Light is Right Joe Campbell
As I used to compose them, headlines rarely excite me. Recently, though, I read one that did. It said Climate change could be the cause of record cold. I was excited because my meteorological mentors also call climate change global warming.
As both labels contain the same number of letters, the headline writer might as easily have typed Global warming could be the cause of record cold. That would really have excited me
The idea that global warming causes global cooling is intriguing. Paradoxes, not to mention contradictions, usually are. I’m especially intrigued because my mentors believe that the root cause, if I may use that hackneyed expression, is rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.
As it helps to produce the oxygen I breathe and the food I eat, carbon dioxide happens to be my favourite chemical compound. If, as my mentors say, it also causes global temperatures both to rise and fall, my admiration for it only increases. Such incredible versatility ought to be acknowledged and praised, don’t you think?
Why, look how it affects ice. Carbon dioxide fueled climate change can clear the Northwest Passage of it and cover the Great Lakes with it. What’s more, thanks to my favourite compound, ice can advance in the Antarctic while it retreats in the Arctic. If that’s not paradoxical enough, my mentors credit atmospheric carbon dioxide with floods from too much rain and droughts from too little.
I’m not naïve enough to imagine that its powers are unlimited. As far as I know, my mentors haven’t credited it with volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis or meteor strikes, not yet anyway. But they suggest that it can make hurricanes and tornadoes stronger.
Because it’s my favourite, I address and describe carbon dioxide as I do family and friends. Just as for Dorothy, James, and Michael I prefer the diminutives Dot, Jim, and Mike, for carbon dioxide I prefer CO2. I don’t mean to be disrespectfully familiar, just friendly. If it’s implicated in both sweltering heat and frigid cold, I’d rather CO2 were a friend than an enemy.
Its paradoxical history is written in air bubbles researchers recover from polar ice cores. The narrative reveals that atmospheric CO2 has been waxing and waning for eons without help or hindrance from us. During major ice ages it wanes, apparently hiding in the oceans; at other times, like ours, it waxes, as it returns to the air. Thanks to these cycles, which are related to changes in the earth’s orbit, the sun, and the solar radiation reflected into space, the world is spared permanent freezing or never ending sweltering.
The question, though, is how do my mentors account for unusual warming and cooling between major ice ages? By now, most of us have heard of the medieval warm period and the minor ice age that followed. Is CO2 really versatile enough to cause both departures from normal temperatures, by waxing to warm us up and waning to cool us down?
If so, maybe the way to prevent a future minor ice age, which some say is already under way, is to produce more atmospheric CO2. The solution, in other words, may be to keep on doing what we’re doing. Just don’t tell my meteorological mentors that I suggested it.
You may tell some of my other scientific mentors, though. Their research indicates that higher levels of atmospheric CO2 help plants to grow larger and faster while decreasing the amount of water they use. So my favourite chemical compound is not only a greenhouse gas that conserves global heat. It’s also a green gas, an airborne fertilizer that increases global food supplies for a population that has more than doubled over the last half century.
Oh, I realize that the increased quantity of vegetation might entail a somewhat decreased quality. But that didn’t hinder the dinosaurs, which flourished in an atmosphere much richer in CO2 than ours. Why, the plant eaters grew prodigiously large feasting on the lush vegetation and the flesh eaters did the same feasting on the plant eaters.
Their leftovers, the vegetation they didn’t consume, eventually retreated into the earth. There, with the carbon captured from atmospheric CO2, it reinvented itself as coal and oil, which heat our homes and power our industry. In doing so, both fuels return CO2 to the atmosphere.
The process is part of the carbon cycle. Since long before environmentalists thought of it, recycling has been integral to the lifestyle of my favourite chemical compound. What I don’t understand is why it’s not everyone’s favourite.
