Climate Stupidity: Carbon Dioxide Isn’t the Villain — But Climate Bureaucracy Is

The specific gravity of carbon dioxide is 1.52 relative to dry air and is the same as that of propane. It is even heavier than our humid atmosphere, ranging around 1.61. It falls throughout the atmosphere like a cotton seed.

Wind can blow it upward, but it falls right back down. It acts like rainwater, seeking low points. We do not need to build pipelines to inject it into the ground. It sinks into the ground all by itself.

Carbon and carbon dioxide (CO2) are not black or dark pollutants. They are colorless. A diamond ring is pure carbon. They are the building blocks of life on this planet.

Photosynthesis (CO2 + Sunlight + H2O) cannot exist without carbon dioxide. Photosynthesis uses sunlight to transform CO2 into glucose and other organic compounds that make plants, and it transforms water into oxygen, which is released.

We breathe in oxygen and exhale CO2. Plants absorb CO2 and give us oxygen. As Patrick Moore (cofounder of Greenpeace) has pointed out for over ten years, CO2 is critical to the lifecycle of the plant and animal kingdoms. He has referenced an analysis that indicates nearly triple the CO2 content in our atmosphere would be more ideal for plant life. He is correct.

“[An] increase in carbon dioxide directly increases plant photosynthesis. … If photosynthesis ceased, there would soon be little food or other organic matter on Earth. Most organisms would disappear, and in time, Earth’s atmosphere would become nearly devoid of gaseous oxygen.” (Britannica, ref. Plant Physiology, Salisbury, and Ross).

Furthermore, CO2 does not cause warming. It cools 20 degrees Fahrenheit in less than four minutes. It cannot possibly retain heat from day to day (global warming).

We know this because we measured it at my gas-physics Weights and Measures facility. We also measured the humid atmosphere, including the trace gases therein. That cools about one degree every 32 minutes, or 20 degrees in roughly 11 hours.

CO2 will therefore cool as fast as the Sun and the atmosphere allow it to cool. Even our humid atmosphere cools too quickly to retain heat from day to day. The latter test also proves that no gas – not CO2, nitrogen, methane, nor even humid air – retains temperature from day to day. These experiments are detailed in the book referenced below.

The stupidity began in 1988 when James Hansen, who coined the term global warming, flip-flopped from “global cooling” to “global warming” being dangerous.

He testified before Al Gore’s committee, and Gore fed the fear with $22-billion annual funding for universities and professors to study the matter.

Hansen’s claim is a falsehood. People move to warmer climates for their health. Consider all the species in the plant and animal kingdoms that thrive near the equator, and none survive at the poles.

Yet, out of desperation for the money, professors cornered themselves into attempts to prove a falsehood to be true. To do that, one must lie or proffer false theories. This has led climate-change activists to demand devastating economic rules to assuage their self-induced fears.

They fear a recurrence of the 1.16 degrees Fahrenheit global temperature rise over the past century, despite temperatures rising and falling by 20 degrees each day. They fear that sea levels might rise millimeters in decades to come while tides rise and fall six feet each day.

Ever wonder why they decided to vilify CO2 rather than smog? This mental disintegration began with our first climate change bureaucracy. The Federal Clean Air Act authorized states to make their own rules. What a mistake that was.

California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown formed our nation’s first clean-air district in the Los Angeles basin, the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD).

Smog is created by cars, trucks, and planes, which are regulated by the Federal Clean Air Act and the California Air Resources Board (CARB). The new district had no jurisdiction over smog.

Our significant progress in reducing smog is not the result of CARB’s taxes and regulations, and certainly not from anything the SCAQMD has done. The progress is almost entirely due to the catalytic converter, which was the invention of an oil company engineer.

SCAQMD, with hundreds of employees, had to vilify something other than smog to justify its existence and funding. Its successful ruse was to vilify the trace molecules of nitrogen in natural gas, which are harmless, but the public did not generally know that. At the time, the district admitted publicly that CO2 is harmless.

They chose to regulate factories that use clean-burning natural gas. Residences burn far more natural gas than factories, but few complained when the SCAQMD wrote rules to regulate factories.

These bellwether bureaucrats began by writing rules that required annual fees to operate machinery. They wrote any rules they wanted with no oversight or approval of the legislature. They granted themselves police power to enforce the rules and commonly issued $5,000 enforcement fines.

SCAQMD had written 1,145 rules when they wrote the most destructive regulation ever written – cap and trade. It was Rule 1,146, which required natural gas measurement, layered with the RECLAIM rule, which added the cap-and-trade feature. It was nicknamed “cap and trade” some years later.

The rule required a 75 percent reduction in gas burned over five years. It was implemented on January 1, 1994. That week, eight factories announced that they would close.

What would you do if a regulation landed on your desk requiring you to reduce your only heat source by 75 percent over five years? The rule applied to factories with equipment that burned 10-million BTUs per hour or more.

That list was 466 of our largest factories, out of approximately 1,800 factories in the basin.

Each factory was given a target reduction of about 15 percent each year. My company was chosen for its accurate compliance with the rule. The factories had to have us test their gas physics instruments once per year.

A factory might have four boilers (large water heaters), and shut down boiler number four to comply with the first-year target. As the years progressed, factories shut down more and more gas equipment until they were forced to close.

As we approached the end of the five years, in 1998, the SCAQMD decided to add a new list of smaller factories that use 5-million BTU equipment. This was ostensibly, was to extend the careers of the nearly 800 employees at the air quality district.

They did not stop. By 2001, they lowered the threshold all the way down to 75,000 BTUs (residential size), the smallest of factories. By the time I sold the interest in my company and quit counting in 2006, just over 1,200 of roughly 1,800 factories had closed.

Old boilers, heat-treat equipment, furnaces, and ovens are brittle and a risk to move. Most factories tried to hang on while they made other plans, but in the end, almost all of them simply closed and sold their machinery to Chinese import/export representatives.

The Chinese observed our factories closing and began to make offers for the manufacturing equipment. They did not care about the condition of the equipment, and they paid top dollar.

Chinese factory owners were anxious to export to the U.S., and what better plan was there than to buy the machinery to make what Americans were already buying?

The Los Angeles basin had been the largest manufacturing market in the country, roughly three times the size of the auto-industry Rust Belt. The 1994 cap-and-trade rule was the reason we now buy so much from China.

Progressives were so inspired by their success in regulating nitrogen at our factories that they decided maybe they could get away with regulating the other remaining molecule of natural gas exhaust that they had formerly declared to be harmless: CO2.

This is when and why progressives stopped talking about smog. They knew the public would know carbon dioxide is harmless, so they prevaricated that it causes global warming, and that global warming is dangerous.

James T. Moodey owned a Weights and Measures gas-physics test facility. A condensed version of the author’s science paper, “Three Proofs Carbon Dioxide Causes No Warming in the Atmosphere — No Gas Causes Warming,” is here and in his book The Ladder Out of Poverty.