Physicist throws global warming under the bus

Shrieks of “HERESY!!” and “APOSTASY!!” must be echoing through the Cathedral of the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming right about now, as a former University of Ottawa professor says that fossil fuels are insignificant to the amount of CO2 in the air:

The present (2010) historic maximum of anthropogenic (caused by humans) fossil fuel burning is only 8% or so of global primary production (GPP) (both expressed as kilograms of carbon per year, kg-C/y). GPP is the rate at which new biomass (living matter) is produced on the whole planet. And of course all biomass can in principle be considered fuel that could be burned with oxygen (O2) to produce CO2 gas, H2O water, energy, and an ash residue.

This shows the extent to which anthropogenic energy production from fossil fuel burning is small in comparison to the sun’s energy delivery to Earth, since biomass primary production results from the sun’s energy via photosynthesis.

(…)

Given all the fuss that is made about the present rate of fossil fuel burning (2010; 0.8 x 10^13 kg-C/y where 10^13 = 10,000,000,000,000 with thirteen zeros), it is important to keep in mind that this represents an amount of CO2 release comparable to or somewhat less than the CO2 released by simple breathing from humankind and its domestic animals [LINK]. The combined biomass of humankind and its domestic animals (cattle, sheep, goats, chickens, pigs, pets, etc.) is in turn estimated to be only 0.04% of Earth’s living biomass (all expressed as kilograms of carbon, kg-C), which is a lot more CO2-producing breathing. (Ants, for example, are estimated to represent ten to one hundred times the biomass of humankind and ants can be argued to have β€œtransformed” the planet and its ecology far more than humans.)

Emphasis added.

Dr. Rancourt has a very Left/Progressive outlook, but a portion of his conclusion is worth quoting:

For left progressives to collaborate with First World governments that practice global extortion and geopolitical wars in order to pass carbon schemes to undemocratically manage and control the developments of non-First-World communities and sovereign states is obscene, racist, and cruelly cynical.

This conservative finds it hard to disagree. Well, except for that “global extortion” and “geopolitical wars” part. Can’t have everything…

But he touches on a good point: the AGW cultists and alarmists not only want to cripple Western economies and establish bureaucratic-statist control over the lives of individual citizens, but they want to keep poor countries poor, too, by denying them the very means the industrial and post-industrial nations used to become wealthy. It’s no wonder that both China and India have refused to sign on to the global-warming farce; the measures the alarmists demand we take to fight a problem that does not exist would absolutely derail their economic development.

In the great scheme of things, this is just another small crack in the vaunted scientific consensus. By itself, it means little. But, the more cracks appear, the sooner comes the day when the AGW cathedral collapses.

via WUWT

UPDATE: Is the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming the Beauvais Cathedral of our time? Via Dan Collins.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

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