God, not Man, Makes Climate

“When he uttereth his voice, there is a multitude of waters in the heavens, and he causeth the vapours to ascend from the ends of the earth; he maketh lightnings with rain, and bringeth forth the wind out of his treasures.” Jeremiah 10:13 (KJV)

INTRODUCTION

Leftist politicians and MSM practitioners have made much noise about the danger of global warming caused by man-made CO2 (and to a lesser extent, the CH4 in cow farts), but have not supported their claims with facts or scientifically valid reasoning.  My purpose in this article is not to rebut their claims, but rather to make the point that the changes in climate which have occurred in the past and can occur in the future  are due to natural, non-anthropic causes.  Which is to say that these changes occur no matter what humans do or don’t do.

The short term time scale climate changes  called weather are certainly non-anthropic.   And even if the butterfly in Australia beats its wings and causes a tornado in Kansas (as a chaos theory of weather would have it), most butterflies beating their wings have no effect on the weather.  It takes generally much energy (in the physics sense of that word) to affect weather.

One event that had such energy  was the recent underwater eruption of the volcano Tonga (full name: Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai).   According to an article by Jeff Childer on Substack, the dire consequences of this eruption will meet the most pessimistic predictions of global warming advocates in the near future.

In this article I don’t intend to analyze Jeff Childer’s propositions in detail.   Rather, I’ll try to draw a big picture of what might be going on, guided by historical events and plausible scientific inferences.  I hope the reader will look at the references given below about the Tonga eruption and the more general ones about climate, what is and is not science, to get a complete story.

Let’s first briefly examine what occurred in the Tonga eruption

THE TONGA VOLCANO ERUPTION

In the center of the featured image is a satellite image of the volcanic eruption that occurred in January 2022.   You can get a qualitative idea of the scale from the curvature of the horizon.  Below is a time lapse image showing the eruption  as it first broke the ocean-air interface:

From NASA via Wikimedia Commons

Let’s continue with the pictorial representations of the Tonga eruption (as the Chinese saying goes, “one picture is worth…”):

NASA’s Pictorial Representation of Tonga Volcano Eruption,
Credit: Goddard Space Flight Center/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith

Besides the effects shown in the picture above—tsunamis, plasma currents in the thermosphere, ejection of huge amounts of water into the atmosphere—the eruption caused sea water temperatures to increase and roiling of the sea bed.  Melting of antarctic ice resulted from warmer sea water.  Since H2O is a greenhouse gas (see below), one might expect a warming effect from the eruption, unlike that from other major volcanic eruptions.  (See this article about the “Year without a Summer.“)

Let’s look at this natural catastrophe from a historical and scientific perspective.

A HISTORICAL AND SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE: CLIMATE, SOLAR ACTIVITY, GREENHOUSE GASES, VULCANISM

Long Term Climate and Solar Activity

In the past, before man-made CO2 could possibly contribute to global warming, there have been periods of warmth and cold.  In recent history there was the Medieval Warm Period (MWP, roughly 950 to  1300) followed by the Little Ice Age (LIA, roughly 1400 to 1700).   During the MWP Greenland was colonized by Vikings who had to leave when the cold came.   During the Little Ice Age, the climate became much colder;  for example, the river Thames froze almost every year in the winters between 1600 and 1800.¹  Soon and Baliunas have proposed that fluctuations in solar output, indicated by sunspot activity, correlate with such temperature variation and may be causal.  (Of course this interpretation has been criticized by global warming advocates.)

