My Lords and Ladies, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Thank
you for the opportunity to set out my views on climate change. As I have
stated publicly on many occasions, there is no definitive scientific
proof, through real-world observation, that carbon dioxide
is responsible for any of the slight warming of the global climate that
has occurred during the past 300 years, since the peak of the Little
Ice Age. If there were such a proof through testing and replication it
would have been written down for all to see.
The
contention that human emissions are now the dominant influence on
climate is simply a hypothesis, rather than a universally accepted
scientific theory. It is therefore correct, indeed verging on compulsory
in the scientific tradition, to be skeptical of those who express
certainty that “the science is settled” and “the debate is over”.
But
there is certainty beyond any doubt that CO2 is the building block for
all life on Earth and that without its presence in the global atmosphere
at a sufficient concentration this would be a dead planet.
Yet today our children and our publics are taught that CO2 is a toxic
pollutant that will destroy life and bring civilization to its knees. Tonight I hope to turn this dangerous human-caused propaganda on its head. Tonight
I will demonstrate that human emissions
of CO2 have already saved life on our planet from a very untimely end.
That in the absence of our emitting some of the carbon back into the
atmosphere from whence it came in the first place, most or perhaps all
life on Earth would begin to die less than two
million years from today.
But first a bit of background.
I was
born and raised in the tiny floating village of Winter Harbour on the
northwest tip of Vancouver Island, in the rainforest by the Pacific.
There was no road to my village so for eight years myself
and a few other children were taken by boat each day to a one-room
schoolhouse in the nearby fishing village. I didn’t realize how lucky I
was playing on the tide flats by the salmon-spawning streams in the
rainforest, until I was sent off to boarding school
in Vancouver where I excelled in science. I did my undergraduate
studies at the University of British Columbia, gravitating to the life
sciences – biology, biochemistry, genetics, and forestry – the
environment and the industry my family has been in for more
than 100 years. Then, before the word was known to the general public, I
discovered the science of ecology, the science of how all living things
are inter-related, and how we are related to them.
At the
height of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the threat of all-out nuclear
war and the newly emerging consciousness of the environment I was
transformed into a radical environmental activist. While
doing my PhD in ecology in 1971 I joined a group of activists who had
begun to meet in the basement of the Unitarian Church, to plan a protest
voyage against US hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska.
We
proved that a somewhat rag-tag looking group of activists could sail an
old fishing boat across the north Pacific ocean and help change the
course of history. We created a focal point for the media
to report on public opposition to the tests.
When
that H-bomb exploded in November 1971, it was the last hydrogen bomb the
United States ever detonated. Even though there were four more tests
planned in the series, President Nixon canceled them due
to the public opposition we had helped to create. That was the birth of
Greenpeace.
Flushed
with victory, on our way home from Alaska we were made brothers of the
Namgis Nation in their Big House at Alert Bay near my northern Vancouver
Island home. For Greenpeace this began the tradition
of the Warriors of the Rainbow, after a Cree Indian legend that
predicted the coming together of all races and creeds to save the Earth
from destruction. We named our ship the Rainbow Warrior and I spent the
next fifteen years in the top committee of Greenpeace,
on the front lines of the environmental movement as we evolved from
that church basement into the world’s largest environmental activist
organization.
Next
we took on French atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific. They
proved a bit more difficult than the US nuclear tests. It took years to
eventually drive these tests underground at Mururoa
Atoll in French Polynesia. In 1985, under direct orders from President
Mitterrand, French commandos bombed and sank the Rainbow Warrior in
Auckland Harbour, killing our photographer. Those protests continued
until long after I left Greenpeace. It wasn’t until
the mid-1990s that nuclear testing finally ended in the South Pacific,
and it most other parts of the world as well.
Going
back to 1975, Greenpeace set out to save the whales from extinction at
the hands of huge factory whaling fleets. We confronted the Soviet
factory whaling fleet in the North Pacific, putting ourselves
in front of their harpoons in our little rubber boats to protect the
fleeing whales. This was broadcast on television news around the world,
bringing the Save the Whales movement into everyone’s living rooms for
the first time. After four years of voyages,
in 1979 factory whaling was finally banned in the North Pacific, and by
1981 in all the world’s oceans.
