Global Warming In A Nutshell
Wednesday, July 4, 2007 at 04:30PM What follows is a nine-page critique of the so-called "global warming" scare that has taken the world by storm. It took a lot of time and effort to pull this together. I hope readers will agree it is sufficiently comprehensive to put this whole topic in a reasonable perspective.
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PreambleThe debate over so-called “global warming” is frustrating.
I am far from an expert, although I do read a fair amount of the science on this topic, and have kept a sizeable file on the pros and cons over the years. My main concerns are the following. I think a good deal of the science is not up to a high standard, not because no earnest efforts are made, but because the subject matter (the entire earth and surrounding atmosphere) is far too vast, the number of fluctuating variables and the time spans too great, and the whole business is so shot through with political sensitivities (primarily of the anti-human, anti-population, anti-industry sort) that serious hypotheses can neither be framed nor tested in a controlled way.
On the political note, it is hard to escape the feeling that a great many global warming proponents are reflex leftists in their political beliefs and anywhere from mildly, to wildly anti-capitalist or even entirely opposed to all facets of western civilization. Spiritually speaking, they usually fall in the camp of neo-romantic nature lovers who, like most of us, despair of seeing their sweet planet earth fouled with human garbage, toxins, effluent, poisons, and the like. So they fight back by clinging to the dream of restoring the Garden of Eden, a beauteous earth as it must have been before humans arrived. There is no harm in this if a cleaner earth can be gotten without harming civilization. The most radical of them, however, are intemperate and to be avoided, for they are green through and through and consider human beings and their materialistic activities to be a kind of biological scourge or plague upon nature that must be eliminated. You can see some startling examples of Radical Green Ideas from their own mouths at the end of this piece.
For less rabid sorts, however, the religion of nature is rooted in the ancient vision of the innocent and half-naked noble savage, free of all need and care, eating fresh fruit and sleeping under an oak tree just after sipping his fill from a fresh babbling brook (or today, perhaps, from a bottle of Pinot Noir around the campfire). In short, at the back of this environmental consciousness (where dire warnings about global warming, excess human population, and filthy industrial activity are linked) a pristine purity beckons. I have felt its pull myself. Who hasn’t? But it is precisely the presence – and prevalence - of certain of these unbalanced and pseudo-mystical motivations that turn up in the “science” of climate change that suggests we ought to question all statements made about global warming (and many other environmentalist claims, too).
In what follows there is an underlying question present. Namely, given that all weather systems are chaotic by definition, and that humans have failed miserably at modeling and predicting the outcomes of even very limited chaotic systems such as river currents, wave action, or even fluctuating water pressure flowing through an ordinary pipe, or clouds forming overhead in the next few minutes … How is any prediction about such a vast and complicated subject possible?
Is the Earth Warming or Cooling?
The consensus now seems to be that some cooling as well as warming has occurred in the last century, and on balance, slightly more of the latter than the former. But I don’t think anyone knows for sure, because on a daily basis the “temperature” of Earth (here, you must specify land surface, ocean, mountain, or atmospheric temperatures) never stays the same. On the sunny side of the globe the sun’s heat at some hundreds of degrees Celsius is intense and is fortunately for us prevented by our thin atmosphere from boiling our blood. On the night side the same atmosphere (thanks to its greenhouse effect) traps the heat raised in the day and, combined with the warmed up soil, water, rock and foliage, prevents cooling that otherwise at minus hundreds of degrees C would freeze us solid by morning. So the entire planet is rolling from exposure to extreme heat to cold every 24 hours. The result is that it is either warming or cooling in millions of different places all the time, night and day. And so, despite what we hear from political agencies such as the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (IPCC) that there is definitely “global warming,” not all climatologists agree. Some of those who disagree most energetically, such as Dr. Richard Lindzen, and those who participated in the BBC’s “Great Global Warming Swindle” show of March, 2007 were themselves contributors to the latest IPCC report. They say the science in that report is unreliable at best “because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally.” As a result, they conclude, “current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward)” (National Post, Dec. 22, 2006).
So What Is the Future of the Planet?