Greenhouse Gases

What is a greenhouse gas?  The term comes from warmth in greenhouses due to emission of CO2 by plant respiration.  How does this occur?  Here’s a brief explanation.   Polyatomic molecules (molecules with three or more atoms) can vibrate in a bending motion.  The discrete frequencies of these vibrations lie in the Infrared (IR) region of the spectrum, the region corresponding to heat radiation.   IR radiation at the vibrational frequency can be absorbed by a molecule, increasing its vibrational energy, and then re-emitted, the molecule reradiating the absorbed radiation and going back to lower vibrational energy.  Now, not only CO2 but also H2O is a greenhouse gas.   And there is much more H2O in the atmosphere than CO2.   Indeed, the effect of H2O is clearly shown on cloudy nights—the night temperature on a cloudy night is much higher than when the night is clear, other factors being the same.  Also note the direction in which radiation is re-emitted is essentially random since the molecules rotate.   Thus one could expect half of the thermal radiation absorbed by a greenhouse gas to be directed back to earth and half out to space.

Vulcanism

Catastrophes from erupting volcanos have been noted through history from Aetna to the most recent, Tonga.  In almost all cases there is a large amount of particulate matter emitted into the atmosphere, ashes, cinders, etc., that shield the earth from sunlight.  This results in cooling, as occurred in 1816, “The Year without a Summer,” after the tremendous eruption by Mt. Tambora.   There is usually a large amount of sulfur dioxide, SO2, emitted in volcanic eruptions.  However, SO2 does not act as a greenhouse gas.  Since after a cursory internet search, I have not found out why this is so, I’ll propose the following explanation:  SO2 combines with with H2O to form sulfurous acid, acid rain which would not stay in the atmosphere.  This reaction removes H2O from  the atmosphere…and thereby is a cooling agent.   Far-fetched?  Maybe.

FINAL THOUGHTS

So, how do these perspectives guide us in predicting the effects of  the Tonga eruption?  For me, in a quandary.   Where are the particulates that usually come from a volcanic eruption?  Have they been spread through the ocean and not spewed forth into the atmosphere?   The south Pacific has warmed, and that will cause more H2O to come into the atmosphere, so that there will be more warming than just from the water the eruption itself yielded.

If I use local weather here in northeast Pennsylvania as a gauge (and that’s not reliable), the summer has been unusually cool and wet.  I have to conclude that I don’t know what the effects—short or long term—will be. (Added 06/08/23: but see note 2.)  I do know that it is too complicated to make facile predictions.  That’s the same conclusion to which I came 26 years ago, converted from being a warmist after reading Prof. Richard Lindzen’s  masterful 70 page exposition on why anthropic global warming was silly. (Here is a Youtube address on this by Lindzen, who held an endowed chair of Meteorology at MIT.)   I have the sense and hope that in all the non-linear differential equations that govern the weather, with all their chaotic solutions and unknown boundary conditions, there is a feedback principle operating that mediates catastrophe.  God, the designer of all things, would have it so.

NOTES

¹An interesting note about search engine bias:  if you search in Google or Bing for “images, medieval warm period” you’ll find many images with the Medieval Warm Period flattened out with a sharp temperature increase in present times (in some cases that I know of, by use of massaged computer data).   However, if you search with Duck, Duck Go with the search term “IPCC image Medieval Warm Period” you’ll find a number based on the 1992 IPCC report. For example,

From Notrickszone.com

²After this article was written I ran across an image from NASA observation SAGE III (March 2022) that showed a ring  of aerosols and particulate matter in the stratosphere (presumably the edge of a shell).  The ring is the dark brown arc just below the blue.  This would indicate that there would be some cooling effect due to shielding of sunlight.

Credits: Image courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center; Photo number: ISS066-E-161686; PI: Jean-Paul Vernier, National Institute of Aerospace/NASA Langley Research Center

https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/

REFERENCES

The reader will find it difficult to find references on Global Warming skeptics using Google or Bing.  I advise DuckduckGo as the least likely to misdirect.  There are two authors whose work as skeptics I respect:  Matt Briggs, see his blog,  William Briggs, Statistician to the Stars, and search for “global warming;”  Anthony Watts, see his blog, Watts up with that.”

I’ve written several posts about  anthropic global warming.  Here’s one: “Lessons in Scientific Integrity: Climategate.”; here’s another:”Hello, My Name is Bob and I’m a Climate Change Denier.”

And here is a web page for articles on the Tonga eruption: