Background

Over the past several decades a great deal of international effort has been undertaken to show that anthropogenic CO₂ is causing climate change on the planet by raising the planet’s temperature.  Therefore the increased temperatures will change the world’s climate patterns which will result in the melting of the world’s glaciers, increased storms and probably loss of valuable crop lands by rising sea levels. The implied result on the world’s civilizations will be catastrophic and therefore there will be a significant loss of life from both the climate change and the probable wars that will be fought over dwindling resources. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been given the primary task of showing how this will happen and this research is being done primarily by NASA and NOAA in the United States and the Met Office Hadley Center and Climate Research Unit in the United Kingdom. To show what is happening on a planetary scale very complex computer models have been constructed by some of the world’s best scientists and those models have shown that the temperature of the planet will hit unprecedented levels possibly as soon as 2050.  To prevent this from happening various international forums have been held such as Rio de Janiero in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 where goals for a reduction in the CO₂ emissions from the burning of fossil fuels primarily from petroleum, coal and natural gas were agreed to by the parties.  Efforts to date have been totally unsuccessful and CO₂ levels have now about to go over 400 ppm and they are increasing by and increasing rate now at 2 ppm per year.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 by the United Nations (UN) at the request of some of its members. Its mission is to provide comprehensive scientific assessments of current scientific, technical and socio-economic information worldwide about the risk of climate change more specifically Anthropogenic Climate Change (which is by definition climate change caused by the action of humans). The concern was from the global increase in temperatures which were “presumed” to be from increasing levels of Carbon Dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere as measured in parts per million (ppm) resulting from burning carbon based fuels; and this resulted in a self full filling prophecy. The IPCC does not do research and so the information they use comes predominantly from four sources the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA-GISS) and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gas Group  (NOAA-CCGG) in the U.S. and the Met Office Hadley Centre (UKMO) and the Climate Research Unit University of East Anglia (CRU) in the United Kingdom (UK).  Others are involved as well but these four agencies at the direction of their governments are the primary drivers of this concept.

The concept of Anthropogenic Climate Change actually started in the late 19^th century with the belief that lower levels of CO₂ might be the cause of the past ice ages. During the 20^th century that transitioned into the concept that too much CO₂ might cause global overheating and that belief reached a peak in the 1970’s when the environmental movement started in earnest with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. as well as other like agencies and organizations in both the US, UK and what was to become the European Union EU. The environmentalists all had concerns over pollution and the resulting affect on both humans and the environment and this link to CO₂ seemed like a simple way to promote their concerns.  These environmental movements, in themselves, were needed as concerns over pollution were very real back then. However virtually all the worlds energy is produced from carbon based fuels. Most of the real pollution from coal (e.g. sulfur, fly ash, mercury, soot) and from petroleum and gasoline (e.g. nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, ozone and particulate matter) was all fixable through technology and they have been mostly eliminated in the United States. Unfortunately, Carbon Dioxide production from fossil fuels cannot be eliminated by any known cost effective means and so this aspect of the environmental movement was very misguided. It was assumed by many in the movement that alternative means of producing energy could be developed and they were called Clean Energy and the movement took on a life of its own.

The history of the concept of CO₂ being a factor in the worlds temperature was based on the work of many scientists and the fact that CO₂ was originally thought to be a significant greenhouse gas so reasonable attempts were made to calculate the warming effect of this gas on the planet.  There were a lot of concerns that a significant warming of the planet could result from the increasing usage of fossil (carbon based) fuels being used to generate ~400 Quadrillion watts (Quad) of usable energy for civilization in the 80’s. This is especially true because that number of Quads has already significantly increased and will, probably more than double by the middle of the 21^st century as reported by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the UN as the rest of the world increase’s their standard of living.

Continued in A Short History of Climate Change, Part II