Going Green Does Not Counteract Climate Change
The argument for going green is to avoid the effect on climate change that using fossil fuels creates.
Avoiding the use of fossil fuels creates other climate factors that are also more or less troubling such as those created by the mining and development of battery materials and the hazards associated with batteries such as fires and the non disposable toxic residue of spent batteries. Also, the cost associated with car batteries for electric cars is enormous.
But focusing on global warming and carbon emissions as the source is lousy science performed by ideologues rather than dispassionate scientists.
In order to assess that assertion a broad review of all involved is necessary.
In the first place, climate change is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on since the earth was created and continues through today and will continue into the future.
Earth's atmosphere wasn't always full of life-giving oxygen — it was once a choking mixture of carbon dioxide and other gases, more like the atmosphere of Mars or Venus.
The sources for climate change are numerous, occur on a global scale as well as localized, have both long term and short term impacts and vary from immensely powerful to mildly impactful.
It is impossible to measure them all at the same time and therefore provide a simple answer. What can be done, is to counter the faux accuracy of climate change alarmists in their assessments and predictions. That doesn’t mean we can prove anything, any more than the climate change alarmists, because proof would require that we provide precise relationships between the countless factors affecting climate change and to date that is impossible.
Furthermore climate change that interacts with the earth in a global sense and alternatively localized climate change, makes everything more confusing.
Among the sources for climate change are: changes in rainfall, changes in ocean temperatures and circulations, sea level changes, ice cap changes, La Nina, El Nino, volcanoes, hydrothermal vents, wildfires and wildfire seasons, earthquakes, solar activity, earth’s spin, earth’s tilt, earth’s orbit, atmospheric and surface wind dynamics.
The sun plays a role because it heats parts off the earth at different intensities and this heat generates thermal changes in crust, water and air. That is why we have seasons.
Sun influence Upper atmosphere vs earth influence lower atmosphere.
Changes in Earth’s spin, tilt, and orbit have affected the Earth system in the past on various scales. Some of these ways include:
Increasing or decreasing amount of sunlight that is absorbed by different areas of the surface of the Earth. This can affect Earth’s temperature.
Like El Niño in the Pacific, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) changes weather on a large scale.
Historically the earth has experienced 5 ice ages: Quaternary, Karoo, Andean-Saharan, Cryogenian, and Huronian.
By increasing snow and ice cover, especially at high latitudes, the reflection of sunlight can increase, which in turn decreases the amount of light that is absorbed by Earth’s surface. Earth’s temperature which is not uniform affects the distribution of ice and snow.
Changes in the Earth system that are affected by snow and ice cover, include the carbon cycle, and how much carbon (including the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide) is transferred between the atmosphere, biosphere, and ocean.
Over at least the past million years, glacial and interglacial cycles have been triggered by variations in how much sunlight reaches the Northern Hemisphere in the summer, which are driven by small variations in the geometry of Earth’s axis and its orbit around the Sun. But these fluctuations in sunlight aren’t enough on their own to bring about full-blown ice ages and interglacials. They trigger several feedback loops that amplify the original warming or cooling. During an interglacial,
sea ice and snow retreat, reducing the amount of sunlight the Earth reflects;
warming increases atmospheric water vapor, which is a powerful greenhouse gas;
permafrost thaws and decomposes, releasing more methane and carbon dioxide; and
the ocean warms and releases dissolved carbon dioxide, which traps even more heat.
These feedbacks amplify the initial warming until the Earth’s orbit goes through a phase during which the amount of Northern Hemisphere summer sunlight is minimized. Then these feedbacks operate in reverse, reinforcing the cooling trend.
Small changes in Earth’s spin, tilt, and orbit over these long periods of time can change the amount of sunlight received (and therefore absorbed and re-radiated) by different parts of the Earth. Over 10s to 100s of thousands of years, these small changes in the position of the Earth in relationship to the Sun can change the amount of solar radiation, also known as insolation, received by different parts of the Earth. In turn, changes in insolation over these long periods of time can change regional climates and the length and intensity of the seasons. The Earth’s spin, tilt, and orbit continue to change today.
Winds have a huge impact on a region's climate.
Even though massive forces produce dominant changes, perturbations of much smaller influences cannot be ignored as everything is impacted by everything else and a small change can result in a substantial impact.
Rain shadows, for instance, are created as moisture-laden wind approaches a mountain range. The moisture condenses as rain and other precipitation before coming over the crest of the mountain. Dry "downslope winds" mark the other side of the mountain.
