I finished Patrick Moore’s book. Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom, recently. In fact, I was unable to put it down. Moore is an ecologist and one of the original founders of Greenpeace. He parted ways with them because of “…their transition from what was sensible environmentalism, to a platform of anti-human and anti-science campaigns that were more concerned with fundraising and scaring people with mis-information....” Moore has since become a public critic of the general global warming hysteria and has dedicated his work toward researching and providing evidence of what he believes are mostly false narratives.

Moore addresses each major subject within the global warming trope by chapter. He doesn’t deny that the climate is changing. Rather, he looks at it from the perspective of geological time. From that view, the climate we humans have enjoyed for only 160,000 years is nowhere near the norm for the planet. We are in the relatively cold Pleistocene glacial period which consists of multiple warming and cooling periods and has no definitive end date that science can pinpoint.

The book discusses the political emphasis on funding for research and technology supporting the general hysteria, but I won’t go into that here. I’m confident that most readers fully understand by now that if it doesn’t fit the prevailing political and social narratives, it doesn’t get the research grants, it doesn’t get widely published, and it certainly doesn’t get good peer or Amazon reviews.

Moore explains that polar bears, undersea reefs, African trees, and other “warming threatened” forms of life on the planet actually thrive in the current climate and there are more diverse species of animal life on Earth right now than during most other eras. He explains in detail that the CO₂ level and climate temperature data are not correlated in any way. There is a causative relationship only if you look from the arbitrary range of data points starting in about 1850 to the present—a mere 170 years.

One of the points that climate warming proponents do not speak about is the fact that carbon is possibly the most important element on our planet. We are carbon-based life forms. Water and carbon led to the most basic life forms, and they in turn used photosynthesis to create glucose…the sugars necessary for the energy plants and animals needed to evolve and survive. Without them, there is no us.

Moore further discusses how the level of CO₂ in our atmosphere is close to an all-time low at some 415 ppm rather than at some unusually high-level that global warming proponents would have us believe. In fact, the CO₂ level has been much higher than this during most of the existence of modern life. Considering geological time spans, the Earth’s atmospheric CO₂ has been about 2,000 ppm with highs of some 6,000 ppm. It has dropped very low before during the peak of glacial periods. Moore adds that at about 150 ppm plants begin to suffocate.

Where did all this CO₂ come from? Carbon is abundant in our planet and is released into the atmosphere through vulcanism. Volcanos have erupted since the early formation of the Earth. The more active the volcanos, the more CO₂ in the atmosphere. Mammalian life has lived through millions of years with atmospheric CO₂ levels at 2,000 ppm and even higher. It makes no sense that the current level of 415 ppm is somehow dangerous. On the contrary, one might argue that it is dangerously low.

If it is true that our CO₂ is low, where did the CO₂ go? The elements in the Earth that helped fuel vulcanism, such as uranium, radon, and others, were deposited on the planet 4.6 billion years ago and they have been decaying ever since. That is why volcanic eruptions are a relatively rare event in the present era. So, the planet is producing much less atmospheric carbon than it did millions of years ago.

Still, this implies that even though the carbon would stop increasing, it would be at some consistent level, right? Unfortunately, the level of atmospheric CO₂ has steadily declined for the last 150 million years, and where that carbon has gone may surprise you.

We know that carbon is stored in fossil fuels and in living and dead plants. Did you know that plants and soil contain twice as much carbon as the atmosphere? The ocean holds 45 times the carbon as the atmosphere does. The really surprising thing is that 100 million billion tons of carbon are stored in carbonaceous rocks, such as marble, limestone, and chalk, which are the fossilized remains of ancient sea animals that could make their own protective shells. This is 118,000 times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. These are all referred to as carbon sinks. Carbon is predominantly being absorbed rather than released into the atmosphere, and this may be the real global threat.

In geologic thinking, we are perilously close to the lowest levels of atmospheric CO₂ that can sustain life as we know it, and we do not know of another natural mechanism that releases more carbon into the atmosphere. To intentionally reduce it further is to put an even greater strain on the growth of the plants that make up the foundation of all life on Earth. Perhaps this is even the natural way life as we know it is supposed to end—except for that pesky, climate-denying neighbor and his big SUV. Get the book. I highly recommend it.

Image: Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom cover.