In this blog post, we will examine whether carbon dioxide reduction is a sufficient countermeasure based on various theories surrounding the causes of global warming.
Summer is hot and winter is cold. However, the heat of summer and the cold of winter have been getting worse over the years. In the winter of 2010, Korea recorded the largest amount of snowfall since weather observations began in the east coast region, and many regions experienced record high temperatures every summer, suffering from the intensified climate. Not only Korea but the whole world is suffering from climate change. In particular, the winter of the northern hemisphere at the beginning of this year turned the North American continent into a freezer. It was colder in North America than in Antarctica, where the average temperature was around minus 25 degrees Celsius, and the mercury in Minnesota, the coldest state, was minus 37 degrees Celsius, which is even colder than the surface of Mars, which averages minus 30 degrees Celsius. This record-breaking cold wave, which looked like a scene from the movie “Tomorrow,” killed 22 people and caused extensive damage, including the paralysis of life and transportation across the United States, which is estimated to have caused more than $5 billion in economic losses.
The world is suffering from extreme climate change, not only from the heat and heavy snow, but also from the heavy rains that fell in two days in 2013 in Sichuan, China, with more than 920 mm of rain, nearly half of the annual precipitation in Korea, causing a flood and causing landslides and other damage.
The cold wave in the North American continent mentioned earlier is said to have been caused by the influence of the “polar vortex.” This “polar vortex” is a very strong cyclonic flow that appears in the polar stratosphere in winter, but it is usually blocked by the strong westerly jet stream and stays in northern Siberia, not moving south. However, it is explained that the jet stream weakened due to the effects of global warming, causing a cold low-pressure system called the “polar vortex” to descend to the central United States, causing the Korean Wave. And the heat waves and floods in various regions are also explained as phenomena caused by global warming.
These extreme climate changes are caused by various factors, such as the polar vortex and the formation of many rain clouds due to the warming of the water temperature, but at the root of these factors is “global warming.” This kind of climate change has become more severe in the last century, and the human race, feeling a sense of crisis, has been working hard to find the main cause of climate change, which is considered to be global warming. As a result, the causes of ozone layer destruction by freon gas and excessive global warming by greenhouse gases have been found. Experts have identified carbon dioxide as the main cause of global warming, which is increasing along with the industrialization of mankind and the development of green spaces, and is highly correlated with the increase in the average temperature of the Earth. Therefore, countries around the world are aware of the crisis of carbon dioxide emissions and in December 1997, the Kyoto Protocol, a climate change agreement, was signed in Kyoto, Japan, for the purpose of regulating and preventing global warming. The Kyoto Protocol was proposed to set targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions according to the economic and industrial levels of each country and to introduce systems such as carbon emissions trading to achieve a global reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.
I agree that global warming is causing major changes to the world’s climate. If the average annual temperature of the Earth continues to rise, the Arctic glaciers will melt at a rapid pace, and the amount of light reflected by the Earth, known as “albedo,” will decrease, causing the Earth to absorb solar heat. This will lead to a positive feedback loop in which greenhouse gases in the ground and water become less soluble and are released into the atmosphere, further warming the Earth. As a result, some regions may become deserts, and areas with low elevations may be submerged and disappear as sea levels rise due to melting glaciers. In addition, more powerful typhoons and floods may occur as the amount of water evaporating into the atmosphere increases, and some regions may experience extreme drought. There is no doubt that global warming is rapidly changing the Earth’s climate, as the climate changes that can occur due to global warming are clearly evident in the aforementioned examples of cold waves, floods, and heavy snowfall. Therefore, it is necessary to stop global warming, which is threatening many living organisms on Earth by changing the Earth’s climate, and I think it is reasonable to make efforts to reduce carbon dioxide, which is considered to be the main substance of global warming.
However, I disagree with the current leading theory that the increase in carbon dioxide concentration due to industrialization or green space development is entirely responsible for global warming. It is true that the concentration of carbon dioxide has been increasing since industrialization, and that trend is in line with the rise in global average temperatures. And in the early 19th century, Svante Arrhenius’s study “On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Atmosphere on the Temperature of the Earth’s Surface” quantitatively showed that carbon dioxide affects the rise in temperature, and there is also a lot of evidence that carbon dioxide warms the earth. It is also understandable that the whole world is frantically trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions because of such supporting data.