On this entire question it is wisest to take the long view. Throughout its geological history of some 4.5 billion years the earth has gone through at least 25 very long ice-age cycles, each involving about 90% cold weather, and about 10% warm weather. The six major periods of refrigeration have each lasted about 50 million years. Over the past 850,000 years ice ages have dominated the earth’s climate, interrupted by a few warm periods that have rarely exceeded 12,000 years. It is now about 11,000 years since the last ice age ended abruptly, and in a mere 50 to 100 years produced a climate much like what we have today. Talk about climate change! With so much fear-mongering (which may be a species protective instinct) it is easy to forget that in the early 1970s, in reaction to a short period of cooling from about 1940 to 1970 there developed a widespread “global cooling” hysteria, and a new ice age was widely predicted. Here are some quotes from that time:
* “the cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people in poor nations… if it continues it will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000 (U.S. Senator Claiborne Pell, cited in Lowell Ponte, The Cooling, 1976).
* “…the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” (Nigel Calder, International Wildlife, 1975). * “Once the freeze starts, it will be too late,” (Douglas Colligan, “Brace yourself for another ice age,” in Science Digest, Feb 1973).
* “According to the National Academy of Sciences report on climate, we may be approaching the end of a major interglacial cycle, with the approach of a full-blown 10,000-year ice age a real possibility” in Science, March 1, 1975).
* “I believe that increased rapid air pollution, through its effect on the reflectivity of the earth [sending heat back into space instead of absorbing it] is currently dominant and is responsible for the temperature decline of the past decade or two” (Reid Bryson, “Environmental Roulette,” in Global Ecology, 1971).
What Are Greenhouse Gasses?
The label “greenhouse gasses” was first used in the 70s to create the impression that man was fouling the atmosphere with industrial gasses that were “trapping” heat on earth that would ordinarily escape into the upper atmosphere and dissipate into space. But the fact is that most of the heat-trapping on earth (without which we would not have a habitable climate at all) is done by natural water vapour found in the air, especially in clouds, and also by carbon dioxide. Without this natural atmospheric “greenhouse” (relatively speaking, about the thickness of one layer of paint on a basketball) we would sizzle to a cinder by day and freeze solid by night. Oxygen and Nitrogen, the two other major atmospheric gasses, do not trap heat. And although Carbon Dioxide now has a bad name (I think a lot of people confuse it with Carbon Monoxide, a deadly gas) it is actually a richly life-enhancing substance (see below) without which there would be no organic life possible on earth. Indeed, all biological and plant life on earth is “carbon-based.” On this score, the current consensus is that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has indeed been increasing over the past century, and that the earth’s temperature has also risen about a half a degree Celsius in the past century (after accounting for ups and downs). However, a major point of conflict in the search for the cause of this rise has to do with confusion over cause and effect. Some, such as Al Gore infamously link the rise in temperature to the prior rise in CO2 that he claims is due to increased industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels (said to be man-made, or “anthropogenic” causes). But others argue that it is just the reverse. Natural temperature increases are due to normal causes such as solar radiation cycles, ocean current changes, and so on, and are followed by a natural rise in CO2 levels, and not the other way around. The simple evidence for this is the fact that there have been many far warmer periods in the history of earth when there was rising temperature followed by rising CO2 but no industrialization whatever.
How Is Climate-change Measured?
There are many methods. But first, ask yourself: if you were given unlimited funding and reliable instruments, how would you measure the climate of “the globe”? Where should your measurements be taken, and at what time of day? Weather systems and temperatures are always local, so how would you average or blend all the readings to get a reliable number? After all, the oceans of the earth are huge heat and cold reservoirs, and are millions of square miles in extent, as are the vast deserts and ice-fields of earth. Antarctica alone is 12.5 million square miles in extent. So where do you place your thermometers? On which mountain? In which valleys? Where on, or in, the oceans? Clearly the vastest areas will be the least studied for the obvious practical reasons of inaccessibility. As it happened, earnest climatologists placed lots of thermometers at airports and outside urban areas many decades ago and have been peeking at them ever since. By now about 70 million readings have been accumulated. Unfortunately for their “science,” however, most of these instruments have been overtaken by urban sprawl and now sit in so-called “heat islands” caused by encroaching buildings, roads, plazas, and parking lots. So temperatures from these, the most numerous such stations on earth, have had to be “adjusted” to compensate for urbanization. Satellite measurements are apparently quite accurate, but they have shown either no change at all in the past 50 years since they came into use, or in many cases the degradation of these delicate instruments from cosmic radiation (or the decay of the orbits of the satellites themselves) has again called for “adjustment” to readings. An even more damaging if very human problem with readings from surface temperature stations is that data is often taken only monthly, the time of day of such readings is often not known, and data from stations where readings are interrupted, or where the time of the reading is not known (someone got sick? Ran out of snowmobile gas? Too many blackflies to go into the bush today?) … are often thrown out of the mix, thus biasing the data. One study of an entire century of readings reported that after adjustments for such omissions and gaps only 18.4% of the earth’s surface was covered by what was published as a “global” sampling (Michaels, et al, 1998).
