Continuing our look at the book Canary in a Climate World this week we examine Chapter 2 by Dr. Patrick Moore, lifelong environmentalist and Greenpeace co-founder. Also Greenpeace outcast, albeit self-imposed, because in his words “scientific reasoning was subordinated to political activism.” He first saw the pattern emerging when the organization he helped found began a push for a worldwide ban on chlorine, even though chlorination of drinking water is one of the most important public health measures in use around the world today. (Not to mention being half of salt and thus among other things ubiquitous in the oceans.) “That moment made it clear to me that complex scientific realities were being replaced with moral slogans,” he says. “Today the same pattern appears in climate policy, only on a vastly larger scale.” Indeed.
In the early 1970s Moore, who has a doctorate in ecology, played a key role in stopping the mass slaughter of whales, and is also in the most iconic seal-hugging picture of all time so his credentials as a committed and informed environmentalist ought to be beyond challenge, walks his readers through the essential role carbon dioxide has played in the evolution of life on this planet. CO2 levels were much higher than today for hundreds of millions of years during which plant life flourished. But living organisms lock carbon away in geological formations of limestone, chalk, marble and fossil fuels. During the more recent ice age cycles CO2 levels have fallen to perilously low levels, and are still well below levels typical in Earth’s history. (In fact Moore argues that we ought if possible to raise them dramatically, at least doubling them.)
What’s more, the current climatic changes are occurring in a context of nonstop climate change. “Climate has always changed,” he notes. “It will continue to change.” Temperature and CO2 move together over time in part because oceans release it as they warm and absorb it when they cool. So temperature can drive CO2 change as much as the opposite.
In the context of these complexities, Net Zero goals, Moore warns, underestimate “the importance of affordable energy to human well being.” He notes that billions of poor people around the world are suffering because of a lack of reliable energy, and their path to economic development is blocked without it. Moore recounts his years working with the US Nuclear Energy Institute studying reactor safety. He concluded that “nuclear power remains one of the safest large scale energy technologies ever developed.”
Summing up, he says that “stewardship must be grounded in science rather than fear... There is no climate emergency and carbon Net Zero is a ridiculous solution to an imaginary problem.” And summing up, we say the key lesson from Moore’s chapter is not the specifics, important as they are, but the abandonment of reasoning among so many climate activists of the same sort that drove him out of Greenpeace decades ago, suggesting an enduring problem.
Next week: Inspiration for young scientists from a Nobel prize-winning physicist.
