Sunlight on Climate Change: A Heretic's Guide to Global Climate Hysteria

By Ronald Paul Barmby

SUNLIGHT ON CLIMATE CHANGE explains in understandable terms the science of how both natural and human-caused global warming work. It describes how expensive and doubtful strategies, adopted by governments to comply with the goals of the Paris Agreement, have caused and will continue to cause increased human emissions of carbon dioxide, contribute to unhealthy air quality and significantly increase food costs for the very poor. It explores why declarations of a climate emergency are based on a political agenda, not scientific facts, and invites the reader to reconsider this belief system in the light of science.

Carbon dioxide has physical limitations as a greenhouse gas; global warming began a prolonged pause in 1998. Choosing classical science over politicized pseudo-science is not denial, it is heresy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Aug 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9780228831358

Ronald Paul Barmby

RON BARMBY is a Professional Engineer with both Bachelors and Masters Degrees in Engineering. His four decade career has taken him to over 40 countries on five continents investigating geosciences and working in local cultures. His recent adventures include running the Boston marathon twice, climbing Kilimanjaro, and crossing Canada by motorcycle. A proud twelfth generation Canadian, Ron and his wife, Lysle, divide their time between Celista, British Columbia and Calgary, Alberta.

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SUNLIGHT ON CLIMATE CHANGE

A Heretic’s Guide to

Global Climate Hysteria

RONALD PAUL BARMBY

Sunlight on Climate Change

Copyright © 2020 by Ronald Paul Barmby

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-3134-1 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-3133-4 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-3135-8 (eBook)

Quaecumque Vera

(Whatsoever Things Are True)

For Lysle

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, and most beautiful person I have ever known—and even that is an understatement.

– F. Scott Fitzgerald

Table of Contents

Preface

The climate change debate needs diversity, facts and fairness.

An Introduction to Global Climate Hysteria1

There is a difference between a Heretic and a Denier. Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding.

Chapter 1: Carbon Dioxide Deserves a Fair Trial9

•The Prosecution’s case against Carbon Dioxide:

CO2 is an industrial pollutant that will cause runaway global temperature increases and kill the oceans.

•The Defence’s case for Carbon Dioxide:

CO2 is essential to all life in all its forms, its effect as a greenhouse gas is minimal, and its impact on the oceans and marine life is essentially nil.

Chapter 2: The Sun is the Smoking Gun of Climate Change

•The Sun is the Gun; Sunspots Are the Smoke:

Sunspots have been used for hundreds of years to successfully predict climate.

•The Earth is a Moving Target: Milankovitch Cycles and the Milky Way Rotation:

Let’s consider the ice ages and why they happened.

Chapter 3: History is the First Casualty

The global warming community keeps shortening the definition of recorded history to avoid well documented events that clearly demonstrate climate change occurs naturally.

Chapter 4: There is No Climate Emergency; There is a Crisis in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

•The Scientific Method vs. The IPCC Method:

Are 25% of your friends Elvis Presley impersonators?

•A Heretic’s Interpretation – There Is No Climate Emergency:

Forget the forecasts; did global warming stop in 1998?

•The Crisis in the IPCC:

The Iron Lady helped establish the IPCC, then turned against it. Since then, it has got much worse.

Chapter 5: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugliest CO2 Reduction Ideas

Here are five green initiatives that were not thought all the way through. Give the bill to the taxpayer, the environment, or the very poor.

Chapter 6: Quaecumque Vera (Whatsoever Things Are True)

Ten things you should know that are true. #1 is there never was a 97% consensus among scientists that man-made global warming is real and dangerous.

Chapter 7: Saving the Planet

The 2015 Paris Agreement’s current failure rate is 99.99%. There is a better way.

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Bibliography

About the Author

Preface

The basis of the theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide contribute to the greenhouse gas effect is undeniable. However, the current international debate on the impact of greenhouse gases on global warming lacks a diversity of viewpoints. Non-conformists get shouted out by every level of media and our politicians ridicule dissenters. The result is public policy on climate change that is wrong and dangerous to our society because fact-based decisions have been replaced with fear-based decisions.

