Superb blog! My respect to author Paul Dunbar for this outstanding piece:
Written by Paul Dunbar December 21, 2019
Whirl up, sea —
whirl your pointed pines,
splash your great pines on our rocks,
hurl your green over us,
cover us with your pools of fir.
(Oread, by H. D.)
Carbon is the element of life, common to all known life-forms. Its unique and astonishing properties make life possible. With four electrons available for covalent bonding, carbon forms a unique diversity of complex organic compounds, with more than ten million described to date; and yet that figure is only a tiny fraction of those theoretically possible. Carbon has an unusual ability to form polymers — macromolecules with repeating sequences, such as DNA — at temperatures experienced on earth. Carbon’s physical properties vary widely according to the allotropic form it takes, forms as distinct as graphene and diamond: soft and hard; opaque and transparent; conductive and insulating. Carbon will not ionise under any except implausibly extreme conditions. Its allotropes are thermally conductive, thermodynamically stable and chemically resistant. Taken together, these properties make it the foundation of all life.
Carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the universe, and the second in the human body (after oxygen). Like all heavy elements it is forged in the furnaces of stars. But when the British scientist Fred Hoyle came to this element in his ground-breaking work on stellar nucleosynthesis, he found himself faced with a conundrum: carbon should not exist.
That is, it should be transformed instantaneously into oxygen on coming into existence. The only way it could persist would be for a very specific value to be assigned to the parameters of the carbon-12 isotope: i.e., a resonance level at 7.65 MeV (million electric volts) above its ground state.
Hoyle’s prediction of this value was confirmed experimentally, and for the scientist this resulted in a mind-blowing epiphany.
“I do not believe,” he wrote, “that any scientist who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside the stars.”
(Religion and the Scientists, 1959.)
Carbon is the impossible element, and the miracle of life begins with physics.
Hoyle is one of a number of physicists throughout the 20th century who started to advance the teleological argument — that physical parameters governing the condition of the universe are fine-tuned to very specific values which enable not only the possibility of life, but of astronomical structures, diverse elements, chemical bonds, and even of matter itself.
For Hoyle, the very existence of carbon was proof of intelligent design in physics. In recent times, powerful arguments have emerged regarding intelligent design in biology. These are arguments not from faith but from science. Not least among them is Watson and Crick’s discovery of the quaternary code embedded in DNA, comparable to but vastly exceeding in complexity our own binary digital codes. This, in plain terms, is language; and according to all of our knowledge and experience, there is only one possible source for language — and that is, intelligent mind.
Where and how we imagine this mind is an individual philosophical challenge. Hoyle did not default to belief in an anthropomorphic God. Instead he adopted a position strikingly consonant with ancient philosophy in both its Eastern and Western branches, Buddhism and Stoicism — that the universe itself is intelligent. And that means it is alive, and conscious.
As the Stoic philosopher Chryssipus of Soli wrote, in his De Nature Deorum: “The universe itself is God.”
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For the past several million years, the planet has effectively been in a CO2 drought. Plants grow best with atmospheric levels above 1000 parts per million. During the last glaciation, levels fell as low as 180 ppm, perilously close to the limit of 150 ppm below which plants, and therefore any life on the planet, cannot survive. The recent rise to around 400 ppm gives us a small cushion of safety.
As the planet begins to recover from its CO2 drought, with humans playing a vital role, we see a global increase in vegetation, a greening especially of arid areas, as clearly shown by satellite imagery. (Studies done by CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, reveal this trend, and their figures are confirmed by NASA.) Increased availability of CO2 transforms dry, semi-desert areas because it enables plants to use water more efficiently — higher CO2 confers drought resistance in plants, which can now absorb the gas using fewer stomatic apertures, thus losing less water to evaporation in the process. And of course it massively boosts growth, which is why growers pump the gas into greenhouses from special generators or engine exhausts. Levels of 800 – 1200 ppm lead to 40-60% increases in yield. In the open air, farmers know that while fertilisers and water can be increased, atmospheric CO2 is always the limiting factor on growth. In recent years the ‘CO2 fertilisation effect’ has brought huge gains to agricultural yields worth hundred of billions of dollars in profit.
And that, in a nutshell, is the greenhouse effect — the only important effect of higher atmospheric carbon. That statement will shock many who are in thrall to the anti-carbon propaganda, but it is what the historical climate reconstructions tell us, based on the reliable proxy of ice-cores. Over the last 650,000 years, of which we have a detailed record of both temperatures and atmospheric composition, there is some correlation observed between warm periods and higher carbon dioxide levels. But rises in temperature precede rising CO2 in the record, and it’s easy to understand why. Warm conditions are good for life; when it is warmer, there is more life, and life is carbon-based.