In
1978 I sat on a baby seal off the East Coast of Canada to protect it
from the hunter’s club. I was arrested and hauled off to jail, the seal
was clubbed and skinned, but a photo of me being arrested
while sitting on the baby seal appeared in more than 3000 newspapers
around the world the next morning. We won the hearts and minds of
millions of people who saw the baby seal slaughter as outdated, cruel,
and unnecessary.
Why
then did I leave Greenpeace after 15 years in the leadership? When
Greenpeace began we had a strong humanitarian orientation, to save
civilization from destruction by all-out nuclear war. Over the
years the “peace” in Greenpeace was gradually lost and my organization,
along with much of the environmental movement, drifted into a belief
that humans are the enemies of the earth. I believe in a humanitarian
environmentalism because we are part of nature,
not separate from it. The first principle of ecology is that we are all
part of the same ecosystem, as Barbara Ward put it, “One human family
on spaceship Earth”, and to preach otherwise teaches that the world
would be better off without us. As we shall see
later in the presentation there is very good reason to see humans as
essential to the survival of life on this planet.
In the
mid 1980s I found myself the only director of Greenpeace International
with a formal education in science. My fellow directors proposed a
campaign to “ban chlorine worldwide”, naming it “The Devil’s
Element”. I pointed out that chlorine is one of the elements in the
Periodic Table, one of the building blocks of the Universe and the 11th
most common element in the Earth’s crust. I argued the fact that
chlorine is the most important element for public health
and medicine. Adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance
in the history of public health and the majority of our synthetic
medicines are based on chlorine chemistry. This fell on deaf ears, and
for me this was the final straw. I had to leave.
When I
left Greenpeace I vowed to develop an environmental policy that was
based on science and logic rather than sensationalism, misinformation,
anti-humanism and fear. In a classic example, a recent
protest led by Greenpeace in the Philippines used the skull and
crossbones to associate Golden Rice with death, when in fact Golden Rice
has the potential to help save 2 million children from death due to
vitamin A deficiency every year.
The
Keeling curve of CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere since 1959
is the supposed smoking gun of catastrophic climate change. We presume
CO2 was at 280 ppm at the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution, before human activity could have caused a significant
impact. I accept that most of the rise from 280 to 400 ppm is caused by
human CO2 emissions with the possibility that some of it is due to
outgassing from warming of the oceans.
NASA
tells us that “Carbon Dioxide Controls Earth’s Temperature” in
child-like denial of the many other factors involved in climate change.
This is reminiscent of NASA’s contention that there might be
life on Mars. Decades after it was demonstrated that there was no life
on Mars, NASA continues to use it as a hook to raise public funding for
more expeditions to the Red Planet. The promulgation of fear of Climate
Change now serves the same purpose. As Bob
Dylan prophetically pointed out, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears”, even
in one of the most admired science organizations in the world.
On the
political front the leaders of the G7 plan to “end extreme poverty and
hunger” by phasing out 85% of the world’s energy supply including 98% of
the energy used to transport people and goods, including
food. The Emperors of the world appear clothed in the photo taken at
the close of the meeting but it was obviously Photo-shopped. They should
be required to stand naked for making such a foolish statement.
The
world’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change,
is hopelessly conflicted by its makeup and it mandate. The Panel is
composed solely of the World Meteorological Organization,
weather forecasters, and the United Nations Environment Program,
environmentalists. Both these organizations are focused primarily on
short-term timescales, days to maybe a century or two. But the most
significant conflict is with the Panel’s mandate from
the United Nations. They are required only to focus on “a change of
climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity
that alters the composition of the atmosphere, and which is in addition
to natural climate variability.”
So
if the IPCC found that climate change was not being affected by human
alteration of the atmosphere or that it is not “dangerous” there would
be no need for them to exist. They are virtually mandated to find on the
side of apocalypse.
Scientific
certainty, political pandering, a hopelessly conflicted IPCC, and now
the Pope, spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, in a bold move to
reinforce the concept of original sin, says the Earth
looks like “an immense pile of filth” and we must go back to
pre-industrial bliss, or is that squalor?
And
then there is the actual immense pile of filth fed to us more than three
times daily by the green-media nexus, a seething cauldron of imminent
doom, like we are already condemned to Damnation in Hell
and there is little chance of Redemption. I fear for the end of the
Enlightenment. I fear an intellectual Gulag with Greenpeace as my prison
guards.
