Climatology is far from an exact science, and there is a great deal of research that does not support the one-sided conclusions of the IPCC, the political body created by Thatcher and Reagan. Since 1950, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has been studying the major thermal oscillations in the Pacific Ocean. The “el niño” phenomenon occurs every 5 to 7 years and moves huge ocean masses from east to west, triggering torrential rains here, droughts elsewhere and giant fires in Australia and Indonesia. Its influence is global. The temperature peak (+2 degrees Celsius) lasts from nine to twelve months and is followed by a reverse episode of cold anomaly. Over the past 50 years, the WMO has observed no increase in the frequency or amplitude of the phenomenon. With such erratic behaviour, it is impossible to blame carbon dioxide, which is released continuously rather than in bursts every two to seven years.
The author shows us that the planet’s climate system is above all an oceanic machine. The mechanisms involved – in these oscillations – lie at the bottom of the oceans, in the powerful underwater currents that link the Pacific and the Atlantic, via the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that plunges into the abyss here and rises up along the coasts. Euler’s fluid mechanics teaches us that a fluid flows because of a pressure difference between the back and the front. As far as the Gulf Stream is concerned (over a hundred kilometres wide and over a kilometre high), it flows because of a difference in thermal tension between the poles and the equator, because as long as the sun shines and as long as the Earth’s axis remains tilted, the pole will remain a cold spot and the equator a hot spot.
The ocean’s thermal inertia explains the difference between continental and oceanic climates. Even in the polar regions, everything stems from this property of storage and resistance to temperature variations. The North Pole is less cold than the Antarctic, which sits on a rocky base. Everywhere on the planet, it is the ocean that dictates to the atmosphere and not the other way round. All the laws of climate identified by Euler, Fourier, Planck, Angstrom and Coriolis apply to us and cannot be reduced to the greenhouse effect alone. Planck’s law tells us that if the earth’s temperature were to rise by 1 degree, the amount of radiation sent back into the cosmos would instantly increase by 4%, causing the earth to cool.
Life on Earth is entirely dependent on solar radiation. Without it, the planet would cool down very quickly. The Earth receives and re-emits millions of billions of watts of solar radiation into the cosmos, without which the Earth would have boiled over a long time ago, wiping out all life. It’s worth remembering this when so many people believe that it’s carbon dioxide that’s warming us up. First-year physics students learn to calculate the balance of incoming and outgoing radiation. The ratio of temperatures leads to a remarkable result that is equal to a simple ratio of lengths: radius of the sun to distance between the Earth and the sun. This equation says that our planet could see its temperature rise (or fall) to worrying proportions as a result of three changes: the diameter of the Sun, its surface temperature and its distance from the Earth.
Taken as a whole, this explains the remarkable stability of the planet’s climate over thousands of centuries and argues against any dramatic acceleration. The climate is not driven by carbon dioxide; it is fundamentally regulated by the sun.
In his book, the author tries to play it down. We are undoubtedly going through a phase of slow warming, but Planck’s response is a powerful brake on runaway warming, as the atmosphere-ocean system is able to moderate any lurching. For millions of years, the planet has been expelling its excess heat into space by radiation and internally by Fourier conduction and atmospheric convection – including Halley’s equatorial cell – three moderating effects that combine forces to ensure climate stability. As for the ideal culprit, C0². The sharp rise in temperatures at the time of the Vikings is in no way attributable to CO², as it enabled them to colonise Greenland and grow vines there before the cold returned. The decisive argument is provided by Al Gore himself. The inconvenient truth revealed to the public the ice cores taken from the depths of Antarctica. This fossil air is a precious archive, tracing the spectacular parallel between carbon dioxide levels and palaeo-temperatures over a period of 650,000 years.
So have we returned to the great fears of the year 1000? It’s time to abandon facile emotion in favour of reason and describe the climate machine in all its complexity, governed by the placid inertia of deep ocean currents.
Daniel HUSSON holds a doctorate in particle physics and is a lecturer in thermodynamics and Einstein’s relativity at the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg. He is the author or co-author of more than seventy international scientific publications, and has also published the book Quarks, the story of a discovery.
Review wrritten by Michel Gabet