With a new administration in the White House and the enormous problems facing the United States of America, it is necessary for the people in charge to separate the message from the noise so that the efforts made to solve the problems go toward the solution and not the chase of the proverbial wild goose.
Three of the major problems facing America and the world today have been made to intertwine so badly in the everyday discussions that the confusion created by the situation threatens to make all of them worse. The first problem is pollution; the second is the apparent climate change; the third is the scarcity of resources - more specifically the energy resources.
I begin with the last. Right now the world depends a great deal on the dwindling fossil fuels which are oil, natural gas and coal. These are substances made of hydrogen and carbon, the reason why they are called hydrocarbons. There are a number of other energy resources such as wind, solar, biomass, waterfalls and nuclear. However, except for the last two, these sources cannot be relied on to form what is called a base load, thus they can never replace the fossils fuels.
To produce electricity from the wind, we use the windmill which is important in the context of this discussion not because of the amount of energy it will contribute to the economies of the future – this will be minimal - but because of the symbolism that the windmill represents.
The windmill is a testimony to the fact that technology never forgets its past. Like the waterwheel, the windmill is an ancient invention that uses energy other than animal power to feed our needs in the homes, industry and commercial enterprises. By the way, hydropower too is produced by an offshoot of an ancient invention, the aforementioned waterwheel now called the turbine.
What all of this means is that in view of the fact the whole world now wishes to industrialize, we are going to need all the technologies we can invent from scratch and all those we can revive from the past to produce energy. Thus, there is not a realistic way by which we can turn our backs on the more recent of the old inventions, the technologies that are based on fossil fuels. Like it or not, these technologies will remain with us until the last drop of oil, the last puff of natural gas and the last lump of coal have been used up. Then the technologies will be adapted to serve other purposes.
Let me now talk about pollution. Garbage is not something we appreciate and we certainly must clean up our cities, water streams, lakes and oceans. But more important than the visible garbage are the invisible compounds such as the chemicals we dump into the atmosphere and those we dump into the waters we drink and the waters where the fish make their habitats. There are ways to clean up our act and we are more or less doing a good job now by installing scrubbers where they are necessary. And there is no doubt we shall continue to make progress in this field and do a better job at cleaning up after ourselves.
But the big debate we are having and from where the confusion is emanating relates to the possible change in the climate of the planet. We ask: What is this beast and what can we do about it? Well, if the planet is warming up for good and not just experiencing one of its many cycles, either it is warming because of natural causes we cannot control or it is warming because of industrial activities we can control.
If the warming is natural, we may have no choice but to adapt to it because if we do not already know what it is, we cannot adapt nature to suit our needs. If the warming is due to our activities, we must find out how and why this is and then do something about it. So far, the finger has been pointing at the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and steps have been taken to curb the emission of this gas. But are we wasting valuable time and costly efforts chasing a wild goose?
I published an article in September of 2007 that answers this question and it can be found on this website under the title Global Warming In Perspective. So far no one has successfully rebutted the points I make. However, one rebuttal was made suggesting that carbon dioxide may be acting like the glass of a greenhouse, letting the energy pass in the direction from the sun to the earth but blocks it when going in the opposite direction.
This is a weak argument that is refuted in the article itself, therefore there is no need for me to refute it again. For those who will not read the entire article, here are the 5 paragraphs most pertinent to this discussion.
[In its most pristine state, the atmosphere of the Earth is made of nitrogen at about 78%, oxygen at 21% and argon at nearly 1%. Because plants exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide back and forth with the atmosphere and because the oceans have the ability to absorb and to release gases including carbon dioxide, we find traces of the latter in the atmosphere at 0.033% or thereabout depending on where and when the reading is taken. Thus, the atmosphere is made of nitrogen, oxygen and argon at about 99.967% and a whiff of carbon dioxide. This is a ratio of 1 in 3,000.]
[All of the gases are held near the surface of the Earth by the force of gravity and there are no transparent walls to separate them from the void of outer space. As the sun shines on the half of planet Earth that faces it, light delivers a fraction of its energy to the gases and water vapor in the atmosphere. Light then goes on to deliver the rest of the energy to everything below the atmosphere like the oceans, the polar ice caps, the deserts, the plants and so on. Given that everyone of these has an index of reflectivity, each absorbs some energy and reflects the rest back out in the form of visible light.]
[The question is this: what happens to the energy that is absorbed by the oceans, the plants, the soil and so on? Well, photosynthesis and the chemical processes that use light make life possible. Also, the physical processes that use other forms of energy make the weather such as rain, lightening, wind, waves and other phenomena possible.]
[There is also this: the second law of thermodynamics is called Entropy, and it says that all those processes will eventually turn into heat which is infrared radiation. Some of this radiation is reflected back into space and the rest is absorbed by the gases and the water vapor that linger within a kilometer or two above the ground. And it is this energy that determines the average temperature of the planet.]
[This energy represents a small fraction of what is delivered to Earth in the first place. And given that water vapor absorbs and delivers more energy than gases, the latter do little to warm the planet. And since carbon dioxide is only 1 part in 3,000 of the atmospheric gases, carbon dioxide does not contribute to the warming of the planet one appreciable iota. The real culprit could be the water vapor…]
Using this as a background, let me now put a new argument in perspective. The weight of the atmosphere over the entire planet is about 5 quadrillion tons; a quadrillion is a million times a billion. The amount of petroleum used every day in the whole world is about 12 million tons but only half of that is used as fuels. The rest goes into the production of such things as plastics, synthetic fibers, cosmetics, car tires and the rest.
Taking into account the atomic weights of carbon and oxygen, the fact that one atom of carbon combines with two of oxygen to make a molecule of carbon dioxide, and working out the mathematics, you find that the 6 million tons of petroleum fuels used each day make carbon dioxide in the ratio of 1 part in 333 million when compared to the total weight of the atmosphere. And when you compare the amount of carbon dioxide that our activities produce with the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere and put there by nature, you find the ratio to be about 1 part in 111,000.
In fact, considering that all the known reserves of conventional oil on the planet amount to about 200 billion tons, you will have to burn in a single day 14 times as much as that to double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And you know what? This will not even change the temperature of the planet by one degree. What it will do is increase the amount of plant life which in turn will increase the amount of animal life. Such thing will happen because life as we know it is made of carbon and hydrogen. In fact, the best foods you can eat are the carbohydrates because they are the hydrocarbons that have not yet fossilized. Thus, to burn oil is to release carbon and hydrogen and to recycle life. It is as hopeful and as simple as that.
Let me make one more point. An experiment called The Biosphere was conducted a few years ago to see how well a self contained community could live in outer space in an atmosphere that replicates the earth in miniature. If today you build one such contraption that is half a sphere in shape with a diameter of 500 meters, you can do an interesting experiment.
If you try to pump into the biosphere carbon dioxide at the same rate that the planet is being filled with the gas due to human activities, you will have to bring not a machine but a sleepy newborn baby to exhale his or her carbon dioxide into the biosphere. This is how much "damage" all of our industrial plants, cars, planes and what have you do to the earth. It is no worse than that.
Yes, we do need to clean up the environment because it is healthier to live in one, and we do need new sources of energy because the planet is running out of them. But let us not do things for the wrong reasons even if they seem to be the right thing in the short run because you can be certain they will prove to be useless and costly in the long run.