A few months ago, my Austrian Cousin wrote me on What’s App: “WTF is Trump doing?”
My cousins apoplectic question about The Paris Accord is the result of a vast media campaign, financed at the behest of Governments, who, through grants are encouraging educators to ignore science completely. Have Scientists and Educators become prostitutes, putting grant monies ahead of facts or even common sense? It’s a disturbing trend in a world which is supposed to embrace conversation, debate and democracy. Instead, the voices of those not in agreement are completely ignored and the balance, no matter if less than 50%, declared a consensus.
One should chuckle at the term “consensus,” as it was a consensus long ago that had people believing in a geocentric solar system. The Geocentric Solar System was a major component of the philosophies of the Catholic Church, arguably the biggest corporation in the 15th and 16th centuries. Geocentricity reinforced the notion that God created the Earth, and man in his image. The Catholic Church had amassed its wealth through the financing of conquest, extending its regulatory and taxing arms well beyond the Vatican walls. The church wanted its themes reinforced and was kind to those who embraced its philosophies. Those that defied its concepts could not partake of the largesse and indulgences of its growing enterprise, or serve a role in extending its reach or in its intellectual community.
Those few brave individuals who spoke out against the mantra of that ruling class are today immortalized. Galileo Galilei was excommunicated from the church, much in the same way as scientists today that do not ascribe to Global Warming are criticized by an intellectually complacent media. Bertolt Brecht even wrote a play about Galileo, you’d laugh at the script as it reads so much like today’s conversations. Today’s scholars find themselves similarly oppressed, systematically being stripped of grants and positions for not imbibing in the Climate Koolaid dujour at the Universities. What would those of yesterday say now? Not only does today’s Vatican accept the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun, it even recognizes the possibility of alien life.
Trump’s abandonment of the Paris Climate Accord is hardly earth shattering. The Accord itself is a farce, attempting to address the absurd notion of humans controlling climate. 7.5 billion people are no match for the atomic fluctuations of our sun, the most forgotten entity in the whole climate conversation. In fact, the only time the sun seems to come up is when our cell phone communication is disrupted by some solar discharge or when Photovoltaic entrepreneurs see it as a source of revenue. Well what if the sun went out tomorrow? There’s your impact…we’d all be dead.
You’re shaking your head. Well hopefully after you read this piece you will see that this frenzy to save the climate is a moot venture in the grand scheme of things. Regrettably we are no match for what lay outside our atmosphere, whether it be the sun or a cataclysmic meteor. Don’t believe me? Just ask the dinosaurs.
To approach this subject and the arguments surrounding it, we need to begin with a fundamental question: What is energy? While things like electricity, oil, coal and nuclear come to mind, oft times we forget things like calories, without which we’d all perish. It is the unification of, or schism between the demand for these two separate types of energy that is often ignored, organic demand versus the inorganic demand. When focusing on climate, it’s the satisfaction of inorganic demand that causes all the hub bub. Burning Fossil fuels is made to be the culprit, and carbon, the stuff of all life is demonized as without virtue, even diabolical.
Organic demand would be the demand for energy that propels all living things. Simplified it is food, manufactured by a producing organism. It is the single celled algae, a kernel of corn, a grain of rice or a staff of wheat. It’s fruits and vegetables, grasses and leaves. It is produced via photosynthesis and then carried through layers of consumers throughout the food pyramid. Calories for all!
Inorganic demand is that which propels the machinery of our societies. It’s the electricity to run lights, clocks, motors, TVs, Refrigerators and other appliances. It satisfies the needs of our transportation system, propelling vehicles such as cars, buses, planes and boats. It does not support life processes but in some cases aids in making them more efficient, like heat for example. Anchoring a pillar in the Climate Change Manifesto, are the emissions produced from the industry of inorganic energy demand fulfillment. The view from 20,000 feet is that it’s a battle between the church of the Sun and the church of the Carbon atom.
