While carbon dioxide emissions are emphasized as the main cause of global warming, it is only one of several theories of climate change, and the point is that we should avoid jumping to conclusions when the exact cause of climate change is not known.
Summers are hot and winters are cold. But these days, the heat of summer and the cold of winter are getting worse year after year. Korea experienced the largest snowfall on record on the east coast in the winter of 2010, and many regions have been experiencing more extreme weather, with record high temperatures every summer. Not only Korea, but the entire world is suffering from climate change. In particular, the Northern Hemisphere winter earlier this year turned the North American continent into a freezer. It was colder in North America than Antarctica, which averages around minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit, and the coldest state, Minnesota, had a mercury reading of minus 37 degrees Fahrenheit, colder than the Martian surface, which averages minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. The record-breaking cold snap, which looked like a scene from the movie Tomorrowland, killed 22 people, paralyzed life and transportation across the U.S., with economic losses estimated at more than $5 billion.
The world is suffering from extreme weather events, not just heat waves and heavy snowfall, but also extreme climate change, such as in 2013, when more than 920 millimeters of rain – nearly half of Korea’s annual precipitation – fell in two days in China’s Sichuan province, causing massive flooding and resulting landslides.
The cold wave in North America is believed to have been caused by the effects of the ‘polar vortex’. The polar vortex is a very strong low-pressure flow that appears in the polar stratosphere in winter, which normally stays over northern Siberia and does not travel south because it is blocked by the strong westerly jet stream. However, global warming has weakened the jet stream, causing the Polar Vortex, a cold low pressure system, to descend as far as the central United States, causing a cold wave. Heat waves and flooding in many parts of the world are also explained by global warming.
While these extreme weather events are locally attributed to a variety of causes, such as the Polar Vortex and the formation of more rain clouds due to warmer water temperatures, they all have one thing in common: global warming. This climate change has become extreme in the last century, and humanity has been trying to find the cause of global warming, which is considered the main cause of climate change, in order to stop it. As a result, they have found causes such as ozone depletion by freon gas and excessive global greenhouse effect by greenhouse gas. Among the many causes of global warming, experts have identified carbon dioxide as the main cause, as its emissions continue to increase along with human industrialization and development of green areas, and it is highly correlated with the increase in the average temperature of the earth. Therefore, with a sense of crisis about carbon dioxide emissions, countries around the world initiated the Kyoto Protocol, a climate change agreement, in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997 to regulate and prevent global warming, and set targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions according to each country’s economic and industrial levels, and introduced systems such as carbon credit trading to reduce carbon dioxide emissions globally.
I agree that global warming is causing major changes in the world’s climate. If the average annual temperature continues to rise, the Arctic glaciers will melt rapidly, reducing the albedo, or the amount of light the Earth reflects, allowing it to absorb more of the sun’s heat, and the solubility of greenhouse gases in the ground or water will decrease, causing them to be released into the atmosphere, further warming the planet in a positive feedback loop. As a result, deserts may form in some areas, glaciers may melt and sea levels may rise, causing low-elevation areas to disappear under water, more intense typhoons and major floods may occur due to increased evaporation of water into the atmosphere, and some areas may experience extreme drought. There is no doubt that global warming is drastically altering the Earth’s climate, as evidenced by the cold waves, floods, and heavy snowfalls we’ve seen. Therefore, it is necessary to stop global warming, which threatens many life forms on Earth, and it is reasonable to try to reduce carbon dioxide, which is the main substance responsible for global warming.