Governments have adopted climate change policies to appease activists and lobbyists rather than cope effectively with climate change. While the world maintains its focus on greenhouse gas emissions from environmentally conscious economies, there are major economies that are polluting the air, water and land without restraint or accountability. That is not fair, and worse, it is not wise.

I am a climate change heretic, and I disagree with academics that have enabled climate change science to be taken over by politics. They have exaggerated the dangers and simplified the causes.

We all share this planet and have a right to join the debate on climate change based on truth. And when we find the truth we need the courage to share it.

That is why I wrote this book.

An Introduction to Global Climate Hysteria

I’m a climate change heretic, not a climate change denier. A heretic rejects an established faith-based doctrine, whereas a denier rejects an established set of reality-based facts. A heretic does not accept an idea when proof of it does not exist; a denier does not accept an idea even when proof of it does exist. A heretic stands on principle; a denier stands on prejudice.

This is an important distinction for a member of the worldwide profession of engineering, which builds the infrastructure that is the foundation of our advanced civilization, the industries that employ countless millions, and the machines that convert yesterday’s science fiction into today’s reality.

The job of Professional Engineers requires a highly advanced education in the laws of science, and the ability to apply that knowledge to the construction of things that have practical uses. It is this combination of the theoretical and the practical that differentiates us from the purely academic scientists. Engineers, by training, know the same advanced laws of thermodynamics, chemistry and physics as do research scientists, and we are great at mathematics. Still, we know from experience that you cannot push on a rope. I belong to a disciplinary sliver of engineering that utilizes the earth sciences, including a detailed history of the biosphere, the thin layer of life on the surface of our planet, and how it has changed over time and is still changing. This is the training and experience I bring to the issue of our changing climate.

As a heretic, I don’t deny facts that are established by the scientific method. I won’t deny that humans have created many environmental disasters (I acknowledge the role my profession has played in this) and I don’t deny that our current exploitation of the Earth’s natural resources and generation of pollution must change before we ruin it all. The climate is changing—it always has been—but as we will learn, the changes are driven by forces largely beyond mankind’s control. Climate changes are cyclic. We have lived through them before, as did the polar bears, and as will my grandchildren. A new climate cycle may have already started as I write this page.

Compared to the great heretics, Galileo Galilei and Martin Luther, my heresy is inconsequential. They acted with great courage against omnipotent religious and political authority to question seemingly unimpeachable orthodoxy, and in the process, unleashed our true intellectual potential. The movement they inspired became known as The Enlightenment, with the goal to Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own understanding. (Immanuel Kant, 1784) I’m a minor heretic because I merely reject the omission of evidence, the alteration of evidence, and the complete fabrication of evidence to propagate the thesis that human-generated carbon dioxide emissions are causing the planet to dangerously and irreversibly warm.

This concern about the Earth heating up has become the defining issue of our times. It started in earnest about 35 years ago by environmentally conscientious activists. They warned that human-generated increases in the carbon dioxide (CO2) content in our atmosphere would result in global warming with dire long-term consequences. The explanations given to support these claims were initially simplistic and often glaringly wrong, but they went mostly unchallenged except in academic circles. Global temperatures were closely watched, and as they went up, the membership of the global warming movement grew by leaps and bounds. Momentum increased due to the efforts of celebrities, protestors, and new green political parties. Few of these people had any serious scientific expertise but they all demanded action. The feared crisis point of temperature increases, initially forecasted to happen sometime in the next 100 years, was revised down to only 50 years into the future.

To address this accelerated schedule, the world came together under a United Nations resolution in 1988 to form the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with the mandate to investigate mankind’s influence on global warming. By 1997, those efforts resulted in the Kyoto Protocol, a framework agreement to reduce human emissions of what are termed greenhouse gases, which are implicated in contributing to global warming. The greenhouse gas that was the primary target for reduced emissions was carbon dioxide. This put the global warming movement on a collision course with the global economy as every flame, even a candle, emits carbon dioxide and much of the global economy is dependent upon burning the fossil fuels coal, oil and natural gas.

