In the early 1970s, I went to an Earth Day gathering near the Charles River in Boston. I got into a short line, probably to get something to eat or drink. Someone in front of me turned around, and a voice from behind asked, “Since when are you an environmentalist?”
The guy in front replied, “As long as they can be co-opted for the movement.” I got on my bike and went home and never took environmentalism seriously, nor should you.
The “movement” was and is the international communist movement. Do not think for a nanosecond that it went away with the demise of the Soviet Union.
Some say that concern for the “climate crisis” has become a religion. Not so. The religion is Marxism. The spectrum Marxists all hate America and the free market.
The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. During the first four billion years, there were few hydrocarbons beneath the surface: no coal, oil, or natural gas. Substantially all the carbon atoms on Earth were in plants, animals, or the atmosphere.
There was abundant plant life, and vertebrates had evolved. Indeed, archaeologists recently found the remains of “giant worms” in northern Greenland (there was no Greenland ice sheet) dating from that period. Yet the oceans did not boil. The Earth was not too hot for life; if it had been, we would not be here.
Here’s Freeman Dyson, one of the smartest people ever to have lived, on climate change alarmism:
“The climate-studies people who work with models always tend to overestimate their models. They come to believe models are real and forget they are only models. … Most of the evolution of life occurred on a planet substantially warmer than it is now and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.”
Five hundred million years ago, thousands of square miles of shallow coastal and inland seas appeared. As plant life and single-cell organisms died and decayed, they sank to the bottom. Over millions of years, the continents shifted and the land sank and rose, and dead organic matter was covered and compressed.
Nitrogen, oxygen, and argon make up 99.964% of our atmosphere. The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) is 0.0407%. That is NOT 4% or even four-tenths of one percent. It is four one-hundredths of one percent: 407 parts per million (by weight: one part per million is one gram per million grams).
This concentration is close to the minimum level to sustain robust plant growth. Three times the present level is ideal and is the level maintained in commercial greenhouses.
Since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-nineteenth century, we have burned billions of tons of fossil fuels with only a modest increase in CO2 levels, which is a necessary byproduct of the combustion of hydrocarbons.
Where did all the CO2 go? Primarily, it’s absorbed by the photosynthetic action in plant life, whether it’s growing trees or crops, and our oceans. Of the 28% of the Earth that is not oceans, lakes, or rivers, about a third is desert, a third is forest, and a third is involved in agriculture.
In round numbers, the land portion of Earth contains about 11 billion acres each of forest, desert, and farmland. Buildings and paving account for less than 1% of the Earth’s surface. At about 165 trees per acre and each tree absorbing about 50 pounds of CO2 each year, trees suck up over 45 billion tons of CO2 each year.
It was accepted wisdom that the tropical rainforests were the “lungs” of the planet. They are not, but the forests of the north are more important. Parenthetically, it has been said that people in southern New Hampshire watched the battle of Bunker Hill when there were no trees in eastern Massachusetts.
As CO2 levels rise, plants become healthier and grow more rapidly, furthering their wholesome impact. The CO2 Coalition estimates that “increasing CO2 concentrations by 300 parts per million will increase plant growth by an average of 46% across all crops.” Levels well over 1,000 parts per million are perfectly harmless to animal life.
Rising sea levels can only come from melting ice that is resting on land. The water in the atmosphere constantly cycles through rain and evaporation. There are two principal masses of more or less permanent ice on Earth: the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet, which account for 95% of the Earth’s ice that is not floating.
If all the glaciers on Earth melt, sea levels will rise less than two feet.
Perhaps the Greenland ice sheet will melt in a thousand years, which will cause a rise in sea level of about twenty-four feet. If the Antarctic ice sheet (7,200,000 cubic miles of ice) melts, sea levels will rise over two hundred feet. That will not happen any time soon, as the mean temperature in the center of that continent is -70 degrees Fahrenheit. The mass of the Antarctic ice sheet has been increasing in recent years.
Hi again, Mike. 👋
Let’s go over this for what’s now a third time. Maybe it will sink in.
The Greenland ice sheet contains about 2.9 million gigatons (Gt) of ice. 🧊
Using the conversion factor that 1 Gt = 1 billion tons, this means that the ice sheet has roughly 2.9 million… https://t.co/JOJaosBIvW
— Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) November 20, 2024
The sea level is rising approximately 0.4 millimeters per year. That’s the thickness of about four sheets of good-quality paper. Of course, when floating sea ice forms or melts, sea levels are unaffected. Eureka! There are huge waterfront projects underway in coastal cities all over the globe.
In Mumbai, to name one city, two multi-billion-dollar projects are underway. Will they get washed away in a few years? Are people rushing to sell their Amsterdam real estate? No to both. Perhaps useful idiots like John Kerry and Charles Windsor believe that climate change will cause a drastic sea level rise, but no one else believes it.
Occam’s Razor tells us that if one straightforward reason explains things, it’s probably a winner. No need to look too far for the chain that links the climate crisis, the George Floyd riots, the antisemitism of the pro-Gaza demonstrators, and the burning of Tesla dealerships: Spectrum Marxists.
Whether the cause of the day is climate change, Black Lives Matter, or Gaza: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” Make no mistake about it, the revolution is a new Communist revolution.
Rich is a recently retired high school mathematics teacher, a career he entered after too many years in the business world. He is a graduate of Brown University and New England School of Law. He also has an LLM from New York University Graduate Law School and has studied the science climate change for thirty years.
The fact that CO2 is needed by Plants and so banning or regulating it would be a totally irresponsible act based upon Junk Science and Politics as well
Another silly climate change is Marxism article.
Actual Marxist / communist nations could not care less about CO2 emissions.
And they don’t care much about air pollution or water pollution.
There is no actual connection between climate activists and Marxism.
The only reason I can think of for people making that claim is that they’re not very bright.
Of course Marxists don’t care about CO2 or any possible climate change caused by CO2. What they do care about is control and power. They find eco-groups to be full of useful idiots to help them with that control. Just look at China. They are more than happy to crank out solar panels, wind turbines, LiIon batteries and EVs for the western countries to install while China keeps building coal plants to power their economy.
Encouraging green dreamers so you can sell them more solar panels, batteries, and windmills sounds like capitalism to me.
China is the global leader in solar and wind energy expansion, outpacing all other countries in terms of both installed capacity and construction projects. China’s rapid growth in renewable energy is driven by massive investments, manufacturing dominance, and government support, making it a major player in the global energy transition.
In 2023, coal provided approximately 60% of China’s total electricity generation. \
China is the world’s largest producer of coal. In 2023, China’s coal production was a record high, surpassing previous years.
They use coal because they have coal.
China is a major importer of natural gas, particularly liquefied natural gas (LNG). In 2023, it was the world’s largest LNG importer.
They do have an air pollution problem, but they don’t care about CO2 emissions.
Many of China’s new coal power plants are being built to replace older, more polluting plants. China has a long-standing commitment to cleaning up its coal sector and has been steadily closing down older, less efficient plants to make way for newer, more technologically advanced ones