavily under­reported by the mainstream media, we have in fact experienced a greening of the earth, as shown in the satellite comparison in Figure 7. One would think that an overall greening trend across Earth would be a detail to trumpet, not to mention the billions of dollars saved per year on incremental fertilizer purchases by farmers across the world.

Regarding the physical and electromagnetic characteristics of carbon dioxide and its ab­sorption of outgoing radiation from Earth, CO2 absorbs outgoing radiation of only four wave­lengths (see Figure 5). Three of these are shared with water and water vapor, where water vapor typically dominates the absorption mechanics. This leaves only one wavelength where CO2 has a true retarding effect to outgoing energy and heat. Within this wavelength (fifteen microm­eters), increasing concentrations have a law of diminishing returns (see Figure 8), where the first hundred ppm of CO2 absorb far more energy than the last hundred ppm. When saturation oc­curs, no amount of increased CO2 will increase heat absorption in any significant way.

 

 

One last point about carbon dioxide is worth mentioning. At low concentration (or any theoretical concentrations in the atmosphere), CO2 is not acutely toxic to human beings. The current atmospheric concentrations of four hundred thirty ppm are well below the city/ urban levels of six hundred ppm, the thousand ppm level typical in commercial airplanes, the four to eight thousand ppm level experienced by astronauts and submariners and the forty thou­sand ppm common in exhaled human breath. Carbon dioxide does not become acutely toxic to human respiratory function until concentra­tion levels reach one hundred to two hundred thousand ppm.

In contrast to the greenhouse gases, there is a second type of gas or particle contained in our atmosphere—the aerosols—which has the opposite effect. Where greenhouse gases ab­sorb redirected radiation from Earth’s surface, trapping the heat inside of Earth’s atmosphere, the aerosols reflect incoming solar radiation before it reaches Earth’s surface. The main aerosols that affect our atmosphere are mostly byproducts of hydrocarbon combustion, the same as carbon dioxide. These primary aerosols are fine particulate matter (PM) or soot, sulfur oxides (SOx) and, to a lesser extent, nitrous oxides (NOx).

Whereas carbon dioxide emissions have steadily risen over the past fifty years, levels of aerosol-forming molecules have steadily decreased since the 1970s. In addition to pol­lution control devices in our automobiles (cata­lytic converters), our hydrocarbon-fueled power plants and the hydrocarbon liquid fuels that we consume have largely been improved and desulfurized over the fifty-year period, causing the level of aerosols in our atmosphere to decrease quite dramatically.

One of the arguments that recently has come into vogue in the mainstream climate community is the claim that this balance between greenhouse gases and aerosols has created a large-scale masking ef­fect, where the cooling from the aerosols offsets the warming from the increased concentration of greenhouse gases. The latest large effort to desulfurize our liquid fuels came in 2020, where the sulfur concentra­tion of heavy marine fuels for ocean-going ships was reduced from 3.5 percent (thirty-five thousand ppm) to 0.5 percent (five thousand ppm). (For reference, gasoline and diesel fuel have sulfur limits of between fifteen and thirty ppm across most of the world.) The latest claim is that this desulfurization push has now removed a last key barrier of aerosol heat reflection, which has been masking global warming for the last fifty years, and thus, with reduced aerosol cooling, we should prepare ourselves for rampant and uninhibited greenhouse gas warming.

This raises a potentially sticky question for the modern climate change hysteria enthusiasts. If we have lived comfortably for the last hundred years with this aerosol shading, and now by removing it we are supposedly paving the way for an unlivable hot planet, could we not reintroduce these masking aerosols in a controlled fashion (that is, partially re-sulfurize the liquid fuels) to add back this layer of protection against uncontrolled global warming? This would also reduce the cost of refining our liquid fuels and ultimately lower the cost of those fuels (a minor side benefit for consumers).