However, I disagree with the currently dominant theory that the increase in carbon dioxide concentration due to industrialization and greenhouse gas emissions is solely responsible for global warming. It is true that carbon dioxide concentrations have been rising since industrialization and that the trend has been in line with rising global average temperatures, and there is plenty of evidence that carbon dioxide is warming the planet, including a study by Svante Arenius in the early 19th century called “On the Effects of Carbonic Acid in the Atmosphere on the Temperature of the Earth’s Surface,” which quantitatively showed that carbon dioxide has an effect on temperature rise. With all of this evidence, it’s understandable that the world has been working hard to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
However, there is a big leap to conclude that carbon dioxide is warming the planet primarily because studies have shown that more carbon dioxide has a greenhouse effect and that carbon dioxide concentrations have increased since industrialization. This is because while carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and is clearly warming the planet, the relationship between rising carbon dioxide concentrations and rising temperatures is only correlative, not causal. According to the book The Age of Ice, which analyzes climate change, 98% of the carbon dioxide on Earth is dissolved in the oceans. And we know that the solubility of the gas in water is sensitive to temperature. Putting this together, it’s entirely possible that something other than carbon dioxide is causing global temperatures to rise and the solubility of carbon dioxide in the oceans to decrease, leading to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and thus the current correlation.
But how do we explain this increase in temperature? In relatively recent years, a number of new warming theories have emerged that refute the carbon dioxide theory and offer explanations. These include the Milankovitch theory, the Dansgor-Euler theory, and the Heinrich theory. The first is the Mankovich theory, which suggests that changes in temperature are caused by astronomical factors outside the Earth rather than inside the Earth, such as the tilt of the Earth’s rotation axis and the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit. The theory is that the steeper the tilt of Earth’s axis of rotation, and the more its orbit is squashed into an elongated ellipse, the more extreme the seasonal climate can become. This theory goes some way to explaining why we’re experiencing more extreme summer heat waves and winter cold snaps, without ruling out the global warming effects of increased carbon dioxide from industrialization. However, since the eccentricity changes every 100,000 years and the rotation axis tilt changes every 40,000 years or so, it cannot adequately explain the rapid changes in temperature over short periods of time.
Therefore, the Dansgor-Euler theory and the Heinrich theory, which state that the Earth’s temperature can change rapidly even within a relatively short period of decades or centuries, can explain the short-term temperature rise that the Milankovitch theory does not consider. The Dansgor-Euler theory explains the rapid temperature increases within very short periods of time that preceded several glacial periods in the past, using changes in oxygen isotope ratios in ice cores deep within glaciers that correlate with changes in temperature to infer temperature changes at the time. The fact that oxygen isotope ratios in glacier cores from different parts of the world changed significantly around the same time in the decades and centuries before the last ice age suggests that extreme temperature changes could have occurred without necessarily changing carbon dioxide concentrations due to industrialization. The Heinrich Theory, which looks for evidence of glacial melt and movement in the short period before the last ice age, also supports the validity of the Dansgor-Euler theory.
Of course, the above theories have limitations in that they do not explain the causes of temperature changes well, but they show that the current global warming trend has occurred many times in the past without factors such as the increase in carbon dioxide caused by industrialization, so the increase in carbon dioxide caused by industrialization is not necessarily the main cause of global warming. And crucially, according to the theory of the greenhouse effect, the massive increase in carbon dioxide should have caused the Earth’s temperature to rise, but there is a fatal counterexample: between 1940 and 1975, the most industrialized period, the average global temperature actually fell. In this respect, the correlation between carbon dioxide and global average temperature and the validity of the greenhouse effect theory is insufficient to say that carbon dioxide is the main cause of warming. And there are many other possibilities for global warming that don’t necessarily involve carbon dioxide. Therefore, I am worried that we are focusing on the increase in carbon dioxide, which is not yet a definite cause, and missing other causes that may have a greater impact on global warming. Therefore, I don’t think it’s right to blame the increase in carbon dioxide as the main cause of global warming when we don’t know the exact cause.
There is no doubt that a warming planet is a big problem that will affect human life on a small scale and could destabilize the global ecosystem on a larger scale. Humanity has come up with various theories about global warming in an attempt to solve this problem, but they are still theories, and a conclusive analysis is still lacking. However, the world is reacting to the theory of carbon dioxide-induced warming, which has not yet been conclusively proven, as if reducing carbon dioxide alone would be half the battle against global warming. Global warming may be caused by factors outside the Earth, and even if it is inside the Earth, we may not be able to stop it. Since we don’t know the exact cause of global warming, we need to avoid jumping to conclusions about the cause, and instead discuss what we can do about the inevitable global warming other than reducing carbon dioxide.
