The cult of Globlaoneywarming comes right out of pop-science fiction. The irrationality of stating – with the case closed – that an increase in a trace chemical which is 0.03% in weight of atmospheric gases, and which is 95% emitted by the Gaia goddess herself, is a human-created 'crime' which somehow 'traps' infrared light and heat and deranges climate patterns, is so absurd, so unscientific, so banal, that it must have originated from a Carl Sagan novel. In fact much of the cult of Warm's 'inspiration' did indeed flow from the pop culture and the ramblings of both fantasists and quack-scientists during the period from about 1940 to 1970. These activists and futurists posited that both Mars and Venus suffered from the 'greenhouse' effect and that the hated-human was creating the same set of destabilizing conditions here on earth. No other explanations suffice it appears.
Mars and Venus?
Globaloneywarming qua ClimateChange, is of course about money, power, Green-Red activism, a hatred of the human, and world government. Any solution no matter how utterly fascistic [in the real sense of the word which means destroying the individual and elevating the collective], is warranted, as long as saving Gaia informs the reason, the motivation and the objective of the action involved. But the neo-Delphic earth-centric cult flows out of a rather mindless and irrational pop-science fiction culture, one that was utterly wrong about the properties of the planets nearest to earth, namely Mars and Venus.
Hollywood still portrays Mars as insufferably hot. The planet is of course dead cold with temperatures oftentimes around -220 C. Venus is the opposite. A dead planet but with a temperature as high as 600 C. Both however are roughly the same size with apparently the same chemical composition in their atmospheres – one dominated by Co2 which makes up over 95% of the atmospheric gases. Why then are both planets so different in their climate? I doubt that we really know. Just as much as I doubt that we humans understand anything about our own climate which is composed of about 1 million variables.
Greenhouse?
The main explanation is that the Co2 concentration on both Mars and Venus works differently then the thin trace of Co2 in our own atmosphere. Light from the Sun passes through the Earth's atmosphere, which is transparent to visible light and warms the surface of the Earth, which in turn 're-radiates' the energy in an infrared form. This is what we are taught anyways. This new energy stays 'trapped' to use the Warmist term, in the Earth's atmosphere pushing up our global temperature. There are of course negative as well as positive feedback loops in this process – a fact that the UN-IPCC-Warmist cult leaves out of their 'modeling'. The Greenhouse effect is thus unlike a 'greenhouse'. If the earth was a greenhouse in the sense that the average human understands that word, our climate would be like Venus'.
The major components in the earth's atmosphere are nitrogen and oxygen and these are NOT not 'greenhouse gases'. The most important Greenhouse gases are water vapor, methane, and carbon dioxide (CO2). It's the CO2 that worries people when it comes to Global Warming. Carbon dioxide makes up only about 330 parts per million of our atmosphere – an amount which is below normal if you look at the long history of the earth's planet. The trace chemical Co2 is such a minor element of our atmosphere that you could increase it 100x and it would be 3% of the total atmosphere and would change little in our climate. It is fantastic to claim, as the warmists do, that our lower-than-average-levels of C02 if they double to 0.06 % of atmospheric gases would have anything but a minimal impact on climate. This is why they don't release their databases for public vetting.
C02 and the end of life
What about Venus and Mars? Unlike Earth's atmosphere, their atmospheres are about 95% CO2. But apparently it is not the percentage of CO2, it's the total amount in the atmosphere that counts. Venus has a very thick atmosphere where at the surface, the atmospheric pressure is ninety times that at Earth's surface. The Martian atmosphere, in contrast is supposedly very thin at less than 1% the pressure of Earth's. Mars barely has any so-called greenhouse effect.