Let’s
begin with our knowledge of the long-term history of the Earth’s
temperature and of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. Our best inference
from various proxies back indicate that CO2 was higher for the
first 4 billion years of Earth’s history than it has been since the
Cambrian Period until today. I will focus on the past 540 million years
since modern life forms evolved. It is glaringly obvious that
temperature and CO2 are in an inverse correlation at least
as often as they are in any semblance of correlation. Two clear
examples of reverse correlation occurred 150 million years and 50
million years ago. At the end of the Jurassic temperature fell
dramatically while CO2 spiked. During the Eocene Thermal Maximum,
temperature was likely higher than any time in the past 550 million
years while CO2 had been on a downward track for 100 million years. This
evidence alone sufficient to warrant deep speculation of any claimed
lock-step causal relationship between CO2 and
temperature.
The
Devonian Period beginning 400 million years ago marked the culmination
of the invasion of life onto the land. Plants evolved to produce lignin,
which in combination with cellulose, created wood which
in turn for the first time allowed plants to grow tall, in competition
with each other for sunlight. As vast forests spread across the land
living biomass increased by orders of magnitude, pulling down carbon as
CO2 from the atmosphere to make wood. Lignin
is very difficult to break down and no decomposer species possessed the
enzymes to digest it. Trees died atop one another until they were 100
metres or more in depth. This was the making of the great coal beds
around the world as this huge store of sequestered
carbon continued to build for 90 million years. Then, fortunately for
the future of life, white rot fungi evolved to produce the enzymes that
can digest lignin and coincident with that the coal-making era came to
an end.
There
was no guarantee that fungi or any other decomposer species would
develop the complex of enzymes required to digest lignin. If they had
not, CO2, which had already been drawn down for the first time
in Earth’s history to levels similar to todays, would have continued to
decline as trees continued to grow and die. That is until CO2
approached the threshold of 150 ppm below which plants begin first to
starve, then stop growing altogether, and then die.
Not just woody plants but all plants. This would bring about the
extinction of most, if not all, terrestrial species, as animals,
insects, and other invertebrates starved for lack of food. And that
would be that. The human species would never have existed.
This was only the first time that there was a distinct possibility that
life would come close to extinguishing itself, due to a shortage of
CO2, which is essential for life on Earth.
A
well-documented record of global temperature over the past 65 million
years shows that we have been in a major cooling period since the Eocene
Thermal Maximum 50 million years ago. The Earth was an average
16C warmer then, with most of the increased warmth at the higher
latitudes. The entire planet, including the Arctic and Antarctica were
ice-free and the land there was covered in forest.
The
ancestors of every species on Earth today survived through what may have
been the warmest time in the history of life. It makes one wonder about
dire predictions that even a 2C rise in temperature
from pre-industrial times would cause mass extinctions and the
destruction of civilization. Glaciers began to form in Antarctica 30
million years ago and in the northern hemisphere 3 million years ago.
Today, even in this interglacial period of the Pleistocene
Ice Age, we are experiencing one of the coldest climates in the Earth’s
history.
Coming
closer to the present we have learned from Antarctic ice cores that for
the past 800,000 years there have been regular periods of major
glaciation followed by interglacial periods in 100,000 year-cycles.
These cycles coincide with the Milankovitch cycles that are tied to the
eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and its axial tilt. It is highly
plausible that these cycles are related to solar intensity and the
seasonal distribution of solar heat on the Earth’s
surface. There is a strong correlation between temperature and the
level of atmospheric CO2 during these successive glaciations, indicating
a possible cause-effect relationship between the two. CO2 lags
temperature by an average of 800 years during the most
recent 400,000-year period, indicating that temperature is the cause,
as the cause never comes after the effect.
Looking
at the past 50,000 years of temperature and CO2 we can see that changes
in CO2 follow changes in temperature. This is as one could expect, as
the Milankovitch cycles are far more likely to cause
a change in temperature than a change in CO2. And a change in the
temperature is far more likely to cause a change in CO2 due to
outgassing of CO2 from the oceans during warmer times and an ingassing
(absorption) of CO2 during colder periods. Yet climate alarmists
persist in insisting that CO2 is causing the change in temperature,
despite the illogical nature of that assertion.
