Geoscientist Online

Dear Editor, I, and perhaps and a significant portion of the Geological Society of London, do not wish to join Martin Lack’s faux science bandwagon (Join the decarbonisation bandwagon, Geoscientist 29 (3), 9, April 2019), nor wish him to use the GSL to promote baseless, alarmist Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) thinking that it is less than 12 years to the 6^th mass extinction event. This is all based on a failure, deliberately or otherwise, to understand the physical properties of CO₂ and ignore the-past-is-the-key-to-the-present thinking. It is little wonder that children are so traumatised today.

A concerned portion of the membership and past members wrote to the President on 1^st June 2018 requesting a review of the Society’s Position Statements on Climate Change, because there is not a consensus for the position taken by Dr D’Olier foisted on the membership. There has been no response.

The debate is far from over. It is a debate that is needed and one the Geological Society should not shy away from, else it runs the real risk of not adhering to expected scientific rigour.

It is clear from the several ice-core records that are now available that CO₂ follows temperature change not the other way around.

There are several inconvenient truths and several unanswered questions that the Society should be grappling with:

During the last interglacial when temperatures were far higher than the current interglacial, with hippopotamuses grazing off NW Scotland, CO₂ abundance was less than it is today. So too was the situation during the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period, the latter being a time when Greenland was green.

CO₂ levels have dropped steadily since the Cretaceous period to the dangerously low levels we see today. Some C4 grasses became extinct at the end of Tertiary period because CO₂ concentration was so low.

During the last global ice age, CO₂ levels were over 5,000 ppm. CO₂ does not cause global warming.

The highest CO₂ level is thought to have been 8,000 ppm during the Cambrian period.

There is not enough available carbon to reach these levels and there are many sinks to take any excess away, notably plants, weathering and carbonate formation.  

The coincidence of rising global temperatures from the end of the Mini Ice Age, circa 1850 ,with rising CO₂ due to human’s activities is just that, a coincidence. The UN ICCP have mixed up cause with coincidence.  

Half of the warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution began had already happened by 1943, long before the advent of significant CO₂ emissions, which only began around 1950; most of the rest was between 1976 and approximately 2000, despite the accelerating CO₂ emissions.

There is no denying the climate changes and the world has generally warmed up, albeit in fits-and- starts, from the end of the last ice age, some 11,000 years ago, and there has been warming following the Mini Ice Age and that CO₂ has risen sharply since the 1950’s.  However if one digs into the data, it’s clear that CO₂ is not the culprit.

For Martin Lack to compare the oil-and-gas industry to the cigarette industry was also bizarre. The former have and continues to provide feedstock for pharmaceuticals, heat, energy (including electricity) and fertilizer, and the latter provide a real way to extinction. 

For the record, levels of CO₂ during the Carboniferous—a warm period—were stubbornly low at 150 ppm.

Should the Society continue to ignore the request to debate this important issue and allow itself to be steered by extraordinary popular delusions, then one can’t help thinking that the GSL has crossed the boundary from being a learned society to become yet another populist movement, a political party perhaps? 

Chris Matchette-Downes (FGS)