Sea Levels affect the climates of coastal cities.
Melting ice caps and ice sheets are the result of climate change and also contribute to climate change.
Dry air can extend wildfire seasons.
While human created carbon dioxide from camp fires, fireplace fires, building fires, burning forests, furnaces and automotive devices contribute to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, wildfires and volcanoes also contribute (and always have) massive amounts of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. It is believed the earth’s atmosphere evolved to the level of oxygen that supports humans through the oxygen producing photosynthesis capabilities of plant life and such mechanisms as ultraviolet light. The oceans are enormous and they have a vast capacity to absorb carbon dioxide.
Little-studied gas known as dimethylsulfide, or DMS. algae might play a vital role in regulating the Earth’s climate.
DMS represents a large source of sulfur going into the Earth’s atmosphere. As such, it helps drive the formation of clouds, which block solar radiation from reaching the Earth’s surface and reflect it back into space. That means DMS could help offset greenhouse warming.
DMS is emitted from the leaves of certain species of marsh grass.
molecule called dimethylsulfoniopropionate, or DMSP—the source of DMS—concentrates in organisms in the marine food web.
Clouds, of course, have a major impact on the Earth’s climate. They deflect solar radiation back into space, preventing sunlight from heating the Earth’s surface and providing a cooling effect. Clouds are even more important over oceans, which are both more extensive and darker than land and so absorb a majority of the heat hitting the planet, Toole said. So the question becomes, can algae produce enough DMS to increase cloud cover and keep the planet’s temperature from rising?
Putting sulfur in the atmosphere, as with DMS emissions, is a more efficient way of cooling the atmosphere than removing carbon dioxide.
pull of gravity from our solar system’s two largest gas giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, causes the shape of Earth’s orbit to vary from nearly circular to slightly elliptical.
When Earth’s orbit is at its most elliptic, about 23 percent more incoming solar radiation reaches Earth at our planet’s closest approach to the Sun each year than does at its farthest departure from the Sun. Currently, Earth’s eccentricity is near its least elliptic (most circular) and is very slowly decreasing, in a cycle that spans about 100,000 years.
Obliquity – The angle Earth’s axis of rotation is tilted as it travels around the Sun is known as obliquity. Obliquity is why Earth has seasons. Over the last million years, it has varied between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees with respect to Earth’s orbital plane. The greater Earth’s axial tilt angle, the more extreme our seasons are
Larger tilt angles favor periods of deglaciation (the melting and retreat of glaciers and ice sheets). These effects aren’t uniform globally -- higher latitudes receive a larger change in total solar radiation than areas closer to the equator.
Earth’s axis is currently tilted 23.4 degrees, or about half way between its extremes, and this angle is very slowly decreasing in a cycle that spans about 41,000 years.
As obliquity decreases, it gradually helps make our seasons milder, resulting in increasingly warmer winters, and cooler summers that gradually, over time, allow snow and ice at high latitudes to build up into large ice sheets. As ice cover increases, it reflects more of the Sun’s energy back into space, promoting even further cooling.
Precession – As Earth rotates, it wobbles slightly upon its axis, like a slightly off-center spinning toy top. This wobble is due to tidal forces caused by the gravitational influences of the Sun and Moon that cause Earth to bulge at the equator, affecting its rotation. The trend in the direction of this wobble relative to the fixed positions of stars is known as axial precession. The cycle of axial precession spans about 25,771.5 years.
in about 13,000 years, axial precession will cause these conditions to flip, with the Northern Hemisphere seeing more extremes in solar radiation and the Southern Hemisphere experiencing more moderate seasonal variations.
The small changes set in motion by Milankovitch cycles operate separately and together to influence Earth’s climate over very long timespans, leading to larger changes in our climate over tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years.
Milutin Milankovitch (Serbian) calculated that Ice Ages occur approximately every 41,000 years. Subsequent research confirms that they did occur at 41,000-year intervals between one and three million years ago. But about 800,000 years ago, the cycle of Ice Ages lengthened to 100,000 years, matching Earth’s eccentricity cycle.
It's widely believed that the rise of plants turned that carbon dioxide into oxygen through the chemical reactions of photosynthesis, in a period called the Great Oxygenation Event. But a new study suggests there may be another way to make oxygen from carbon dioxide, using ultraviolet light.
The findings could explain how the Earth's atmosphere evolved and demonstrate how survivable the atmosphere on earth is and how complicated that set of survival mechanisms are and how and why climate change is far from the simple presentation of climate change alarmists present.