Causes of problems are not always obvious. An aim in my book Animal Farm 2 is to explain how climate change can have several possible causes requiring caution in adopting a net zero strategy.

Two well-known environmental problems have had difficulties finding causes. In 1958, Rachel Carlson received a letter from a friend in Massachusetts bemoaning the large bird kills that had occurred on Cape Cod as the result of spraying with DDT to kill mosquitoes. Her book ‘Silent Spring’ advocated conservation of ecology and campaigned to ban the use of DDT in the USA, a chloro-carbon shown to magnify in the avian food chain, weakening egg-shells of predator birds. DDT consequently ceased to be used for anti-malaria spraying world-wide. Many people died from malaria who might have lived had DDT spraying continued. Carlson’s data was challenged. DDT spraying is reported to have resumed now in some countries.

Cause of another problem is also uncertain. To mend the Ozone Hole over the Antarctic, scientists realised chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), long-lived chemicals, used in refrigerators and aerosol sprays since the 1930s. In the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an international treaty phased out the production of CFCs. The Ozone Hole experience could have opened the way for mankind to control climate change by limiting air pollution. Scientists have seen the first definitive proof of ozone recovery, observing a 20 percent decrease in ozone depletion during the winter months from 2005 to 2016. Perhaps people suffered fewer skin cancers. But the cause of the Ozone Hole remains uncertain. It forms and disappears on an annual basis, in springtime over Antarctica.

These examples illustrate the difficulty in establishing causes of complex problems having certainty.

The cause of climate change is also uncertain. The accepted view is that combustion producing carbon dioxide traps heat by a greenhouse effect, despite diurnal cooling. Otherwise warming could be by volcanic eruptions, bushfires, Earth orbit change, hydro and nuclear energy supply, or by accumulation in the atmosphere of low temperature spent energy. One way to prevent warming could be to reduce combustion of fossil fuels, which form CO₂ as a byproduct. Release of carbon dioxide by desorption in warming oceans, where most is stored, is overlooked.

The carbon dioxide entrapment theory promulgated by Al Gore is that carbon dioxide production is harmful and can be stopped by substituting renewable energy technologies for fossil fuel combustion. But solar energy entrapment is not determined by the a priori properties of the atmosphere containing more carbon dioxide and depends instead on the heat transfer properties at the Earth’s surface. Solar energy warms the atmosphere by convection and conduction of all gases in contact with the surface, not by carbon dioxide alone higher up. Entrapment by a CO₂ infrared absorption effect higher up wouldn’t be sufficient for a significant effect from the 0.045% by volume of carbon dioxide.

On Earth, as on the Moon, most ice melting can possibly be attributed to less ice in glaciers, due to reduced precipitation at the poles with, or to a non-atmospheric effect, orbit change, or sublimation. Possibilities abound.

Global warming can be explained as the increase in ambient temperature from anthropomorphic heat consumption. Our spent energy hangs around, by Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics, warming environments until radiated into the coldness of space. Hypothesising additional entrapment is overkill, a red herring, redolent of the overreach in the DDT and Ozone Hole theories. The evidence for the theories is unconvincing.

People can feel naked in a hailstorm of sensational reporting of climate events, unless they can blame a greenhouse effect and fossil fuels for climate change. They are comforted by a goal of net zero, meaning a strategy of balancing the amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) that’s emitted, to be less than is removed from the atmosphere, because the plan is for the situation to improve, or at least, not to worsen.

Humans probably have never before attempted to control anything as large as the World’s climate, 5.5 quadrillion tons of atmosphere, interacting with the million times larger mass of the Earth. By comparison, the manipulation and effects of A-bombs and Apollo 11 were minuscule. Remediation of the ozone hole could be wishful thinking and we should not realistically expect to be able to remediate climate change similarly because it is a larger problem. The atmosphere is huge, as you may have noticed flying in an aircraft at 10,000 meters, or when you witness air crushing a strong metal oil barrel, which has been evacuated by condensing steam and crumples like a handkerchief. Benignity of the atmosphere cannot be taken for granted. We need to approach climate control with an attitude of humility, not with the intellectual arrogance of student eco-warriors.

To achieve net zero, the roles of the aberrant gases to be reduced need to be identified to plan their demise and to prepare substitutes. Carbon dioxide has a vital role for plants and its concentration is already low. I am not an atmospheric physicist and am a chemical engineer who respects the physical properties and thermodynamics. The details of the greenhouse effect theory seem to me uncertain, shored up by wishful thinking and without ability to verify the net zero theory by results soon enough.

My novel Animal Farm 2 sequels George Orwell’s satire, updating super-power tyranny and including science theories and geopolitics of climate change.

Reviews and excerpts of my nine novels are on my blog martinknox.com