For the last 60 years or so it is the 'greenhouse' effect and Co2 which has exercised the feverish minds of activists now labelled as scientists and great writers. The idea being that even a minimal rise in an infrared trapping chemical like Co2 would bring about catastrophic swings in climate as supposedly have been observed on the surface of Mars for example, even though the climate makeup of Mars is utterly different than that of the earth's. This is why the cult of warm now brands terrible winter weather as part of the warming process. Supposedly NASA has seen the same process take place on Mars, where dust storms have displaced Co2 levels and led to swings in temperatures. Again these 'guesses' are now declared 'science' and if you declaim against them or propose alternative theories, or ridicule the idea that a trace chemical causes anything by itself, you will be branded. An obvious question is this: since the climate of Mars and Venus are not comparable to that of the Earth, why are we basing 'climate policy' on second and third-hand observations and theories about these 2 planets?
Fantasists
The American Institute of Physics: a firm believer in the cult of GlobaloneyWarming published a paper which actually refutes its support of the cult of Warm. The paper highlights the spurious and disingenuous influence of fantasists and activists, from Sagan to James Hansen. It would be as if we built our society strictly along the lines of a Swift novel, or the mumblings from Plato declaring them both to have put forward unalterable truths. Utopias don't exist. Neither does globaloneywarming.
“Already back in 1940, Rupert Wildt had made a rough calculation of the greenhouse effect from the large amount of CO2 that others had found in telescope studies of Venus; he predicted the effect could raise the surface temperature above the boiling point of water. But raising it as high as 600°K seemed impossible. Nobody mounted a serious attack on the problem (after all, very few people were doing any kind of planetary astronomy in those decades). Finally in 1960 a young doctoral student, Carl Sagan, took up the problem and got a solution that made his name known among astronomers. Using what he later recalled as "embarrassingly crude" methods, taking data from tables designed for steam boiler engineering, he confirmed that Venus could indeed be a greenhouse effect furnace. The atmosphere would have to be almost totally opaque, and this "very efficient greenhouse effect" couldn't all be due to CO2. He pointed to absorption of radiation by water vapor as the likely culprit.
Sagan, a science fiction fan from his early years, was among those who had dreamed of a living sister planet of swamp and ocean, but now he had to admit that "Venus is a hot, dry, sandy... and probably lifeless planet."..............
In a 1971 paper, James Pollack argued that Venus might once have had oceans like Earth's It seemed that such a "runaway greenhouse" could have turned the Earth too into a furnace, if the starting conditions had been only a little different. (Into the 21st century the question of whether Venus was in fact once a watery planet remained unresolved.)..................
The greenhouse effect of the sulfates could be calculated, and by the late 1970s, NASA climate modeler James Hansen stated confidently that the sulfates together with CO2 "are responsible for the basic climatic state on Venus." Hansen had originally become interested in the greenhouse effect when, in response to Sagan's primitive calculations, he tried to derive a better explanation of why the planet's atmosphere was so hot. Now Hansen's findings about sulfate aerosols strengthened his belief that these particles could make a serious difference for the Earth's climate as well. Sulfates were emitted by volcanoes and, increasingly, by human industry, so Venus had things to tell us about climate change at home.”
The antecedents of the cult of warm are in the science-fiction arena and with 'embarrassingly crude' models of activists from NASA and other institutes. These crude models are still crude, perhaps even cruder today; and it is revealing that the cult of warm will never release their database models, algorithms, assumptions and variable explanations and details. This is science? Garbage in, garbage out. There are 1 million variables in climate. You can't model such complexity. Period. Focusing on 'sulphates' or 'greenhouse gases' might have some utility. But they are neither the sole reason for climate as it exists; nor are they the sole reason for any 'changes' in climate. How does the cult of warm explain the last major pole shifts on the Earth, where for instance the North Pole shifted from roughly Ecuador to its current position? Are magnetic pole changes now subject to levels of C02? Please.
In general, any objective observer would state that 'greenhouse gases' are still a small part of the climate issue. We understand very little about our own oceans for example, and the interplay of heating, cooling and current movements within the 99% of the cubic volume which is water on this planet. We might be better off spending time, money and energy understanding our own planet better, including its water mass, than positing weird theories based on far away second hand observations of Mars and Venus – 2 planets which in-toto, we know very little about. Activism and science-fiction projection is not science. Neither is the cult of warm.