Table of Contents
John Rofe
Private Fraud Investigator
THE CAUSE OF CLIMATE CHANGE
Eminent meteorologists will all explain that the weather is a complex mixture of pattern and chaos. Pattern dominates daily, but chaos in the longer term. The climate is the 30 year average of weather conditions at a particular place and time of the year. So the climate is what we expect and, like it or not, the weather is what we get.
We need to deal with some statistics before going further. The sun is at the centre of our local universe and it heats and lights all of the planets in our solar system based on proximity. It supplies about 99.9% of Earth’s energy. There are three things essential for all life on Earth – water, oxygen and carbon dioxide. Every life form is carbon-based and, because everything we ingest contains carbon, we need to eliminate it from our bloodstream in the form of carbon dioxide gas. We humans exhale 100 times the carbon dioxide we inhale (adults about 360kg/year). There is 20.7% oxygen in the air and only a tiny 0.04% carbon dioxide. Human instigated emissions of carbon dioxide are less than 5% of all annual emissions. Carbon dioxide gas is heavier than air, while water vapour is much lighter than air.
Sunlight strikes particular points on Earth’s surface at differing angles. So its rays will take a longer or shorter path through the atmosphere. The first major absolute determinant of climate is the latitude of each point. For each point’s attitude to the sun – day or night, summer, autumn, winter, or spring, the sun has a different climate effect.
For all of geological time, there has been no evidence of a correlation between the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide (which started at up to 0.7% CO2 some 540 million years ago) and Earth’s temperature (starting at 22 oC). Since then both have oscillated widely. But during the latter stages of the Pleistocene Era (the last 2.7 million years), there is evidence from deep Antarctic ice core analysis that a change in the temperature of Earth’s atmosphere has typically led to a change in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide — with a delay of between 400-800 years.
The atmosphere thins with higher altitude, and for every 1,000 metres of height, the temperature reduces by 6.5oC as a direct consequence. At the upper limit of the troposphere, water freezes, so the weather and most greenhouse gases are usually restricted to the first 10 km of altitude. As a result, the second major absolute determinant of climate is the altitude of each point.
The Earth differs from all other known planets because the composition of its atmosphere includes several “greenhouse gases”. These restrict both surface heating and surface cooling at night by about 33oC. and make the planet habitable. What keeps the average global temperature moderate is the effect of the water cycle consisting of surface liquid (oceans, rivers and lakes etc) evaporating with heat to become water vapour (concentration varies between 0.2-0.4% in deserts and at the poles, up to 4% in tropical rain forests).
Despite the largest of volcanic and asteroid extinction-level events (e.g. Taupo, Yellowstone), the water cycle has always restored and purified Earth’s atmosphere and maintained temperature norms, just as it has during modern times for A-bombs, firestorms and during the COVID-19 lockdown. Atomic absorption spectroscopy proves that not only is water vapour 96% of all “greenhouse gases”, it totally dominates the extremely limited thermal radiative effects of all the others together.
In New Zealand, the average level of water vapour is 1%. Water vapour always rises until it condenses out to become minute cloud droplets. These droplets coalesce to become rain, hail or snow. It has been calculated the volume of evaporation is about 420 trillion tonnes p.a., with a similar quantity of precipitation. In the sky above earth, there is between 15 and 20 trillion tonnes of water that the sun must penetrate on entry and from which heat must escape. Because the level of real humidity varies from place to place and time to time, its greenhouse gas effect also varies. As a result, the third major absolute determinant of climate is humidity, i.e. water vapour and its twin – clouds. This is often apparent in daily variations of diurnal maximum temperature, the diurnal range and night-time heat loss.
There is no identifiable effect from any other greenhouse gases, nor would we expect to find such. The fourth major absolute determinant of climate is solar variability due to the 11-year, 170-year and 400-year cycles of solar variability. The sun’s electromagnetic output varies and these changes correlate with the changes to the climate.
If you enjoyed this BFD article please share it.