However, there is a big leap in concluding that carbon dioxide mainly causes the Earth to heat up because of research results showing that the more carbon dioxide there is, the more greenhouse effect it has, and because the concentration of carbon dioxide has increased since industrialization. Carbon dioxide is clearly a greenhouse gas that warms the earth, but the rise in carbon dioxide concentration and the rise in temperature are only correlated, not proven to be causally related. According to the book “The Age of Ice,” which analyzes climate change, 98% of the carbon dioxide on earth is dissolved in the ocean. And we know that the solubility of gases in water changes sensitively with temperature. Taken together, it is possible to consider the possibility that the correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature is due to other factors, rather than carbon dioxide, and that the solubility of carbon dioxide in the ocean has decreased, resulting in a higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
So how can this rise in temperature be explained? In recent years, new theories of global warming have been emerging one after another to explain the question, refuting the theory of carbon dioxide. The most prominent examples are the Milankovitch theory, the Dansgaard-Oeschger theory, and the Heinrich theory. First of all, the Milankovitch theory is a theory that sees changes in temperature caused by astronomical factors outside the Earth, such as the tilt of the Earth’s axis of rotation and the eccentricity of the orbit, which indicates the degree to which the orbit is distorted. The theory is that the more the tilt of the Earth’s axis of rotation increases, and the more the elliptical orbit of the Earth’s orbit becomes elongated, the more extreme the seasonal climate can become. Using this theory, the reason why the summer heat waves and winter cold waves that are currently occurring are becoming more extreme can be explained to some extent, even if the effect of global warming caused by carbon dioxide, which has increased due to industrialization, is excluded. However, the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit changes in 100,000-year cycles, and the tilt of the Earth’s axis changes in about 40,000-year cycles, so it cannot adequately explain the rapid changes in temperature over a short period of time.
Therefore, if we refer to the “Danesko-Oeschger theory” and the “Heinrich theory,” which state that the Earth’s temperature can change rapidly even within a relatively short period of time, say tens or hundreds of years, we can explain the short-term temperature rise that the “Milankovitch theory” did not consider. The Dansgård-Oeschger theory explains that there was a rapid rise in temperature during a very short period of time before several ice ages in the past. This theory estimates the temperature change at the time by using the degree of change in the oxygen isotope ratio, which is related to the change in temperature in the glacial core deep in the glacier. Judging from the fact that the oxygen isotope ratios of ice cores from various parts of the world changed significantly around the same time in the tens and hundreds of years before the Ice Age, it is possible to think that even if the change in carbon dioxide concentration is not due to industrialization, the Earth could have experienced severe temperature changes. The Heinrich theory, which estimates the temperature rise by finding traces of movement caused by melting glaciers during the brief period before the Ice Age, also reinforces the validity of the Dansgård-Oeschger theory.
Of course, these theories have limitations in that they do not explain well the cause of temperature change, but these theories show that there have been many past cases of global warming without factors such as the increase in carbon dioxide due to industrialization, so the increase in carbon dioxide due to industrialization cannot be said to be the main cause of global warming. And crucially, according to the theory of the greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide, the Earth’s temperature should rise due to the enormous increase in carbon dioxide, but there is a fatal counterexample in which the global average temperature actually fell during the period from 1940 to 1975, when industrialization was most advanced. In this respect, it can be said that the correlation between carbon dioxide and global average temperature and the validity of the greenhouse effect theory are insufficient to say that carbon dioxide is the main culprit of global warming. And even if we do not necessarily go with the carbon dioxide theory, there are many possibilities that could make the Earth warmer. Therefore, there is a concern that attention is being focused on the increase in carbon dioxide, which is not yet known to be the cause, and that the cause that may have a greater impact on global warming may be overlooked. Therefore, I think it is not right to define the increase in carbon dioxide as the main culprit of global warming at this time when the exact cause has not been identified.
There is no doubt that global warming is a major problem that can affect human life on a small scale and the global ecosystem on a large scale. Humankind has come up with various theories about global warming as a solution to this problem, but all of them remain theoretical, and there is still a lack of conclusive analysis of them. However, the whole world is blindly believing in the theory of global warming caused by carbon dioxide, which has not yet been clearly proven, and is responding as if reducing carbon dioxide emissions would be half the battle in stopping global warming. Global warming may be caused by external factors, and even if it is caused by internal factors, it may be something that humans cannot prevent. As we have not yet identified the exact cause of global warming, we should avoid making hasty judgments and instead discuss what measures, other than reducing carbon dioxide, should be taken to prevent the unstoppable advance of global warming.