More damaging to current global warming theory, which predicts the warming of earth’s surface and therefore also a warming of the upper atmosphere, is that satellite readings by NASA (accurate to 3 one-hundredths of a degree Celsius!) show that atmospheric temperatures are cooling over the past twenty years, not warming. So why, contrary to theory, are surface temperatures rising a little, but atmospheric temperatures falling? No one knows. When other methods of tracking temperature changes are tallied such as from glacier ice-coring, tree-ring growth, coral layers, and so on (though all have been disputed in terms of accuracy) the weak consensus is that there was a twentieth-century warming from 1900 to about 1940 (of almost half a degree Celsius - long before most human greenhouse gasses were created), then there was a cooling from 1940 to about 1970, and then a warming trend again to the present (perhaps). The upshot is that even if we can agree that “on average” there has been a half a degree of warming in the past century, most of it occurred prior to the recent rise in CO2 levels. But seriously, of what significance is this, for the long history of the earth has shown a great number of “non-greenhouse” warmings and alternative coolings. For example, ice-coring and CO2 measurements from same show that some 135,000 years ago there was a cooling of about 8 degrees Celsius spread over a 20,000 year period, while CO2 levels which were at four times today’s levels did not lower at all (Rind, D., Nature, 363, 1992). More embarrassing for current greenhouse theory is that during the Ordovician Age 440 million years ago CO2 levels were ten times higher than they are today, and according to such as Al Gore this should have produced a lot of warming. However, that period was an ice age and vast ice sheets covered much of the earth (up to 30% of earth’s surface, compared to today’s 10%).
Are Climate Models Accurate?
Climate predictions are developed via a powerful computer program called a General Circulation Model (GCM). To put things in perspective it is useful to recall that most probability models can handle two variables (such as cloud change and wind change) accurately. But when a third is introduced (such as water vapour change), the math gets very tricky and the predictions sloppier. Add a fourth, such as solar radiation, absorption, and reflectivity from an ever-changing cloud cover, and within those clouds the changing volumes of vapour and particulate matter, and, and … Well, when we learn that today’s climate models are tracking about 5 million variables the heart sinks at the astonishing probabilities for large-scale error. This is not surprising as most weather predictions today, even with the advantages of satellite views and infra-red and radar imaging, often get the weather wrong for the coming weekend! Throw a few volcanic eruptions such as Mt. Pinatubo (erupted in 1991) or Mt. St. Helen’s (May, 1980) into the mix that can spew more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in 24 hours than have been put there in 100 years of industrialization, and you get a good sense of the predictive unreliability at hand. Mt. Erebus, which is on Ross island in Antarctica was estimated to have spewed over 1,000 tonnes of chlorine per day between 1976 and 1983, which is almost 2/3 of the entire world’s daily production of Chlorofluorocarbons (the major villain in erosion of the ozone layer). That estimate has been revised much lower since, and Erebus is much quieter now, at around 36 tons per day by 1991. But such variations give a sense of what Mother nature can do. Further to this, all climate models rely on climate “parameters” programmed into the computer model and accurate assessment of so-called “feedback” mechanisms (what does the model say will happen if we double CO2?). Not much is known about real-world feedback, so whatever is used in such models comes from estimating. This produces a field day for computer geeks and catastrophists because you can model anything you want to see and then go around saying this is what will happen because the model says so. In their attempts to face this problem (in which the computer model is a kind of psychogram of the scientist’s imagination) serious climatologists who just want to guesstimate something close to the possible future outcomes, include adjustments for things like “heat flux.” But such “artificial flux tuning” can themselves introduce large biases in data, as can and do biases in calculation of water vapour levels, cloud cover, storm activity, ocean to surface interactions, and feedback from snow and ice cover. So a simple summary of this situation would be to say that there are a lot of fanciful computer models out there chasing elusive and fluctuating data.
What Is The Effect of Solar and Cosmic Radiation?
