St. Augustine said it best: "Faith is to believe what we cannot see; and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe," in this particular case, the deleterious effects of man-made carbon dioxide emissions. On the other hand, if one prefers to trust evidence, the answers are perfectly clear.
Carbon dioxide is a transparent, odorless, and tasteless gas and not a pollutant. Its concentration is increasing slowly in the atmosphere but has not yet reached 400 ppm, while it will take 20,000 ppm to make you feel short of breath and 50,000 ppm to kill you. No reason to panic.
Some 18,000 years ago the Arctic Ice Cap covered much of the north part of this continent, Europe, and Asia; there was 1 km of ice over the place where I am writing these lines. Most of it has now melted, and it is likely that all of it will soon. This is corroborated by a concomitant rise of sea level. No sane person denies global warming or its fluctuations.
The ice cores have sampled a 620,000-years-long record. There is no substantial controversy about their analysis or interpretation. They show seven distinct glaciations separated by interglacial periods. We had nothing to do with bringing about these climate changes since we appeared only some 180,000 years ago and started substantive emissions of carbon dioxide only 150 years ago.
The ice cores show that every interglacial period started with a sharp increase of temperature, followed, some 600-800 years later, by a sharp rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Therefore, clearly, rising temperatures caused the rising levels of carbon dioxide and not the other way around. Since carbon dioxide is about two times more soluble at 0˚ C. than at 20˚ C., it is obvious that rising temperatures caused it to outgas from the enormous reservoir of seawater; later, decreasing temperatures returned it to solution.
Therefore, carbon dioxide has a very subordinate effect on global temperatures. What drives them has not yet been conclusively nailed down, but having noticed that everywhere on earth days are warmer than nights, my money is on the sun and the effects of its vagaries. The predictions of people who cannot tell the weather 1 week in advance but emit discordant claims to know it 100 years ahead shows arrogance.
The remedy proposed by many governments reminds one of Clement VI's AD 1338 prescription to end an epidemic of plague: Let all Christians travel to Rome (the center of the epidemic) and join their prayers to that of its victims. One and one-quarter million did. Ninety percent of them caught the disease and died. Not good governance, I suggest, but innocuous when compared to compelling 7 billion, soon 9 billion people to cut their carbon emissions by up to 85%.
Jamil Azad
Geoscientist Calgary
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