Will anyone stop to realize that there is a finite amount of Carbon within the sphere of the Earth? We as a race, are not manufacturing more carbon than already exists. It’s not being imported from Space. We are not synthesizing Carbon. It’s just here, whether in the complexity of a diamond or the simplicity of a glucose molecule. It pairs with hydrogens and oxygens, is burned into byproduct molecules and the cycle starts all over again.
Carbon is the substrate that facilitates the most sustainable and renewable energy form that exists, organic matter. Yet the “consensus” emphatically resists that Photosynthesis play any future role not only in the satisfaction of organic calorie demand, but inorganic demand as well. They are hell bent on finding different ways to support our inorganic demand like wind, tide, solar, and soon fusion; Alternative Energy Sources.
To the Climate argument…If we use Fossil fuels rich in carbon to power propulsion and home heating (water and air), the “consensus” says that we will be causing global warming, or in its reboot, Climate Change. One benefit of warming temperatures would be the creation of arable land opportunities in areas not traditionally able to support agriculture, such as the southern Taiga. Extraordinary land masses exist in the Taiga that could produce millions of tons of food. It may also lead to an extended growing season in the temperate zones, producing even more food. Why is it that warming is bad?
Is warming bad because a bunch of City planners decided to build cities at sea level right on the ocean and are afraid of rising sea levels? What if the earth’s crust shifts and the city ends up in the ocean like in Japan’s Yanguni Jima? Is it bad because wealthy individuals have their fair share of beach houses? Well there was no industrial pollution 9000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. There are many cities that lay now submerged in our oceans off the coast of India, Japan, China, and inland in Bolivia and so on. It is easy to blame Rising sea levels instead of undulating tectonic shifts for the disparity in the waterline. Even if both were true….
Additionally, if the air is warmer this would lead to a decrease in the consumption of home heating oil, effectively lowering the overall carbon output from the same.
This is not to say that Alternative Energy Sources will not assist in our energy needs, but they will in no way Impact total energy demand, not one scintilla. In fact, these may only facilitate a population explosion which will put a further burden on our organic energy demand cycles.
What Trump left out of his speech withdrawing from the Climate accord is that our real enemy is an ever-increasing world Population. We are witnessing population explosions in the Muslim world as well as in India and China. From the corporate perspective, this is a good thing, as growth to the bottom line can continue for the foreseeable future. From a practical standpoint, exponential population bursts create system stresses that could possibly fracture the stability of the world. There are so many quantifiable societal impacts such as education, food, human waste and so on.
If you put a single bacterium in a petri dish, over time it will replicate and populate in the alar until the resources in that finite system are exhausted, and then the population eventually dies. Can this happen in our world? In a closed system? Can the producers keep making enough to satisfy the dietary needs of the consumers?
Every single human is a carbon-based life form. On average, each human consumes about 3,000 calories per day. This equates to approximately 1500 pounds (907 kilograms) per year. There are 7.5 billion people on the earth. That means the world needs to produce 15 trillion pounds (6.8 trillion kg) of food to support the population. Assuming the population grows another billion in the next 5-6 years, we will need to add another 2 trillion pounds (907 million kg) to this model. That’s a lot of carbon!
At some point, we will run out of accessible carbon, and consumption will need decline by default. Will population numbers plateau? Only time will tell, but the Climate Change Crusaders should shift their energy to something more Malthusian and embrace Population Equilibrium. After all, one day we will have no atoms of carbon left.
Reference material
Humans produce 2.3 pounds of CO2 per day https://www.reference.com/science/much-co2-human-exhale-3f8cfdd9076c129
1 gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO2 http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/contentIncludes/co2_inc.htm
Tree can absorb 48 pounds of CO2 https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm
The industry of Climate Change is going bankrupt: https://www.yahoo.com/news/leaders-join-frances-macron-discuss-climate-cash-crunch-020349888.html