It is
sobering to consider the magnitude of climate change during the past
20,000 years, since the peak of the last major glaciation. At that time
there were 3.3 kilometres of ice on top of what is today
the city of Montreal, a city of more than 3 million people. 95% of
Canada was covered in a sheet of ice. Even as far south as Chicago there
was nearly a kilometre of ice. If the Milankovitch cycle continues to
prevail, and there is little reason aside from
our CO2 emissions to think otherwise, this will happen gradually again
during the next 80,000 years. Will our CO2 emissions stave off another
glaciation as James Lovelock has suggested? There doesn’t seem to be
much hope of that so far, as despite 1/3 of all
our CO2 emissions being released during the past 18 years the UK Met
Office contends there has been no statistically significant warming
during this century.
At the
height of the last glaciation the sea level was about 120 metres lower
than it is today. By 7,000 years ago all the low-altitude, mid-latitude
glaciers had melted. There is no consensus about the
variation in sea level since then although many scientists have
concluded that the sea level was higher than today during the Holocene
Thermal optimum from 9,000 to 5,000 years ago when the Sahara was green.
The sea level may also have been higher than today
during the Medieval Warm Period.
Hundred
of islands near the Equator in Papua, Indonesia, have been undercut by
the sea in a manner that gives credence to the hypothesis that there has
been little net change in sea level in the past thousands
of years. It takes a long time for so much erosion to occur from gentle
wave action in a tropical sea.
Coming
back to the relationship between temperature and CO2 in the modern era
we can see that temperature has risen at a steady slow rate in Central
England since 1700 while human CO2 emissions were not
relevant until 1850 and then began an exponential rise after 1950. This
is not indicative of a direct causal relationship between the two.
After freezing over regularly during the Little Ice Age the River Thames
froze for the last time in 1814, as the Earth
moved into what might be called the Modern Warm Period.
The
IPCC states it is “extremely likely” that human emissions have been the
dominant cause of global warming “since the mid-20th century”, that is
since 1950. They claim that “extremely” means 95% certain,
even though the number 95 was simply plucked from the air like an act
of magic. And “likely” is not a scientific word but rather indicative of
a judgment, another word for an opinion.
There
was a 30-year period of warming from 1910-1940, then a cooling from 1940
to 1970, just as CO2 emissions began to rise exponentially, and then a
30-year warming from 1970-2000 that was very similar
in duration and temperature rise to the rise from 1910-1940. One may
then ask “what caused the increase in temperature from 1910-1940 if it
was not human emissions? And if it was natural factors how do we know
that the same natural factors were not responsible
for the rise between 1970-2000.” You don’t need to go back millions of
years to find the logical fallacy in the IPCC’s certainty that we are
the villains in the piece.
Water
is by far the most important greenhouse gas, and is the only molecule
that is present in the atmosphere in all three states, gas, liquid, and
solid. As a gas, water vapour is a greenhouse gas, but
as a liquid and solid it is not. As a liquid water forms clouds, which
send solar radiation back into space during the day and hold heat in at
night. There is no possibility that computer models can predict the net
effect of atmospheric water in a higher CO2
atmosphere. Yet warmists postulate that higher CO2 will result in
positive feedback from water, thus magnifying the effect of CO2 alone by
2-3 times. Other scientists believe that water may have a neutral or
negative feedback on CO2. The observational evidence
from the early years of this century tends to reinforce the latter
hypothesis.
How
many politicians or members of the media or the public are aware of this
statement about climate change from the IPCC in 2007?
“we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system,
and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
There
is a graph showing that the climate models have grossly exaggerated the
rate of warming that confirms the IPCC statement. The only trends the
computer models seem able to predict accurately are ones
that have already occurred.
Coming
to the core of my presentation, CO2 is the currency of life and the
most important building block for all life on Earth. All life is
carbon-based, including our own. Surely the carbon cycle and
its central role in the creation of life should be taught to our
children rather than the demonization of CO2, that “carbon” is a
“pollutant” that threatens the continuation of life. We know for a fact
that CO2 is essential for life and that it must be at
a certain level in the atmosphere for the survival of plants, which are
the primary food for all the other species alive today. Should we not
encourage our citizens, students, teachers, politicians, scientists, and
other leaders to celebrate CO2 as the giver
of life that it is?
