Debunking Popular Climate Myths Related to Carbon Dioxide

If you believe the debate over global warming has ever been about science, or for that matter climate, you have been conditioned, through formal education or through reports warning of doom and gloom, to believe what others rightly describe as a world-wide hoax concocted to unite the world under a single socialistic government where there is no capitalism, no democracy, and no freedom.

Why is exposing the truth so important? Because it has everything to do with the redistribution of wealth and the establishment of political agendas aimed at destroying the foundation of eastern democracies and free markets. Accordingly, it is therefore critical for everyone to become informed so free and open debate can exist, rather than the suppression and falsification of actual scientific climate data.

This article will expose some of the popular climate myths about CO2, so reader will be equipped with ammunition to spread the truth to those who are willing to listen and have not yet become environmental extremists.  Links are included after each myth to substantiate information and to provide reference material for further interest and clarification.

The article was written using individual articles, with permission of my friend Jay Lehr, Ph.D., in which he exposed popular climate myths related to CO2. Jay Lehr is Senior Policy Analyst for The International Climate Science Coalition.

Carbon dioxide has always been in the earth’s atmosphere in much greater levels than today. 600 million years ago when the greatest explosion of new animal species occurred, CO2 concentrations exceeded 6500 ppm, 17 times more than today. Over billions of years the geologic record clearly shows that there is no long-term correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and the Earth’s climate. There are periods in the Earth’s History when CO2 concentrations were many times higher than they are today, yet temperatures were identical to or even colder than modern times. The claim that fossil fuel emissions control atmospheric CO2 concentrations is likewise invalid, as they have gone up and done with no input from mankind.  The grand total for the CO2 produced by all living things, including humans and livestock, is estimated to be 440 billion tons per year or 13 times the CO2 currently being produced by fossil fuel emissions.

Upon examining actual weather records over the past 100 years no correlation was found between rising carbon dioxide levels and local temperatures.  As climate change alarmists are prone to do, they focus on isolated temperatures that have reached all-time highs, while ignoring reports of record all-time lows. From 1970 until 1998 there was a warming period that raised temperatures by about 0.7 F that helped spawn the global warming alarmist movement, but since 1998 little warming has occurred while carbon dioxide emissions continued to increase. This is totally consistent with variations in the amount of heat the Earth receives from the Sun.

According to what Al Gore wrote in his 2006 book, An Inconvenient Truth, Global Warming is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 6.5 million years ago.   Extinctions have always been an integral part of the Earth’s history and in recent centuries mankind has been the cause of some, having encroached on the habitat of some animals, but not a single species has been shown to be either threatened or endangered by the warming of the Earth by man’s increasing use of fossil fuels and the carbon dioxide emissions therefrom. Plant live thrived when temperatures and carbon dioxide levels were both higher than they are today.  S. J. Gould in his 1933, The Book of Life, points to strong clues that the 20 mass extinctions in the geologic record point to global cooling.  The “poster animal” of the climate change movement is the polar bear. It was Al Gore who said that because melting ice they will have no place to live. Not true because the floating ice (pack ice) is not melting significantly and the polar bear in thriving.  Its numbers have quintupled in the past 50 years from 5,000 to 25,000.

Earth’s climate has varied widely over its history, from ice ages where large ice sheets covered many land areas, to warm periods with no ice at the poles. Several factors have affected past climate change, including solar variability, volcanic activity and changes in the composition of the atmosphere. Data from Antarctic ice cores reveals an interesting story. During the past 400,000 years CO2 and temperatures are closely correlated, which means they rise and fall together. However, based on Antarctic ice core data, changes in CO2 follow changes in temperatures by about 600 to 1000 years, which has led some to conclude that CO2 simply cannot be responsible for current global warming.  Most of the warming and cooling trends observed during human history are related to third periodic factor operating on time scales of a ten to a thousand years and resulted in temperature shifts spanning a total range of around 7 degrees Fahrenheit. These shits arise from the fact that the output of energy and radiation from our Sun is not constant, but changes according to both long-term and short-term cycles of solar activity, these solar cycles, and their connection with the Earth’s climate, have been documented using the recorded history of sunspot cycles, aurora observations, radio-carbon dating techniques, and changes in solar radiance.