Scientists looking for the principal cause of rises in temperature that cannot be due to human activity (such as occurred between 1910 and 1940) point to the increased brightness of the sun. Obviously, all of earth’s energy systems are solar-driven, and so variations in solar radiation have a profound effect on our climate. The surface magnetism of the sun is measurable and shows a clear 11-year cycle during which brightness rises and dims according the rise and fall of solar-surface magnetism (from NASA satellite data). Records of the rise and fall of earth’s surface temperatures over the past 240 years track these changes in solar radiation very closely (though no one knows whether the influence of solar radiation is short (decades) or long term (centuries). Also, for unknown reasons, every two centuries or so (confirmed by radiocarbon tests and other means) the sun’s magnetism level and brightness drops significantly for a few decades (this is called a “Maunder Minimum”) as it did from 1640 to about 1720, during which period earth’s temperature went down 1 degree C. The “little ice age” that occurred then ended about 1860. Renowned climatologist Professor Tim Patterson of Carlton University in Ottawa warns that the next weak solar cycle will be hitting us about 2020, and we ought to be concerned because “no one is farming north of us.” (his quotes are from the Calgary Sun (!), May 18, 2007). He also states that things warmed up considerably after the Little Ice Age until about 1940 “with no help from carbon dioxide.” After that, cooling took place until about 1970 even though CO2 “was going up like crazy.” Patterson says “there is no correlation between warming and CO2,” and suspects that any warming not explained by solar radiation is due to patterns of cosmic radiation which constantly bombards earth. Cosmic particles tend to create more cloud cover and so more cooling. But when the sun is in a bright cycle as at present, solar radiation blows away the cosmic particles and we get warming (for now). One theory now given a good deal of credence is that earth's climate results from the combined effect of: the changing shape of the earth's orbit around the sun from circular to elliptical over a 100,000 year period (resulting in a varition of distance from or proximity to the sun of some 20,000 kilometres); the wobble of the earth's axis itself (the pole wanders in a circle over a 26,000 year period); and the difference in the earth's equatorial and orbital planes which varies a few degrees during every 40,000 years; and ... that these things combined correlate highly with the earth's ice ages. On a final note, an observation that seems to support the solar and cosmic radiation emphasis is that Mars, the only other planet to show its climate secrets, has been experiencing a warming along with us, and its polar ice sheets have been visibly diminishing. Dr. Abdussamatov a senior member of the Russian Academy of Sciences says "Mars has global warming but without a greenhouse and without the participation of Martians” (National Post, Jan 6, 2007). The warming here and there, he insists, “can only be a straight-line consequence of …a long-time change in solar irradiance,” which explains the increased volume of CO2 emissions (due to a warming of the oceans and thus a release of stored CO2). He explains that the common view that man’s industrial activity is the deciding factor in global warming “has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations,” and notes that heated man-made greenhouse gasses, which become lighter due to expansion, rise in the atmosphere and give their absorbed heat away. But the real news, he warns, is that the heating of earth’s oceans due to solar irradiation, which has now begun to fall, has reached its peak and is now also falling. This solar cycle will reach its weakest irradiance around 2040, after which there will be an inevitable deep freeze on earth lasting for about 50 years. Then, temperatures will rise again.
What Will Happen If Ice at the Poles Melts?
Most of the ice on earth is at the two poles. At the North Pole almost all the ice is floating in water. And from Archimedes’ Principle we know that anything floating in water displaces its own weight in water. So an ice-cube dropped into a glass of water will cause a little rise in the level of water in the glass because the cube has pushed the water up by displacement. But as the ice-cube melts, the higher level will remain exactly the same. It will not go up or down, because whether you add two ounces of liquid water to a glass, or two ounces of frozen water, the amount is the same. If all the ice at the North Pole that is floating in water – most of it - melts tomorrow, the sea-levels of the earth will not be changed in any way. Not one inch. Not a millionth of an inch. That can only happen if ice that is resting on land up there melts and flows as new water into the oceans. So much for the North Pole. The average annual temperature in the high Arctic is – 34 degrees C. On top of this, a 40-year record of Arctic temperature by Americans and Russians from 1950 to 1990 showed a cooling trend of 1.5 degrees C (Kahl, D., Nature, 361, 1993). In short, it is a little hard to fathom why a global rise of one degree down here in the next century would change much up there.