It is a
proven fact that plants, including trees and all our food crops, are
capable of growing much faster at higher levels of CO2 than present in
the atmosphere today. Even at the today’s concentration
of 400 ppm plants are relatively starved for nutrition. The optimum
level of CO2 for plant growth is about 5 times higher, 2000 ppm, yet the
alarmists warn it is already too high. They must be challenged every
day by every person who knows the truth in this
matter. CO2 is the giver of life and we should celebrate CO2 rather
than denigrate it as is the fashion today.
We are
witnessing the “Greening of the Earth” as higher levels of CO2, due to
human emissions from the use of fossil fuels, promote increased growth
of plants around the world. This has been confirmed
by scientists with CSIRO in Australia, in Germany, and in North
America. Only half of the CO2 we are emitting from the use of fossil
fuels is showing up in the atmosphere. The balance is going somewhere
else and the best science says most of it is going into
an increase in global plant biomass. And what could be wrong with that,
as forests and agricultural crops become more productive?
All
the CO2 in the atmosphere has been created by outgassing from the
Earth’s core during massive volcanic eruptions. This was much more
prevalent in the early history of the Earth when the core was hotter
than it is today. During the past 150 million years there has not been
enough addition of CO2 to the atmosphere to offset the gradual losses
due to burial in sediments.
Let’s look at where all the carbon is in the world, and how it is moving around.
Today,
at just over 400 ppm CO2 there are 850 billion tons of CO2 in the
atmosphere. By comparison, when modern life-forms evolved over 500
million years ago there was nearly 15,000 billion tons of CO2
in the atmosphere, 17 times today’s level. Plants and soils combined
contain more than 2,000 billion tons of carbon, more that twice as much
as the entire global atmosphere. The oceans contain 38,000 billion tons
of dissolved CO2, 45 times as much as in the
atmosphere. Fossil fuels, which were made from plants that pulled CO2
from the atmosphere account for 5,000 – 10,000 billion tons of carbon, 6
– 12 times as much carbon as is in the atmosphere.
But
the truly stunning number is the amount of carbon that has been
sequestered from the atmosphere and turned into carbonaceous rocks.
100,000,000 billion tons, that’s one quadrillion tons of carbon,
have been turned into stone by marine species that learned to make
armour-plating for themselves by combining calcium and carbon into
calcium carbonate. Limestone, chalk, and marble are all of life origin
and amount to 99.9% of all the carbon ever present
in the global atmosphere. The white cliffs of Dover are made of the
calcium carbonate skeletons of coccolithophores, tiny marine
phytoplankton.
The
vast majority of the carbon dioxide that originated in the atmosphere
has been sequestered and stored quite permanently in carbonaceous rocks
where it cannot be used as food by plants.
Beginning
540 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian Period many
marine species of invertebrates evolved the ability to control
calcification and to build armour plating to protect their soft
bodies. Shellfish such as clams and snails, corals, coccolithofores
(phytoplankton) and foraminifera (zooplankton) began to combine carbon
dioxide with calcium and thus to remove carbon from the life cycle as
the shells sank into sediments; 100,000,000 billion
tons of carbonaceous sediment. It is ironic that life itself, by
devising a protective suit of armour, determined its own eventual demise
by continuously removing CO2 from the atmosphere. This is carbon
sequestration and storage writ large. These are the carbonaceous
sediments that form the shale deposits from which we are fracking gas
and oil today. And I add my support to those who say, “OK UK, get
fracking”.
The
past 150 million years has seen a steady drawing down of CO2 from the
atmosphere. There are many components to this but what matters is the
net effect, a removal on average of 37,000 tons of carbon
from the atmosphere every year for 150 million years. The amount of CO2
in the atmosphere was reduced by about 90% during this period. This
means that volcanic emissions of CO2 have been outweighed by the loss of
carbon to calcium carbonate sediments on a
multi-million year basis.
If
this trend continues CO2 will inevitably fall to levels that threaten
the survival of plants, which require a minimum of 150 ppm to survive.
If plants die all the animals, insects, and other invertebrates
that depend on plants for their survival will also die.
How
long will it be at the present level of CO2 depletion until most or all
of life on Earth is threatened with extinction by lack of CO2 in the
atmosphere?