EARTH AND OCEANS

After the sun’s radiative output travels one hundred fifty million ki­lometers through space to Earth and gets absorbed and refracted through our atmosphere on the inbound lane, it finally reaches our planet. Here, it is time to introduce another key variable in the climate discussion, the albedo, which is the ratio of how much of that energy is absorbed by Earth versus directly reflected into our atmosphere. White materials like snow and clouds have a high albedo (close to 1) and directly reflect most of the incoming radiation. Black surfaces such as asphalt, roads, dark forests and oceans absorb most of the incoming energy and have a low albedo (0.1). As a com­posite picture, Earth has an average albedo of roughly 0.31. Albedo is yet another topic rarely discussed in the mainstream climate narrative, but paradoxically it is one of those variables hugely and directly influenced by human ac­tivity. Expanding urban sprawl, cutting down forests for crop and pasture land, mining and building roads all materially alter the absorp­tion/reflection ratio of the Earth.

Here is an interesting thought experiment. In all the climate hysteria that we experience today, wouldn’t one possible solution be to incentivize individuals to paint their roofs white or offer a tax credit for homeowners who make their roofs reflective? These incremental, low-cost measures could be done at the local level—with no outsourcing possible. But I have yet to see this low-stakes, commonsense step to addressing the apparent world-altering problem of climate change proposed or implemented anywhere, except perhaps indirectly in the form of tax credits for the installation of solar panels on residential rooftops. However, solar panels actually have the reverse effect, as they have a relatively low albedo (0.2–0.25) on average, and are designed to absorb as much solar energy as possible. Thus, they tend to lower the albedo (more heat absorption) of the surrounding area, increasing the surface temperature of the local environment in which they are installed.

Despite the extensive focus of the main­stream climate narrative on emissions, gaseous carbon dioxide and the atmosphere, none of these are the main stores of carbon or carbon-based chemistry on our planet. For that, we need to look to the shores and the oceans. On land, carbon from the air is absorbed by plant life and converted into sugars; it then decom­poses into the soil and ultimately is bound into rock formations or converted into hydrocarbon energy. In the oceans, carbon dioxide similarly provides the nutrients that feed algae, plankton and microorganism growth, as well as being absorbed by the aqueous saline solution of the oceans to form carbonic acid, which is eventu­ally converted into sediment and carbonic rock formations.

To give a sense of the magnitude of the car­bon available on land, sea and air, respectively, the latest IPCC report provides the following figures:

• Carbon Equivalent on Land: 3,350 billion tonnes
• Carbon Equivalent in Oceans: 40,500 billion tonnes
• Carbon Equivalent in Atmosphere: 870 billion tonnes, of which 590 are “natural” CO2 and 280 billion tonnes are from hu­man activity over the past one hundred fifty years

Large exchanges of carbon are constantly occurring between the land, oceans and the air. These exchanges are orders of magnitude larger than the annual incremental carbon added to the balance from human activity, estimated to be around ten billion incremental tonnes per year. However, what is interesting is how the global balance of carbon is represented by the IPCC and in other mainstream scientific reports. The “natural” exchanges of carbon between the land, ocean and atmosphere are always shown to be in balance, and the only imbalance shown is the carbon resulting from human activity. It would be more accurate to acknowledge that because we have only an incomplete picture of Earth’s natural carbon cycle and even less ability to ac­curately measure these exchanges on a global level, we are, as a result, treating them like static variables. Because we do have the ability to measure with some level of scientific preci­sion the carbon released from human activity through combustion and smokestacks, we focus our efforts and assign our root causes to what we can measure, even if it paints an incomplete picture of our natural world.

Earth suffers from another large and envi­ronmentally disruptive force completely outside human control. Vulcanism or volcanism (which I like to think of as Earth’s internal recycling con­veyer belt) involves the periodic large eruptions of molten rock and volcanic gases from deep inside the Earth to the surface. The eruption of large and super-large volcanos typically has a net cooling effect on the planet, as shown by the theorized eruption prior to the period of rapid global cooling in 536 AD. More recent eruptions likewise have resulted in a large global cooling effect, such as Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815, which resulted in a period known colloquially as “The Year Without a Summer.” At the time, Thomas Jefferson recorded ice floating on the rivers near Monticello, Virginia in August.