As for the South Pole, the massive amounts of ice there – most of the world’s store of ice – is indeed resting on land. But the average altitude of Antarctica is about 7,000 feet, in places exceeding 15,000 feet, and the average annual temperature is somewhere around - 50C. The ice has been sitting there for several hundred million years, is so large it forms its own microclimate, gets sunlight only at a narrow angle for only six months a year, and like other major ice sheets is remarkably resistant to melting. There is no known mechanism that could melt such a mass of ice. A warming of earth, even if it occurs at levels of a few degrees Celsius will not change much on a continent that is averaging -50C. As for the alarmist photos of “shelf” ice melting at Antarctica? It is already floating in water and so, as at the North Pole, the same amount of displacement occurs whether it sits in the water as ice today, or as melted ice (water) tomorrow. To top it off, studies have shown that Antarctica has actually been cooling recently. For the two decades prior to 2000, satellites recorded a cooling of 0.42 degrees C and land units recorded 0.008 degrees C (Comiso, 2000, and Watkins and Simmonds, 2000).
What Is the Connection Between Carbon Dioxide and Temperature Change?
It is disputed. In Al Gore’s very slick film An Inconvenient Truth the central case presented was that the clear rise in atmospheric CO2 is the cause of a parallel rise in the earth’s surface temperature (but this is not so in the upper atmosphere, as mentioned above – on which fact Gore is slickly silent). However – it bears repeating - many climatologists of high repute insist the relationship is the reverse. To complicate matters, there has been a general warming trend for the past 300 years since the little-ice age, and CO2 levels have tended to track this. What greatly frustrates the prophets of doom in our midst, however, is the truth of the so-called “Medieval Warming Period” – a centuries long period over 1,000 years ago when the earth was much warmer than today – about 2 degrees C - in the complete absence of any man-made greenhouse gasses except from gaseous cows, horses, and humans. That was when the Vikings settled Greenland, then withdrew when another cooling arrived. Even more embarrassing is the fact that scientists such as John Matthews from Canada’s geologic survey reported finding fossils of pine trees and even tropical vegetation and biological organisms in the high arctic, around Ellesmere island some 400 miles from the North Pole. And Ohio University’s Peter Webb the same year dug up 3 million year old roots and leaves of beech trees from a mountain 400 miles from the South Pole (Toronto Star, June 16, 1991). And … fossils of dinosaurs found in the high Arctic are plentiful and on display in many museums. The arctic sea temperature 55 million years ago was around 18 degrees Celsius and later during what is called the “super-greenhouse” period, sea temperatures there rose to 23 degrees C. For a reality warp, try to imagine Eskimos in bikinis! (National Post, June 1, 2006).
How Much CO2 Are We Talking About?
Amounts of CO2 (which amounts to about 0.07% of the entire atmosphere) are tallied in gigatons of Carbon (Gt C). A gigaton is a billion metric tons, or a trillion kilograms. The recent annual increase in global carbon attributed to man-made activities has been estimated at roughly 6.52 Gt C. But to understand what this means we have to ask how much natural Carbon there is to begin with, and where it is, and how fast it moves from place to place? Estimates are that the earth’s atmosphere contains around 750 Gt C; the surface of oceans contains about 1,000 Gt C; the intermediate and deep oceans about 38,000 Gt C; and the earth’s natural vegetation cover and other stuff lying around contains about 2,200 Gt C. And … Carbon moves naturally from one place to another: about 90 Gt C per year move between oceans and air; about 60 Gt C between vegetation and air; about 50 Gt C between marine life and ocean surfaces; and between surface and deep ocean levels about 100 Gt C. So great is the magnitude of these reservoirs of Carbon, and the rate of production and absorption between them that no accurate number can be placed on the amount of man-made Carbon present on earth. Nor can a source of the recent rise in atmospheric Carbon be determined. Reliable research tells us that in historical terms, concentrations of CO2 have varied widely over geological time, with peaks as much as twenty times higher than at present, and troughs at eighteenth-century levels. And incidentally, each human being exhales about 100,000 litres of CO2 per year, which (times the earth's human population) comes to about a third of the amount expelled by the 500 million automobiles on earth, and to that we have to add the 150 Gigatons of CO2 from the breathing of the billions of animals on earth.
How Do Plants Respond to CO2 Enrichment?
Very favourably. Controlled Experiments with environments where plants such as orange trees and wheat are grown in, um, greenhouses, and force-fed Carbon at very high levels of enrichment, produce astonishing results – as much as tripling the rate of growth. In one experiment, sour orange trees had a growth rate 170% faster than normal and orange production was 127% greater. All plants seem to respond energetically to Carbon fertilization, especially trees, because carbon is a nutrient, or food for all organic life on earth, and not a pollutant or some evil gas as we tend to believe due to its recent bad press. Indeed, some reading around on this topic produces the feeling that the earth is presently carbon poor compared to its past, and that more of it would help feed millions of chronically hungry human beings.