During
this Pleistocene Ice Age, CO2 tends to reach a minimum level when the
successive glaciations reach their peak. During the last glaciation,
which peaked 18,000 years ago, CO2 bottomed out at 180
ppm, extremely likely the lowest level CO2 has been in the history of
the Earth. This is only 30 ppm above the level that plants begin to die.
Paleontological research has demonstrated that even at 180 ppm there
was a severe restriction of growth as plants
began to starve. With the onset of the warmer interglacial period CO2
rebounded to 280 ppm. But even today, with human emissions causing CO2
to reach 400 ppm plants are still restricted in their growth rate, which
would be much higher if CO2 were at 1000-2000
ppm.
Here
is the shocking news. If humans had not begun to unlock some of the
carbon stored as fossil fuels, all of which had been in the atmosphere
as CO2 before sequestration by plants and animals, life on
Earth would have soon been starved of this essential nutrient and would
begin to die. Given the present trends of glaciations and interglacial
periods this would likely have occurred less than 2 million years from
today, a blink in nature’s eye, 0.05% of the
3.5 billion-year history of life.
No
other species could have accomplished the task of putting some of the
carbon back into the atmosphere that was taken out and locked in the
Earth’s crust by plants and animals over the millennia. This
is why I honour James Lovelock in my lecture this evening. Jim was for
many years of the belief that humans are the one-and-only rogue species
on Gaia, destined to cause catastrophic global warming. I enjoy the Gaia
hypothesis but I am not religious about
it and for me this was too much like original sin. It was as if humans
were the only evil species on the Earth.
But
James Lovelock has seen the light and realized that humans may be part
of Gaia’s plan, and he has good reason to do so. And I honour him
because it takes courage to change your mind after investing
so much of your reputation on the opposite opinion. Rather than seeing
humans as the enemies of Gaia, Lovelock now sees that we may be working
with Gaia to “stave of another ice age”, or major glaciation. This is
much more plausible than the climate doom-and
gloom scenario because our release of CO2 back into the atmosphere has
definitely reversed the steady downward slide of this essential food for
life, and hopefully may reduce the chance that the climate will slide
into another period of major glaciation. We
can be certain that higher levels of CO2 will result in increased plant
growth and biomass. We really don’t know whether or not higher levels
of CO2 will prevent or reduce the eventual slide into another major
glaciation. Personally I am not hopeful for this
because the long-term history just doesn’t support a strong correlation
between CO2 and temperature.
It
does boggle the mind in the face of our knowledge that the level of CO2
has been steadily falling that human CO2 emissions are not universally
acclaimed as a miracle of salvation. From direct observation
we already know that the extreme predictions of CO2’s impact on global
temperature are highly unlikely given that about one-third of all our
CO2 emissions have been discharged during the past 18 years and there
has been no statistically significant warming.
And even if there were some additional warming that would surely be
preferable to the extermination of all or most species on the planet.
You
heard it here. “Human emissions of carbon dioxide have saved life on
Earth from inevitable starvation and extinction due to lack of CO2”. To
use the analogy of the Atomic Clock, if the Earth were 24
hours old we were at 38 seconds to midnight
when we reversed the trend towards the End Times. If that isn’t good
news I don’t know what is. You don’t get to stave off Armageddon every
day.
I
issue a challenge to anyone to provide a compelling argument that
counters my analysis of the historical record and the prediction of CO2
starvation based on the 150 million year trend. Ad hominem arguments
about “deniers” need not apply. I submit that much of society has been
collectively misled into believing that global CO2 and temperature are
too high when the opposite is true for both. Does anyone deny that below
150 ppm CO2 that plants will die? Does anyone
deny that the Earth has been in a 50 million-year cooling period and
that this Pleistocene Ice Age is one of the coldest periods in the
history of the planet?
If we
assume human emissions have to date added some 200 billion tons of CO2
to the atmosphere, even if we ceased using fossil fuels today we have
already bought another 5 million years for life on earth.
But we will not stop using fossil fuels to power our civilization so it
is likely that we can forestall plant starvation for lack of CO2 by at
least 65 million years. Even when the fossil fuels have become scarce we
have the quadrillion tons of carbon in carbonaceous
rocks, which we can transform into lime and CO2 for the manufacture of
cement. And we already know how to do that with solar energy or nuclear
energy. This alone, regardless of fossil fuel consumption, will more
than offset the loss of CO2 due to calcium carbonate
burial in marine sediments. Without a doubt the human species has made
it possible to prolong the survival of life on Earth for more than 100
million years. We are not the enemy of nature but its salvation.