More significantly, the oceans emit CO2 as they warm. Cooling water absorbs, and warming waters exhale, the gas of life. So when the conditions exist, the planet provides. Oceans warm more slowly than landmass, and that is why there is a time lag of at least 800 hundred years between rising temperatures and rising CO2. It is important to note that the warming of the oceans is not a consequence of the warming of the atmosphere; the depths of the ocean can only be warmed by convection, not conduction. Ultimately, both atmosphere and ocean are warmed by the same source, solar irradiance. Currently, according to NASA, there is no warming of the deep ocean.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas — that is, it helps the biosphere to retain heat. But it is by no means the most important one — water vapour composes around 70% of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and constitutes about 95% of the effect. CO2 plays a much smaller role, and its effect diminishes as more is added. Atmospheric temperature exhibits a logarithmic dependence on carbon dioxide levels — that is, if it takes an increase of 400 ppm to bring about a rise of one degree Celsius, it will take a further 800 ppm to raise temperatures by another degree; another 1600 ppm to add a further degree, 3200 ppm to add the next, and so on. This system of diminishing returns ensures that there can be no ‘tipping point’ in terms of atmospheric carbon; and no ‘runaway warming’ due to feedbacks is observed in the history of the earth, despite enormously higher levels of CO2 in the past.
Over the industrial period we have seen a net warming of less than one degree Celsius, which represents a remarkable degree of stability. We can not only live in a carbon rich atmosphere but would thrive, along with all other species. There is no such thing as an excess; higher atmospheric carbon, in fact, is the key to ending world hunger.
Deserts greening from rising CO2 (CSIRO)
But there are those among us who do not want to see that happen; who indeed would regard it as a catastrophe, undermining their power at the top of a hierarchical society dependent on artificial scarcity.
In 1991, the elite think-tank behind the United Nations’ environmental policy, the Club of Rome, published a report entitled ‘The First Global Revolution’, which contains this astonishing passage.
“The need for enemies seems to be a common historical factor. Some states have striven to overcome domestic failure and internal contradictions by blaming external enemies. The ploy of finding a scapegoat is as old as mankind itself – when things become too difficult at home, divert attention to adventure abroad. Bring the divided nation together to face an outside enemy, either a real one, or else one invented for the purpose.
In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” (p 115)
Thus the global elite explicitly declared war on humanity and created a travesty of environmentalism as its weapon. Through selective governmental funding and led by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the globalists began promoting heavily manipulated science to spread fear of an impending catastrophe triggered by the extraction of energy from hydrocarbons, whether by burning wood, coal, oil or methane gas. Through international treaties, taxes and cap-and-trade carbon exchanges, they seek to inhibit and ultimately reverse the addition of life-giving CO2 to the atmosphere.
The aim, explicit in the UN’s Agenda 21 and 30 policy documents, is to shut off humanity’s access to hydrocarbons, the source of 98% of the world’s energy at current technological levels, and crucial to Third World development. Carbon, the element of life, is identified as a pollutant, specifically in its atmospheric form, which sustains all life on this planet through photosynthesis, binding carbon into living forms.
This whipped-up hysteria, spread by a politicised, bureaucratised travesty of science, is founded on a reversal of causation. The early ice-core surveys seemed to reveal some degree of correlation between temperature and carbon dioxide, attracting the interest of the pioneering oceanographer Dr Roger Revelle, who posed the question in 1957: might our industrial generation of atmospheric carbon dioxide become problematic over time? After more than three decades studying the question, Revelle concluded in an article co-authored with Fred Singer and Chauncey Starr that the hypothesis remained unproven, and advised that it should not form the basis for drastic action.
The article (“What to do about greenhouse warming: Look before you leap”, 1992) was published posthumously, Revelle having died in 1991. The dismissive response of one of the professor’s former students, a certain Albert Arnold Gore, was to claim that Revelle had gone senile before his death. And this nasty, personal tone still characterises the debate about anthropogenic climate change three decades later.
In any case the political die was already cast; the Club of Rome’s declaration of war on humanity had already been issued. The IPCC, instituted in 1988 on a brief to look only at human causes of climate change, ignored such calls for caution and promoted the idea of a climate emergency too urgent to allow time for further debate: the so-called precautionary principle. It adopted fraudulent studies such as Dr Michael Mann’s ‘hockey-stick’ reconstruction of climate history as doctrine, and published its Summaries for Policymakers before its scientists had finished their reports, cherry-picking and even altering its own scientists’ conclusions. One of the best accounts of the corrupt behaviour of the IPCC’s bureaucrats is provided by Christopher Booker in his 2009 book, The Real Global Warming Disaster.
As further ice-core surveys provided more data points, it became clear that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels follow, not precede, rises and falls in temperature. The record frequently shows a complete decoupling of any relationship between carbon dioxide levels and temperature. Indeed, the planet has experienced six ice-ages when CO2 was at high levels. The idea that atmospheric carbon dioxide drives climate is a knowing inversion of the facts; it is war propaganda.
And it leads to tortured contradiction: if carbon dioxide, the root of all life, is a pollutant, then life itself is pollution.
That seems to me a mockery; a Satanic inversion.
Read the rest at THE LETHAL TEXT