Some Quotes on Climate Science From the Top
* Professor Willie Soon, Astrophysicist, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, and co-author of a major Harvard study of 240 climate studies showing warming and cooling variability long before the industrial age, says that policy makers should use “strong caution in finding a human fingerprint” in climate change (National Post, April 8, 2007).
* Professor Emeritus Antonino Zichichi, Advanced Physics, University of Bologna, and President of the World Federation of Scientists, complained of climate models in general, and of the IPCC report in particular, stating that models as were used in the IPCC report “are incoherent and invalid from a scientific point of view.”
* Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: "It's a political activist movement," and anyone who disagrees with the anti-capitalist global-warming theory is considered "like a holocaust denier."
* Professor Reid Bryson, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Global Warming: Man made global warming "is a theory for which there is no credible proof." And on Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth: "Don't make me throw up. It's not science. It's not true."
Some Radical Green Ideas
Just listen to some of these anti-humanist sentiments I found in my files, from when all this was getting revved up around 1993. Here is David Bower, anti-population spokesman for Friends of the Earth: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parent holds a government licence.” And here is Carol Amery from the German Green Party who says that she and her colleagues “aspire to a cultural model in which the killing of a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of six-year old children to Asian brothels.” Huh? I mean, that is a strange mind indeed: she does not imagine herself as one of those children. And hear also Stephanie Mills, a co-author of the book Whatever Happened to Ecology? who insists that “humanity is debased protoplasm.” Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd operation told the press that “humanity is the AIDS of the earth.” And finally, and perhaps the most rabidly anti-human of them all, was this bit from David Graber, a research biologist with the American National Parks Service:
“Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the earth. Until such time as homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” David seems to imagine himself surviving the virus he is wishing on the rest of us.
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Sources: In addition to various articles and news sources in my files collected over the years, much of the data and insight in this piece was taken from publications such as The Fraser Institute’s Global Warming, A Guide to the Science (2001), as well as from the excellent scientific papers collected by the Institute in Global Warming: the Science and the Politics (1997), and also from various sources published by the Marshall Institute, USA, over the years.
Reader Comments (5)
Two points:
Antarctica began to accumulate ice about 35 to 40 million years ago: Probably as much the result of plate drift as an indicator of a previously much warmer world.
The cooling of the Sun may be experienced sooner that you suggest.
Two recent papers by Archibald, David C., available at www.lavoisier.com.au deal with solar cycles 24 and 25 - with interesting conclusions.
As a geologist with a life-long interest in climate and paleoclimate I must give you high marks for your 'paper'.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas - but its ability to 'trap' out-going IR radiation is limited to one important band (13.5 to 15.5 microns). 8.4% of Earth's black body radiation can be 'stopped' by CO2. At the present concentration of ~385ppmv this occurs in less than 300 metres from the radiating surface. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere will not increase the amount of heat 'trapped'. It will just reduce the average travel distance before attenuation. That makes the air near the ground slightly warmer - particularly at night.
The Earth's atmosphere evolved from an anoxic mixture of ~20% CO2 with nitrogen and a selection of minor gasses to today’s ~21% oxygen plus nitrogen mixture.
We have no geological evidence that the temperature on Earth ever reflected 'high CO2' warming.
One must consider that the Solar System orbits the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy once every 226 million years. In addition to inter-solar system factors, the Earth’s climate reflects conditions encountered by the Sun and its fleet of planets - including some sort of ‘anomaly’ that gives us an 'Ice Age' - it appears - once each orbit. We are just now (geologically speaking) exiting (?) those conditions and should expect a general warming - if we have in fact passed beyond and are not just enjoying an Inter-glacial period and about to re-enter another Glacial Stage.
It is amusing to observe how the proponents of AGW present their case following the Five Rules of Propaganda as set out by Norman Davies in - Europe: A History. This I take to be a measure of their confidence in their data and the lack of honesty they bring to the subject.
One item though - the reference to Mt.Erebus and chlorine emission, from what I gather the amount of HCl injected into the stratosphere by this and other volcanoes is pretty well nill:
http://stason.org/TULARC/science-engineering/ozone-depletion-stratospheric-chlorine/23-Volcanoes-put-more-chlorine-into-the-stratosphere-than-CF.html