As a
postscript I would like to make a few comments about the other side of
the alleged dangerous climate change coin, our energy policy, in
particular the much maligned fossil fuels; coal, oil, and natural
gas.
Depending
how it’s tallied, fossil fuels account for between 85-88% of global
energy consumption and more than 95% of energy for the transport of
people and goods, including our food.
Earlier
this year the leaders of the G7 countries agreed that fossil fuels
should be phased out by 2100, a most bizarre development to say the
least. Of course no intelligent person really believes this
will happen but it is a testament to the power of the elites that have
converged around the catastrophic human-caused climate change that so
many alleged world leaders must participate in the charade. How might we
convince them to celebrate CO2 rather than
to denigrate it?
A lot
of nasty things are said about fossil fuels even though they are largely
responsible for our longevity, our prosperity, and our comfortable
lifestyles.
Hydrocarbons,
the energy components of fossil fuels, are 100% organic, as in organic
chemistry. They were produced by solar energy in ancient seas and
forests. When they are burned for energy the main
products are water and CO2, the two most essential foods for life. And
fossil fuels are by far the largest storage battery of direct solar
energy on Earth. Nothing else comes close except nuclear fuel, which is
also solar in the sense that it was produced
in dying stars.
Today,
Greenpeace protests Russian and American oil rigs with 3000 HP
diesel-powered ships and uses 200 HP outboard motors to board the rigs
and hang anti-oil plastic banners made with fossil fuels. Then
they issue a media release telling us we must “end our addiction to
oil”. I wouldn’t mind so much if Greenpeace rode bicycles to their
sailing ships and rowed their little boats into the rigs to hang organic
cotton banners. We didn’t have an H-bomb on board
the boat that sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign against nuclear
testing.
Some
of the world’s oil comes from my native country in the Canadian oil
sands of northern Alberta. I had never worked with fossil fuel interests
until I became incensed with the lies being spread about
my country’s oil production in the capitals of our allies around the
world. I visited the oil sands operations to find out for myself what
was happening there.
It is
true it’s not a pretty sight when the land is stripped bare to get at
the sand so the oil can be removed from it. Canada is actually cleaning
up the biggest natural oil spill in history, and making
a profit from it. The oil was brought to the surface when the Rocky
Mountains were thrust up by the colliding Pacific Plate. When the sand
is returned back to the land 99% of the so-called “toxic oil” has been
removed from it.
Anti-oil
activists say the oil-sands operations are destroying the boreal forest
of Canada. Canada’s boreal forest accounts for 10% of all the world’s
forests and the oil-sands area is like a pimple on
an elephant by comparison. By law, every square inch of land disturbed
by oil-sands extraction must be returned to native boreal forest. When
will cities like London, Brussels, and New York that have laid waste to
the natural environment be returned to their
native ecosystems?
The
art and science of ecological restoration, or reclamation as it is
called in the mining industry, is a well-established practice. The land
is re-contoured, the original soil is put back, and native
species of plants and trees are established. It is possible, by
creating depressions where the land was flat, to increase biodiversity
by making ponds and lakes where wetland plants, insects, and waterfowl
can become established in the reclaimed landscape.
The
tailings ponds where the cleaned sand is returned look ugly for a few
years but are eventually reclaimed into grasslands. The Fort McKay First
Nation is under contract to manage a herd of bison on
a reclaimed tailings pond. Every tailings pond will be reclaimed in a
similar manner when operations have been completed.
As an
ecologist and environmentalist for more than 45 years this is good
enough for me. The land is disturbed for a blink of an eye in geological
time and is then returned to a sustainable boreal forest
ecosystem with cleaner sand. And as a bonus we get the fuel to power
our weed-eaters, scooters, motorcycles, cars, trucks, buses, trains, and
aircraft.
To
conclude, carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the stuff of life,
the staff of life, the currency of life, indeed the backbone of life on
Earth.
I am honoured to have been chosen to deliver your annual lecture.
Thank you for listening to me this evening.
I hope you have seen CO2 from a new perspective and will join with me to Celebrate CO2!