It is the global movement that will damage the world.  One goal of the global warming movement is to limit the amount of energy that is available and place it under government control.  Energy costs are increasing because public utilities are being forced to replace what was existing and economical power with solar and wind, which since 2000 has raised electricity bills significantly for low-income families and small businesses.   Renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, are incapable of meeting the world’s energy needs either now or in the future, and also require government subsidies for investment. The Socialist agenda to cripple affordable energy from coal and oil is working.  Despite our booming economy, it will continue to be threatened as long as our government bases any of its politics on the global warming movement.  Scientists who disagree with the global warming movement risk losing their ability to publish papers, receive government funding, or even stay employed.

Solar power only becomes economically viable and competitive through massive government subsides which become hidden in our tax burden. At an efficiency of 7 watts per square meter harvested it would take 50 years to break even on energy out versus energy in and no solar collector has or will ever last 50 years. Additionally, solar energy can’t be turned on and off to meet shifts in energy. The sun shines during the day, but power needs peak in the morning and evening.  While a solar farm can be built anywhere, sunny areas of the country are not evenly distributed requiring transmission lines from the sunniest areas to the less sunny areas.  There is also not enough land in the U.S. to harvest the Solar energy to play a major role in the nation’s energy requirements.  Wide-spread solar energy with the Green New Deal are but a fantasy of those who truly wish to destroy the nation as set forth by our Founding Fathers.

Even though wind energy currently provides the United States with four times the amount of energy solar technologies supply, that doesn’t mean wind power can grow to the extent needed to replace fossil fuels.  The growth of wind power is hampered by many limitations, including its intermittent and inefficient nature; the limitations of batteries or other back-up systems; the lack of available sites with adequate wind; the acreage required to harness the wind; the excessive expense; its dramatic danger to the bird population; and the danger to human health created by its inevitable throbbing noise.  The average turbine constructed today is rated to produce 2.5 megawatts of power. That assumes the wind will blow at its most desirable speed between 8 and 25 miles per hour, 24 hours a day, yet none have every produced more than 30 to 40% of that.  The biggest drawback is the immense amounts of land they require.  880 square miles of land would be needed to produce the energy equivalent to the average fossil fuel power plant of 1000 megawatts of electricity.   Backup power is also needed when the wind doesn’t blow and transmission lines to connect to electric grids.  Like solar power, wind power needs government subsidies to be economically viable.  It looks like Minnesota will have a very expensive mess to clean up when the wind turbines currently operating in the state reach the end of their 20-year useful lifetimes.  According to utility documents filed by Xcel Energy for its Nobles Wind facility, it will cost approximately $445,000 (in 2009 dollars) for each of the 134 turbines in operation.

Electric cars are being promoted, but most people don’t think about the source of the energy needed to charge the batteries or where the electricity required to power electric cars is going to come from?  Constructing batteries for electric cars requires the burning of a great deal of fossil fuels.  It would thereby appear to be a difficult task for the nation to produce enough energy to replace gasoline-fueled cars.  

Consider Solar and wind energy sources. In 2018, about 4,178 billion kilowatthours (kWh) (or 4.18 trillion kWh) of electricity were generated at utility-scale electricity generation facilities in the United States.  About 63% of this electricity generation was from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, petroleum, and other gases). About 20% was from nuclear energy, and about 17% was from renewable energy   As Kurt Williamsen wrote in The New American: “Assuming the government uses wind power to electrify the country – since snow cover, rain, clouds and short winter days mean solar cells aren’t very useful across most of the country – the nation would need approximately 2,762,000 2-MW wind turbines (the big ones) to replace conventional electrical generation and to power our new electric vehicles. With each of these turbines needing about 92 acres of land so that the wind flows properly and doesn’t damage the turbines (that’s 92 acres generally devoid of trees, houses, or other structures), the land area required would be enormous.” Williamsen then quotes an an engineer named Ed Hiserodt, who said that the space required would be equal to the size of Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware, Rhode Island, Maryland, the District of Columbia, West Virginia, North Carolina and Florida.”  Also, since our nation’s power grid is in desperate need of repairs and modernization, there is no way our nation could distribute sufficient electricity to replace gasoline.

Electric-Car Owners in California were recently shocked by California’s power blackouts.

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