Twenty years ago, the warming trend slowed significantly, despite carbon dioxide emissions growing faster than predicted. The reaction from the global warming movement was to rebrand with an emphasis on future global warming as climate change. The justification for the validity of future climate change was an erroneously claimed scientific worldwide consensus that global warming was mostly man-made and dangerous. Governments took action: trillions of public and private dollars were spent on green energy, green transportation, and green consumer products. The results of these programs were higher energy costs for the rich countries, higher food costs for the developing countries, and in places like London, UK, higher levels of unhealthy pollutants in the air. Fossil fuel consumption increased.

Forecasts of global temperature increases continued to fail. The movement shifted their focus, yet again, to a perceived but inaccurate increase in extreme weather-related events. Climate change was re-branded as climate emergency. Although human-emitted carbon dioxide represents only one of every 85,000 molecules in the atmosphere, those molecules were blamed for all weather-related emergencies, even though there was no statistical increase in the historical severity or frequency of these events. The climate emergency alarm was pulled because the activists believed that carbon dioxide emission levels were so high and growing so fast that we had little more than a decade before all hope for saving the planet from irreversible catastrophic temperature increases would be lost. This was propagandized to the point where the media presented climate change as an imminent existential world crisis. Then we taught this in our schools as fact and caused widespread anxiety among a generation who had not yet come of age.

From this, the 2015 Paris Agreement was born to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, mainly carbon dioxide, which meant drastically reducing fossil fuel use. Rather than unifying the world around a common cause, the Agreement engendered chaos and disruption. Committing to the targets of the Paris Agreement affects which governments get elected, which countries are still strongly allied, and whether some countries remain united as countries. The poor populations riot over increased fuel prices, the oil producers are sued for meeting the demands of the oil consumers, and our youth accuse us of stealing their hopes for the future. Some major economies are addressing climate change, but the biggest carbon dioxide emitters by far have been incentivized by the Paris Agreement to maximize their greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible. The developing economies want a free pass on emission reductions and $100 billion per year in compensation from the developed economies that are expected to reduce emissions at their own economic peril.

Let’s take a deep breath and try to figure this out. Before we undertake a jackhammering and restructuring of the entire world economy, we need to look at why we think we must do that. It seems the complete scientific justification offered by political leaders to the tax-paying public for fighting global warming, or climate change, or the climate emergency, is based on the findings and forecasts of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

It is incumbent on elected governments to explain to their citizens in simple terms the science behind climate change and humanity’s role in it, and invite a fulsome diverse discussion and verification of the facts before committing their constituents to the full implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement. That’s how democracies handle trade agreements and military alliances. No government appears to be willing to do that for climate change, implying that either the science is too difficult to explain or that our politicians simply do not want to explain it because of the political liabilities. Governments with policy agendas wholly unrelated to climate change are often unable to meet their goals unless they are re-elected. If the electorate is concerned about climate change, governments must at least appear concerned as well. So our politicians defer to the IPCC. We deserve more justification than that.

Carbon dioxide emissions continue to grow. At the same time, the worldwide temperature databases stubbornly conflict with the climate emergency forecasts by refusing to warm by any meaningful amount for the last 20 years and counting. In the USA, where the best raw ground-based temperature data in the world exist, evidence suggests a cooling period may have already begun.

We need to know if carbon dioxide has already spent its ability to act as a greenhouse gas and whether peak global warming is already behind us. We need to know if greenhouse gas reduction initiatives will contribute to sending billions of people in the developing world back into the poverty from which they have recently emerged. We need to know if climate change is entirely natural, and whether all humans can do is to adapt to it as we have done since we stood erect. Most importantly, we need to know if the IPCC is a competent scientific organization and understand what is written in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

It is an understatement to say it would be prudent to work toward understanding climate change and the proposed remedies before our next step does more damage than good. Climate change is like a complicated engineering problem, and my primary objective is to explain it in a way that requires thoughtful engagement, but not post-secondary scientific training. My secondary objective is to explain historical climate change so you will have the tools to critically question the global warming information that we are bombarded with by politicians and the media. I hope this book better equips you to differentiate between someone’s opinion and established science, and between faith and facts.

Climate change is complicated because there are many natural cycles and processes that influence our climate. On their own, each of these is relatively straightforward, but the complexity is in how they interact with each other, which is often uncertain. For this reason, the discussion often devolves into arguments over difficult mathematics (I