The cooling effect of volcanos is due to the large amount of black dust and pumice thrown into the upper atmosphere, which acts as an aerosol and reflects incoming sunlight away from the lower atmosphere. Volcanic gases also tend to have a cooling effect when the dominant gas is sulfur dioxide, also an aerosol.

There are occasions when the volcanic gas released contains sig­nificant amounts of carbon dioxide and water vapor. This is particularly true of underwater volcanos, which are much less studied and understood compared with their land-based cousins. One such volcano erupted in January 2022 near Tonga in the South Pacific. The Hunga-Tonga volcano eruption resulted in the largest atmospheric explosion ever recorded, larger than nuclear weapons tests. It unleashed an enormous plume of ash, pumice and sulfur dioxide and a huge amount of water vapor (being an underwater volcano) that reached thirty-five miles (sixty kilometers) into the air, breaching the lower atmosphere. What made this volcano unique was the size and underwater nature of the eruption, with one estimate as to the amount of water vapor pushed into the atmosphere placed at seven cubic kilometers. Like so many other items of interest that do not fit the main “carbon dioxide causes all warming” theory, the volanic eruption remains underreported and unknown to many. It would be one factor that could explain the high (but not unusually high) ocean temperatures and corresponding air temperatures experienced in 2023.

I would be remiss not to also mention the large ocean and air current circulations that help facilitate the transfer of mass and heat across the planet. These have regular short-duration cycles similar to sunspots. The governing circulation patterns are referred to as “El Niño” and “La Niña” (“The Boy” and “The Girl,” respectively). In overly broad terms, El Niño results in warm, wet winters and La Niña in cold, dry winters, and they alternate against each other. Since 1900, major El Niños (warmer in North America) have been experienced every four years, with La Niñas (colder in North America) slightly less frequent at every five years. The winter of 2023-2024 happens to be a major El Niño year, which offers another natural, non-carbon-dioxide variable helping to explain the elevated temperatures seen this past year.

A MONOTHEISTIC VIEW

In summary, if you subscribe to the monotheistic view of climate change—that is, that there is only one cause of global climate change and that cause is carbon dioxide from hydrocarbon combustion—then you will also have to believe the following, in total and simultaneously:

• The solar output of the sun, despite oscillating between max and min every six and a half years, has no effect on Earth’s climate.
• The celestial position of Earth relative to the sun and its long dura­tion cycles have no effect on Earth’s climate.
• The water vapor concentration of Earth’s atmosphere has no ef­fect on Earth’s climate, despite being the dominant greenhouse gas.
• By getting rid of pollution from sulfur dioxide in our transportation fuels, we are causing more harm to the environment, because these aerosols mask runaway warming from carbon dioxide.
• The enormous regular transfers of carbon between Earth’s biosphere, oceans and atmosphere are always in mathematical balance, and completely overwhelmed by carbon dioxide emissions from hydrocar­bon combustion.
• Changes in Earth’s albedo from other hu­man activities have no effect relative to increased human carbon emissions.
• Other well-observed natural processes such as volcanos and ocean current circu­lation are insignificant relative to carbon dioxide emissions.

This list only scratches the surface of the many and numerous contradictions that under­pin modern climate-change discussions. With so many contradictions, it begs the question of whether what we are told constitutes actual or repeatable science.

REFERENCES

1. Freedman A. Scientists unnerved by record shattering 2023 temperatures. Axios, Jan. 12, 2024.
2. Scorching October puts 2023 on track to be hottest year in 125,000 years. Al Jazeera, Nov. 8, 2023.
3. Pullella P. Climate change and its human causes cannot be denied, papal document says. Reuters, Oct. 5, 2023.
4. Kirkpatrick J. The obscure origins of modern climate change hysteria. Wise Traditions. Fall 2023;24(3):77-86.
5. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/

This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Spring 2024

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